What the Lord Sees in the Heart of Those He Calls, 2nd Tuesday (II), January 21, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr
January 20, 2020
1 Sam 16:1-13, Ps 89, Mk 2:23-28

The homily was not recorded. The following points were attempted: 

• Today we have the opportunity to deepen reflections on the meaning of vocation, which can nourish both our baptismal vocation to be holy and faithfully love God and others as God loves, as well as our vocation within a vocation, as priests or religious.
• In the first reading, we have the vocation story of David. God sent the prophet Samuel to Jesse’s house to anoint the one whom God would indicate he had chosen to be his king after he rejected Saul for his infidelity. Samuel had long served the Lord but he still looked too much with human eyes than God’s vision. When Samuel first saw Jesse’s eldest son Eliab, he thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is here before him.” But the Lord said to him, “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature.” That’s precisely what had been done with Saul, who we heard on Saturday “was a handsome young man. There was no other child of Israel more handsome than Saul; he stood head and shoulders above the people.” But God as we know rejected him. The Lord told Samuel, “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.” And so the presentations happened of the next six sons, but none was chosen by God. Finally, Samuel asked if there were any other boys and Jesse replied that the youngest was still tending the sheep. After he was sent for, this ruddy, youthful, handsome boy approached and the Lord said, “There. Anoint him, for this is he!” And Samuel did anoint him, so that well before he would supplant Saul as the acknowledged leader of God’s people, he would be getting prepared by “the Spirit of the Lord [who had] rushed upon him.”
• The Lord normally chooses those superficially unlikely, because he sees what we often miss. The Blessed Mother would say in her famous Magnificat, “the Lord has looked with favor on the lowliness of his handmaid.” St. Paul would say in his first Letter to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth.  Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.”
• The Lord sees the heart, but we need to ask: What was it in David’s heart that God saw? What was it in our heart that God saw?
  • In David’s heart he saw the capacity for passionate fidelity not counting on human respect. David wasn’t embarrassed to dance in front of the ark of the Lord even when his loved ones taunted him for it.
  • In David’s heart he saw great courage, the courage that would lead him to go against the fearsome Goliath armed just with a slingshot and the name of the Lord.
  • In David’s heart he saw sincerity and the capacity to receive his mercy. After Samuel told Saul he had sinned, Saul made excuses. After Nathan told David he had sinned, David immediately repented.
  • In David’s heart he saw humility and a capacity for forgiveness. David forgave Saul who was trying to kill him. He forgave his Son Absalom who tried to steal his kingdom. He forgave Shimei, who was cursing him as he was fleeing.
  • In David’s heart he saw a passion for unity. Unlike Saul who tried to destroy enemies, David sought to unite, and did the two kingdoms.
  • In David’s heart he saw a capacity for shepherding after his own heart. David was a young shepherd, capable of risking and giving his life for his sheep, capable of risking and giving his life for God. In him God the Father ultimately saw an image of the heart of his 28th generation grandson, the Son of David who would become the Good Shepherd. Jesus mentions an illustration of that shepherdly wisdom after God’s own heart in today’s Gospel. Jesus mentions that when David and his soldiers were fighting for the Lord and were starving, the entered the shrine where Abiathar was high priest and ate the “bread of offering,” the showbread that would normally remain there for a week as an offering of the best of grains before it would replaced and then the week old bread consumed by the priests. David had a heart capable of prioritizing according to God’s will, that the Lord isn’t glorified by his sons — not to mention his soldiers — starving, that the good of the practice of the bread of offering in the temple isn’t absolute, and higher goods need to be remembered. Jesus’ heart was similar. When his apostles were starving on the Sabbath, they plucked off the heads of grain, meshed them in their hands, and ate, even though according to the Scribes and Pharisees — and not according to God — they were violating the Sabbath. The Scribes and Pharisees to prevent the people of Israel from ever getting close to breaking the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath Day, created a whole series of regulations with regard to work. We see this throughout the Gospel. They preferred that people starve rather than mesh grain a little in their hands, as if starving glorified God. They preferred that people with mangled hands waited another day so that Jesus wouldn’t do the work of loving mercy and cure them. David’s heart saw God’s will more clearly than the Scribes and Pharisees did, and it was one of the reasons why he was chosen.
• God in his eternal vision likewise saw something in our hearts that led him to call us. He probably saw a similar capacity for passionate fidelity even though many of our contemporaries would think that we’re crazy for giving up the money, the control, the sex and earthly loves of the world in order to bind ourselves to the poor, obedient and chaste Christ. God saw in us the courage to do what others were persuading us not to do, and the courage to persevere. God saw in us the capacity of humbly receiving his mercy, letting our life be defined by it, and forgiving others, including those who have really hurt us. He saw in us a capacity for shepherding through spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, for nurturing and for our willingness to lay down our lives for the sake of those entrusted to us, however small and vulnerable. He saw in us a passion and commitment for unity, something that he will give his grace to enlarge during this Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity. He saw in us ultimately something that reminded him of the love of the heart of his Son. He chose us and anointed us from early in life so that we might correspond to that vocation. And he sent the Holy Spirit upon us, as he did upon David, to help us to attune our hearts ever more to his wisdom.
• Today we celebrate someone chosen by God, like David at a very young age, and who became a tremendous witness of passionate fidelity, courage, sincerity, and chaste love for God. St. Agnes was a beautiful 12 year old virgin in Rome, who had consecrated herself to the Lord, her “heavenly spouse,” as she called Jesus in the stories of her death. Men who wanted her for themselves couldn’t stand the fact that she belonged to someone else, even to the One she believed was God. If they couldn’t have her, they didn’t want anyone to have her. In fact, if they couldn’t have her, they wanted her dead. They outed her as a Christian during the ferocious anti-Christian persecution of the emperor Diocletian in 304. After the magistrate tried to frighten her through showing her various means of torture, she persevered. He sentenced her to a brothel so that people would destroy the beauty of her bodily consecration to the Lord, but the Lord miraculously protected her. Her martyrdom, as St. Ambrose once said, was simply an extension of the death to self out of love for God that characterized her chaste virginity: virginity is praiseworthy, he wrote, not because it is found in martyrs but because in makes martyrs. Her chaste love for the Lord in little things became the school of the training in courage that allowed her to remain faithful in love of the Lord and others while under the threat of torture and death. Her chaste love made it possible for her to slay Goliaths.
• Today we are preparing not to sacrifice a heifer but ourselves together with the Lord. In the great miracle of Lanciano, when 1300 years the host took on the accidents of human heart wall, something confirmed only in anatomical and histological tests in the 1970s, we can get a glimpse that in every Mass, the Lord seeks to give us a heart transplant, to give us his own heart together with his entire Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so that our hearts may become increasingly pure and see and revere him in everything; so that our hearts may beat in synchrony with his and continue loving as he loves us first, so that God the Father in seeing our hearts might more and more see a reflection of his Son’s. Today, in gratitude for our vocations and the way the Lord called us like he called David, in gratitude for the grace of chastity that made St. Agnes strong in bearing witness to Christ, we turn to God and we ask him for the grace ultimately to be faithful to our calling!

The readings for today’s Mass were: