Wisdom for Salvation through Faith in Christ Jesus, 9th Friday (II), June 5, 2020

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Boniface, Martyr
June 5, 2020
2 Tim 3:10-17, Ps 119, Mk 12:35-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: [to be completed]

• In today’s first reading, we continue to see how St. Paul encourages the young St. Timothy and the young Church that has been entrusted to Paul’s spiritual son. He praises Timothy for striving to follow Paul’s “teaching, way of life, purpose, faith, patience, love, endurance, persecutions, and sufferings.” He reminds him that “all who want to live religiously in Christ Jesus will be persecuted” by “wicked people and charlatans” who are both “deceivers and deceived,” but just as “the Lord delivered him” from all of his past hardships, so the Lord is trustworthy to be with him and them in future situations. But then, after describing for him what awaits, St. Paul taught him bout the principle and means of fidelity: to “remain faithful to what you have learned and believed, because you know from whom you learned it, and that from infancy you have known the sacred Scriptures.” Timothy learned it from the Holy Spirit through St. Paul and through Sacred Scripture, which Timothy, growing up Jewish, had learned from his mother and grandmother. St. Paul says that the Scriptures give us “wisdom for salvation through faith in Christ Jesus,” because they are ” inspired by God and [are] useful for teaching, for refutation, for correction, and for training in righteousness,” and makes one who belongs to God “competent and equipped for every good work.”
• St. Paul underlines for St. Timothy, for the early Church, and for the Church at all times the importance of Sacred Scripture. It is the way that God the Holy Spirit trains us in holiness and forms us for the work of the Gospel, since it helps us to unite ourselves to God in faith so that we will never do any work alone. The same Holy Spirit who inspired it helps us to know, understand and live by it. We’re called to live by every word that comes from the mouth of God. It is an extraordinary gift to us, imparting to us God’s perspective, making us wise, leading us to salvation through faith.
• In the Gospel, we see Jesus pointing out the deeper meaning of Scripture. After having been interrogated by the Scribes, Pharisees and Sadducees in the Temple area, Jesus finally asks a question himself, something to show that the scribes — like the one who asked him yesterday about the most important commandment and whom Jesus challenged not just to know but to live the two-fold commandment of love — despite all their study might not know about Sacred Scripture, particularly Psalm 110. He asks, “How do the scribes claim that the Christ is the son of David?” and puts to them an enigma from Sacred Scripture if that is indeed true. “David himself, inspired by the Holy Spirit, said: ‘The Lord said to my lord, ‘Sit at my right hand until I place your enemies under your feet.’ David himself calls him ‘lord’; so how is he his son?’” Jesus affirms that the Holy Spirit inspired David in the writing of the Psalms, since “all Scripture is inspired by God.” But then he says that the Scribes themselves are unable to solve that enigma, as to why David’s descendent would be called “Lord.” It wasn’t just because he was the Messiah. Jesus, of course, is the answer to that question and he was trying to open them up for it. He was in fact giving us both of the essential attributes St. Paul described to St. Timothy in yesterday’s passage as constituting St. Paul’s Gospel: “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David.” Jesus is divine, and hence able to be called Lord; but he also very much David’s son.” St. Mark tells us at the end of the passage, “The great crowd heard this with delight,” not just because the proud Scribes were a little humbled, but because they were brought more deeply into the mystery and depth of Sacred Scripture.
• Sacred Scripture is important in every human life, but it’s especially important in religious life. Pope Benedict wrote in his 2010 exhortation on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church, “The consecrated life … is born from hearing the word of God and embracing the Gospel as its rule of life. A life devoted to following Christ in his chastity, poverty and obedience thus becomes a living ‘exegesis’ of God’s word. The Holy Spirit, in whom the Bible was written, is the same Spirit who illumines the word of God with new light for the founders and foundresses. Every charism and every rule springs from it and seeks to be an expression of it thus opening up new pathways of Christian living marked by the radicalism of the Gospel. … Today too, both old and new expressions of special consecration are called to be genuine schools of the spiritual life, where the Scriptures can be read according to the Holy Spirit in the Church, for the benefit of the entire People of God. … Communities of consecrated life [should] always make provision for solid instruction in the faith-filled reading of the Bible. … I would like to echo the consideration and gratitude [for] those forms of contemplative life whose specific charism is to devote a great part of their day to imitating the Mother of God, who diligently pondered the words and deeds of her Son (cf. Lk 2:19, 51), and Mary of Bethany, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened attentively to his words (cf. Lk 10:38). … The world today is often excessively caught up in outward activities and risks losing its bearings. Contemplative men and women, by their lives of prayer, attentive hearing and meditation on God’s Word, remind us that man does not live by bread alone but by every word that comes from the mouth of God (cf. Mt 4:4). All the faithful, then, should be clearly conscious that this form of life shows today’s world what is most important, indeed, the one thing necessary: there is an ultimate reason which makes life worth living, and that is God and his inscrutable love.”
• Someone who lived his religious life like the Mother of God and Mary of Bethany, who was not just an exegete but a “living exegesis” of God’s word, was Saint Boniface, whom the Church celebrates today. He was expert in living Sacred Scripture, which trained him in righteousness, equipped him for every good work, and strengthened him to become, like St. Paul, a missionary and eventually a martyr. Boniface was a devout young man who became a Benedictine early in life. At the age of 41 left his English monastery where he was a Latin scholar and a Scripture teacher to become a missionary. In his first attempt, in modern Holland, he was rejected. He went to Rome where the Pope ordained him and sent him as a Bishop to evangelize Germany, where he helped pagans overcome their worship of trees and through four decades of labor built up the structure of the Church. At the very end of his life, he went back to Frisia, to Holland, to try to bring them the seed of the Word of God, but they killed him as he was preparing for Mass. Pope Benedict gave a catechesis on him in 2009 in which he stressed his zeal to bring the Word of God to the stubborn even in his ninth decade. “Although he was getting on in years (he was almost 80), he prepared himself for a new evangelizing mission: with about 50 monks he returned to Frisia where he had begun his work. … While he was beginning the celebration of Mass at Dokkum (in what today is northern Holland) on 5 June 754, he was assaulted by a band of pagans. Advancing with a serene expression he forbade his followers from fighting saying, ‘cease, my sons, from fighting, give up warfare, for the witness of Scripture recommends that we do not give an eye for an eye but rather good for evil. Here is the long awaited day, the time of our end has now come; courage in the Lord!’ These were his last words before he fell under the blows of his aggressors.” He was quoting Sacred Scripture, and putting it into practice, until the end. Pope Benedict asked, “Centuries later, what message can we gather today from the teaching and marvelous activity of this great missionary and martyr? For those who approach Boniface, an initial fact stands out: the centrality of the word of God, lived and interpreted in the faith of the Church, a word that he lived, preached and witnessed to until he gave the supreme gift of himself in martyrdom. He was so passionate about the word of God that he felt the urgent need and duty to communicate it to others, even at his own personal risk.” Pope Benedict then makes a personal application: “His ardent zeal for the Gospel never fails to impress me. At the age of 41 he left a beautiful and fruitful monastic life, the life of a monk and teacher, in order to proclaim the Gospel to the simple, to barbarians; once again, at the age of 80, he went to a region in which he foresaw his martyrdom. By comparing his ardent faith, this zeal for the Gospel, with our own often lukewarm and bureaucratized faith, we see what we must do and how to renew our faith, in order to give the precious pearl of the Gospel as a gift to our time.” His model of total self-giving as a young man, as a zealous lover of Scripture living the evangelical counsels, as a Missionary, as a Bishop, and as a Martyr is a model for us all.
• Saint Boniface put into flesh what St. Gregory the Great had quipped a century and a half earlier: vita bonorum viva lectio, “The life of the saints [the good] is a leaving reading” of Sacred Scripture. He learned that intimate connection every Mass he attended and celebrated, as the Verbum Domini (The Word of the Lord) leads us to the Verbum caro factum est (the Word made flesh) and makes us possible like Mary at the annunciation of saying, Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum (let it be done to me according to your word).

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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