Would that All of the People of the Lord Were Prophets, 26th Sunday (B), September 26, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx
26th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year B
September 26, 2021
Numbers 11:25-29, Ps 19, James 5:1-6, Mk 9:38-43.45.47-48

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

The following text guided today’s homily: 

• The Word of God today is so rich in thematic content. It would be easy to preach a whole retreat on what they tell us today about envy. We see it in Joshua’s plea to Moses to stop Eldad and Medad from prophesying in the name of the Lord. Even though they had not shown up when the Spirit descended on those Moses had appointed to be judges among the people, the Spirit descended upon them anyway and they were applying God’s wisdom to present circumstances just like the rest. Rather than rejoicing that they were serving the Lord in this way, Joshua complained, as if their work was somehow a bad thing rather than a great thing. Similarly in the Gospel we see Saint John the Beloved Disciple’s intervention with Jesus, complaining and asking Jesus to stop a man who didn’t travel with them who was doing exorcisms in Jesus’ name. Jesus had come to liberate us from the power of the evil one, he had sent out the apostles and disciples with the command to cast out demons, but Saint John was treating it as a negative rather than a positive that possessed people were being freed because that liberation was happening from someone he considered an outsider. Envy — a sadness or anger at others’ gifts — is always an issue in Christian life and in religious and priestly life. When God blesses others, it’s always an opportunity for us, however, to see whether we really want God’s name to be hallowed, his kingdom to come and his will to be done, or whether we’re seeking to have our exalted over those of others.
• It would likewise be easy to talk today about the sin of scandal about which Jesus speaks so clearly in the Gospel and how we need to be brutal in cutting off from our lives whatever — whether it be our hands, feet, or eyes — that lead us and others to sin. The scandalous worldliness of the mammon-loving man in the second reading, living in luxury and pleasure while deaf to the cries of the workers on his farm, is a strong warning to everyone about the need to excise the soul-numbing materialism that anesthetizes us to others’ pain.
• Similarly I always love to talk about the contrast between Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel — “Whoever is not against us is for us” — and what he said after the Pharisees had accused him of casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons: “Whoever is not with me is against me; whoever does not gather with me scatters,” which can teach us so much about the interpretation of Sacred Scripture and the harmonization of seemingly contradictory passages. But insofar as that’s what we focused on exactly three years ago when I was here for the 26^th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B, and insofar as I’m sure you’ve remembered every word, I’ll limit myself just to recalling that Saint Augustine and Saint John Chrysostom both taught that the seemingly conflicting passages show that that there are parts of us that are with the Lord and parts of us that are not with Him. God wants us to seek to bring all parts of us into alignment with Him and to help him bring others into that integral communion.
• What I hope to do today is to focus on Moses’ words from the end of today’s first reading that have always fascinated me: “Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets!” By our baptism, by our confirmation, by our consecration as Missionaries of Charity or ordination in the person of Christ, we have been given a prophetic character and God wants us to be prophets, he wants us by word and example to preach and proclaim him, to actualize his word, to help people by that word come to recognize that he has the words of eternal life and that we’re called to live off of every word that comes from his mouth.
• We’re living in an age in which our proclamation of Christ and of his truth and love is more urgent. We know from salvation history that God always raised up prophets to call his people back to the Covenant. Most were summoned to preach conversion and holiness and the comfort and consolation that would flow from living according to the Lord’s ways. As our culture wanders further from various basic truths — about who we are as men and women, the nature of marriage, the evil of the intentional killing of human beings in the womb, at the end of life, or at any other moment, the terrible sins of omission for neglecting the poor — it is increasingly important that the Church raises its voice in unison, echoing the Lord’s. But we know that many in the Church, not just bishops, priests, deacons and religious, but lay Catholics in high office, in schools and universities, even at the ballot box, remain mute. Earlier this week, my bishop from the Diocese of Fall River, MA, emailed me, saying he would like to nominate me as a Missionary of the Eucharist as part of the US Bishops’ three-year Eucharistic Revival. I told him I would be honored. Similarly, you may know that I am a papally-appointed Missionary of Mercy, given the mandate by Pope Francis during the Jubilee of Mercy to preach on mercy, to dedicate myself more to the spiritual and corporal works, and to exercise his faculties in the Sacrament of Reconciliation. That is one of the great honors of my life. But the very fact that we need to have Missionaries of the Eucharist, Missionaries of Mercy, and Missionaries of Charity is a sign of how much we need people to proclaim and exemplify God’s presence in the Eucharist, God’s Mercy and God’s Love. None of these extraordinary gifts, however beautiful, can be taken for granted. If we have to preach about them to an age that has ceased to take these treasures seriously, so we, too, have to preach, like the prophets of old, about the idols we have put in their place. Today, through Moses, God reminds us that he wants us all to be the prophets the Holy Spirit wants us to be for our age.
• Prophecy, proclaiming the truth and love of Christ, is an important part of your charism. Your Constitutions say beautifully, “The task of evangelizing all people constitutes the essential mission of the Church in obedience to Christ’s command to ‘go and preach to all nations.’” That communicates what the Popes since the Second Vatican Council have all been stressing: that the Church, and each of us in the Church, doesn’t have a mission, but is a mission. Your Constitutions continue, “The Church, moved by the power and love of the Holy Spirit, wishes, through us, to prepare a way for the Lord and in some way to make Him present to all peoples by prayer, works of penance, word and action.” Prophecy, evangelization, is to make God present, to help people recognize that God is alive, is with us, cares, and is calling us to the fullness of life with him and others. Your charter continues, “Apostolic action is of the very nature of our Society. The whole life of the members is, therefore, to be imbued with an apostolic spirit, and the whole of their apostolic action is to be animated by a religious spirit, …proceed[ing] from intimate union with God, and is to confirm and foster this union.” This focuses that when we pray, we become more like the One we adore, and we begin to share his zeal for every lost sheep. Our intimate union with him inflames our desire for his desires and sends us outward, together with him. Finally your Constitutions not various humble works of love that are part of this prophetic mission: education, visiting people in their homes, welcoming people into homes for the abandoned, caring for the sick, the dying and beggars, and the spiritual works of mercy. These are all means by which we speak with body language the truths God has revealed about the dignity of each person we meet.
• When I think about the prophetic dimension of your life as Missionaries of Charity, and, more generally, of religious life, I return to the greatest document the Church has ever given us on the theme, Saint John Paul II’s 1996 exhortation Vita Consecrata, the 25th  anniversary of which we’re celebrating this year. In it the Holy Father wrote, “There is a prophetic dimension that belongs to the consecrated life as such, resulting from the radical nature of the following of Christ and of the subsequent dedication to the mission characteristic of the consecrated life.” Prophecy is constitutive of religious life. To be consecrated is to be set apart to belong to Christ but then, with Christ, to be sent out on mission. John Paul II said that the prophecy of religious men and women begins with the “prophetic witness to the primacy that God and the truths of the Gospel have in the Christian life.” We witness to the fact that God exists and gives us his guidance, that we’re not alone, but that God is with us always until the end of time. John Paul II makes the point of how prayer spurs us outward. “True prophecy is born of God,” he writes, “from friendship with him, from attentive listening to his word in the different circumstances of history. Prophets feel in their hearts a burning desire for the holiness of God and, having heard his word in the dialogue of prayer, they proclaim that word with their lives, with their lips and with their actions, becoming people who speak for God against evil and sin” (VC 84). He speaks about the increasing urgency and necessity of prophecy, “in our world, where it often seems that the signs of God’s presence have been lost from sight,” not just to the “primacy of God” about which we’ve just spoken, but also to “eternal life, … a profound yearning for a brotherhood, … [to a] boldness of a prophet who is unafraid of risking even his life.” In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks about eternal life and how it’s worth it even to enter maimed, despite the fact that those who will be raised forever will not enter without an eye, or a hand or a foot, but will have all restored; for that reason, we’re not afraid even of martyrdom. He finishes by calling us, like Jesus in today’s Gospel, to a “consistency between proclamation and life,” which is what gives the prophetic life of consecrated persons particular power. Rather than giving scandal through living hypocritically, he wants to help us lead people to the source of wholeness, God himself. Consecrated do that in a particular way he says through the profession of the evangelical counsels of chastity, poverty and obedience, which proclaim the chaste, poor and obedient Christ and shows us, against the hedonism, materialism and libertinism of the age the path to true love, true riches and true freedom. This witness, he says, is a “spiritual therapy for humanity” and “especially in difficult times, is a blessing for human life and for the Church.” Pope Benedict adds that the prophetic living of the of the evangelical counsels “thus becomes ‘a living exegesis of God’s word,” and a most powerful proclamation.
• Would that all the people of the Lord were prophets! Today the great Missionary of Charity from the bosom of the Father comes to renew us in that work from the inside, to bless us and send us out to proclaim the Gospel of the Lord, the Gospel of his love and truth. Just as the Holy Spirit came down upon the 70 in the desert, upon Eldad and Medad, upon the apostles and Mary on Pentecost, so the Holy Spirit desires to come down upon us with tongues of fire, so that we may proclaim the Gospel in and out of season with ardent love. Rather than plucking out eyes and chopping off limbs, the Holy Spirit wants to purify our eyes so that chastely they may see those in need, cleanse our hands so that empty of worldly obstacles and open to God’s help we may stretch them out to those in need, and strengthen our feet so that we might walk in the Lord’s ways, following the Lord in everything, crossing the road, and helping others to join us on the pilgrimage of obedient love until, we pray, the Father’s eternal embrace.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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