“You must be put to death!,” 17th Friday (II), August 3, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus
August 3, 2018
Jer 26:1-9, Ps 69, Mt 13:54-58

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today in the Gospel we encounter a real-life illustration of many of the lessons Jesus has been teaching us in the Parables of the Kingdom over the last eight days. When Jesus returns to his hometown synagogue to sow the Word of God, he didn’t find in everyone the fruitful soil he found in his Mother and foster-father. He found some rocky soil that immediately responded to his words with astonishment as well as much packed down soil by the wayside that totally resisted his message because their hearts were hardened to the possibility that someone who grew up among them could actually possess such wisdom and work such mighty deeds. They were the ones who would see but not understand, who would hear but not listen. Among the Nazarenes there were wheat and weeds growing up side-by-side, good and bad fish caught in the same net. There were those who were willing to sell all they had to obtain the pearl of great price and the buried treasure who is God and others who didn’t recognize the value of that Pearl and Treasure speaking to them in their own synagogue. There were those with the faith of mustard seeds that would grow large and others whose faith would grow smaller than a mustard seed, for to the one who had more would be given and to the one who had not, even what he had would be taken away. There would be those who, hearing Jesus, would become like the head of the household taking from the storeroom where he held his treasures things both old and new and others who would joylessly only draw from that storeroom what was stale. All of this would be seen when Jesus returned home. At first he was received with astonishment, but that soon passed to offense, and as we know from St. Luke’s account, it would then turn to homicidal thoughts and attempted murder as they sought to toss him off of a Nazarene cliff. “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house,” Jesus would say, foretelling the opposition, the suffering, the rejection and sometimes even the martyrdom of God’s ambassadors. St. John’s words in his prologue, “he came to his own, but his own did not receive him,” can be applied not only to the Light who was rejected by those who preferred darkness, but to every prophet.
• We see this truth on display in today’s first reading as God sent the Prophet Jeremiah to the Temple to proclaim a message of conversion and an offer of mercy. Jeremiah said that if they would listen and turn back, each from his evil way, God would not allow them to suffer the consequences of their destructive choices, but “if you disobey me, not living according to the law I placed before you and not listening to the words of my servants the prophets, whom I send you constantly though you do not obey them, I will treat this house like Shiloh, and make this the city to which all the nations of the earth shall refer when cursing one another.” Shiloh, as you remember, was where the Ark of the Covenant had been kept for 369 years until the Philistines captured it. Now that ark was in the Temple and God was telling them that just as Shiloh lost the ark and was eventually destroyed, the same thing could happen to the Temple in Jerusalem, and Jerusalem, the Holy City, rather than being a word of spiritual aspiration would become a word worse than Sodom and Gomorrah. Upon hearing those words, “the priests and the prophets” — the leaders of the people, those who were expected holy, to be closest to God — grabbed hold of him and said words that prophesied what would be heard in the Praetorium 639 years later: “You must be put to death!” In order to suppress the message, they would need to extinguish the messenger. In God’s house, where his glory abided, his ambassador and his word were not only unwelcome but marked for extermination.
• I want to make two applications of the Word of God to our circumstances. The first is with regard to rejection. Just like Jesus, just like Jeremiah, we will experience rejection in our living and proclaiming faith in God come in the flesh. Jesus promised that we would, that we would be dragged before civil and religious leaders, that we would be hated and opposed, that many would simply not receive us. He told us that when that happens, we should rejoice and be glad, for our reward would be great; to recognize that it would be an occasion for giving testimony; and, if we are free to leave, to leave wiping the dust off of our sandals, not carrying the baggage of emotional wounds to the next place. We need to be prepared for rejection, because ultimately as Jesus says, they’re not rejecting us but him and the One who sent him. On the other hand, he said, those who receive us, receive him and the Father as well, and so we keep going out out giving people a chance to accept the Lord. Rejection is never easy as a human phenomenon but it is a means for greater union with Jesus, for witness of our faith in him out of season, and ultimately for conversion.
• The second application is where rejection sometimes leads: it leads to dead. In Nazareth, it led to people in the synagogue trying to kill Jesus throwing him off a cliff. In Jeremiah’s case, it led to priests’ and prophets’ calling for Jeremiah to be put to death. Outwardly religious people were trying to kill others. Yesterday Pope Francis updated the Catechism of the Catholic Church on the death penalty. Many were very pleased by the news. Others, who support the death penalty, were not. Some were accusing Pope Francis of “heresy”, since, they say, the death penalty has always been permitted under certain conditions and now the Pope was saying it was “inadmissible.” There’s some confusion on the matter about which I hope to write an article next week. The Pope was essentially saying that when society don’t have to kill someone in social self-defense then it mustn’t, and that today that necessity no longer exists. It was a prudential application of the principles of the Church to present circumstances. The principle of self-defense still obtains when there’s a legitimate necessity for self-defense; but otherwise, the Pope is saying that it’s morally inadmissible for the State to say to a criminal, “You must be put to death!,” when other means exist to protect society. His life and death cannot be instrumentalized to deter others from committing similar crimes. What struck me was that there were several Catholic religious leaders — including some priest friends of mine — who were outraged at what the Pope did. Some were concerned that Church teaching was being whimsically changed, something that would undermine Church teaching as a whole. Others just seemed, frankly, to be in favor of the death penalty. Many, like me, have been engaged in the cultural, legal and political battle to end abortion and have fought for decades the attempt to relativize the intrinsic evil of abortion by equating it to capital punishment. But that’s not what Pope Francis is not doing. He’s basically stating that when we give States or anyone the ability to take someone’s life — to plan to kill someone — when such an action is not necessary for self-defense, then we’re lowering the respect for human life overall. Jesus says to us, “Whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me.” Is there any reason to think that he makes an exception to someone on death row? When society, not to mention “priests and prophets” say, “You must be put to death!,” to me it seems basically a reverberation from the howls of Pontius Pilate’s courtyard, when they said about Jesus, “Crucify him!”
• Today at Mass, we are given the opportunity to receive Jesus into our sanctuary like Mary and Joseph and not like Jesus’ cousins or contemporaries. Rather than calling for death, we receive the Author of Life. And we become, in essence, an Ark of the Covenant containing within the most precious treasure of all. And we ask him whom we’re about to receive to grant us an increase in faith, so that through this miracle of Holy Communion, he may work many others in and through us.

The readings for today’s Mass were: