Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Votive Mass of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Handmaid of the Lord

October 31, 2020

Phil 1:18-26, Ps 42, Lk 14:1.7-11

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today, by means of a parable on seats at a dinner gathering, Jesus teaches us about the humility necessary for us to come to the eternal banquet. The parable goes flat against the way many in the world, including sometimes many of us Christians, behave. In this world so many want to be noticed, esteemed, and exalted. They want the places of honor at table, first class seats on airplanes and front row seats at concerts. They hunger for titles of status and worldly honor and positions of power and influence. They want waiters and butlers to serve them, chauffeurs to drive them, and the rich, famous and important to call them. At a human level, this is not only common but understandable. But Jesus calls us to a different standard, a higher standard that is at the same time paradoxically a lower one. He tell us, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” He wants us to learn from him how to serve rather than to be served, to seek the lowest place rather than the highest, to treasure God’s esteem rather than others’ adulation so that God may say to us, in this world and the next, “My friend, come up higher!” The way to be exalted at Jesus’ right side forever is humbly to serve at Jesus’ side here on earth, and to follow him not just in seeking the lowest places at table but in getting up from the table like he did at the Last Supper, picking up the basin and towel to wash others’ feet, and serving them in such self-effacing ways.

* We see this lesson described for us in St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians from which we have our first reading today. When he was young, Saul of Tarsus was a meteoric superstar. He was brilliant, one of the brightest, most zealous students of the Great Rabbi Gamaliel, someone who had been trusted with a huge commission at a young age to try to destroy the Church, which he was convinced in his Pharisaical arrogance couldn’t have been from God. But the Lord converted him and led him along a path of humility, blinding him in order to show him his spiritual blind spots before the illumination of baptism. Rather than continuing on the path to fame and power over life-and-death, he became a hunted man, needing to escape by being lowered in walls through baskets. He disappeared into the desert for 14 years to pray and learn anew. Because others didn’t trust his conversion, he returned to serving God quietly through making tents. He had a humiliating “thorn” in his flesh (2 Cor 12:6-7), whatever that was, but it was through bearing it that he learned that God’s grace was sufficient for him. After many years, St. Barnabas came for him and the Holy Spirit set them both aside for the Mission he had planned for them. And cooperating with the Spirit, he proclaimed the Gospel to the furthest expanses of the world. He proclaimed that God called nobodies, the humble of the world, to shame those who thought they were somebodies (1 Cor 1:26-29) so that no one could boast before God. He grasped that it was truly when he was weak that he was strong (2 Cor 12:10), because then God’s power was able to work through him with no resistance. And from prison, as this humble but great man wrote this letter, he sought to decrease so that Christ would increase, saying, as we heard today, that for him “life is Christ and death is gain,” that because his soul was athirst for the living God, he longed “to depart and be with Christ,” and yet was “happy to remain in the flesh for the benefit of others,