Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint John Henry Newman

October 9, 2023

Jon 1:1-2:1-2.11, Jon 2:3-5.8, Lk 10:25-37

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.9.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the readings we see two great dynamisms, two fundamental polarities in life. The first we see in Jonah in the first reading. When God reveals his will to him, he seeks to flee from the presence of the Lord. He boards a boat heading to Tarshish, which was basically in western Spain, as far west as Jonah would have known of the geography of the time. But such fleeing from the Lord is never a private action. It always impacts those around us, as Jonah’s sinful polarity was risking the life of the fellow mariners.

* We see that same polarity in the first two figures in the Parable of the Good Samaritan in the Gospel. The priest and the levite were fleeing from the love of God and love of neighbor, were fleeing from the type of charity to which God was calling them at the moment. Only the Samaritan, someone whom Jews thought were perpetually in flight from God by worshipping God on Mount Gerizim rather than in Jerusalem, heard God’s call and responded. If Jesus gave the parable today, it would be as if a man had been mugged, abused, and dropped in a sewer waiting to die and the Pope and Missionaries of Charity, hearing the groaning, crossed the road so that they wouldn’t get involved, but then a drug dealer and pimp, or a member of Al Qaeda, or someone convicted of a heinous crime, or someone else many of the people in the world think a despicable loser drew near to care for him, nurse him back to health and sacrifice money for his future care.

* What leads to the transition from fleeing from the Lord to that of drawing near? The answer is found in the responsory to the first reading, which is in fact part of the second chapter of Jonah that was excised from the first reading so that we could make Jonah’s prayer our own. Prayer, real contact with God, transforms us from those who flee the Lord to those who serve and love and the Lord, especially in others. God himself transforms us to set us on his path.

* Today in the Gospel, Jesus describes that path for us. A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe what he thinks the answer is from his study of the law. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus gave elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized that the struggle for this scribe would be to practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere inquisitiveness, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line.