Fr. Roger J. LandrySacred Heart Mission of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanThursday of the Second Week of AdventMemorial of St. Juan DiegoDecember 9, 2021Is 41:13-20, Ps 145, Mt 11:11-15

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* The Jews were waiting in the long Advent for two figures. The first was the Messiah. The second was Elijah, whom God had said through the Prophet Malachi, “Behold, I will send you the prophet Elijah before the great and terrible day of the Lord comes” (Mal 4:5; Mal 3:1). Jesus in today’s Gospel identified the work of Elijah with St. John the Baptist, telling us, “If you are willing to accept it, he is Elijah, the one who is to come.” Later in St. Matthew’s Gospel, after Elijah appeared with Moses speaking to Jesus during the Transfiguration, Jesus was even more explicit: “Elijah will indeed come and restore all things, but I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him but did to him whatever they pleased. So also will the Son of Man suffer at their hands” (Mt 17:12), pointing out how they had manhandled his precursor. “Elijah” pointed out the “Messiah” and the “Messiah” was pointing out “Elijah.” The fulfillment of the Advent for the one who would come in the person of Elijah was an indication of the even greater fulfillment.

* But because of John the Baptist’s role in pointing out the Messiah, not to mention because of his personal holiness and witness to the point of martyrdom, Jesus said something astonishing in today’s Gospel: “Amen, I say to you, among those born of women, there has been none greater than John the Baptist, yet the least in the Kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” First, Jesus was saying that up until then John was the greatest human being who had ever lived. We need to ponder that. There were lots of heroic martyrs and faithful Israelites, but he had the role to make straight the paths of the Lord. He was one born of a woman having already been blessed by God in the womb. No one had been born so exalted as to have pointed out by his leaping the Messiah. And he was still pointing him out, at the Jordan, through preaching repentance and faith, through martyrdom. But Jesus goes on to say that the littlest in the kingdom of God was even greater than John, that the one sanctified in the womb of the Kingdom is greater than all those born just of women. This is not so much a testimony about moral greatness, but about objective greatness, and a reminder to us of just how lucky we are to have been reborn in that womb of the Church soon after birth or whenever we entered into the sacred waters. We’re also greater because we’ve seen and received the full revelation of Christ to which John was still in some sense prophesying, because John hadn’t seen what would come later: Jesus’s incredible love revealed for us on the Cross that gave us the power to become children of God.

* But just as there was a cost for John’s becoming the greatest born of woman — his suffering on account of pointing out not only the Lamb but the Bridegroom and therefore the truth about marriage before Herod — so there’s a cost for our Christian greatness in fully entering the kingdom. Jesus describes both sufferings in the Gospel: “From the days of John the Baptist until now, the Kingdom of heaven suffers violence, and the violent are taking it by force.” There are two types of violence Jesus describes: violence against the Kingdom and violence for the Kingdom. We see the violence against the Kingdom from the beginning. The slaughter of the Holy Innocents. Jesus’ neighbors in Nazareth trying to murder him by throwing him off the Nazarene cliff. The collusion of the arch-inimical Sadducees,