Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the 23rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

September 11, 2020

1 Cor 9:16-19.22-27, Ps 84, Lk 6:39-42

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us an indication of what he hopes we will become: “When fully trained,” he said, “every disciple will be like his teacher.” Jesus wants us to become like him, to love as he has loved, to live as he has lived. The essence of human life and of Christian existence is to become “fully trained.” God provides this training, through his Word, through his Church, even through the suffering he permits. In the Gospel, in the powerful parable of the splinter and the wooden beam, Jesus indicates to us that he wants us paying attention to the ways that we need to grow, to those aspects of our own conduct that still need to be trained, rather than to obsess about others’ faults and flaws, so that we might see clearly, virtuously, charitably and be better trained to help our neighbor.

* St. Paul in the first reading today likewise talks about the training necessary to become saints, to become like Jesus. He makes an analogy to the training of championship athletes. “Do you not know that the runners in the stadium all run in the race, but only one wins the prize? Run so as to win. Every athlete exercises discipline in every way. They do it to win a perishable crown, but we an imperishable one.” We need to learn how to exercise discipline in every way, because discipline makes disciples. In this, St. Paul leads the Corinthians and us by example. He says, “Thus I do not run aimlessly; I do not fight as if I were shadowboxing. No, I drive my body and train it, for fear that, after having preached to others, I myself should be disqualified.” He was taking out his own logs from his life and that’s why he was able to see so clearly to assist others.

* And help others he did. He wanted everyone to become fully trained disciples through exercising discipline in every way. He made himself “a slave to all so as to win over as many as possible.” He became “all things to all, to save at least some.” His love for others and his recognition of God’s love for them because the driving force of his zeal. He wasn’t doing it for money or for earthly compensation, but because of an interior obligation to share the joy of what he himself had received. “Woe to me,” he says today, “if I do not preach the Gospel!” He recognized he had been given a treasure of which he had been made a steward and sought to pass on free of charge what he himself had received. A Christian spiritual athlete fully formed will have that same holy woe.

* The importance of this training is shown most conspicuously during times of crisis. Today on the 19th anniversary of the September 11 attacks, we see the blindness of terrorism and how evil and metastatic is the jihadi approach to life, as otherwise generous and sacrificial people are inspired not to make a sacrifice of themselves in love but waste their lives in suicidal terrorist acts. We are conscious, however, that we cannot just see the evil in their world vision, but must remember that the demagogues who manipulate them do so by calling the USA, not a nation filled Christian disciples like Jesus their master, but rather the “the great Satan,” because they see the cultural and moral garbage we often blithely tolerate and export to other countries. And so 9/11 must always be a day not just of prayerful remembrance but of continual pleading to God for mercy, begging him not only to save us from the scourge of terrorism but to have mercy on us for the types of behavior that the terrorist leaders are able unjustifiably to use to incite acts of homicidal hatred and grant us the gift of conversion,