Homily for 27th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
27th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Oct. 6, 2019

Collect
Christian Brothers, Iona College, New Rochelle, N.Y.
St. Pius X, Scarsdale, N.Y.
St. Michael, Greenwich, Conn.

“In the abundance of your kindness, you surpass the merits and the desires of those who entreat you…” (Collect).

Many of the collects, or opening prayers, of our Sunday Masses are rather hard to understand in the translation we’ve been using since 2010.

These prayers are called “collects” because, in theory anyway, after the priest invites us all to pray, the congregation is expected to pray silently for a moment.  Then the celebrant “collects” everyone’s prayer in one joint appeal to the Father’s love and mercy.  With its resounding “Amen,” the congregation ratifies what the priest prays.

So today, what have we prayed for?  As always, we begin by naming some attribute of the Father, which usually becomes the basis for our pleading—or our “entreaty,” to use the word in today’s Collect.  The 1st attribute today is almighty God’s “abundance of kindness.”  “Kindness” here translates pietas, which in Latin doesn’t mean “piety.”  Pietas is a Roman virtue connoting family devotion, loyalty, or emotional bond, such as that between parent and child.[1]  Pietas, translated here as “kindness,” reinforces the bond between us children of God and the “ever-living God” who’s our father.

This kindness of our Father surpasses both our merits and our desires.  The “merits” of our behavior are nil.  Whatever good we do is overwhelmed by the weight of our sins.  We merit condemnation.  Before Holy Communion we acclaim, “O Lord, I am not worthy that you should enter under my roof,” not worthy that you should come to me.  The good that we do is done by the power of God’s grace.  If we may be accounted virtuous, and most of you, maybe all of you, are virtuous, it’s because the power of our Lord Jesus lives and works in us.  The very word virtue means “power,” and thru his Son Jesus the Father freely gives us this power, the power to act like Jesus.  He gives it, above all, thru the sacraments, these sacred mysteries in which we encounter Christ and are taken up into his life.

All of that “surpasses our desires.”  Every normal, healthy human being desires life, a long life, a healthy life, a peaceful life.  If we expect to find such life on this earth, however, we’re doomed to disappointment and frustration.  But the abundance of divine kindness surpasses our feeble desires and offers us eternal life, eternal youth, eternal peace.  Our frequent prayer for the deceased is “eternal rest grant unto them, O Lord,” because God truly gives us this gift thru the death and resurrection of Jesus.

After paying tribute to God’s attributes, we get to the actual prayer.  “Pour out your mercy upon us to pardon what conscience dreads and give what prayer does not dare to ask.”  Actually, we do dare to ask.  We’re asking here and now.  At every Mass, also, we introduce the Our Father with “At the Savior’s command …, we dare to say….”

Jonathan Edwards

We ask our kind, devoted heavenly Father, the Almighty, to be merciful, even tho we don’t merit mercy.  We ask for pardon we don’t deserve.  Our conscience dreads divine justice, due payment for our sins.  In an American lit class you may have read Jonathan Edwards’ sermon “Sinners in the hands of an angry God,” and you may remember an image he uses, of a spider dangling over a fire, likening that to us sinners suspended over hellfire only by God’s mercy.

Most of us, I dare say, certainly including me, have done or said things in our past, or failed to do something, of which we’re now utterly ashamed.  There are people who believe they’ve been so evil that they’re beyond redemption, beyond forgiveness—and they’re unwilling, then, to approach that great sacrament of God’s mercy, Reconciliation or Penance.  Conscience condemns them, perhaps rightly, and they dare not approach God for pardon.

The Letter to the Hebrews tells us that “Jesus, the Son of God,” is enthroned in heaven and acts as our “high priest” to intercede for us.  So we may “with confidence,” and not fear, “draw near the throne of grace” to “receive mercy and find grace” (4:14,16).  God desires more than we know to forgive us.

The kindness, the pietas, of our heavenly Father has given us his Son to award us pardon we don’t merit, to give us more life and joy than we can possibly imagine, much less desire.  We pray for that, and in our Eucharist we thank God for it as once more, in the sacred mysteries, we approach the throne of grace.

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    [1] Daniel J. Merz and Marcel Rooney, OSB, Essential Presidential Prayers and Texts (Chicago: LTP, 2011), p. 230.