Homily for 31st Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the
31st Sunday of Ordinary Time

Oct. 31, 2021
Eucharistic Prayer
St. Joseph Church , New Rochelle, N.Y.

“Do this in memory of me” (Words of Institution, E.P.).

How often have you heard that command of Jesus?  Yet have you ever asked what it is that Jesus is commanding us to do?

On the most basic level, he’s commanding us to re-enact what he did at the Last Supper, to take bread and wine, bless them, share them, and consume them—to carry out a ritual.

On a deeper level, he’s commanding us to understand what that ritual means.  What we’re doing is what he did:  changing bread into his body and wine into his blood, and consuming these altered substances that he’s given us, given for us, for the forgiveness of our sins.  It’s bread no longer, wine no longer, despite their outer appearance and taste, but himself—God’s love, God’s power, God’s forgiveness made flesh that we might share in that love, that power, that forgiveness, and be transformed ourselves from sinners alienated from God into friends of God, into saints.  As we prepare to celebrate All Hallows Eve, the eve of all the saints, we remember why God made us and how Jesus remakes us—to be saints.

“Do this in memory of me.”  What is our Lord Jesus doing that we must remember?  At the Last Supper he’s surrendering his life to his Father.  He’s committing himself to obeying his Father.  He told us that he’d come down from heaven to do the will of the one who sent him (John 6:38) and that his food was to do his Father’s will and to finish his work (John 4:34).  St. Paul affirms, “Thru one man’s obedience all people have been made right with God” (Rom 5:19).

Jesus doesn’t want to be arrested, tortured, and executed, nor does his Father want that.  What the Father wants is that Jesus reveal God’s love and forgiveness for the whole human race, and his compassion for the lowly, the suffering, and the oppressed.  That’s what got Jesus into trouble with the Jewish authorities.  Abp. Samuel Aquila of Denver expresses it this way in a recent newspaper column:  “His direct truthfulness was challenging, and to some it was so threatening that they plotted against Jesus and eventually killed him.”  Such insistence still gets many Christians into trouble and leads to exile, prison, or martyrdom, e.g. St. Oscar Romero and Blessed Stanley Rother, a missionary priest from Oklahoma killed by government militia in Guatemala because he catechized and educated the peasants.

If you and I are to do what Jesus has done, in memory of him, receiving the Eucharist isn’t enuf.  Obedience like his is required of us too.  We are required to seek the Father’s will in our own lives and do our best to carry it out—in our married lives, family lives, work lives, recreational lives; in our interactions with people on the street, on the highways, and on the World Wide Web.  The famous acronym WWJD—“What would Jesus do?”—can’t be just a slogan.  It must be lived.

In particular, what Jesus did at the Last Supper and on Good Friday was to give his body for us, pour out his blood for us.  He sacrificed his life for our salvation.  We heard in the Letter to the Hebrews, “He offered himself once for all when he offered himself” (7:27).  To do this in memory of him is to sacrifice ourselves for the sake of others:  spouses to sacrifice for each other, parents for their children, grown children for their aging parents, those with social advantages for those aren’t well off, like the sick, the unemployed, the hungry, the homeless, the refugee, the desperate pregnant woman and the single mother, those who need education.  The Church engages in such social works in imitation of Jesus—in memory of him.  The Church is us, not just Cardinal Dolan or the clergy or religious sisters.  It’s all of us.  All of us must offer ourselves as sacrifices to God, like Jesus.