HOMILY HOMILY WEEK 24 03 – Yr I

 

KOREAN MARTYRS

Revelation, Resistance and Vindication

(1 Tm 3:14-16; Ps 111; Lk 7:31-35)

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Three words capture the essence of today’s readings: revelation, resistance and vindication.

These three words also offer us a clear message: we are to place our complete faith in Jesus Christ and express that faith by being the Church.

St. Paul in the first reading to Timothy strives to explain what he calls the “great mystery of our religion.” That mystery centers on Jesus who was “revealed in the flesh, vindicated in spirit, seen by angels (I would add humans), proclaimed among the Gentiles, believed in throughout the world, and taken up in glory.”

That is our faith, the core of our belief. St. Paul takes pains to instruct Timothy and the early believers in how they are to conduct themselves as members of the Body of Christ, the Church of the living God that he calls the “household of God.” He then adds the beautiful description of the Church as the “pillar and bulwark of truth.” That, too, is part of the great mystery of our religion – that we are part and part of the revelation of who Jesus is for the world, and also of the building up of the Reign of God here on earth by our adherence to the truth of our faith.

In the gospel, however, we see just the opposite – resistance to this mystery. Jesus finds it necessary to chide the people of his time for their unbelief, cynicism and fickleness. They resisted John the Baptist, and now they are resisting him. At the end of the gospel, Jesus adds an interesting comment that St. Paul also mentions in the first reading – “Wisdom (Jesus) is vindicated by all her children.”

The definition of the transitive word vindicate is to free from allegation or blame, to provide justification or defense for someone or some value. I would add, to validate the claims or authenticity of someone or some value. The sense of the word as used by Jesus and Paul is that the claims of John the Baptist (Here is the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world” and of Jesus (I am the Way, Truth, Life, Messiah, Lord, Savior) is proven true by the very existence and life of the Church, the Body of Christ.

What an awesome mission – to prove to the world that Jesus is truly who he claims to be by our belief, our actions, our values in the face of all stubborn unbelief, false pride and self-serving criticism.

The root cause of that resistance to so beautiful a message, I believe, goes back to the story of the Garden of Eden, and the first sin, eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. That mythological tree symbolized humanities warped and fatal desire to decide for itself what is right or wrong.

That resistance to a message about who God is and the call to do the will of God rather than our own stubborn will, is evident all around us. People who turn to addictions rather than deal with their hurt and defects; a society that allows abortion on one hand, and physician assisted suicide on the other; trying to make gender neutrality the norm rather than an exception, to the point of punishing those who choose heterosexuality, and all the ism’s like protectionism, consumerism, materialism, atheism – it is rampant all around us.

Nowhere was that resistance more vicious and vociferous than in the early days of Christianity in Korea, giving rise to our memorial today of the Korean martyrs. In the early 1600’s, Christian communities began to flourish in Korea under the leadership of lay people. On 1836, missionaries from France, members of the Parish Foreign Mission Society, secretly entered the country. The Christian communities began to encounter hostility and, during the persecutions of the mid-19^th century, over 10,000 Christians were killed. Andrew Kim Tae-gôn, the first Korean priest, was one of them and Paul Chong, a seminarian and catechist, was one of the many lay people who suffered. These and 101 other Korean martyrs, clergy and lay, young and old, were canonized in 1984.

Here is a portion from a letter written by Fr. Andrew Kim, “But as the Scriptures say, God numbers the very hairs on our head and in his all-embracing providence he has care over us all. Persecution, therefore, can only be regarded as the command of the Lord or as a prize he gives. Hold fast, then, to the will of God and with all your heart, fight the good fight under the leadership of Jesus; conquer again the diabolical power of this world that Christ has already vanquished. I beg you not to fail in your love for one another, but to support one another and to stand fast until the Lord mercifully delivers us from our trials. There are twenty of us in this place and by God’s grace we are, so far, all well. If any of us is executed, I ask you not to forget our families. I have many things to say, yet how can pen and paper capture what I feel? I end this letter. As we are all near the final ordeal, I urge you to remain steadfast in faith, so that at last we will all reach heaven and there rejoice together. I embrace you all in love.”

What faith these ancestors in our religion had! We will probably never be confronted with such a test of faith. For us, life will be more like living Calvary in slow motion – living the mystery of the life, death and resurrection of Jesus, daily vindicating who he is as his Body, the Church, by our selfless love and striving to live in his truth.

The Eucharist is an act of faith that can strengthen us to live Calvary in slow motion, and to live the mystery of our great faith. Let us pray today that it might be so every day.