Faith-Religion-St Jane Frances de Chantal

HOMILY WEEK 19 01 – Year I

A Religion of the Heart –

Optional Memorial: St Jeanne Frances de Chantal

(Dt 10:12-22; Ps 147; Mt 17:22-27)

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“Act justly, love tenderly and walk humbly with our God.”

That quote, taken from the prophet Micah, aptly summarizes the message of today’s readings – to walk humbly with our God in an intimate relationship of love.

In the first reading from Deuteronomy, Moses urges the people to respond to God’s liberating love for them by walking in God’s ways. He spells that out: love God and serve God alone; keep God’s commandments; live faith from the heart; be fair and work for justice, and welcome strangers – a message sorely needed in our world today as we harden out hearts against strangers and immigrants.

Moses reminds the people they are chosen by God to be in an intimate relationship of the heart with God – a covenant of love setting them apart from all the other peoples of the world, and making them an icon on earth of who God is. That would demand of them a response of striving to be God-like, of metanoia, of change, radically described in this passage as “Circumscribe, then, the foreskin of your heart, and do not be stubborn any longer.”

Stubborn self-will was the sin of Adam and Eve who wanted to decide for themselves what was right and wrong by eating of the forbidden tree of the “knowledge of good and evil.” Stubborn self-will was also consistently the sin of the chosen people throughout their desert wanderings, with their murmuring in the desert, their complaining to Moses and Aaron, their oft-times desire to return to the misery of Egypt, and especially their lusting after the false gods of money, fame and power, the very things Jesus rejected when he was tempted in the desert.

And stubborn self-will is unfortunately the sin of our society today, also bent on doing its own will, to its own detriment I believe, with such developments as physician-assisted suicide and the ideology of children deciding for themselves what gender they want to be, blithely ignoring any connection with their own God-given physiology. We would do well to listen more closely to the words of Moses and take them to heart.

In the gospel, Jesus spells out walking in God’s ways more fully – we are to follow him through his pattern of passion, death and resurrection. We are to die to our sin, heal of our sinfulness, let go of our defects of character, and rise to a new life lived with him.

Today the church honors St. Jane Frances de Chantal. Born Jane Frémiot at Dijon, France, in 1572, she and her husband had six children. In 1601, however, her husband died in an accident. After overcoming her depression, Jane Frances sought the spiritual dimension of her suffering. With her spiritual advisor, Francis de Sales, she founded the Congregation of the Visitation for women who wished to live religious life but could not endure the austerity of the existing religious orders. Committed to working with the sick and the poor, she died in 1641, having established about 85 monasteries.

The Eucharist is one of our best ways to follow Jesus and do the will of God. As Ron Rolheiser OMI puts it, the Eucharist is our “one great act of fidelity.” Ever since Jesus took, blessed, broke and shared bread and wine and told us to “do this in memory of him” we have been faithfully doing that for over two thousand years.

May our celebration today deepen our faith in him, and empower us to live those teachings of Moses, seconded by Jesus himself – to walk humbly with our God in an intimate relationship of love, sharing that love with strangers and the poor.