HOMILY WEEK 24 04 – Year I

Love, Faith, Purity, Repentance and Forgiveness:

Optional Memorial of St. Januarius

(1 Tm 4:12-16; Ps 111; Lk 7:36-50)

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Five key words describe and sum up the readings today: love, faith, purity, repentance and forgiveness.

In the first reading, St. Paul provides interesting advice to a young bishop, Timothy: Love, have faith, be pure, encourage, promote the Word of God, and on top of all that, be a teacher.

The focus in the gospel is on repentance and forgiveness. This is a classic example of Jesus teaching and healing. The lesson is that those who have been forgiven much have received great love and can then show great love. To repent is to receive love. To forgive is to love. For some, mercy is the highest virtue.

Pope Francis and his year of mercy fits right in with these readings. So too does Walter Kasper’s book Mercy.He also considers mercy and forgiveness to be the greatest virtue, far outshining all others.

Like Timothy, we are encouraged to love, have faith, be pure, and forgive anyone who has hurt us in any way, as well as ask for forgiveness from anyone we have hurt, and we will be like the woman in the gospel, showing much love because we have been forgiven much.

There is a chilling and telling comparison in this gospel. On the one hand, the Pharisee hosting Jesus, who certainly is religious, dutiful, pious and even prayerful, reveals himself at a deeper level to be hard, judgmental, unforgiving, lacking in compassion and critical of Jesus. The woman who obviously is a sinner, on the other hand, is repentant, weeping tears of sorrow and contrition, believes in Jesus and his compassion, is receiving his forgiveness and expresses her gratitude with an extravagant and even sensuous gesture. We are left with a soul-stirring question – which of these two most resembles us? Obviously, if it is the Pharisee, we have some inner work to do.

Today the Church invites us to honor St. Januarius. Little is known about the life or martyrdom of St. Januarius. His fame is centered on a relic, said to contain his blood, that is kept in the cathedral at Naples. Early devotion to the saint was based on the belief that Januarius, an Italian bishop, lived in the 4^thcentury and was martyred during the Diocletian persecution, but the records are unreliable. Early Christians kept clothing of martyrs soaked with blood as objects of devotion, and if possible, gathered blood in flasks, sometimes buried with them to indicate martyrdom.

In the 14th century there occurred a phenomenon that was to attract curiosity throughout the centuries. The year was 1389. A procession was making its way about the cathedral when the priest holding the flasks containing the saint’s coagulated blood noticed that the contents began to liquefy and bubble. Since then the blood has repeated this phenomenon three times each year. The solid mass in the vial becomes liquefied, sometimes seeming to bubble and froth.

Even today the happenings provoke worldwide interest. The relic is an object of devotion and the activity is said to be miraculous. The cathedral is always filled to capacity when the resident cardinal or a priest holds the reliquary for all to see, being careful not to touch the crystal sides. The cardinal then announces, “The miracle has happened,” words that cause great joy and the chanting of the “Te Deum”. No natural explanation has been found for this phenomenon. But today, perhaps this miracle, and the miracle of being gratuitously forgiven by the mercy of God in Jesus, come together for our consideration.

The Eucharist, with the eyes of faith, is also a miracle of compassion, forgiveness and healing involving blood. We are nourished by the very word of God, then humble gifts of bread and wine are miraculously transformed into the body and blood of Jesus. We who receive communion are in that very act, forgiven, healed and transformed into the Body of Christ, sent out to be bread for the world.

May our celebration empower us to live St. Paul’s teachings of love, faith and purity to Timothy, and become our own version of the repentant woman in the gospels, hearing for ourselves those beautiful words of Jesus, “Your faith has saved you; go in peace.”