HOMILY WEEK 19 01 – Year I
A Religion of the Heart:
Memorial of St Maximilian Kolbe
(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.
St. Maximilian Kolbe
The church honours today someone who lived these readings to the full. St Maximillian was born in Poland in 1894. As a Franciscan, he worked to spread the Gospel in his native Poland as well as Japan. He had a great devotion to and promoted the veneration of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He was strongly influenced in 1906 at the age of 12, by a vision of the Blessed Virgin Mary. He later described this incident: “That night I asked the Mother of God what was to become of me. Then she came to me holding two crowns, one white, the other red. She asked me if I was willing to accept either of these crowns. The white one meant that I should persevere in purity, and the red that I should become a martyr. I said that I would accept them both.”
Maximillian founded and supervised the monastery of Niepokalanów near Warsaw, operated an amateur radio station (SP3RN) and founded or ran several other organizations and publications. During the Nazi occupation of Poland, he helped thousands of refugees, including Polish Jews. He was arrested by the Gestapo in 1941 and imprisoned at Auschwitz. Three months after Maximillian’s arrival, a prisoner escaped. In retaliation, 10 men were chosen at random to die. One was a young father; Maximillian offered to take his place. His offer accepted, Maximillian died on this day in 1941 and was canonized in October 1982. I believe the young father he saved was present at his canonization ceremony.
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.
