A Homily for the Ninth Sunday after Pentecost

​+ ‘Grown men don’t cry,’ or so the adage goes. And yet the Sacred Liturgy of this Holy Mass places us before Our Lord, who, as He makes His entry into Jerusalem to the acclaim of the people, at the sight of the Holy City weeps. His tears are not shallow: they flow from the depths of His love for all that Jerusalem had been promised of old; for all that Jerusalem could and should be in the merciful design of Almighty God for His Chosen People.
 
And yet, in St Matthew’s Gospel Our Lord finds it necessary to cry out in grief: “O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, killing the prophets and stoning those who are sent to you! How often would I have gathered your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings, and you would not!” (Mt 23:37) And in the Holy Gospel of this Mass He weeps, lamenting: “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!” Our Lord’s tears flow all the more deeply still as He foretells the brutal destruction of the Holy City, literally and theologically, “because you did not know the time of your visitation.”
 
Grown men do cry, it seems, in the face of such terrible realities—quite appropriately; instructively even. For if the tears of Our Blessed Lord do nothing else, they manifest the reality of His profound piety in respect of the Covenant between God and His People, and His deep love for the very City that is its incarnation. Our Lord also wept at the death of Lazarus, prompting those around to observe: “See how He loved him.” (cf. Jn. 11:35-36) The incarnate Son of God cries. He cries because He loves. He cries to manifest the profundity of love that is Almighty God. He cries so that we too may be moved to tears and convert our ways to His.
 
The very human reality of tears upon Our Lord’s face serves to remind us of something utterly crucial: that the Catholic faith is not fundamentally a creed to which to assent or a code of morals with which to comply. Rather, it is a personal relationship with the Person of Jesus Christ Whose love for us is infinite and Who sheds tears over us when we damage or destroy that relationship by our sins. To be sure, creeds and moral precepts follow from this relationship and from His definitive revelation of God in history, and they are integral to that relationship. But Christianity is first and foremost the reality that, by the grace of Baptism, we are inserted into a relationship of such unthinkable intimacy with God that He holds tears to be indeed worth the shedding.
 
We would do well to take some time to contemplate this reality. It is more than instructive—it is revelatory. Creeds can be studied, but when I come to see in them the face of Christ who loves me, the Truth they contain begins to live in me. Moral norms can be known to be right, but when I begin to understand the anguish that disregarding them will cause in He who gave Himself in loving sacrifice upon the Cross for me, they cease to be impositions and become the foundations of life lived to its fullness in Christ.
 
Prayer, too, is transformed by this reality. St Benedict instructs his sons to pray “not in a loud voice, but with tears and fervour of heart.” (Rule, ch. 52) Certainly, he also instructs his monks to sing the entire psalter each week—but that too should be done with tears, as it were. Prayer is nothing other than daring to continue to look upon the face of Christ weeping out of profound love for us, and of therein receiving the grace of responding appropriately.
 
In contemplating this reality in her Sacred Liturgy this morning the Church proclaims with the words of Our Lord: “Would that even today you knew the things that make for peace!” In the context of the Gospel passage from which this was taken, these words referred to the impending destruction of the Holy City. In this liturgical context they call us to know, indeed, to find those things that make for peace with Almighty God in the particular circumstances of our different vocations, and to live according to them. For without them, destruction impends for us also. We must remember the stark reality that Our Lord’s love and tears for the Holy City did not save it from the consequences of rejecting Him. Similarly, Baptism does not take us prisoner or remove our free will. We may reject His love if we wish, but that has clear consequences.
 
Stark as these realities are, the love of Our Blessed Lord is as merciful as to say that “even today” it is not too late. Even today it is not too late to seek out that which, in love, He calls me to do—be that my conversion from sin and vice; be that to give myself totally to Him in the monastic or religious life; be that to commit myself to the fruitful living of the vocation of Christian marriage; be that to test a vocation to the priesthood; or be that simply to draw new strength in the living of my actual vocation through the contemplation of the weeping face of Christ.
 
Iam hora est! The time is at hand to act so that Our Lord has no further reason to weep in respect of ourselves. +