Homily for the Feast of St. Jude
October 28, 2023
Everything Impossible
St. Paul
of the Cross, the founder of the Passionist religious order, traveled
throughout Italy in the early part of the 1700s, preaching the Gospel to a
society that had grown cold. Once, he entered a town and came to the town square
to begin preaching. There was a cynical old soldier who sat on a large stone
seat across the square, mocking and blaspheming as St. Paul went on. At the end
of the sermon, Paul went up to him and encouraged him to convert and follow
Christ.
The soldier
looked across the square and saw the butcher shop, and the butcher about to
begin cutting up an ox that he had just killed. The soldier replied, “I’ll be
converted as soon as that ox returns to life.” At that instant, the dead ox
leapt to his feet and began charging at the soldier. Terrified, the soldier ran
out of the way at the last second, and the ox crashed into the stone seat that
he had been occupying, dropping dead a second time at the feet of the solider.
Needless to say, the soldier was instantaneously converted!
Our modern,
rationalistic ears hear stories like that and think they are myths, fables, legends.
They feel too impossible to be true. But is anything truly impossible to God?
The lives of the saints are filled with events that really happened but are
truly impossible by human efforts. And these miracles do not only happen in the
past – just last week a parishioner showed me a recent photograph of the
Eucharist in a monstrance from California – and clearly within the Eucharistic
Host is an image of Our Lady, inexplicable except for a miracle from God.
St.
Jude, of course, is the patron saint of the impossible. He has gained this
reputation because his name was so close to Judas that you’d have to be pretty
desperate to pray to someone whose name is similar to the worst man in human
history! But time and again, people can testify to the power of the
intercession of St. Jude to accomplish the impossible.
When we
turn to God or a saint to ask them to do something impossible, however, we do
not do so in a superstitious way, as if we are performing a magical incantation
to get what we want. Sometimes devotion to St. Jude can fall into that category
– periodically I find a stack of prayers left in our church which promise that
all of our wishes will come true if we pray to St. Jude and leave 9 copies in
church for 9 days. That’s a chain letter – that’s not devotion. Rather, when we
ask for the impossible, we do so with a surrender that accepts the Lord’s
answer – which could be yes, no, or not yet – and we trust that His answer is
for our happiness.
Because
the greatest and most impossible thing in the entire universe is precisely what
God wants to do – He wants to make you a saint. Ha!, you may be saying. That is
truly impossible. And from a human level, yes. We are all so broken and
weak – how can we do the great things the saints did? Not on our own – we can
only do them by trusting in the God Who does the impossible. If He can rise
from the dead, and make an ox come to life, can He not make your soul overflow
with the divine life of grace so that you are radiant in holiness?
Do we
want Him to do that impossible task in us? I hope so – for holiness is the
reason we are created, and holiness is the destiny of the blessed in Heaven. Most
people want to settle for a mediocre decency, but God is looking for a few
willing souls where He can do the impossible and make them saints. Will you be
one of them?
We pray
through the intercession of St. Jude that God will do the impossible in us and
make us the saints He has created us to be!
No comments:
Post a Comment