Homily for Thursday, 16 October 2014– Memorial of St. Margaret Mary Alacoque

Thursday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time

Readings of the day: Ephesians 1:1-10; Psalm 98:1, 2-3ab, 3cd-4, 5-6; Luke 11:47-54

In what ways have we been blessed by God, sisters and brothers in Christ? Have we not been blessed by God in more ways than we could count?

Today St. Paul gives us from his letter to the Ephesians a beautiful hymn of gratitude for the many ways in which God has blessed us. “Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who has blessed us in Christ with every spiritual blessing in the heavens,” St. Paul writes.

St. Paul goes on to name some of these blessings we have received: “Adoption” as daughters and sons of God “through Jesus Christ”; the calling in light of being daughters and sons of God in Christ “to be holy and without blemish before” God. For the times when we have not been so “holy and without blemish,” we have been blessed with “redemption by [Christ’s] blood; the forgiveness of transgressions.” We have been blessed with “the riches of [God’s] grace”; by God’s plan to save us in “the fullness of time.” Like us, St. Paul cannot list all the blessings we have received as a people of God; as sisters and brothers in Christ. He stops at speaking of God’s plan; God’s blessing of us as the sum of “all things in Christ.” Have we not been so blessed by God that the amount and ways in which we have been and will continue to be blessed becomes a mystery?

St. Margaret Mary, patron saint of our parish whose feast we celebrate today, speaks of God’s many blessings in a similar way to that of St. Paul. St. Margaret Mary developed and promoted the devotion to the Sacred Heart of Jesus that is shared by many saints and by many of us here. In a letter she speaks of the Sacred Heart of Jesus as the fount or “abyss of all blessings” into which “the poor” are invited to “submerge all their needs.” The Sacred Heart of Our Lord Jesus Christ, St. Margaret Mary says, “is an abyss of joy in which all of us can immerse our sorrows. It is an abyss of lowliness to counteract our foolishness, an abyss of mercy for the wretched, an abyss of love to meet our every need.” In the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ we are blessed with “peace of heart” ourselves, St. Margaret Mary writes in the same letter. This “peace of heart” is the same “grace and peace from God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ” with which St. Paul greets the Ephesians.

On this feast day of St. Margaret Mary, we pray for our parish in a special way through one of its patron saints. United especially through the Sacred Heart of Jesus Christ, we pray in gratitude to God who gives us his grace; who has given us his beloved Son by whose cross and resurrection we are saved; who has given and continues to give us “every spiritual blessing in the heavens.”