Saturday in the 26th Week of Ordinary Time, October 1, 2022

The Feast of St. Therese of the Child Jesus

Luke 10, 17-24

The seventy-two disciples returned rejoicing and said to Jesus, “Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.” Jesus said, “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky. Behold, I have given you the power ‘to tread upon serpents’ and scorpions and upon the full force of the enemy and nothing will harm you. Nevertheless, do not rejoice because the spirits are subject to you, but rejoice because your names are written in heaven.” At that very moment he rejoiced in the Holy Spirit and said, “I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike. Yes, Father, such has been your gracious will. All things have been handed over to me by my Father. No one knows who the Son is except the Father, and who the Father is except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.”  Turning to the disciples in private he said, “Blessed are the eyes that see what you see. For I say to you, many prophets and kings desired to see what you see, but did not see it, and to hear what you hear, but did not hear it.”

At this point in St. Luke’s chronology, Jesus had sent seventy-two of his disciples in pairs to those towns and villages where he intended to go.  If we think about this, he was proposing to visit another thirty-six towns and villages.  This tells us of how extensive was his preaching in Galilee and Judea, and of the torrid pace he put himself on.  The travel on foot by itself would have been exhausting, but this combined with preaching and healing makes his labor very difficult to imagine.  His relentless dedication to preaching the Gospel gives example to us of how dedicated we must be to living the Gospel we have received from him.

“Lord, even the demons are subject to us because of your name.”  The disciples, to whom the Lord had given a temporary share in his power to cast out demons, are amazed at what God has accomplished through them.  They are quite conscious of the fact that it is not their own doing that causes the demons to flee, but that it is the name of Jesus that does this.  To this, the Lord replies: “I have observed Satan fall like lightning from the sky.”  The tense of the Greek verb is actually in the imperfect rather than the perfect, and so what he says is more like, “I was beholding Satan, who fell like a flash of lightning from the sky.”  The imperfect indicates an ongoing action that took place in the past.  The sense is that the Lord saw Satan before he fell, as he fell, and after he fell.  “Like lightning”, indicating the blaze of Satan losing his place in the firmament and the horrific nature of his fall.  If the fall was so great, we can only wonder at the crash that finally came.  Jesus is also likening Satan’s fall to that of a meteorite coming down at night.  At the time, the nature of meteorites was not at all understood and the streaks they made in the sky as they plummeted caused fear among those observing them.  The Lord’s sharp description would have startled his hearers, and also would have made them wonder about who this was who could speak in this way.  “Rejoice because your names are written in heaven.”  Satan, the great angel, was cast out of heaven and forever lost his place there, but the names of the disciples are set in heaven indicating their places there.  This is as though to say that Satan’s fall allows for the rise of the disciples, and we can see how this works through Divine Providence, for the devil’s tempting provides opportunity for the disciples to grow in virtue through resisting his temptations, and the devil would not be tempting them if he had not fallen from heaven.

“I give you praise, Father, Lord of heaven and earth, for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned you have revealed them to the childlike.”  These words seem detached from the episode of the return of the disciples: what is the Lord saying the Father has revealed to them?  He means the Gospel that he has given them to preach.  As it happens, this perfectly fits St. Therese, whose feast is celebrated today.  She, in her smallness, possessed wisdom that the great philosophers of ancient times did not, and that very many of her own time did not, either.  In the last part of the nineteenth century, during which Therese lived, the leading people of society were flinging aside belief in God as though it were a thing of childhood.  The writings of Charles Darwin and Thomas Malthus were making faith seem unnecessary and antiquated.  The new modern spirit even began to creep into the Church as well, such as through the French ex-priest Alfred Loisy.  Ernest Renan, a distinguished scholar of ancient languages, wrote a book about Jesus which became hugely popular in Europe at that time.  Renan attempted to portray the Lord only as an exemplary human who performed no miracles.  Little Therese, without a university education and who only once traveled outside her country, knew more than they, and more than multitudes of their followers.  She wrote no polemics or treatises, either, but the book made of her notes about her life with Jesus has influenced countless souls ever since it was put in print.  

We pray to St. Therese in our own day, asking her to obtain for us the graces we need to persevere in our faith and to grow in true wisdom through prayer.