Fr. Roger J. Landry

Shrine of Our Lady of the Martyrs, Auriesville, New York

Friday of the 13th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart

July 2, 2021

Gen 23:1-4.19;24:1-8.62-67, Ps 106, Mt 9:9-13

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.2.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today the Church has us focus on the mercy and specificity of God’s call. None of us is random by God, just another in a big group. With great merciful love, he calls us by name. We see this very powerfully in the calling of St. Matthew in today’s Gospel. Matthew was a despised tax collector who used to extort money from his own people to give it to the occupying Romans. The way the Roman tax system worked was that the Romans needed to get a set fee from a given territory; everything the tax collectors got beyond that was theirs to keep. Because of this system, many tax collectors, filled with greed, would begin rapaciously to rip off their own people with the help of the Roman army. They were like modern mafia dons who extort neighborhood small businesses and even families to pay “protection fees” lest an “accident” happen to their businesses or loved ones. For Jesus to go after Matthew at his customs post then would have been as dramatic as Jesus’ entering into Al Capone’s speakeasy and calling him from his booze and hundred dollar bills or into the Playboy Mansion today and calling Hugh Hefner from his exploited babes. But Jesus desires mercy and he came to call sinners to repentance and he was going to show that by going after one of the most notorious sinners of his day. Matthew must have heard about Jesus and perhaps even stood at a distance to hear him speak, but likely thought that he would never be accepted among Jesus’ associates not to mention friends. Yet in today’s Gospel Jesus enters the place where he was working and says to him, “Follow me!” Many, as we know, objected. The Pharisees, in particular, whose name means “separated ones,” refused to interact with public sinners at all. When Matthew threw a party to celebrate his conversion and his calling and introduce his associates, friends, and others to Jesus, the Pharisees objected, saying, “Why does your teacher eat with tax collectors and sinners?” Jesus would later be dubbed, pejoratively in their eyes, a “friend of tax collectors and sinners.” But Jesus replied by saying, “Those who are well do not need a physician, but the sick do. Go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘I desire mercy, not sacrifice.’ I did not come to call the righteous but sinners.”

* We see there a key lesson in every Christian vocation except the sinful Blessed Virgin Mary’s. Jesus has come to call sinners. Like with St. Matthew, we wants us to leave our sins behind and then to become walking advertisements to others that forgiveness of sins is not only possible but life-changing. Jesus did the same with Peter, whose first words to the Lord were “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man.” He did the same with Paul, who used to terrorize and kill Christians in his youth. He did the same with Augustine and so many other famous saints throughout the centuries. But he’s done so with every Christian. I don’t think we ponder enough St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing,