Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sister of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

February 25, 2022

James 5:9-12, Ps 103, Mk 10:1-12

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, Jesus speaks about the meaning of marriage, but in so doing he describes not just what marriage is God’s plans but opens a window into who God is, who the human person is, and how he’s called to love. And in the first reading, St. James focuses on virtues that will help us to persevere in living out the nuptial reality of our existence. These are, by God’s providence, good lessons by which to frame my latest regularly scheduled Mass with you. Since my first Mass here, March 20, 2015, I have come 358 times to celebrate Mass with you, where together we have entered into the consummation of Christ the Bridegroom’s one-flesh, faithful, fruitful, indissoluble Covenantal union with his Bride. It’s here where we have sought to say to our compassionate and merciful Lord a yes that means yes in response to the yes he is and says to us. And we give him thanks for the way he has allowed us mutually to strengthen each other’s faithful fiat and adamant amen. As we seek to bless the Lord with all our soul, have our whole being bless his holy name and forget not his benefits, let us enter anew into today’s readings, which summarize in a sense all of salvation history.

* When the Pharisees come to Jesus to try to trip him up with a question about whether it is licit for a man to divorce his wife, Jesus said that Moses permitted divorce because of the hardness of hearts, but that divorce and remarriage were not part of God’s plans. Jesus begins at the beginning, with the creation of the human person: “From the beginning of creation, God made them male and female. For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh. So they are no longer two but one flesh. Therefore what God has joined together, no human being must separate.” “God created man male and female,” as we read in the Book of Genesis; “in the image of God he made them.” That’s why Saint John Paul II in his beautiful catechizes on Human Love in the Divine Plan (popularly called the Theology of the Body) said that the greatest expression of the imago Dei is the family: God is a unitary Deity but a loving communion of persons and therefore, the image of God is more than just man’s rational nature, but his capacity to live in a communion of love. And the greatest human example of that loving communion of persons is marriage, where analogously to the way that the Father’s and Son’s love spirated the Holy Spirit the love of a man and a woman can beget a child, who is a fruit of their love and a source for that love to grow. That’s what marriage was in the beginning, the primordial sacrament, the external sign in the visible world pointing to the interpersonal communion who is God. All of nature, from the beginning, is communal, and the human person was created with a nuptial nature meant to bring him into communion with others and with God.

* When Jesus came, he sought to elevate marriage from this primordial sacrament to one of the seven sacraments, a sign and means of intimate communion with God. It was meant to point to, and be inserted within, the nuptial dimension of the Covenant God makes with us his people. After quoting the words Jesus cited in today’s Gospel from the Book of Genesis, that a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one fles...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

February 24, 2022

Jas 5:1-6, Ps 49, Mk 9:41-50

 

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.24.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus speaks to us very powerfully in the Gospel about the coherence, the integrity, the correspondence between what we believe and how we behave, we’re supposed to have in our life. This is a coherence that’s supposed to be found in not just the big things of our life but the little things. He begins by saying that anyone who gives a cup of cold water to another because of the person’s relationship to Christ will surely not lose his reward. Christian coherence doesn’t involve fidelity onlywhen threatened with martyrdom, but fidelity in looking out with the eyes and the heart to care for the needs of anyone who is thirsty, aware that Christ identifies with everyone who is thirsty and longs to say to us, “When I was thirsty, you gave me to drink.”

* But then Christ pivots to talk about incoherence and the scandal that it gives. With very graphic language, he says, “Whoever causes one of these little ones who believe in me to sin, it would be better for him if a great millstone were put around his neck and he were thrown into the sea.” It’s bad enough that we sin, but Jesus says it’s infinitely worse when we lead others to sin, especially those with a child-like faith who look with love to Jesus and expect us to represent Him and live what he asks of us. One of the most frightening ways people were put to death in the ancient world was by drowning them. Their hands would be tied behind their back securely and a rope would be tied around their neck and attached to heavy weights — occasionally a millstone — and they would be drawn like an anchor straight to the bottom of the river or lake or sea. Jesus was saying that having that happen to you would be better than what will happen to those who cause scandal. Jesus is infinitely merciful with individual sinners who with repentance approach him for forgiveness, but here he can’t be more brutal in describing how severe he is, and he wants us to be, with conduct that leads to sin and scandal, not only because will it lead us to death but because it’s also spiritually homicidal.

* So he tells us, “If your hand causes you to sin, cut it off. … And if your foot causes you to sin, cut if off.  … And if your eye causes you to sin, pluck it out.” The reason is because “it is better for you to enter into life maimed than with two hands [or two feet or two eyes] to go into Gehenna, into the unquenchable fire.” At first this seems savage but it’s basic human wisdom. Doctors amputate legs when the legs cannot be saved lest the whole person die. Hikers trapped in rocks amputate their harms so that they may escape. Jesus is telling us to live spiritually by the same wisdom with regard to spiritual amputations. If there’s something leading us to sin and through our incoherent life leading others to sin, we need to be brutal in surgically excising it from our life. If we don’t amputate these scandal-inducing sins from our life, we’ll have a worse fate than being drowned with a millstone tied around our neck. The question is, Are we as prudent spiritually as doctors and hikers are physically?

* St. James in the first reading today spoke about one particular type of evil that we need to be brutal in excising from our life: the selfish hoarding of possessions while others are in need. He was writing his letter to Christians and he said that many of them were preparing themselves for slaughter by “killing the righteous one.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Polycarp, Bishop and Martyr

February 23. 2022

James 4:13-17, Ps 49, Mk 9:38-40

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.23.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today, as we give thanks for the last seven years when I’ve had the privilege to celebrate Mass for you three, four and five times a week, the Word of God and today’s feast unsurprisingly provide us categories with which to align our heads and hearts.

* We begin with the first reading, which helps us to focus on the will of God. During my early years as a parish priest, at Espirito Santo Parish in Fall River, I always loved how many of the parishioners, whenever I’d say to them in Portuguese “See you tomorrow,” would  reply, “Se Deus quiser” (“If God should will”). I used to joke with them that I didn’t know that they knew the Letter of St. James so well, something that caught most off-guard, because most didn’t know the Scriptural foundation of their good Christian habit. Today St. James discusses those who are always making plans for the future, saying things like, “Today or tomorrow we shall go into such and such a town, spend a year there doing business, and make a profit.” He tells them, “You have no idea what your life will be like tomorrow. … Instead you should say, ‘If the Lord wills it, we shall live to do this or that.’”

* “If the Lord wills it.” It’s a beautiful expression that first reminds us that every day is a gift and, indeed, that it’s the Lord’s will that holds us in existence. It’s a mentality, a spirituality, that helps us to entrust ourselves to his loving will in the present and leave the future to his Providence. Many Scripture scholars say that St. James’ letter is a step-by-step application of what Jesus taught in the Sermon on the Mount. On this point about living in the present and not presuming upon tomorrow, Jesus — after describing that we shouldn’t worry about what we are to eat, drink, wear or live because our Providential Father knows we need all of these things and cares for us — stressed, “Do not worry about tomorrow; tomorrow will take care of itself” (Mt 6:29). He added, with regard to our needs, a few verses later, “Seek first the kingdom of God and his righteousness and everything else will be given to you besides” (Mt 6:33).  Based on the Lord’s own wisdom, St. James goes beyond how we should regard what we’ll be doing tomorrow, but is telling us that everything in our life, every day in the present, we should entrust to the Lord’s will, to his love, to his providence. We should seek his kingdom, we should strive to align our whole existence to God’s will, to make our life a commentary on the words, “Thy will be done!” That’s why the Responsorial Psalm today — which always is meant to respond to or relate to the first reading in some way — focuses on spiritual poverty (“Blessed are the poor in spirit; the Kingdom of heaven is theirs”) because spiritual poverty grasps that our whole life is dependent on God’s loving care, including the number of our days, and those who are spiritually poor are rich in their trust in God’s will. I thank you, Sisters, for over the last several years giving me a beautiful witness of loving trust and of faithfully doing of the Lord’s will. You did it when you came here to St. Andrew’s from St. John the Martyr. You are preparing interiorly to do it again from St. Andrew’s to where God is asking you to go. Just like Abraham left Ur of the Chaldeans,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Feast of the Chair of St. Peter

February 22, 2022

1 Pet 5:1-4, Ps 23, Mt 16:13-19

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.22.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, we have a double confession. Inspired by God the Father, Simon confesses Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God. Jesus in return gives another, almost equally striking confession: You are kepha (the Aramaic means both the name “Peter” and the thing “Rock”), you are Rock and on this Rock, on you, I will build my Church and the gates of Hell won’t prevail against it. Jesus built his Church with an architectural plan and the foundation of the Church would be Peter. That means that if we’re going to be truly a follower of Jesus Christ, if we’re going to be fully Christian, we need to build our faith in Christ on Peter because Christ himself did. At the beginning of Mass today, we prayed to God the Father, “Grant that no tempests may disturb us for you have set us fast on the rock of the Apostle Peter’s confession of faith.” God has made our faith steadfast on the Rock’s profession of faith, and therefore our growth in faith, our deepening in the Christian life, is directly linked to Peter, to the office of the Papacy, and to the responsibilities Christ gave him he passed on to his successors.

* Today the Church celebrates the Feast of the “Chair” of St. Peter. Liturgically, it recalls the day he took up his episcopal ministry in Antioch, where he served before coming to Rome. He was Pope from Jesus’ ascension (May 19, 30 AD), but he didn’t immediately go to Rome. The early Christians not only celebrated Peter’s heroic martyrdom as a feast but also celebrated the day in which he started to guide the first Christians in the place Jesus’ believers were first called Christians.

* To celebrate the feast of St. Peter’s Chair, however, is something more specific than fêting Peter’s ministry as a whole. The chair was the ancient symbol of teaching authority. Teachers would sit and all their students would stand, the exact opposite of what happens today. In the Gospel, the evangelists tell us on several occasions that Jesus “sat down and began to teach” the crowds. The chair became a symbol of teaching authority and in some ways that remains today, when we refer to the person who has the “chair of philosophy” or “chair of theology” or even the “chair” of a particular meeting. To celebrate the feast of the Chair of St. Peter is to rejoice in the teaching authority Christ has given him for the sake of his body the Church. Jesus gave Peter the “keys of the kingdom of heaven,” to bind and loose on earth, and that even greater authority over the sacraments points to the authority he has to teach authoritatively in Jesus’ name. We retain the expression of the Pope’s teaching ex cathedra (literally “from the chair”) to highlight his most solemn teachings to us, applying Christ’s words and wisdom to the present age.

* I had the privilege to be ordained a deacon at the Altar of the Chair in St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican. In the sculpture that hovers over the altar, Bernini enshrined the chair that in the 1600s everyone believed was the one used by St. Peter 1600 years earlier to teach the faith to the people of Rome. They were mistaken by a measly 800 years — history then wasn’t what it is now and archaeology basically didn’t exist — and the chair was actually given to the Pope around the year 800 by the emperor Otto II, but the reality to which the altar of the chair pointed was Peter’s authority, and Bernini illustrated the theology of that authority in this incredible scul...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Seventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Peter Damian, Doctor of the Church

February 21, 2022

James 3:13-18, Ps 19, Mk 9:14-29

 

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.21.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In Jesus’ miraculous healing of the boy afflicted with a demon who made him deaf, mute and it seems epileptic, we discover two essential things necessary not just for miracles but for the Christian life as a whole.

* The first requirement is true faith. When Jesus descended the Mount of the Transfiguration with Peter, James and John and asked what the commotion was at the bottom of the hill, the father of the afflicted boy said, “Teacher, I have brought to you my son possessed by a mute spirit. Wherever it seizes him, it throws him down; he foams at the mouth, grinds his teeth, and becomes rigid. I asked your disciples to drive it out, but they were unable to do so.” Jesus’ response to that information was, “O faithless generation, how long will I be with you? How long will I endure you?” Jesus was pointing out the lack of faith seemingly both in the father as well as in his disciples. When Jesus asked for the boy to be brought to him and talked with the father about how since childbirth the demon would cause him nearly to kill himself in fire or in water, the father said to him, “But if you can do anything, have compassion on us and help us.” Jesus, who came to the earth to help us to believe in God, called the man out on his frail faith: “‘If you can!’ Everything is possible to one who has faith.” And the father replied, “I do believe, Lord. Help my unbelief!” It was his faith that had brought him to come to Jesus in the first place, but he clearly needed more faith, and thankfully wasn’t afraid to ask for it. And Jesus worked the great miracle.

* After the crowd had disappeared, the disciples asked Jesus why they couldn’t drive it out, and Jesus gave us the second necessary ingredient for this miracle and the Christian life. “This kind can only come out through prayer.” Jesus implied that it was not just his divine power that was necessary, a power he had already given when he sent them out to proclaim the Gospel, to heal the sick, cast out demons and even raise the dead. Persevering prayer was also needed. They needed to be truly close to God, united with him through the dialogue of life that is prayer. In some of the ancient manuscripts of St. Mark’s Gospel it said, we read, “This kind can only be expunged by prayer and fasting.” Regardless of which Jesus said, the point is clear: the prayer needed is not just one of the lips, but of the heart and body. That’s something Jesus was regularly doing. And it’s something that he was calling the disciples to do if we were going to be capable of casting out the most entrenched demons. Persevering prayer in the disciples would be a sign of our faith, which seems also to be a prerequisite for such a miracle. Prayer is faith in action. Sometimes those in the Church — the apostles and their successors, priests and religious, lay people with stellar reputations — do not have the type of prayer life, the faith, the fasting that can be the means by which Jesus can continue his saving work. But even should that happen, God forbid, even if our faith might be weak, we shouldn’t give up, but should go to the Lord with the faith we have and ask him to increase it in us and in the Church. In the work of exorcizing possessed persons today, there’s a need for that type of persevering prayer and fasting. Exorcisms aren’t like magic formulas said once and easily,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

February 19, 2022

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.19.22_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when Jesus will speak to us about the most revolutionary and challenging part of his teaching, what distinguishes Christianity from every other religion and moral philosophy: his command to love even our enemies. Jesus calls us to do far more than merely tolerate those who oppose us or not be subsumed with a spirit of revenge toward them. He calls us to lovethem, to do good to them when they hate us, to bless them when they curse us, to pray for them when they mistreat us, to turn the other cheek when they slap us first, to give our undergarments to those who take our coats and ultimately to be willing to die for them. In doing so, Jesus is trying to help us to learn how to be like him, to love others as he has loved us first, to act in accordance with his image and likeness in which we were created. He tells us that if we do so, we will be “children of the Most High, for he himself is kind to the ungrateful and the wicked.” We will become “merciful, just as also [our] Father is merciful.” He says that if we live by this standard, if we measure out in this way, “gifts will be given to [us], a good measure, packed together, shaken down, and overflowing will be poured into [our] lap,” not necessarily of course by the persecutors but by God himself.

* We learn from Jesus how to live this Gospel. He loves those who don’t love him and even those who have made themselves his enemies through sin. He blesses those who curse him and blaspheme against him. He gives and gives and gives, and forgives, forgives and forgives. We see this Gospel put into practice in all its clarity on Good Friday, as Jesus prayed to the Father to forgive his executioners, those who were mocking him, and all those whose sins were bringing about his expiatory death, “for they know not what they are doing.” When the soldiers of the High Priest or the Roman guards slapped him on one cheek, Jesus could have easily annihilated them by his power of God, but he didn’t fight back, because he loved those who were harming him and didn’t want to harm them back. When they stripped him of his cloak, he allowed them to strip him of his tunic as well. When they bid him to walk on the road to Calvary, he walked a second mile. In all of this, Jesus tells us, “Come, follow me!” He wants us to be distinguished from all the rest by the way we, as Christians, love everyone like he does, including those who don’t love us. “For if you love those who love you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners love those who love them. And if you do good to those who do good to you, what credit is that to you? Even sinners do the same.” When he tells us, “Do to others as you would have them do to you,” he is ultimately saying, “love others with the same forgiving love with which you would want to be loved by others.”

* In all of this, Jesus is calling us to live by his standard. The standard of most in the world is reciprocity. We generally try to treat well those who treat us well; if others treat us poorly, we feel justified in doing the same to them. But as the old adage goes, living by the principle of an “eye for an eye” just leaves the whole world blind. Christ calls us to look on others with the eyes of God the Father,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

February 18, 2022

James 2:14-24.26, Ps 112, Mk 8:34-9:1

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.18.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today St. James gets our attention with a highly provocative vocative, asking, “Do you want proof, you ignoramus, that faith without works is useless?” His whole point is to stress that living faith leads to charity. There was an idea at the time, popular among gnostics, that all one needed to have was special knowledge of salvation, to know the right things, and to hold them; our deeds didn’t really matter. In later centuries, some Christians tried to make the case that that’s what St. Paul said in his Letter to the Romans, “We are saved by faith apart from works of the law” (Rom 3:28), which is true, that we’re saved by God’s grace received in faith and not by our own actions. But while we’re saved by God’s gratuitous love, we need to receive that gift, open it up and live by it. St. Paul would call it “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). St. John the Baptist would describe it to the Pharisees, “Produce good fruit as evidence of your repentance” (Matt 3:8). Jesus himself would say clearly that we’re judged by our acts in his depiction of the Last Judgment, saying that to be saved, we must care for the poor and needy, the hungry and thirsty, the ill and imprisoned, the naked and the stranger (Mt 25:31-46). That’s precisely what St. James was describing in his letter, that we can’t say we have faith, that we grasp the presence of the Lord in our world, within us, within our neighbor, if we don’t lift a finger to help those we see in need. Our faith, as St. James says, must be demonstrated through our works, it must be active in our works, like Abraham’s was in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac. If our faith is living, it will show in the way it impacts our life.

* Popes Benedict and Francis have a beautiful section in the encyclical by four hands, Lumen Fidei, in which they underline how the truth of faith must overflow into charity. “Faith transforms the whole person precisely to the extent that he or she becomes open to love. Through this blending of faith and love we come to see the kind of knowledge that faith entails, its power to convince and its ability to illumine our steps. Faith knows because it is tied to love, because love itself brings enlightenment” (LF 26).

* In the Gospel today, Jesus describes some of the most important acts of living faith. Faith is meant to bring us alive and Jesus shows us the way to save our lives. He tells us, “Whoever wishes to come after me,” in other words, whoever believes in me and wants to be my disciple, “must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me. For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake and that of the Gospel will save it.” These are very difficult works that require faith because they go against worldly ways. We live in a self-affirming age and Jesus calls us to self-denial so that we might have self-mastery and be capable of self-gift. We live in a hedonistic age that is addicted to pleasure and phobic about pain and Jesus calls us to take up or seize (rather than reluctantly accept) the Cross, the instrument on which we will die to ourselves, so that he in turn may live. Then he calls us to follow him as he sets the example of washing others’ feet, of becoming the servant of all, of giving his life as a ransom for others’. These are the works that flow from true faith in Jesus. Without these works, our faith is dead and we will lose our life,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of the Seven Founders of the Servite Order

February 17, 2022

James 2:1-9, Ps 34, Mt 8:27-23

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.17.22_homily.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Twice in five days the Church will have us travel with Jesus to Caesarea Philippi, well north of the Sea of Galilee, to where Jesus asks his apostles two fundamental questions: Who do others say he is? And who does each of us say that he is? Next Tuesday, the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, we’ll have a chance to ponder with the help of St. Matthew’s Gospel the meaning of Simon Peter’s confession of Jesus as the Messiah and Son of God and Jesus’ confession of Simon Peter as the “rock” on whom he would build his Church. Today, with the help of St. Mark’s version, we can ponder instead what Jesus says to Simon Peter at the end of the scene and what it means for each of us.

* When Simon Peter confessed Jesus publicly not just to be another great prophet like John the Baptist or a string of Old Testament heroes but rather to be the long awaited Messiah — and as St. Matthew remembers also the Son of God — that brought with it a whole series of expectations. The Messiah was to be the one who would bring back the Kingdom of David, who would kick out all foreign powers, who would return Israel to prominence. Yet, as soon as Peter confessed Jesus to be this long awaited Anointed One, Jesus confessed the type of Messiah he would be. Rather than uniting the Jews and defeating and expelling the Romans, rather than leading them to triumph, he would instead suffer greatly, be rejected by the chief priests, the scribes and the elders and be killed. Jesus told them all of this “openly,” St. Mark tells us, so that they would know it clearly. It’s at that point that Simon Peter called Jesus aside and “rebuked him.” “God forbid anything like this should happen to you!,” he said, according to St. Matthew’s version. It was totally incompatible with the Messiah, he insisted, to suffer in this way. But then Jesus said something to him very instructive. He said, “Get behind me, Satan! You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”

* Satan! Can you imagine Jesus calling you Satan — not to mention a few minutes after he called you “rock”? Satan, we know, was opposed to God’s plan of salvation. He sought to place any and all obstacles in Jesus’ path. Jesus, in calling Peter Satan, was telling him in the clearest language possible that he was acting like the devil and trying to prevent the fulfillment of his mission as Messiah. He therefore tells Peter, not “Get away from me!,” but “Get behind me!,” because Jesus wasn’t trying to rid himself of Peter, but pointing out what Peter had been trying to do, lead the Lord rather than follow him. To tell him to get behind him was to make him a disciple rather than a roadblock. Jesus also told Peter the reason why he was behaving like an obstacle: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Yesterday, we pondered the miracle of the progressive healing of the blind man so that he could see things distinctly as they really are. Today it’s Peter who needs to be cured of his blindness, because he was seeing only with human eyes rather than with the eyes of faith, the eyes that God seeks to give us. Peter at first saw what the crowds didn’t, that perhaps the rest of the apostles didn’t yet see or were afraid to acknowledge, that Jesus wasn’t just one of the prophets of old, but rather the Messiah. But Peter needed God’s continued help to see the type of Messiah Jes...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

February 16, 2022

James 1:19-27, Ps 15, Mk 8:22-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.16.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus does something noteworthy. Unlike most of the other recorded miracles of Jesus where he healed instantaneously by his touch or by his words, today he heals a blind man progressively, in stages. After Jesus puts spit on his eyelids, the man can see people looking like walking trees; the next time Jesus does it, the man could see everything distinctly. Jesus obviously had the power to heal him of his blindness instantaneously, but he progressively healed him, I believe, in order to help the man grow and persevere in hope and faith. Many of Jesus’ miracles, still today, are progressive. He heals us in stages, so that we, too, may grow in the Christian virtues of patience, perseverance and faith in contact with Jesus’ sacred humanity touching our own.

* Today we can ponder how Jesus seeks progressively to heal our sight, to heal our hearing, to heal our speech, and to heal our behavior. Jesus worked this miracle in the Gospel immediately before the scene tomorrow when he’ll ask the apostles and us who we believe him to be. The apostles needed God’s help to see who he really is. Some thought initially he was the Messiah, others didn’t, but they all needed to grasp that he was also the Son of God. Peter confesses him as the Christ and Son of God by the grace of the healing of his mind by God the Father. We, too, need that healing to see him and confess him.

* In the first reading today, St. James talks about the mirror of the Word of God, which is one way God progressively heals us. The more we get to know God’s holy Word, the more we get to know God, to know ourselves, and to know how we’re called to live in loving communion with him. St. James says positively that when we look into the mirror of the Word of God, we see who we’re supposed to be and how we’re called to respond to God’s help to change. When people look in a mirror, we do so to see if our hair is straight, if we still have shaving cream on the ears, if the double-windsor knot of a man’s tie is straight, if a woman’s make up came out the way it should. If there’s anything awry as we look in the mirror, we then try to correct it. That’s the vision that the Word of God gives to us, to help us see ourselves as we are and to help us to correct ourselves by bringing ourselves into alignment with God’s word and will. That’s the first healing God gives us, of our sight, to see ourselves as we really ought to be, to remember our fundamental identity. In the Responsorial Psalm today, we see the “mirror image” of the one who will live on the Lord’s mountain, the mirror image of who God wants us to be and become: “He who walks blamelessly and does justice; who thinks the truth in his heart and slanders not with his tongue. Who harms not his fellow man, nor takes up a reproach against his neighbor; who lends not his money at usury and accepts no bribe against the innocent.”

* The next progressive healing God wants to give us is of our hearing and speech. St. James is very clear today about the way a Christian ought to listen and converse: “Know this, my dear brothers and sisters, everyone should be quick to hear, slow to speak, slow to anger. … If anyone thinks he is religious and does not bridle his tongue but deceives his heart, his religion is vain.” Many people, rather than being quick to hear and slow to speak, are instead slow to hear and quick to speak.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Claude la Colombière

February 15, 2022

Jas 1:12-18, Ps 94, Mk 8:14-21

 

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.15.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the Gospel, Jesus tells his disciples with him in the boat to beware of the leaven of the Pharisees and of Herod. Leaven, we know, is small and almost imperceptible but it gives growth to bread. The leaven of the Pharisees was what we observed in the Gospel yesterday, this incessant desire for signs, for external works of the law, for arguing with Jesus and rejecting him. It’s, as Jesus says elsewhere, their hypocrisy, their being whitewashed tombs, beautiful on the outside but full of filth and death on the inside. It’s their focus on straining out gnats and swallowing camels.  It’s a religious externalism serving to enhance pride. It’s literally a “separation” from others, including sinners, out of the idea that that is pleasing to God. The leaven of Herod means a sensual, political and spiritually worldly approach to life without sincerity in the relationship with God, something we see in St. Mark’s Gospel earlier when Herod just wants to meet Jesus when he hears about him because some said he was John the Baptist risen from the dead. In both cases, their leaven was an absence of real faith. It was not a focus on God but on themselves, on their own works, their own pleasures, their own doubts and questions.

* Jesus then described a different type of leaven, what we might call a divine yeast, shown in the two different miracles of the multiplications of loaves and fish. The leaven Jesus wants is faith, is trust in Him, is confidence that even if the apostles didn’t bring bread into the boat that somehow God would take care of them like he took care of the vast multitudes with the multiplications. Jesus asks us the same question he asked them, “Do you still not understand?” He further asks, “Do you have eyes and not see, ears and not hear?,” bringing back what he said before the interpretation of the Sower and the Seed, basing himself on Isaiah, that he gives us parables to force us to work a little to understand them. The multiplication of the loaves and fish were similar to parables, he implied, that he wanted us to ponder to get their bigger meaning. Jesus wants this leaven of faith to grow in us, so that we trust in him increasingly. He tells us elsewhere in the Gospel that unless we convert and become like little children, we will not enter the kingdom of God. To become childlike is to grow in trust. Sometimes as we age we become more cynical, less faithful, less trusting in God or in anyone else. We become “wise” in worldly calculations but foolish in faith. Jesus wants to give us a different type of growth.

* St. James talks about the bad leaven of growth in succumbing to temptation versus the good leaven of growth through persevering faith in temptation. The one who perseveres faithfully during trials, he says, is “blessed” and will receive the “crown of life” after having been proven. On the other hand, he describes the curse of succumbing to temptation and what it can lead to, death. He first says that no one should say, “I am being tempted by God,” because God doesn’t tempt. He permits temptations so that we may pass the test of temptations with fidelity, but he doesn’t send them. The root of our temptations, St. James describes, is our desires. God has made us desire good things and we always desire things under the “aspect of good.” Thieves desire the good of material possessions.