Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

January 29, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.29.22_Landry_ConCon_1.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 we will once again join those in the Nazareth synagogue after Jesus reveals himself to them as the Messiah. It’s not a tranquil conversation. In fact, after the dialogues that took place before Pontius Pilate and on Calvary, it may be one of the most difficult colloquies in the Gospel. But it is important for us to enter into the drama, because the rejection of Jesus by those in his hometown is not only a prelude to what he endured in the Passion but also what can happen whenever we, and others, don’t want to accept Jesus on his own terms but try to box him into our own safe categories.

* This scene this Sunday is a continuation of what began last week when Jesus, arriving on the Sabbath in his hometown synagogue, was invited by the Chazzan, the synagogue leader, to read a passage of God’s word and to give a commentary. By this point, Jesus already had a reputation throughout Galilee for teaching with authority unlike any had ever heard. He was becoming famous especially for the miracles he was working, like casting out demons and curing the sick and the paralyzed. Jesus unrolled the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, read one of the most famous passages referring to the Messiah for whom the Jews had long waited and gave a once sentence homily, that Isaiah’s words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, … to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” were being fulfilled in their hearing.

* Mark and St. Luke both tell us that the listeners’ first reaction to Jesus’ teaching was astonishment. They were amazed at the “gracious words that came from his mouth” and “the wisdom that had been given to him,” both of which were probably very much on display in the way he read the words of Isaiah that he, the Word of the Father, had inspired seven centuries before. But that quickly changed once they began to reflect on what he said. First, Jesus was saying that he was the Messiah. That couldn’t be, they thought, because they knew him, they likely had pieces of furniture he made, they remembered him playing with themselves or their kids when he was younger. They didn’t believe, on the basis of Scripture and experience, that anything good, not to mention the Messiah, could come from Nazareth. “Is this not Joseph’s son?,” “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?,” they derisively asked aloud. Second, if the Scripture passage that their long-time neighbor and local construction worker had read was being fulfilled in their hearing, and he had come to proclaim the Gospel to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, then they naturally began to ask themselves whether he was saying theywere poor, captive, blind and oppressed.

* Rather than engaging their consciences, however, to see if what Jesus was saying might be true, rather than humbly asking, “What should we do?,” St. Mark tells us that they began to ask him to put a show there of healing like they heard he had done in the Synagogue of Capernaum. Jesus not only didn’tdo miracles there but St.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the 3rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Thomas Aquinas, Doctor of the Church

January 28, 2022

2 Sam 11:1-10.13-17, Ps 51, Mk 4:26-34

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.28.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus continues to speak to us about the growth in faith he desires. On Wednesday, he gave us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed and focused on faith-filled receptivity, which he said features hearing the Word, actively accepting it, and bearing fruit 30, 60 and 100-fold. Yesterday he said true faith can’t be hidden, but shines like the light of a lamp placed on a lamp stand, and that the more we exercise the spiritual muscle of the theological virtue of faith, the more it will grow. Today he gives us two images to teach us two more aspects about the increase in faith that is meant to happen when we enter and live in his kingdom.

* Jesus says, first, that faith grows like a mustard seed. “When it is sown in the ground,” Jesus says, “it is the smallest of all the seeds on the earth. But once it is sown, it springs up and becomes the largest of plants and puts forth large branches, so that the birds of the sky can dwell in its shade.” Even a little bit of faith is enough, Jesus would say elsewhere, to move mountains. Even when it seems small, we should know that it contains within the power to grow to be enormous. And by another image Jesus describes one of the most important parts of that growth. It’s God’s work. Jesus compares the growth in faith to what happens with a farmer scattering seed in the Holy Land, turning it over once, and then allowing the growth. “It is as if a man were to scatter seed on the land and would sleep and rise night and day and the seed would sprout and grow, he knows not how. Of its own accord the land yields fruit, first the blade, then the ear, then the full grain in the ear. And when the grain is ripe, he wields the sickle at once, for the harvest has come.” The farmer certainly does some work, but most of the growth happens by what is contained in the seed, what is contained in the soil, and the water that comes. So it is with growth in faith. God has given us that seed, he’ll provide the water, and he’ll give so many of the nutrients necessary for us to be rich, fruitful soil. And so we should have great confidence in God’s work.

* But as Jesus will describe in other agricultural images, the soil of our receptivity can also receive other seeds in it, seeds of thorn bushes and darnel that can suck the nutrients out of the soil and even prevent choke the growth Christ wants to do in us. We see that type of seed in the first reading. David, rather than working in the afternoon while his troops are fighting against the Ammonites and besieging Rabbah, is taking an indolent nap. When he awoke, he strolled about the roof of the palace and saw a neighbor, Bathsheba, bathing. And the seed of lust in David’s eyes and heart began to grow. After having committed adultery with her in his heart, he summoned her and committed adultery with her in the flesh. And the destructive seed of sin continued to grow larger even still. After Bathsheba told him she was pregnant, David summoned her husband, David’s trusted armor bearer Uriah, home from the battle lines in the hope that he might go home, have relations with Bathsheba and cover up David’s sin. But it didn’t work. Uriah was too loyal to David even to visit his wife because it was the custom that soldiers would have no relations with their wives during battle since it was thought that love-making with weaken them of vigor and valor.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Third Week of Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Angela Merici

January 27, 2022

2 Sam 7:18-19.24-29, Ps 132, Mk 4:21-25

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.27.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday Jesus gave us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, which allowed us to take a soil sample of our receptivity to his action in our life and to point us toward bearing abundant fruit through eliminating the packed down soil, or subterranean rock layers or thorns that can choke the growth of the seed. He also explained to us why he uses Parables, so that we’ll be provoked to put in the work to understand the imagery he is using and apply it to our life; if we don’t find ourselves doing the work but blowing off what he says, it’s a clear sign that our hearts are hardened. Today Jesus continues that lesson by focusing on three things that should happen when we are receiving his word on good soil.

* The first is that it will shine through us. Jesus has lit the lamp of our minds and hearts with his holy word and he doesn’t want us to place it under a bushel basket or a bed but on a lamp stand. He doesn’t want us to keep what he teaches us secret but to make it visible, to bring it to the light of day so that others might similarly be illuminated.

* Second, we will take care of it. Jesus tells us to “take care what you hear.” We can understand this in two senses. First, it means to pay attention, that we listen well to what he’s saying. We ought to be at the edge of our seats when Jesus speaks, attentive to every word, remembering it, pondering it in our hearts, placing it together with what he’s taught us before and letting it become a foundation for what he wishes to teach us later in our prayer, in our listening to Sacred Scripture, in what he reveals to us in day-to-day events. The second way he wants us to take care of what we hear is to treasure what he reveals, to care for it, to nourish it, to water the seeds of his word. In today’s first reading, we see David’s prayer before the Lord, his utter astonishment at the Lord’s goodness to him, he “amen” and “fiat” to the doubly-shocking news that Nathan gave him ‚— which we would have heard yesterday, if we didn’t have the proper first reading for the feast of SS. Timothy and Titus —  that he wouldn’t be allowed to build a house for the Lord and that the Lord would build one in turn for him. Filled with awe and gratitude, caring for God’s word, David said in prayer, “Who am I, Lord God, and who are the members of my house, that you have brought me to this point? Yet even this you see as too little, Lord God;  you have also spoken of the house of your servant  for a long time to come:  this too you have shown to man, Lord God! … It is you, Lord of hosts, God of Israel, who said in a revelation to your servant, ‘I will build a house for you.’” The Lord God had blessed David with the promise of establishing in him an eternal kingdom, one that would be fulfilled by Jesus his descendent according to the flesh and it was a blessing almost too much to comprehend. David asks for God to fulfill that promise, uniting his will to the will of the Lord. Likewise, when Jesus gives us his teaching, it’s a similar blessing and we should respond to it with wonder and amazement, just like Moses in receiving and proclaiming the law of the Lord cried out to the Lord, “For what great nation is there that has gods so close to it as the Lord, our God, is to us whenever we call upon him?  Or what great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before yo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Saint Timothy and Titus

January 26, 2022

2 Tim 1:1-8, Ps 96, Mk 4:1-20

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.26.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Three days ago the Church celebrated Sunday of the Word of God. Today Jesus gives us one of his most important parables about how we are to receive the gift of that word and what to expect when we seek to share that word with others. He calls the word a seed, he describes how he, and later his followers, sow that word, and then he talks about four different types of response to it in four different types of soil. Today is an opportunity for us to take a soil sample of our receptivity to God’s word in our life and more broadly our openness to God’s action. It’s also a day on which we can see the fruitfulness of the Word in the lives of the great collaborators of St. Paul, SS. Timothy and Titus.

* Let’s begin with the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. Jesus uses not just this parable but every parable to bring into the light the receptivity of those who hear him. When he was asked by those with the apostles why he spoke in parables, he said, quoting the Prophet Isaiah, “The mystery of the Kingdom of God has been granted to you. But to those outside everything comes in parables, so that ‘they may look and see but not perceive, and hear and listen but not understand, in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.’” Jesus uses parables because it exposes whether those listening are hungry to grow in truth. The parables require some work to understand and especially to grasp their application by analogy to the things of the life of faith. There are some — we could say, some with the first three types of soil Jesus will say later in the Parable — who won’t really put in the work to comprehend them. They’ll look and see but not perceive, hear and listen but not understand precisely because they don’t think they really need the truth of the parable at all or enough to justify the effort. They don’t really think they need conversion, need saving, and need that word. It’s only those with good soil, who hunger for the truth, who will put in the effort to decipher the meaning of the parable and live by it. They’re the ones who will struggle, together with God’s grace, to hear and listen in order to understand, to see and perceive.

* To understand the meaning of the parable, we first need to grasp how farming was done in Jesus’ day. Farm plots were long and thin and there were paths between them on which the farmers and all pedestrians would walk. Sowers would just scatter seed everywhere and it would land in various places. Then the farmers would go and try to turn over the soil — rather than turning over the soil and then planting, as we do today.

* Jesus describes four types of earth that the seed of his Word and work falls upon. The first is soil along the path. Over time, the dirt would be packed down, the seed couldn’t penetrate it, and the birds would come and eat the seeds that had fallen upon it. This refers to those with stubborn soil, who are not receptive to God’s word, either because they’re inveterate sinners or because they think they already know what they need to know. Jesus says, “As soon as they hear, Satan comes at once and takes away the word sown in them.”

* The second type of soil is “rocky ground,” where there is “little soil.” These refer to those who are superficial. In the Holy Land, many areas have a thick layer of limestone a few inches beneath the surface.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul

January 25, 2022

Acts 9:1-22, Ps 117, Mt 16:15-18

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.25.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today on this feast of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus — one of the most important events in the history of the world because of the impact this one man had, post-conversion, in spreading the Gospel all over the known world at the time and whose writings have deeply influenced all of Christian theology — it is important to understand what led to his conversion, what his conversion truly was, and what it means for our conversion.

* St. Paul’s shocking conversion was, at least partially, the miraculous result of St. Stephen’s prayers. When the first Christian martyr was being stoned to death outside the Jerusalem Gate that now bears his name, the stone-throwing assassins were all laying their cloaks at the feet of Saul, showing that he was presiding over the execution. St. Stephen prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” as he was asking Jesus to receive his spirit, echoing Jesus’ own words from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” These prayers — Stephen’s and Jesus’ — were heard. God didn’t hold this sin against Saul. And Jesus Christ met him on the road to Damascus to give him through that forgiveness the gift of conversion.

* His shocking conversion was not principally the superficial change from being a persecutor of Christians to a proclaimer of Christ, from a murderer of the faithful to a maker. It wasn’t from an immoral life far from God to a moral one. As Pope Benedict XVI stressed, it was from a false notion of a holy life to a true notion. Paul had been from his young days a zealous follower of God. He had come down from Turkey to Jerusalem to study at the feet of the greatest rabbi of the age, Gamaliel. As a young man, he had such zeal to keep the community of Israel together that he made it his mission to try to stomp out the heretical sect that was dividing Judaism and blasphemously claiming that a carpenter from Nazareth not only was the Messiah but the Son of God, one who said he would destroy the holy Temple. That’s why he was terrorizing Christians. In the persecution of the Church, he was the furthest thing, for example, from Herod, who hunted down the baby Jesus in order to preserve his own privileges. Paul’s conversion was, rather, from an erroneous notion that we are saved by our external adhesion to all the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law, to the true one that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We are saved by Christ’s work, not our own.

* We can also say, on the heels of the Sunday of the Word of God, that Saul, despite his scholarship, had a defective notion of what was contained in the Word of God and where it was leading. He was “kicking against the goad” (Acts 26:14), as Jesus said to him, meaning rebelling against the stick used to drive cattle, because he was not following where the “goad” of the Word of God was ultimately leading him.

* That leads to the deeper level of his conversion and the deepest essence of any thorough Christian conversion. It was a death and resurrection. After St. Paul met the Lord 137 miles north of Jerusalem in Damascus where the Christian community was strong, after he was blinded and needed to walk by faith, he was baptized by Ananias and the scales fell from his eyes, a sign not just of a capacity to see things in the new light of Christ that had previous blinded him but a death and resurrection. He would later write to the Romans,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Saint Francis de Sales

January 24, 2022

2 Sam 5:1-7.10, Ps 89, Mk 3:22-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.24.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* On this seventh day of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, focused on making real Jesus’ prayer on Holy Thursday that we all may be one, as the Father and He are one, we have readings and the feast of a great saint that help us to focus us squarely on unity and division.

* In the passage from Second Samuel, we see the leaders of the tribes of Israel come to David in Hebron, where he was King of Judah, asking him to shepherd the children of Israel, too. (Judah is the southern part of the Holy Land, Israel the northern, and each was inhabited by different tribes among the descendants of Jacob). David, who was a uniter by personality and training as a shepherd, agreed and ruled over both kingdoms for the next 33 years. It’s an image of what’s supposed to happen with the “son of David,” Christ, who came to gather the tribes of Israel against the forces that divide and scatter. The Kingdom of God Jesus came to inaugurate is a United Kingdom, where people are in communion with God and each other.

* We see in the Gospel, however, that the devil seeks to destroy that unity and tries to get others, consciously or unconsciously, to cooperate with him in that fragmentation and destruction. The scribes who had come from Jerusalem on foot to Galilee, witnessing Jesus’ exorcisms, couldn’t deny that the exorcisms were occurring, that possessed people were being liberated, that the demons themselves were hailing Jesus as the “Holy One of God.” They couldn’t deny the facts. But they could try to change the interpretation. And because they had already prejudged Jesus not to be the type of Messiah they were looking for, because he didn’t follow their own man-made prescriptions with regard to the Sabbath, to fasting and to other parts of the fence they drew around the Mosaic law, they concluded that since he couldn’t be of God, then he had to be of the devil. That’s why they said that Jesus himself was “possessed by Beelzebul” and was exorcising not by God’s power but by the power of the “prince of demons.”

* Jesus pointed out the absurdity of that claim in some brief parables that not only answer the objections but communicate something really important about the unity that’s meant to reign in his kingdom. “How can Satan drive out Satan?,” he asked. “If a kingdom is divided against itself,” he continued, “that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand; that is the end of him. But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.” In other words, the only way he could plunder Satan’s house (his temporary abode in a possessed man) and drive him out of that house is if he had bound up Satan first. If a possessed man — as they were claiming Jesus to be — were battling against the prince of demons and casting demons out from those whom the demons had occupied, then Satan’s kingdom would be defeated. Underneath Jesus’ reply is a crucially important principle of unity, something that President Abraham Lincoln himself would famously cite to try to keep the United States united.

* But then Jesus describes a moral principle with regard to the unitive power of the truth versus the destructive power of lies. “Amen, I say to you,” he said,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

January 23, 2021

Neh 8:2-6.8-10, Ps 19, 1 Cor 12:12-30, Lk 1:1-4.4:14-21

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.23.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today we encounter Jesus preaching in his hometown synagogue, just as St. Luke tells us in his “orderly sequence” that he was doing in all the synagogues of the region of Galilee, leaving the people astonished. He was handed the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah and he read, from Isaiah 61, the passage describing the work of the eventual Messiah: he would be filled with the Spirit of the Lord, anointed to preach the Good News to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to the oppressed, to help the blind see, and to announce a Jubilee Year (Is 61:1-2). After reading that passage, Jesus very dramatically handed the scroll back to the Chazzan, the synagogue attendant, and sat down, as all the eyes in the room were locked on him. And he gave a shocking, one-sentence homily: “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” Today, in other words, the Messiah has come and he is speaking to you now! Today, the long awaited one, whom you have been eagerly anticipating for more than a millennium, is here!

* The words of Isaiah’s prophecy were being unveiled before their eyes. The Spirit of the Lord, who had come down upon Jesus in a visible way at his Baptism in the Jordan, as we celebrated two weeks ago, was very much still upon him. He was proclaiming the Gospel to the poor and lowly, to those who were humble enough to receive it, all throughout Galilee and making them lavishly rich with the treasure of God’s holy revelation. He was restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, vigor to cripples, health to the moribund and would soon even be restoring life to the dead. He was proclaiming liberty to those captive to sin through his merciful forgiveness and was letting those oppressed by the devil go free through exorcisms. In all of this, he was proclaiming a “year acceptable to the Lord,” a Jubilee Year, which was a reset button that God wanted the Jews to press every 50 years to reestablish their bonds with him and particularly with each other through charity. All of the aspects of this Messianic prophecy Jesus was actualizing before their eyes.

* We’ll see their reaction next week, but a little promo is necessary so that we can draw today the prophetic consequences. All began to speak highly of him and were “amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.” But then they began to doubt, remembering his origins, that Mary was his mother and Joseph his putative father, that Jesus had likely built several of the pieces of furniture and perhaps even some of the homes of those present. They couldn’t believe that the Messiah could really come from those humble origins. They also began to recognize the import of his words. If the Scripture he had read was being fulfilled in their hearing and he had come to proclaim the Gospel to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, then they naturally began to ask themselves whether he was saying they were poor, captive, blind and oppressed, an implication they refused to engage. No prophet, Jesus would say, is accepted in his native place; neither is the Messiah, the Son of God, and the Savior of the world. As we’ll see, when Jesus didn’t want to put on a show of miracles because of their lack of faith, they were all filled with anger, rose up, drove him out of the synagogue and up the brow of the hill on which Nazareth had been built intending to hurl him to his death.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

January 22, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.22.22_Landry_ConCon_1.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 we will encounter Jesus preaching in his hometown synagogue. He was handed the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah and he read, from Isaiah 61, the passage describing the work of the eventual Messiah: he would be filled with the Spirit of the Lord, anointed to preach the Good News to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to the oppressed, to help the blind see, and to announce a Jubilee Year (Is 61:1-2). After reading that passage, Jesus very dramatically handed the scroll back to the synagogue attendant and sat down, as all the eyes in the room were locked on him. And he gave a shocking, one-sentence homily: “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” Today, in other words, the Messiah has come and he is speaking to you now! Today, the long awaited one, whom you have been eagerly anticipating for more than a millennium, is here!

* The words of Isaiah’s prophecy were being unveiled before their eyes. The Spirit of the Lord, that had come down upon Jesus in a visible way at his Baptism in the Jordan, as we celebrated two weeks ago, was very much still upon him. He was proclaiming the Gospel to the poor and lowly, to those who were humble enough to receive it, all throughout Galilee and making them lavishly rich with the treasure of God’s holy revelation. He was restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, vigor to cripples, health to the moribund and would soon even be restoring life to the dead. He was proclaiming liberty to those captive to sin through his merciful forgiveness and was letting those oppressed by the devil go free through exorcisms. In all of this, he was proclaiming a “year acceptable to the Lord,” a Jubilee Year, which was a reset button that God wanted the Jews to press every 50 years to reestablish their bonds with him and particularly with each other through charity. All of the aspects of this Messianic prophecy — and all the others — Jesus was actualizing before their eyes.

* Jesus wants continuously to fulfill Sacred Scripture in our hearing, before our eyes, in our minds, hearts and lives. He wants to preach the Good News to us and desires that we be sufficiently poor in spirit to receive it, recognizing how much we need that gift. He has come to set us free from captivity and oppression, especially to slavery to our addictions and sins. He has come to help us recognize our blind spots and recover our sight, so that we might first see him in prayer and the Sacraments and then learn how to see all things in his light. He wants to proclaim not just a year acceptable to the Lord but a lifetime and eternity pleasing to God and joyous to us. He wants to engage us in a consequential conversation of love and life that knows no end, planting the seed of the Word of God within us and helping us to bear great fruit, to let his word take on our flesh and be fulfilled in and by us.

* This Sunday we will celebrate for the third time a new and important annual feast, the Sunday of the Word of God, which Pope Francis established on September 30, 2019 to accentuate the importance that Sacred Scripture is meant to have in the faith, prayer and lives of believers. He announced it intentionally on September 30,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Fabian and St. Sebastian, Martyrs

January 20, 2022

1 Sam 18:6-9.19:1-7, Ps 56, Mk 3:7-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.20.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today on this third day of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, we encounter explicitly in today’s first reading and the Memorials we mark today, and between the lines of today’s Gospel, what is perhaps the greatest destroyer of unity. It’s the sin of envy, the deep sadness over someone else’s success, the anger over someone else’s goodness. It allows us within this Octave to open ourselves up to particular graces the Lord wants us to live by.

* We see the destructive power of envy in today’s first reading. The Israelites, led by Saul, had triumphed in battle. Everyone was rejoicing. The women came out to meet the returning soldiers with an ancient ticker-tape parade, singing and dancing, with tambourines, sistrums and joyful songs they had composed. They began singing, “Saul has slain his thousands.” Think about that. Saul had triumphed over thousands of people. He was not just a king but a hero. And all the women were fawning over him. He should have been exultant, but his joy at his battlefield prowess was short-lived. In the second verse, they sang, “and David his ten thousands.” And that filled Saul with bitterness. Remember, David was slaying tens of thousands of people for the Israelites, for the nation Saul was leading. It would be like cheerleaders on a basketball team that has just won a championship, chanting “our point guard has scored 50 points, but our center has scored 60,” and having the point guard be more upset that he was upstaged by a teammate striving for the same team goal than he would be happy at winning a championship. It was ugly. It was petty. And it was destructive. Rather than rejoicing that God had obviously anointed David with special blessing — otherwise how could the harpist-shepherd really take down so many? — and had blessed Saul and his armies with that gift, he said to himself, “All that remains for him is the kingship.” The victory turned into a defeat in his heart and he sought revenge against the one who helped him triumph. Like King Herod out of envy would eventually try to strike down David’s 28th generation grandson, so Saul put David in his royal crosshairs. Rather than fighting together, rather than working together for the good, rather than rejoicing in their victory, Saul decided to go and destroy his greatest military asset. And even after he calmed down at the end of today’s passage, we would see that this cancer of envy would return over and again and Saul would seek to destroy David several times anew, despite David’s goodness to Saul.

* The future Pope Francis, in a book containing 48 spiritual conferences from his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, pondered what happened in Saul during this scene. “Saul’s envy of David,” he wrote, “betrayed a serious obtuseness on his part. Instead of joining with the people and benefitting from the unification of the whole nation around David, Saul preferred to go on his own way, stubbornly refusing to recognize this man anointed by God. Envy always errs in its object and frustrates the struggle. When people desire something good but do so with envy, they end up losing what is truly good, and, in the case of Saul, it was the common project, the corporate institution. When Saul’s isolated, disobedient conscience separated him from the Lord, he dragged the whole people down with him.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

January 19, 2022

1 Sam 17:32-33.37.40-51, Ps 144, Mk 3:1-6

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.19.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted: 

* In the first reading, we see one of the most famous examples of courage not just in the Bible but in history. For 40 days Goliath had been calling on someone from the Israelite Camp to come out and fight him, one-on-one, to determine the outcome of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines. But none of those on the Israelite side, including Saul, were willing to take him up on the challenge. Everyone was too cowardly. The text tells us that they were all “dismayed and terror-stricken.” David, however, was not. He was a young boy, a harpist — not exactly a form of music associated with warriors! — who had with him a simple slingshot that he would use to get the attention of the sheep he would watch. He heard Goliath’s challenge on the 40th day as he was bringing food to his older brothers in Saul’s army. He volunteered. He was not afraid of going head to head — more like head to waist! – against the 6’9” warrior with all the latest gear, a heavy, long sword, a javelin with an iron head weighing 15 pounds and bronze scimitar, a bronze helmet on his head, and a bronze corselet of scale armor weighing 125 pounds. David didn’t even bother taking up the offer of Saul’s armor. He was satisfied with his sling and five stones he got from a Wadi because he knew he would be acting “in the name of the Lord.” He said, “Not by sword or spear that the Lord saves, for the battle is the Lord’s!” And we know how the story ends.

* In today’s Gospel, we see an example of Jesus’ courage. We’re not normally accustomed to look at Jesus’ courage except perhaps on Good Friday, but today we see it. He was risking his life contradicting the Scribes and the Pharisees with regard to their misunderstanding of the Sabbath. It was because of Jesus’ words about and works of charity on the Sabbath that they would plot to kill him. Jesus met in the synagogue a man with a withered hand and immediately responded with compassion. The Greek word used to describe his hand strongly suggests it was withered through an injury, not because of something from birth. And Jesus wanted to cure his hand and allow him to use it to work and build up a life for himself. But the Pharisees present didn’t look at the injured man in the same way. They were indifferent to his plight. The text suggests that they may have even planted him there as a pawn to try to entrap Jesus, to see if he would try to cure him on the Sabbath. Hence Jesus asked if it were against God’s law and will to do good and save life. They didn’t reply. St. Mark tells us that Jesus looked at them with anger at their malevolence and was grieved at their hardness of heart, which prevented them not only from seeing the place of charity in the law of God but also from looking on this man with love. Jesus’ question, “Is it lawful to do good … rather than evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?,” is still very relevant today. Jesus had the courage to do good, even when it would cost him.  Jesus was essentially asking if it was possible to love someone in deeds on the Lord’s day, if it was possible to save or redeem. Jesus’ opponents didn’t respond because they knew how ridiculous their response would seem. After Jesus was gone, however, the Pharisees went out on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s day, and began to conspire with the Herodians (with whom they would ordinarily not interact at all, because of the Herodians’ licentiousness and relations with the...