Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily in anticipation of Pentecost Sunday

June 4, 2022

 

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This is the text that guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us on Pentecost Sunday. As we celebrate the birthday of the Church and the anniversary of when the Holy Spirit came down upon the apostles and Mary as tongues of fire, the Church this year has us consider the words of Jesus during the Last Supper when he promised, “I will ask the Father and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always,” adding, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.”

* The word Advocate, Parakletos in Greek, means a helper, consoler, champion, upholder, supporter, proponent, protector, someone who speaks on our behalf, lawyer or defense attorney, and was used in that context in Roman and Greek settings. In both languages it means literally someone called to stand beside us, to intercede for us. Jesus was our first Advocate and he says that God the Father sends us the Holy Spirit as “another Advocate” to be with us always, to help, console, uphold, support, protect and defend us.

* He will give us a specific form of assistance. Just as Jesus would tell Pontius Pilate the following day that he had come to “give witness to the truth,” so he told the apostles that the help the Holy Spirit would be the “Spirit of truth,” who would “guide you to all truth” (Jn 16:13), “teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you” (Jn 14:26). The Holy Spirit, like Jesus, would be our Advocate not by serving us like a mob attorney tries to defend his criminal mafiosi, but by helping us to know the truth, love the truth, live the truth, spread the truth and enter into communion with Jesus, who said, “I am the Truth.” He will help us to live in the real, real world, together with God, even in the midst of environments that will be filled with lies or following the infernal inspirations of the one Jesus calls the “liar and the father of lies” (Jn 8:44).

* How much we need the Holy Spirit’s help! How grateful we need to be for the gift of the Holy Spirit to tell the truth about God, about us, about others, about the world. We’re living at a time of assaults against the truth, not just opposition to revealed truths or the truths of the natural law, but a time of spin, of fake news, of believing and spreading lies. We see this attack against the truth not only in the disinformation campaigns of communist governments, but we also in the euphemisms that support the practice of abortion or in the attempt not only to allow those who are confused about their identity to think that they’re girls trapped in boys’ bodies and vice versa and to force everyone else to lie by pretending that they really are what they confusedly think they are.

* That’s why the great refrain of Pentecost, taken from Psalm 104, is, “Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth!” In the context of so much pain and violence flowing from hatred like we have seen recently in Uvalde, Buffalo and the Ukraine, so much despair, pain and suicides flowing from meaninglessness, so much confusion flowing from politically correct lies as well as the failure boldly to teach the truth, we need the Holy Spirit to come to renew us and through us the Church and the world.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx

Seventh Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 29, 2022

Acts 7:55-60, Ps 97, Rev 22:12-14.16-17.20, Jn 17:20-26

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* On Thursday we celebrated the Ascension of the Lord. I had the privilege to do so in Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, at the place where traditionally the Ascension is believed to have occurred. The Lord’s Ascension on the 40th Day after Easter is a time for us to stoke our desire for heaven, where he has gone to prepare a place for us. It is an occasion for us to pray for the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, which he instructed us to do before he was taken up, which the members of the early Church faithfully did around Mary in the Upper Room, and which the Church continues to do every year in the decenarium (ten days) of prayer for the gift of the Holy Spirit each year in anticipation of Pentecost. And it’s a chance for us to focus on the mission Jesus has given to us as he ascended, to be, together with the Holy Spirit, his witnesses to the end of the earth, proclaiming the Good News that the Son of God not only took on our humanity, entered our world, lived, worked, taught, healed, fed, forgave, suffered, died, rose and ascended, but is with us always until the end of time.

* These three main focuses of Ascension are reinforced by the Church on the Seventh Sunday of Easter. The first reading from the Acts of the Apostles has us ponder St. Stephen, who “filled with the Holy Spirit, looked up intently to heaven and saw the glory of God and Jesus standing at the right hand of God [the Father],” and then, as the stones were raining down upon him, cried out, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.” The Holy Spirit helps us to look intently upon, to concentrate on, heaven and the glory of God and to get us to entrust ourselves into Jesus’ lovingly scarred hands. In the second reading from the Book of Revelation, the last chapter of the Bible, that sense of consecration to Jesus is strengthened. The ascended Jesus tells us, “Behold, I am coming soon,” and “the Spirit and the Bride,” the Holy Spirit guiding the Church, say in response, “Come! … Amen! Come, Lord Jesus!” Jesus’ ascension into heaven is not a time for us to say “goodbye!” and then move on to our own pursuits, like those referred to in Jesus’ parable who say to each other, “The Master is long delayed” and proceed to get drunk and take advantage of others (Mt 24:48). Rather it is a time for us to grow in longing for the Lord, to cooperate with the Holy Spirit in saying, “Come!,” and to give witness to Jesus in words, in life, and even in death like St. Stephen.

* In the Gospel, taken from Jesus’ great, intimate priestly prayer on Holy Thursday, we see that Jesus, on the night he was betrayed, rather than focusing on his imminent suffering, was instead praying for us, praying for each of these three realities. He was praying that we would be united with him in heaven. “Father,” he implored, “they are your gift to me. I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see the glory that you gave me, because you loved me before the foundation of the world.” He prayed for that the witness that he was summoning us to give would be fruitful. “Holy Father,” he said, “I pray not only for them,” meaning the apostles, the first wave of those he would send out to continue his mission, “but also for those” — namely us — “who will believe in me through their word.” He had previously prayed to God the Father in this great Priestly Prayer, with words we heard last year and that come immediately before today’s passage, “I gave them your word.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter, C, and for the Ascension, C, (Vigil)

May 28, 2022

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.

* Depending upon where you live, that conversation may be different this Sunday, because those in New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania and Nebraska will hear the Gospel of the Seventh Sunday of Easter, while those everywhere else will hear what those in the states I just mentioned heard on Thursday, the Gospel of the Ascension of the Lord Jesus. The reason for the confusion is in 1998 and 1999, bishops in most regions of the United States decided to transfer the Ascension from the 40th day after Easter to the Seventh Sunday, believing that if they didn’t, Catholics who seldom attend on Holy Days of Obligation would always miss celebrating liturgically this very important event in the Lord’s life. Ironically, however, in making that decision to move the Ascension to the 43rd day after Easter, the bishops in those provinces were preventing Catholics from hearing Jesus’ words on the importance of Christian unity from the 17th Chapter of St. John’s Gospel, a third of which is proclaimed on the Seventh Sunday each year. Catholics in the US unfortunately do not have unity with regard to the celebration of the Solemnity of the Ascension and I would urge that just as the Church is praying for unity to be restored to the celebration of Easter between Catholics and Orthodox, so we might pray and speak to our bishops about restoring unity on the celebration of the Ascension on the 40th

* Since there is not unity, however, please permit me to say something about both Gospels, conscious of the fact that since Jesus is our interlocutor in every prayerful and consequential liturgical conversation, everything is intrinsically coherent.

* In the Gospel for the Ascension this year, taken from St. Luke’s, Jesus tells his apostles and first disciples, “You are witnesses,” and instructs them in his name to preach “repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, … to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” This is the good news that in St. Mark’s version of the Ascension Jesus said they would “go into the whole world … to … proclaim to every creature.” This is the way that, according to St. Matthew, they would “make disciples of all nations, baptizing them” in the name of the Trinity and “teaching them to carry out all” that Jesus commanded. Jesus could have stayed on earth until the end of time crisscrossing the globe after every lost sheep, but as he ascended, he placed his own mission in our hands. He took the training wheels off our discipleship and removed any excuses we might have to pass the buck of sharing and spreading the faith. His confidence and trust in us, despite our weaknesses, is astonishing. He wanted to incorporate us into — and actually entrust to us — his mission of the redemption of the world. But he didn’t leave us orphans (Jn 14:18). St. Luke gives us a beautiful image and detail in this Sunday’s Gospel passage, that Jesus “led them out as far as Bethany, raised his hands, and blessed them. As he was blessing them, he parted from them and was taken up to heaven” (Lk 24:50-51). Jesus departed in the very act of blessing us. And he’s seeking to transform us into his incarnate benediction of the world through how we become his witnesses a...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil

May 21, 2022

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.

* Throughout the Sundays of the Easter Season, the Church has us focus on how Jesus intends us to share in the newness of life that comes from our communion with Him risen from the dead. In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks to us about two things he died and rose from the dead to give us: love and peace. Our hearts were made for love and for peace — and will remain restless until we have them. But love and peace are not things that we can just wish into existence. No matter how many songs and poems we write about them, or talk and dream about them, they are realities that cannot be conjured or fabricated. We will not truly experience them until we follow the means Jesus describes in the Gospel. He who is the Prince of Peace and who is Love personified describes for us this Sunday the path to obtain both.

* But before we examine what Jesus says, it’s important to focus on the stakes. We live in a world that is torn by the lack of peace. It’s easy to point to the Russian atrocities taking place in Ukraine, but there are also horrible conflicts taking place in Ethiopia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Mali, Niger, Burkina Faso, Mozambique, Somalia, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Northern Nigeria and even the West Bank in the Holy Land. In several communist countries — China, Cuba, Venezuela, North Korea — the people live oppressed and in fear of imprisonment and death and even Cardinals are arrested on trumped up charges. Even in the United States, there’s a lack of peace, as 18-year-olds murder innocent people in Buffalo supermarkets, those clamoring for social change torch cars and businesses, pro-life offices are burned down by Molotov cocktails, Churches suffer vandalism, and hundreds of thousands of our littlest brothers and sisters in the womb have their lives gruesomely terminated in the womb. This lack of peace is one of the most obvious manifestations of a lack of love, in which we objectify, label, dehumanize and oppose others rather than will their good.

* But it’s not the only sign of a crisis of love. So many people do not feel they’re loved. St. John Paul II famously said at the beginning of his pontificate, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” People suffer when they don’t experience the love of a mom and dad, especially when they’re young. They suffer when they experience rejection from those on whom they have a crush as young people. They suffer when relationships, engagements, even marriages break up. They suffer when they have only utilitarian friendships and contacts. They suffer when they’re alone. Some out of suffering the lack of love try to distract themselves through addictions to booze and drugs, others to porn and fantasy, others to promiscuity. Others, tired of living without love, thinking that others won’t care or trying to draw attention to their pain and loneliness, take their lives. The crisis of love is real and enormously costly to individuals and all of society.

* In response to the yearnings for peace and love...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Joseph Church, Fall River, MA

Fifth Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 15, 2022

Acts 14:21-27, Ps 145, Rev 21:1-5, Jn 13:31-35

 

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

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This is the text that guided today’s homily: 

Throughout the Easter Season, we ponder the revolutionary aspect that Christ’s resurrection has in the big picture of the salvation of the world and is meant to have in your life and mine. Christ has truly risen and that means that sin and death do not have the last word, but God, holiness and eternal life do. In today’s passage from the Book of Revelation, we get an image of the “new heaven,” “new earth” and “new Jerusalem,” that Jesus’ resurrection makes possible. The One sitting on the throne, the image of God the Father, says, in fact, “Behold, I make all things new.” Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection, in other words, has changed everything. “The old order,” we’re told, “has passed away.” But this newness is not just supposed to be a future reality for which we hope. It’s meant to be a present, life-changing reality here and now. That comes about because the Risen Lord Jesus remains with us, infusing every human reality, including the most challenging ones, with divine meaning. The loud voice from the throne says, “Behold, God’s dwelling is with the human race. He will dwell with them and they will be his people and God himself will always be with them as their God.” In the Easter Season we focus on how the Risen Lord Jesus is with us always until the end of time, accompanying us, enlightening us, strengthening us, nourishing us, forgiving us, uniting us to him and helping us to fulfill his saving Mission, sending us forth to help others, who are living according to the “old order,” experience that same revolutionary newness and enter into relationship with him who dwells Risen among us.

In the Gospel today, Jesus, the One who makes all things new, speaks to us about the way we will experience that newness. With words he proclaimed during the Last Supper that the Church ponders in the light of his Resurrection, he tells us, “I give you a new commandment. Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another.” Up until that point, as you know, the Jewish people, even Jesus’ followers, had lived by the two-fold commandment that God had given them in the Old Testament, on which Jesus said all the law and the prophets depend: to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. Jesus’ “new commandment” was new in both respects. First, it would start not with our loving God with all we have, but God’s loving us so much that he entered the human race, taking on our humanity so that he could give it, down to the last drop of his blood, to save us forever.

Everything begins with “as I have loved you.” God’s love for us shown in Christ changes and refreshes everything. That’s the radical newness that will never be out of date. When we think about Jesus’ birth, growth, preaching and teaching, miracles, suffering, death and resurrection, we cannot treat them just as the mind-blowing historical facts that they are; each was done out of love for us, out of love for you and for me. When we were being held hostage by sin, the Good Shepherd loved us so much that he heroically entered the world to rescue us, giving his life to set us free, and rising on the third day out of love as well so that we might share with him that triumph into eternity. If Liam Neeson’s daughter in the Hollywood Blockbuster Taken recognized the love of her dad in all he died to free her from human traffickers in France, how much more should we recognize Jesus’ incredible love in...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Anthony of Padua Church, New Bedford, MA

Nuptial Mass of Daniel Bruce Marshall and Carina Ann Borges

May 14, 2022

Gen 2:18-24, Ps 34:2-9, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 19:3-6

 

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

In God’s providence, there are no coincidences.

From before the foundation of the world, the same Jesus who visited a wedding in Cana of Galilee made plans for May 14, 2022, to come here to Saint Anthony of Padua Parish in New Bedford, to unite you, Daniel Bruce Marshall and Carina Ann Borges, in the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony.

He formed each of you, just as much as he did Adam and Eve in today’s first reading, to be a “suitable partner” for each other.

He created you “from the beginning” so that you would leave your father and mother and cling to each other and become, by his power, no longer two but one flesh, in an indissoluble reality that no human being — or even all other human beings on the planet — will ever be able to separate.

He who brought you together, as an organist and a cantor, to provide music for the 2017 Diocese of Fall River Pro-Life Bootcamp, wants to help you continue to accompany each other and make beautiful music in a liturgy of life. This is the means by which, as we sung in today’s Psalm, you may together magnify the Lord, glorify and bless him at all times with his praise always in your mouth, savoring how good the Lord is, radiant with joy.

He knew, as you know, and as St. Paul reminds us in today’s epistle, that without the love he has placed in you for each other, your life, rather than becoming a canticle of self-giving, echoing the spousal love song of creation and redemption, might have ended up being just a “noisy gong and clashing cymbal.”

In God’s plan there are no coincidences and part of the complementary vocation he has given you to the Sacrament of Marriage involves his joining you on May 14.

In your plans, May 14 was chosen because it was the closest Saturday to May 13, the Memorial of Our Lady of Fatima, who began appearing to the three shepherd children in the Cova d’Iria on that day in 1917. It was God who inspired in you that desire and love for our Lady, who, in her final appearance on October 13, 1917 (exactly one hundred years before your first unofficial date!) came together with St. Joseph holding the child Jesus as the baby Jesus was blessing the 70,000 present. This happened, as Lucia dos Santos, one of the three shepherd children, later commented, to show the importance of the family by presenting before the world the model of the Holy Family of Nazareth.  “God,” she wrote, “entrusted to the family the sacred mission of co-operating with Him in the work of creation, … a sacred mission that makes two beings one in a union so close that it does not admit of separation… [and from which] God wishes to produce other beings.” In a letter to one of my professors in Rome, the future Cardinal Carlo Caffarra, Lucia made plain just how important the family is in the plans of God, for which she believed Our Lady of Fatima appeared to appeal to us to take more seriously. “The final battle between the Lord and the kingdom of Satan will be about Marriage and the Family,” she firmly stated. “This is the decisive issue.”

And so it is beautiful, inspiring, and wise for you to want to consecrate your marriage today to Our Lady’s Immaculate Heart, to become warriors within the Church militant in that final battle between God and Satan, sanctity and sin, love and envy, life and death. Indeed, marriage and the family, made in God’s image and likeness,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil

May 14, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.14.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us the Fifth Sunday of the Easter Season. We will enter into Jesus’ words given during the Last Supper, looked at through the knowledge of the resurrection. Jesus speaks to us of his and the Father’s glory and the way it will be manifested. “Now,” he says, “is the Son of Man glorified and God [the Father] is glorified in him.” That glorification begins, paradoxically, with what Jesus himself would suffer right after saying those words: his arrest, trial, crucifixion, death and resurrection. While humanly humiliating, it is ultimately the fullest epiphany of who the God of love is, allowing his creatures even to try to murder him in order to save those murderers. As St. Paul would write to the first Christians in Corinth, Christ crucified seems scandalous to Jews and foolishness to pagans but actually puts the full power and wisdom of God on display (1 Cor 1:22-24). Or as the same apostle penned to the Christians in Philippi, Jesus became obedient even to death on a Cross but “therefore” God highly exalted him so that every knee should bend and every tongue confess to the glory of God the Father that Jesus Christ is Lord (Phil 2:1-11). Jesus’ crucifixion, rather than being the most embarrassing and lowest moment in human history, is actually, when looked at with faith, the greatest revelation of who God is, because God is ultimately love and Golgotha shows it. This is why, for example, when Jesus allows a glimpse of his glory to be seen by Peter, James and John during the Transfiguration, he is seen talking to Moses and Elijah about “the exodus he was to accomplish in Jerusalem,” about his leading us through the new and eternal Passover by his passion, death and resurrection. That glory was

foreseen when Jesus’ garments were dazzling white on Tabor such that no bleach on earth could make them, but it was displayed fulfilled when he was stripped of his garments and bathed in blood on Calvary, because there is no greater love than laying down one’s life for one’s friends. God’s great glory is doing so.

* As we see, however, in this Sunday’s Gospel, that’s not the application Jesus gives of his glory. Rather than focusing on divine love exalted among two thieves, he describes the love he wants to see in and among us. “I give you a new commandment,” he says, “Love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” God’s glory is meant to be manifested not just on the Cross but in the way we lay down our lives in love for each other, in supreme moments of heroism and in ordinary daily moments of self-giving sacrifice. Just as it is paradoxical that God’s glory would be shown in a gruesome public crucifixion by his own creatures, so it is surprising that Jesus says it will be shown by the very behavior of those creatures who, receiving his love, remain in it, and share it to the same standard as that with which they were loved by God. God’s glory, in other words, is shown by loving as God loves. To return to the same passage of St. Paul’s letter to the Philippians in which Paul says that Jesus’ obedience to death is his great exaltation, the apostle urges the Christians to be of the “same m...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Cathedral of Saint Agatha, Catania, Sicily

Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year C

May 8, 2022

Acts 13:14.43.52, Ps 100, Rev 7:9.14-17, Jn 10:27-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.8.22_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* On the Fourth Sunday of Easter every year, in the very heart of the Easter Season, the Church celebrates Good Shepherd Sunday, so that we can relate to the Risen Jesus as he wants, as our Good Shepherd. He wants us to receive his shepherdly care and love and he wants to transform us so that we may extend it by cooperating with his shepherdly care of others.

* Each year on this Sunday we meditate on a part of the tenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel in which Jesus identifies himself as the Good Shepherd and lists six different ways he cares for us:

* He calls us by name

* He guides or leads us

* He feeds us

* He protects us

* He freely lays down his life for us

* He gives us eternal life.

* To be a good sheep of the good shepherd, we need to respond to his call to an I-thou personal relationship and friendship; follow his lead, even when he leads us to where we might not initially want to go or into a dark valley; receive with gratitude his nourishment, especially the Word of God and the Word-made-flesh in the Eucharist; stay in his protective hand; recognize, appreciate and receive the gift of his sacrifice on Calvary; and seek with him the gift of the verdant pastures where he seeks to give us eternal repose.

* But Jesus seeks to transform us just like he transformed the first apostles to be not only good sheep but good shepherds of others in communion with him. We saw that last week when Jesus told Peter, “Feed my lambs,” “Tend my sheep,” “Feed my sheep.” The Church today remembers to special ways this is meant to be done.

* The first is in the priesthood. For 59 years the Church has prayed on Good Shepherd Sunday for priestly vocations, for those who have already received the call and those who are not yet aware of it. We need good shepherds, not mercenaries, who do things out of love for God and others, who hear Jesus’ personal call, follow him in a moral life, receive his nourishment, protect others from the evil one, live their vocation to martyrdom and self-gift and help to lead Christ’s sheep to the eternal sheepfold.

* We also mark today, in the USA and beyond, Mother’s Day, and mothers imitate the Good Shepherd’s shepherdly love. They are the first I-thou relationship most children are ever aware of, as they come to know their name as their mother pronounces it in the mother tongue; mothers lead their children along right paths, teaching them right from wrong; they feed their children umbilically, from their breasts, and with so many hearty meals thereafter; they protect their children from harmful influences, even at the risk of their life; and they want what’s best for their children forever, which is why so many mom’s become like St. Monica when their children and grandchildren wander. Today we pray for our moms living and deceased and for all that they’re praying for in their maternal hearts.

* The great way the Good Shepherd meets us every day with his shepherdly care is here at Mass. He eagerly desires us to share this Passover with him and calls us by name; guiding us not only to the altar but to imitate his self-gift; feeding us with the Word of God and the Eucharist; protecting us from the wiles of the evil one from the inside out; giving his life for us on the altar, as he gives us a foretaste of eternal life by ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, C, Vigil

May 7, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.7.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.

* The Fourth Sunday of Easter each year is called Good Shepherd Sunday, because on this day the Church focuses on a part of the tenth Chapter of St. John’s Gospel in which Jesus reveals the relationship he has with each of his faithful followers. Jesus says about himself: “I am the Good Shepherd,” and indicates how he shepherds us. His faithful followers respond to him, with the words of Psalm 100 we’ll hear this Sunday, “We are his people, the sheep of his flock!” or with the more famous words of Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd. I want, I lack, for nothing!” We mark this truth in the heart of the Easter Season each year, because it is the heart of our Easter joy: with the Risen Lord Jesus as our Shepherd, we truly have it all!

* Throughout the Good Shepherd discourse, Jesus shows us how he seeks to relate to us.

* First, “he calls his own sheep by name” and the sheep hear and recognize his voice. He wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. He knows us. He cares about us. Good sheep of the Good Shepherd enter into this mind-blowing I-thou relationship with him, responding to his call and calling out to him by name in return.

* Second, he guides or leads us. He tells us he “calls his own sheep by name and he leads them out. … He goes ahead of them and they follow him.” “He “leads us in right paths for [his] names’ sake.” He takes us “besides the refreshing waters” of baptism and toward the “verdant pastures” of heaven. He wants to lead us on a journey, a true adventure, a life-time pilgrimage. He who is the way doesn’t merely point that path out but accompanies us along it. Good sheep follow the Good Shepherd’s guidance and walk in his ways.

* Third, he feeds us. He “prepares a table for us,” seeking to feed us in every way he knows we need. He feeds us materially as he “gives us today our daily bread” (Mt 6:11). He feeds our souls with his word, for “not on bread alone does man live, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God” (Mt 4:4). He feeds us, ultimately, on his own body and blood in the Eucharist, the food of everlasting life. Good sheep are not only grateful for this three-fold nutrition, but hunger for it!

* Fourth, he protects us. Jesus tells us very clearly that there are “thieves and marauders” who are seeking to fleece, milk, kill, cook and consume us. Against those who come “only to steal and kill and destroy,” Jesus sets himself as our protector, as the gate to the sheepfold so that, essentially, in order to get to us they first need to go through Him. He leaves the 99 behind and comes after us when we’re in danger. “No one can take them out of my hand,” he says. Good Sheep of the Good Shepherd stay in those powerful, saving, protective hands.

* Fifth, he freely gives his life for us. “The Good Shepherd lays down his life for the sheep,” he tells us. “No one takes my life from me. … I freely lay it down.” His protection goes so far as to die so that we might live. This is why we can act on his words, “Be not afraid!” That’s why Psalm 23 exclaims, “Even though I walk in the darkest valley I fear no evil, for he is at my side, with his rod and his staff to comfort me.”

* Lastly, he says,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Chiesa di San Francesco all’Immacolata, Noto, Sicily

Saturday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time

May 7, 2022

Acts 9:31-42, Ps 116, Jn 6:60-69

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.7.22_homily.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we come to the culmination of the “second octave” of Easter, eight days of daily Mass readings from John 6 focused on the Holy Eucharist. We see that there are three responses to Jesus’ words about how we are to receive him as the new manna from heaven each day, to work for this food that leads to eternal life, to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood.

* The first response is rejection, as we see in the “disciples” who found his teaching “hard” and unable to endure. So many of Jesus’ teachings are indeed hard, but they’re possible for those with faith.

* The second response was hypocrisy, that of Judas, who even though he remained in Jesus’ company, didn’t believe, and when Jesus fulfilled these words the next Passover, he completed his betrayal.

* The third response was faith, shown in St. Peter. He didn’t know how Jesus would give his flesh and blood to consume, but he knew he trusted in Jesus enough to trust in what he said and did. St. Thomas Aquinas focused on this faith when he wrote, in his famous Adoro Te Devote, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said, because nothing is truer than the word of truth.”

* We see the consequences of a Eucharistic life in St. Peter in today’s first reading. The two miracles he worked, the healing of Aeneas of his paralysis in Lydda, and the raising of Tabitha from the dead in Joppa, were both based on Jesus’ healings in Capernaum of the paralyzed man lowered through the roof and the raising from the dead of the daughter of Jairus. Peter stressed that “Jesus Christ heals you,” because it was the Eucharistic Jesus working through Peter’s faith that he has the words of eternal life.

* On this Saturday we have a chance to ponder Mary’s faith in allowing her whole life to develop according to God’s word, to believer that what the Lord has spoken to her would be fulfilled. We place the same faith in Jesus’ words about the Eucharist as she did in the Angel Gabriel’s words that she would become the Mother of the Son of God.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading I

Acts 9:31-42

The Church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria

was at peace.

She was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord,

and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit she grew in numbers.

As Peter was passing through every region,

he went down to the holy ones living in Lydda.

There he found a man named Aeneas,

who had been confined to bed for eight years, for he was paralyzed.

Peter said to him,

“Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed.”

He got up at once.

And all the inhabitants of Lydda and Sharon saw him,

and they turned to the Lord.

Now in Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha

(which translated is Dorcas).

She was completely occupied with good deeds and almsgiving.

Now during those days she fell sick and died,

so after washing her, they laid her out in a room upstairs.

Since Lydda was near Joppa,

the disciples, hearing that Peter was there,

sent two men to him with the request,

“Please come to us without delay.”