Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Blessed Stanley Rother

July 28, 2021

Ex 34:29-35, Ps 99, Mt 13:44-46

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we have two short parables that summarize the essence of the Christian life, pointing, however, to a reality that too few actually realize and live. They indicate the fundamental Christian choice and the joy with which we’re supposed to make and renew it. The parables are simple enough to understand. The first is of a poor peasant who happens to find a buried treasure in the midst of his work in someone else’s field. There were no real banks to speak of in ancient Palestine. People would often bury things of value in secret locations in fields. There was no sense of “finders keepers, losers weepers” then; whatever was discovered in a field belonged not to the discoverer but the owner. That’s why the man needed to buy the field. It’s quite obvious that the one selling had no idea that an ancient treasure was buried on his property. He didn’t place the same value in the field as much as his peasant did and so he sold it. For the peasant, selling all he had in order to get the money to buy the field was nothing compared to what he knew he would be gaining. The second parable is of a wealthy merchant actively searching for precious pearls, going from place to place in pursuit of something truly valuable and beautiful. Finally he found the pearl of his dreams, whose worth was unsurpassable, but whose owner valued it less than the money and property he would get in exchange. And so the wealthy merchant sold all that he had before, doubtless houses, gems and other valuables, to obtain that pearl of great price.

* We see a few fundamental lessons about the kingdom of God in these parables.

* The first is that the Kingdom is a treasure greater than any other. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus told us, “Where your treasure is, there will your heart be also” (Mt 6:21). He told us in that same Sermon that many of us seek to “store up for [ourselves] treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal,” but he wanted us to “store up for [ourselves] treasures in heaven,” a treasure not measured in clothing that moths can wreck, metals that rust can corrode, or money that thieves or taxes can take. Jesus is telling us that our heart must be set on God, and not just in general, but set on him more than an aging professional athlete wants to win a championship, more than an ambitious politician seeks to win high office, and more than a man in love will do everything he can to win over and marry the woman he can’t stop thinking about. Is our heart set that way? Do we really treasure God?

* The second lesson is that to obtain the treasure isn’t cheap. We have to give up things, and not just things that we don’t want or value, but things that are precious. In the parables, each sells all he has, all his valuables. Jesus says that to enter his kingdom, we must deny ourselves, pick up our Cross, lose our life, sell what we have and give to the poor, love our enemies, give our cloak and not just our tunic, and even be willing to leave father and mother, children and lands, for his sake and the sake of the Gospel. The price is steep! But it’s nothing compared to what we’re getting.

* That leads to the third lesson. Despite the cost, it’s still the greatest bargain of our life. It’s like trading in a small house in a crowded, unsafe neighborhood for a Mansion at the bay,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 17th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

July 27, 2021

Ex 33:7-11.34:5-9.28, Ps 103, Mt 13:36-43

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.27.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* There’s been a progression in the eight Parables Jesus gives us in the 13th Chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel. They go from focusing on the power of the seed of the Word of God to bear 30, 60, 0r 100 fold fruit in those with good soil, to showing how the growth of the Kingdom happens, as a mustard seed or leaven, once someone really begins to bear that fruit. Today Jesus says that once we receive Him as the Seed sown in us, once we become united with him, he seeks in turn to sow us together with him in the field of the world, as “children of the kingdom.” At the same time, however, he describes in today’s Parable of the Weeds and Wheat (the first part of which we had on Saturday) that while God the Father sows us like wheat as children of the kingdom of the world (united with Christ), so the “Enemy” sows like weeds the “children of the Evil One.” How are we supposed to relate to this reality as wheat and weeds, of children of the kingdom versus those of the evil one?

* The first thing we should ponder is what it means to be in a relationship of filiation. At first glance, it might seem that this parable points to an almost Calvinist notion of predestination, that we’re born either of God or of the devil. But in the spiritual case, what we’re talking about is a relationship of adoption. Through baptism, we become adopted children of God (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:5; Eph 1:5). There’s a choice on God’s part to extend to us this supreme gift and there’s an acceptance of it on our part and a desire to live as chips off the old divine block. Similarly with the devil, there’s an offer on his part — seldom explicit, but through temptation — and an acceptance by free men and women to live according to the world and the flesh. This is something we can see. In the middle of the field of the world there are religious sisters, pious prayerful grandmothers and many innocent children on the one hand and Porn makers, abortion doctors, and drug cartel leaders on the other. Today is an opportunity for us to examine the principle on the basis of which we’re living, whether we’re seeking to live as children of the Father, righteous and shining like the sun, or whether, rather than good wheat that nourishes others, we’re growing more like weeds under the influence of evil.

* The main point of the parable is about what to do with the weeds. The slaves ask their Master, “Do you want us to go and pull them up?” And he shouts, “No!,” lest “you pull up the weeds [and] uproot the wheat along with them.” Out of concern for the wheat, for the children of the kingdom, he urges patience until the harvest. In order to understand better Jesus’ message, it helps to know something about wheat and weeds (called lolium) in the Holy Land. The wheat and the weeds Jesus was likely pointing to are indistinguishable during the early phases of growth. Not even expert farmers can tell the difference between them. When they grow enough to distinguish between them, their roots are so intertwined that you can’t separate them without ripping out the wheat by the roots as well. So one needs to let them grow, take them all out and then separate them on sifting tables, lest the good wheat be contaminated by the toxic fruit of the weeds. By this parable Jesus is saying that the same patience and prudence have to be exercised with the proclamation of the kingdom. The good seed and the bad seed,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Memorial of SS. Joachim and Anne

July 26, 2021

Sir 44:1.10-15, Ps 132, Mt 13:16-17

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.26.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today, on the day after the inaugural heavily-indulgenced celebration of the World Day of Prayer for Grandparents and the Elderly, we have the chance to celebrate the feast of the Grandparents of God, SS. Joachim and Anne. We know very little about them. We receive their names from the gnostic Pseudogospel of St. James, which is highly unreliable but perhaps can be counted upon to get a few facts right, like their names and the fact that they conceived Mary very late in life after both thought that they would die childless and in the Jewish mentality of the time, publicly under a supposed curse of sterility of God. But after Joachim fasted and prayed in the desert and Anne wept a double lamentation, God’s angel came to them and announced they would conceive. If this is true, we can ask, why would God have waited so long? The answer is, I think, to increase their longing, to increase their awareness that every child comes from God. When children are conceived when parents are young, they can frequently think that it was just a result of a biological act and that God was really little involved. But God is always involved in the conception of every child, but sometimes it’s only when children come under rarer circumstances — after much prayer, after multiple miscarriages. much later in life, even miraculously post-menopausally — that we become more aware of it. And we know that the conception in St. Anne’s womb was unlike any other in human history, as her long-awaited daughter was conceived without any stain of original sin, would go on to become the most famous woman of all time, and would give birth not only to the long longed for Messiah but the Son of God himself. The Lord often has us persevere in prayer, sometimes for decades, in order to purify us and strengthen us, and often to give us something far greater in response to a holy desire than we would have ever dared to dream.

* In the first reading today, Sirach, in a lyric of praise for our “godly ancestors,” reminds us that their “wealth remains in their families, their heritage with their descendants,” that “their family endures through God’s Covenant with them” and “their glory will never be blotted out.” How true these words are about SS. Joachim and Anne! It’s easy for us to focus today on their biological relationship to Jesus, that they were the grandparents according to the flesh of the long-awaited Messiah, of the Savior of the world. But once, when an anonymous woman cried out from the crowd in praise of Mary, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you!,” Jesus replied that there was something far greater than Mary’s physical relationship with her Son. “Blessed rather,” Jesus said, “are those who hear the Word of God and act on it,” as Mary had. I have great confidence that the source of Joachim’s and Anne’s happiness is not just or principally the genes they bequeathed to Jesus through their immaculately conceived daughter, but the faith they passed on to their daughter, the faith that had been tried over decades and strengthened, the faith that allowed her to conceive Jesus in her heart before she had ever conceived him in her womb. This points to a central truth that all grandparents, parents and everyone called to spiritual paternity and maternity — like we are, Sisters — need to grasp, that the most important heritage we pass on is our faith. For those in the world, the most important wealth shouldn’t be houses,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Seventeeth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

July 24, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.24.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The text that guided the homily was: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege 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, when he will lead us on a multi-week journey more deeply into the mystery of his life-giving love in the Holy Eucharist.

* The Church has been focusing this year, as we do every three years, on the Gospel of St. Mark. If we continued chapter-by-chapter in this progression, we would have tackled this week St. Mark’s version of the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, the only miracle of Jesus recounted in all four Gospels. But the Church substitutes for us here St. John’s account of the same miracle, because St. John shows how Jesus used it as the launching pad for a long homily on the Eucharist, which will occupy our thoughts four of the next five weeks. The miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and the fish was a true miracle, something that happened in Capernaum, during the time of the Passover, one year before the Last Supper. But Jesus used this miracle as a sign of what he was intending to do for us in the Eucharist. Over the next several weeks, we will focus on the Eucharist. Today we’ll focus on the miracle itself.

* This miracle of the loaves and the fish teaches us very clearly about how God generally works and what he expects from us. When Jesus saw the famished crowds, he could have easily worked a miracle from scratch. He who created the heavens and the earth out of nothing, who fed the Israelites in the desert with miraculous manna and quails from heaven, could easily have satiated the hungry multitude ex nihilo. He didn’t need human or material assistance. But that isn’t the way he acted. He first asked his disciples what their resources were: “Where are we to buy bread for these people to eat?” Philip replied that not even six months’ wages — say $20,000 by today’s standards — would have been enough to feed the crowd of about 5,000 people. The only one who had anything was a young boy, who had five loaves and two fish, food that wouldn’t even be enough to feed a typical family. The Lord started with the young boy’s generosity. Even though strictly speaking he didn’t need anything to work a miracle, he wanted to involve the boy, the apostles and the crowd in the miracle. He wanted to start with what the people had, and bring it to completion.

* This is the way God generally operates with us. He could choose to do everything by himself, but he knows that wouldn’t be ultimately good for us. Just like a parent often gives a child a project and helps the child complete it, so God out of love wants to give us the joy and dignity of being cooperators with him in what he’s doing for us and for others. Look at the wonderful story of the apostles. Jesus wanted to involve these simple men in the most important mission ever, the proclamation of the kingdom of God and the salvation of the human race. Rather than ascending into heaven, he could have chosen to stay here on earth until the end of time, traversed every land, preached in every town and village, healing, exorcising, forgiving, and establishing the Church, but he wanted them to share in this mission. He gave them his message and his authority. They weren’t necessarily talented men in worldly eyes, they were those who humanly had meager starting materials,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Lorenzo Brindisi, Doctor of the Church

July 21, 2021

Ex 16:1-5.9-15, Ps 78, Mt 13:1-9

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.21.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus gives us the first of eight parables in the 13th Chapter of St. Matthew. Jesus is inspiring us, first, to take a soil sample of our hearts, to help determine how we receive and respond to him, to all that he teaches us, and to all that he seeks to do in our life. He is the Sower who goes out to sow. He ultimately sows himself like a “grain of wheat” (Jn 12:24): he sows his word, his grace, his body and blood, all he is and has he tries to implant within us and within the world. But the way we respond to those gifts varies.

* To understand what he says, we first need to grasp a little about ancient farming techniques (and how much farming has advanced in 2,000 years!). Sowers would scatter seed on long thin plots before any soil had been turned over. The seed would land on four different types of earth. The first is the hardened land between plots that would serve as the paths on which people would walk and make hard; no seed could penetrate those ancient sidewalks. The second would be the very thin “rocky” soil that would have thick layers of limestone a few inches underneath the surface. Here the seeds would take and quickly germinate because the water would be retained within the few inches of soil and when the temperature would quickly rise in the morning. Because the roots couldn’t penetrate the stone, however, the sprouts would not be able to last for long, quickly dehydrating and withering as the sun grew in intensity. The third terrain Jesus describes as “thorny” soil, which is basically good earth that could have borne a lot of fruit if it weren’t covered with thornbushes and weeds that would grow up exhausting the nutriets of the soil so that the good seed really couldn’t grow. And the last type was good soil that Jesus describes would bear much fruit.

* Just as a sower would scatter seed over all four types of earth, so Jesus scatters his word, his grace, his saving deeds over all four kinds of people represented by the respective soil samples. We see all four soil types among his first listeners.

* We saw in many of the scribes and Pharisees the hardened soil that totally resisted Jesus’ words and the testimony of his miracles, closing their ears and their hearts to his message and actually accusing him of working his indisputable miracles not by God’s power but by the devil. No matter what Jesus said, no matter how he said it, no matter how he backed it up by deeds, they weren’t going to listen and be converted. The evil one, as Jesus mentions in the Parable, would come to snatch the seed away before it could ever get planted.

* We see the rocky or superficial soil in the people for whom Jesus worked the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. They listened to Jesus for hours, they even followed him after the miracle along the entire upper lip of the Sea of Galilee, but most of them abandoned Jesus as soon as he asked them to believe something they found hard, his teaching on the Eucharist, that to have life we need to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood. They were willing to listen to Jesus’ words for a time, but when he asked them to do something that made them uncomfortable, their faith withered and died.

* We see the thorny soil in those who said that they would follow Jesus but first they wanted to bury their father,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Apollinaris

July 20, 2021

Ex 14:21-15:1, Ex 15, Mt 12:46-50

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.20.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* Jesus entered our world, we see in today’s Gospel, to found a family composed of those who do the will of his Father as Jesus does. Jesus’ words, his fundamental message upon coming into the world, were, as the Letter to the Hebrews reminds us, “Behold, I have come to do your will, O God” (Heb 10:7). When Mary and Jesus’ relatives (all referred to in the composite by “brothers”) had come to see Jesus, Jesus used their visit as an opportunity to speak about a far more important bond than blood. He wanted to speak his plan for us spiritually to be bound to him through doing the will of the Father.

* We know that that family comes into existence through the incredible miracle of baptism. We ponder just how great baptism is in today’s first reading. Our imaginations are pushed to the wondrous brink when we meditate on the Israelites’ walking through the Red Sea at the bottom of the sea bed with walls of water on the left and the right. But as great a miracle as that was, what God has done for us through the exodus of the waters of baptism is even greater, as he’s led us on a passover from alienation to God through original (and perhaps personal) sin to divine filiation. It’s not enough, however, for us to remain merely spiritual-ontological sons and daughters of God through baptism. Jesus wants us to become moral children as well, those whose identity is shown by how they obey the heavenly Father. That’s what the Gospel is about.

* To the one who told him that his mother and brothers were outside hoping to see him, Jesus said, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?’ Stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother.’” At a superficial level, it could seem as if Jesus were denigrating his mother and cousins, but rather, he was specifically praising his mother for the bond she had with him, just like he did when he responded to a woman who praised her womb for having borne him and her breasts for having nursed him. Mary’s whole life can be encapsulated by her words to God through the Archangel Gabriel, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” Mary is the exemplar of all of those who do the Father’s will, or as Jesus responded to the anonymous woman praising her for her physical relationship with him, “Blessed are they who hear the word of God and observe it.” As St. Athanasius once commented, before she had ever conceived the Word in her womb, she had conceived him in her heart, as a doer of God’s word and will. We don’t know much about Jesus’ relatives. We know that later they tried to seize him because they thought he was out of his mind, and so it’s possible that Jesus was trying to convert them to doing the Father’s will together with him and his mother. But Jesus was certainly trying to convert his listeners and us to what it takes to become his family members.

* Jesus says something startling in the Gospel that can help us, via Mary’s example, to do God’s will. We can somewhat understand how Jesus might call us his “brother and sister” through imitating him and entering into his filial obedience of the Father. But he also says that the one who does the will of his heavenly Father is “my mother” as well. To understand what this means, we need to go back to St. Ambrose.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

July 19, 2021

Ex 14:5-18, Ex 15, Mt 12:38-42

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.19.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today the Scribes and the Pharisees — those who as we saw a few days ago had begun to conspire to plot Jesus’ death, those who had said in the previous scene that he did exorcisms by the power of the devil — come up and hypocritically call him “Teacher” and ask him for a sign. A sign is a miracle that points to something else: in this case Jesus’ authority to preach and do what he was saying and doing. But we know that Jesus by this point had been working miracles practically non-stop: he had just cured a man with a withered hand and had expelled demons, he had cured everyone who had been brought to him, he had multiplied bread and fish to feed a multitude, he had healed lepers, made lame people walk and so much more as signs pointing to the fact that he was speaking and working with the authority of God. But the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t want to accept what those miracles signified. So they kept asking for other ones. Perhaps they were waiting until a supposed miracle attempt failed so that they would be able to feel justified in their rejection of Jesus. What they failed to grasp, however, was that Jesus himself was the sign of God; he was the one pointing to God’s presence because he was the sign and signified all at the same time. Jesus cut to the core of why they were asking for such a miracle, saying that an “evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign.” If they were of a good and faithful generation, they would have already taken seriously all of the miracles and words that Jesus had already done and grasped that he himself was the sign for which the Jews should have been looking. The reason why they failed to grasp the meaning of the sign of Jesus and all the other signs he was doing that pointed toward him was because they were obstinate in what we could call their “religious idolatry,” in their worship not of God but of the religion they had made around the God of Israel, all their man-made precepts and interpretations that were leading them to seek to break the fifth and eighth commandments to murder Jesus. No matter how many signs Jesus worked, no matter how many times he spoke with authority, no matter how many times called them to conversion, they refused to budge.

* Obstinacy is perverse adherence to an idea despite all arguments and signs to the contrary and we see one of the most infamous examples of obstinacy in today’s first reading — with which the Scribes and Pharisees were super familiar and from which they should have learned. Pharaoh and the Egyptians were so obstinate in their treating the Jews as their slaves that, despite Pharaoh’s finally giving the Israelites permission to leave to go to worship God in the desert, when the Egyptians saw them leaving, they gave up mourning their first born sons, and came in pursuit. None of the plagues God had worked convinced them to change course. And when God opened the Red Sea to allow the Israelites to pass through on dry ground, not even that miracle could convince the Egyptians that God was giving a clear sign that he was on their side and was helping them to flee. “So obstinate had the Lord made Pharaoh that he pursued the children of Israel even while they were marching away in triumph” and they were so obstinate that they foolishly pursued the Israelites into the Red Sea, where, as we will see tomorrow, they all perished. Nothing could persuade them to stop, review their behavior, and possibly change course.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Church of St. Mary, Mother of God, Washington DC

Nuptial Mass for Jon Elordi and Mairead McArdle

Extraordinary Form

July 17, 2021

Eph 5:22-33, Mt 19:3-6

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.17.21_Homily_Elordi_McArdle_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

When I asked Jon and Mairead, early in marriage preparation, how they understood the meaning of marriage, Mairead gave a beautiful description that illustrates both her deep knowledge of the faith and her journalistic skill to make profound realities intelligible with an economy of words. “Marriage,” she said, “means a lifelong, exclusive commitment, a permanent sacramental bond that makes a husband and wife one flesh. It comes with the responsibility to be open to children and care for all aspects of their well-being. It also means constant forgiveness.” When I asked Jon the same question, he surprised me by quoting G.K. Chesterton’s novel Manalive, which was an introduction not only to Jon’s faith but also to his experience in standup and improv comedy. “Marriage,” said, “is a duel to the death than no man of honor should decline.”

Today we are all so happy to be present at the beginning of that happy duel, as Jon and Mairead make a commitment not to fight each other but become tag-team partners in the good fight of faith, as they seek to run the race, keep the faith and help each other earn the imperishable crown of righteousness that awaits all those who long for God (2 Tim 4:7-8). As Jon went on to say after borrowing from Chesterton, “Marriage, in essence, is a team sport to glorify God, a partnership to help spouses reach heaven and to raise children so that they may too get to heaven.” Today we are all here, together with the great cloud of witnesses of angels and the saints (Heb 12:1), to cheer you on to eternal victory and to help you however we can, beginning with our prayers.

The holy duel of faithful, fruitful and indissoluble love that begins today has a long prehistory, one that goes back beyond Jon’s proposal to Mairead last December 20 inside the Church of the Holy Trinity in Poughkeepsie, New York.  It goes back well before they met via CatholicMatch.com and began dating in July 2019. It goes back even further than when their parents, José and Mary, Thomas and Heidi, got the joy-filled news to expect them 30 and 28 years ago and brought them to the waters of baptism. The prehistory to their wedding extends back to even before God said “Let there be light.” And to understand the significance and beauty of this day, we need to see where it fits into God’s plan for them and for the world.

When Jesus, in the Gospel we just heard, was asked about the nature of marriage, he took it back to the “beginning,” when God made them “made them male and female.” In the Book of Genesis, when God created Adam, Adam had God all to himself in the garden. All of creation had been made for him to govern. He was perfectly in right relationship with God. Even though he seemed to have everything one could ask for, something — more specifically, someone — was missing. And after God had said in the first six phases of creation, “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” and with the creation of the human person, “It was very good,” God finally thundered, “It is not good…for man to be alone.” So he created Eve, a fitting partner, symbolically out of his side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before him. When Adam saw her, he exclaimed, “Finally this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!,” a Hebrew idiom saying that they shared strengths and weaknesses. As Jesus reiterates in today’s Gospel,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

July 17, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.17.21_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, when he’s going to say to us, as he said to his first apostles, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.” After the hard work of the apostles’ missionary journeys, Jesus could see they were tired. Moreover, as Saint Mark tells us, “People were coming and going in great numbers that they did not have an opportunity even to eat.” So Jesus had them go off with him in a boat to a deserted place.

* We know that the rhythm of human life involves not just work, but rest, just as God in the Genesis account rested on the seventh day. Such rest is essential not just to recharge but to focus with God on the meaning of what we’ve done and are doing, on the gift of our life and how we are going to invest it. Jesus took the apostles away not just to give the apostles a break but to review with them all that they had experienced on their apostolic journeys.

* In a similar way, Jesus regularly seeks, in different ways, to draw us away from the daily hustle and bustle, television and gadget screens, so that he might similarly refresh us, helping us to review with the grace of his light what we have been experiencing in the various aspects of our life. It’s an opportunity for him to help us press the reset button on our life, to strengthen us in whatever struggles we face, to move us to thank God the Father for his blessings, to help us to see things more clearly, and to reprioritize according to what’s more important.

* This is what is he seeks to do, first, each day in daily prayer. He wants us to come away with him to the state of the desert, without distractions, to converse with him. How do we do with regard to that daily invitation? Do we prioritize or resist it?

* He also seeks to do this on the Christian Sabbath, on Sundays, in which, out of love, he even makes the invitation a command. When the Lord gave the Third Commandment, he told us the reason why, something that at first might seem a non-sequitur: “Remember that you were once slaves in the land of Egypt. … This is why the Lord, your God, has commanded you to observe the Sabbath day” (Deut 5:15). If we’re not keeping the Sabbath, in other words, we are becoming slaves again: slaves to work or what work can help us obtain, slaves to the errands we try to get done on the weekends, slaves to entertainment, to sports, or other activities. Jesus wants us to come away with him on Sundays so that he can renew us and help us properly put God at the center of our week, our time, our life. He wants us, filled with his love, to use the Sabbath to love God back and love those he has made our neighbors, most especially family members and friends. If we desire to remain spiritually fit and serene on the pilgrimage of life, how important it is for us to truly live Sunday as a Day of the Lord!

* But the Church has often used these words of Jesus — “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while” — to highlight the importance of taking extended time away with the Lord for him to refresh us, particularly with monthly Days of Recollection and annual Retreats.

* A Day of Recollection is at least a period of a few hours — but depending upon our circumstances and availability can exte...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY

Thursday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Bonaventure, Bishop and Doctor

July 15, 2021

Ex 3:13-20, Ps 105, Mt 11:28-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.15.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday we focused on how God reveals himself and seeks to enter into a personal relationship with us but in order for that to occur we must have a childlike receptivity through entering into Jesus’ own filiation. Today in the readings, Jesus deepens the understanding we need to have of those realities and shows us ever more the means. He gives us three powerful verbs to characterize the means by which he seeks to incorporate us into his own childlike sonship.

* The first is “come”: “Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened.” The way we are going to be able to learn how to grow more deeply in spiritual childhood is precisely through our labors and burdens, through our hardships and sacrifices. These experiences make us run to God the Father like a young child hearing powerful thunder for the first time runs to earthly parents. Jesus gives us this invitation to enter as children more and more deeply into God’s revelation precisely through all that we’re going through, through all the various obstacles and challenges. He says if we do, he will give us “rest,” he will “refresh” us. The word translated “refresh” (or poorly translated as “give us rest,” which we are tempted to misinterpret as inactivity) actually means “remake.” Jesus wants to give us a fresh start, a new beginning, to bring us back to our spiritual infancy. In Psalm 23, we pray in anticipation of this remaking, “The Lord is my Shepherd. There is nothing I lack. In green pastures you lead me to grace and besides restful waters you refresh [remake] me.” He thoroughly remakes us in his image in baptism and that life is meant to continue. And he does that not by removing us from work and difficulties but precisely through our labors and hardships. We see this in what he does with the Israelites in the first reading. They are laboring under the burdens of Pharaoh and God comes to their aid. He seeks to remake them as a people, to remind them of their childhood though Abraham, Isaac and Jacob so that they might recognize their divine filiation, and he leads them to the waters of the Red Sea that prefigure baptism.

* The second action Jesus commands is to “take” or “assume.” Jesus tells us “Take my yoke upon you.”  Jesus doesn’t tell us to bend down and let him put the yoke on us. He wants us to seize it. He wants us to want it. What’s that yoke? We know that a yoke is a harness — Jesus doubtless used the make them as a carpenter in Joseph’s shop in Nazareth —  to unite two animals so that they might work in tandem. Jesus wants us to take up “his” yoke and his yoke is the patibulum of the Cross. Later he’ll say that his yoke is “easy,” which means that it is “easy-fitting,” it’s tailor-made, for us, to unite us to him, like the Cross on Calvary was the shoe that fit perfectly Simon of Cyrene’s feet. In the first reading, God revealed himself to Moses as “I Am Who Am,” and Jesus is the incarnation of the great “I Am.” But he revealed him most precisely in his passion and he wants us to pick up our Cross every day so we might be yoked to him with the yoke of the Cross from the inside out.  In St. John’s Gospel, Jesus mentions that he is I AM on several occasions linked to his Passion. He says, “When you lift up the Son of Man [obviously on the Cross!], then you will realize that I AM” (Jn 8:28), saying that “if you do not believe that I AM,