Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Anthony of Padua Parish, New Bedford, MA

Day of Recollection for Men

“Saint Joseph and the Call to Manly Holiness”

October 30, 2021

 

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Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

October 30, 2021

 

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 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, as we participate in the dialogue between the Lord Jesus and a scribe — basically a Scripture professor with a specialty in Mosaic law — about the “first of all the commandments.”

* Jesus’ answer is well-known to us. Quoting the Book of Deuteronomy, perhaps the most famous passage of the Hebrew Bible, he replied, “Hear, O Israel, the Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength” (see Deut 6:4-5) Then he volunteered what he thought was the second of all 613 commandments the Scribes had enumerated in what we now call the Old Testament: “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” taken from the Book of Leviticus (19:18) and concluded by saying, “There is no other commandment greater than these.” Upon hearing Jesus’ answer, the Scribe exclaimed, “Well said, teacher!,” and expressed his agreement that loving God and neighbor is “worth more than all burnt offerings and sacrifices,” worth more, in other words, than all of the other worship giving to God in the temple. The worship that is most important, the priority we should have in our relationship with God, is to love God with everything we have and to love our neighbor. Jesus concludes the conversation by saying to the scribe, somewhat curiously, “You are notfarfrom the kingdom of God.” Through his understanding, in other words, he was closeto the kingdom but not yet in it. Why? In St. Luke’s Gospel, after a similar conversation with another scholar of the law who had asked, not, “Which is the first of all the commandments?,” but “What must I do to inherit eternal life?,” after the answer to love God with all we’ve got and to love our neighbor as ourselves, said, “Dothis and you will live.” The upshot is that to enter the kingdom, we must do more than knowwhat we need to do, but actually dowhat we know we need to do.

* And so we need to ask ourselves? Do I really love God? To love God is more than to acknowledge his existence. It means more than to fulfill certain duties to him owe out of justice. It means to be willing to sacrifice for him, willingly, the way we sacrifice readily for anyone we love, like a man in love sacrifices for the woman he wants to be his wife or a mother sacrifices for a beloved child. It means to care about what God cares about. It means to seek to please him as much as we can. Many of us can think our relationship with God is fine if, basically, we love the Lord with “most of our heart,” with “some of our mind,” with a “little of our strength,” and with the “majority of our soul.” As long as we’re not committing mortal sins, we tell ourselves, as long as we’re not betraying God, or angry at him, or despising him, or doing anything evil against him, then things are basically fine in our relationship. Or we can think that we love the Lord simply because we have good thoughts about him, admire him, think that he’s kind, merciful and generous. But Jesus is calling for much more than this. Love is more than having good feelings or impressions about another; love is the unconquerable benevolence that leads to willing, to choosing consistently,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Anthony of Padua Parish, New Bedford, MA

Saturday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Day of Recollection for Men on “Saint Joseph and the Call to Manly Holiness”

October 30, 2021

Rom 11:1-2.11-12.25-29, Ps 84, Lk 14:1.7-11

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today as we host here at St. Anthony’s a Day of Recollection for Men dedicated to the theme of Saint Joseph and the Call to Manly Holiness, Jesus, in the Gospel, speaks to us of one of the virtues in which St. Joseph excelled: the virtue of humility. The path of manly holiness on which St. Joseph seeks to lead us, the path of eternal exaltation, is a path of humility. By means of a parable on seats at a dinner gathering, Jesus teaches us about the humility necessary for us to come to the eternal banquet. The parable flat contradicts the way many in the world, including sometimes many of us Christians, behave. We see it in the ever-growing number of award shows indulging the egos of those in film, television and music, all giving out awards for best actors, actresses, directors, producers, graphic artists, costume designers, film editors, hairstylists, production designer, sound mixers, screen play writers, you name it. We see it in the honors we give to the students who are  “Most Popular” “Most Friendly, and “Most Likely to Succeed,” to the “Best Looking” women in pageants, to the “Most Successful” sales representatives, to the “Most Valuable Player” not just of the year but of the week, and even to the “best groomed” dogs. So many of us have been raised with a burning desire to be the best, and even more so to be acknowledged as the best. And if we recognize begrudgingly that we’re not the best, we at least want to be better than those with whom we come into contact or are in competition. We want to get our own way, rather than conceding to the wishes of another. We want everyone to acknowledge our rights and their responsibilities. We want to get the last word, rather than concede it to someone else. We want to be the ones noticed and thanked, and resent it if others get the credit we think we deserve. In short, we hunger to be noticed, esteemed, and exalted. We want the places of honor at table, first class seats on airplanes and front row seats and back stage passes at concerts. We want waiters and butlers to serve us, chauffeurs to drive us, and the rich, famous and important to call us. We long for positions of power and influence and titles of status and worldly honor. This is particularly a problem for men in our uber competitiveness. St. Joseph is a remedy. As we’ll have a chance to ponder a lot today, he was a quiet man of action, who humbly cared for Mary and Joseph, content to remain in the background, to allow them to shine and remain in their shadow.

* Today, however, Jesus calls us to that standard of Saint Joseph, a higher standard that is at the same time, paradoxically, a lower one. He tell us, “Everyone who exalts himself will be humbled, but the one who humbles himself will be exalted.” Jesus, who elsewhere in the Gospel told us, “Learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29) and whose whole life was a lesson in humility, wants to help us learn from him how to serve rather than to be served, to seek the lowest place rather than the highest, to treasure God’s esteem rather than others’ adulation so that God may say to us, in this world and the next, like he said to St. Joseph, “My friend, come up higher!” The way to be exalted at Jesus’ right side forever is humbly to serve at Jesus’ side here on earth, and to follow him not just in seeking the lowest pla...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

October 29, 2021

Rom 9:1-5, Ps 147, Lk 14:1-6

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we have a shift in St. Paul’s letter to the Romans which we have been praying for almost three weeks. We turn to the second part of this epistle. In the first 8 chapters, we’ve pondered what it means to be justified before God and how the Holy Spirit seeks to bring that about. Chapters 9-11 are about God’s plan for the justification of the Jews, particularly those who — unlike Mary, Mary Magdalene, the disciples and apostles — have rejected Jesus as Messiah, but unfortunately the Church gives us only two days to ponder these three important chapters! St. Paul describes his suffering for the Jews: “I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie; my conscience joins with the Holy Spirit in bearing me witness that I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.” Just like Christ died for us, St. Paul loved his fellow Jews so much that he was willing even to be cut off from Christ that the Jews come to salvation. His heart was filled with anguish and sorrow because of their state, even though some of them were seeking to kill him as others had plotted — with all sinners of all time — to kill Christ. He loved them with the heart of Christ. He pondered all that God had given them: descendancy from Jacob, adoption as God’s children, his holy shekinah or glory, the covenants (with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David), the law, the worship at the Temple written out by him in Leviticus, the promises, the patriarchs and the genealogy of the Messiah. But his heart was filled with anguish because despite all that preparation, they had not embraced the fulfillment in Christ, in whom their is filiation, glory, the new and eternal covenant, the Legislator, true worship and the down payment on all God’s promises and all the hopes God had given the Jews. This anguish is what led him to become all things to all people, including to his fellow Jews, so that each might come to Christ. Later in these three chapters he will describe God’s plans for the salvation of the Jews, and it’s fundamentally, through seeing God’s goodness working among the Gentiles, they might come to embrace it and all will be saved. But Paul, and God, wishes all of us have a similar anguish of heart for the salvation of others, the anguish that beat in Paul’s heart and in Christ’s Sacred Heart.

* We see a similar anguish in Jesus in the Gospel and it led Jesus to urgent action. Someone with dropsy — an edema, or swelling caused by fluid retention — was there as a plant, to test whether Jesus would cure him on the Sabbath. We see that there was something going on in how the man was placed before Jesus at the meal and St. Luke tells us that Jesus said to the hosts “in reply” to this man’s being in front of him. Jesus took the bait and didn’t hesitate to teach about the importance of every person and the urgency that we should have to love him or her. After asking whether it was lawful to cure on the Sabbath or not — whether it was possible to do good deeds on the Lord’s day! — he healed the man. The principle Jesus gave was no one would ever allow one of their children or even animals who fell into a cistern to remain in there on the Sabbath but would work on the Sabbath to rescue him. Jesus, with merciful affection, wouldn’t allow this man one more day to remain with dropsy.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Feast of SS. Simon and Jude, Apostles

October 28, 2021

Eph 2:19-22, Ps 19, Lk 6:12-16

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* St. Paul in today’s first reading tells the Ephesians and us that our Christian existence is “built upon the foundation of the Apostles.” The feast of the apostles SS. Simon and Jude gives us a chance to ponder several aspects of our Christian life and how to strengthen them by grounding them more firmly on the foundation of what the Lord has done and continues to do through these two apostles.

* The first thing we can examine is the theme of our calling. The apostles’ vocation, we see, was born from Christ’s prayer. Jesus had pulled an all-nighter praying to his Father about whom he should choose and praying for those he would choose. His prayer was not just a single invocation, but a persevering intercession. During the ordination rite of the Last Supper we would see how fervently Jesus would pray to the Father. “I pray for them,” he said aloud, “I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me because they are yours. … Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are. … I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. … Consecrate them in the truth. …  I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.” And then he prayed for the apostles’ work to be fruitful, for all “those who will believe in me through their word,” and prayed for their salvation, “I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that you gave me, … that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” Jesus’ ongoing prayer would take on a very specific form, as we would see in Jesus’ Holy Thursday dialogue with St. Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your [singular] own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers.” It’s important regularly for us to take the time to recall with gratitude and wonder that our vocation, likewise, has its beginning in Jesus’ prayer. Just as much as Jesus prayed all night and then called Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, Simon, Jude, and Judas Iscariot,” so he has prayed and called each of us. He has prayed for each of us, to keep us in the Father’s name, to unite us to God and to each other, to consecrate us in the truth of God’s word, in the truth of Jesus’ own consecration to the Father. Jesus has prayed for us that our faith may not fail and that we will strengthen the faith of each other and those we serve. Jesus continues to pray for us. He’s praying for us at this Mass. He’s praying for us when we have difficulties in our work. His persevering prayer for us is an example for us to persevere in prayer together with him during it as well.

* The second theme is our discipleship. When Jesus came down the mountain, St. Luke tells us, he chose the twelve from among the “disciples,” from among those who were already as the Greek word disciple means Jesus’ “students,” who were zealously following him, who were living by faith, who were hearing his words and seeking to put them into practice. Together with Jesus’ prayer, their faith was the crucial job qualification. Jesus didn’t raid the rabbinical schools for the greatest young Scriptural scholars of the day who could more easily preach and teach. He didn’t turn to the ascetical Pharisees whose whole life was dedicated to trying t...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

October 27, 2021

Rom 8:26-30, Ps 13, Lk 13:22-30

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily:

* “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” someone from the crowd asked Jesus today. He didn’t reply by satisfying the person’s curiosity, because he didn’t come from heaven to earth to answering the interrogatives of inquiring minds. He had come from heaven to earth to save us, and so he responded not by saying how many are saved by how any is saved. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” The word translated as “strive” is the Greek word to “agonize.” To be saved, to enter the Kingdom, to get to Heaven, in other words, we need to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in an NFL training camp to make the cut. The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through.

* Over the last several decades, people have gotten the notion that the Christian life is easy. Most people think, rather, that everyone gets to Heaven — except perhaps those who don’t like us, serial killers, public smokers and those people we don’t like. Such an attitude is a diabolical ambush. Jesus never taught that the Christian life is a cakewalk. He who is the Gate of the sheepfold tells us that we need to agonize to enter into him. Jesus said these words as he was on the road to Jerusalem, and we know what happened when he got to Jerusalem. He entered into his agony, the agony that led to our salvation and opened up the narrow door. But we need to be willing to follow him along that path of sacrificial love.

* Jesus says in the Gospel today that many will seek to enter through the narrow door but not make it. They will be left outside the door, pleading, “We ate and drank in Your presence and You taught in our streets,” and, as Jesus added in a similar passage in the Sermon on the Mount, exclaiming, ‘Did we not prophesy in Your name, and cast out demons in Your name, and do many miracles in Your name.” Jesus says that God will then reply, “I never knew you” (Lk 13:25-27; Mt 7:21-23). Jesus is emphasizing that it’s not enough to have heard Him speak. It’s not sufficient to have eaten and drunk with Him, even the Holy Eucharist. It’s not adequate to proclaim the Gospel in His name, do exorcisms or even work miracles. After all, Judas Iscariot did all of these things, but he never really knew Who Jesus was. We need to enter into intimate friendship and communion with Him. We need to follow Him not just on the outside, but on the inside. We need to become His true friend. We need to agonize to let go of everything in our life that’s not ordered to God, that’s not compatible with the life of faith. We need to squeeze humbly into Jesus and live in full-time loving friendship with him.

* If this were simply a thing of willpower, we would have reason to despair. But it’s not. St. Paul tells us that God responds to our weakness. He sends the Holy Spirit to teach us “how to pray as we ought.” The Holy Spirit helps us to pray not by putting words on our lips but by changing who we are as we pray, so that we might pray conscious that we are beloved sons and daughters of God crying out “Abba, Father.” He transforms us so that we can live as we pray and confidently follow Jesus along the narrow path, so that we will be confident that all our agony, all are sufferings will be worth it.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass of Mary, Mother of Divine Hope

October 26, 2021

Rom 8:18-25, Ps 126, Lk 13:18-21

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* The Kingdom of God is both now and not yet. Jesus says it’s already among us (because the king is with us) but something that we must also pray will come (because we, others and creation have not yet fully entered into it). Like a mustard seed, the kingdom is meant to grow. The kingdom is here, but it’s basically in embryonic form and is meant to grow to full stature. Like leaven, it has a power within to lift up every other reality.

* Once we understand this dynamic of the Kingdom we can more easily grasp what St. Paul is saying in the first reading. Yesterday, he affirmed that through baptism we have already “received a spirit of adoption,” but today he informs us that “we also groan within ourselves as we wait for adoption.” He describes the whole process as “groaning in labor pains,” and labor is an appropriate image. There’s a child waiting to be born; the child is the same before and after, but there is a massive change between the womb and the light. Likewise the mother remains a mother to the child, but there is a massive growth in that relationship after birth. All of this goes back to his question at the end of the seventh chapter, which we heard last Friday about who would save him from his mortal body in which he does not do the good he desires and doesn’t avoid the evil he seeks to evade. The answer is that God the Holy Spirit will do this and this is what the “redemption of the body” means: we groan within as we await the full flourishing of the spirit of adoption and full freedom of the children of God.

* This is why St. Paul says that “in hope we were saved,” which means we are saved as we hope — what Pope Benedict would call in Spe Salvi “living with Christ in the world” — and are saved through hope, meaning by faith in the fulfillment of Christ’s promises. In Spe Salvi Pope Benedict, basing himself on the Letter to the Hebrews, and echoing what St. Paul said today that hope is “for what we do not see,” said that faith/hope is the substance of things hoped for and the guarantee of things not seen: there’s already something present that is meant to grow. And because of that substance, that mustard seed of what will flourish later, the early Christians were willing to suffer the plundering of their property because they had a better possession: namely the treasure of the faith that they already had, even if unfulfilled. The suffering we endure is like those labor pains.

* Because the kingdom of God is a kingdom of hope, we are called to grow in hope as from a mustard seed to a bush and to allow our hope to be leaven for the whole world. In Spe Salvi, Pope Benedict mentioned four settings to grow in hope. The first is prayer, in which, “living with Christ in the world,” we turn to the Father by the power of the Holy Spirit, asking for things we and others need conscious of how often the Lord has heard our prayers and the prayers of his people over the centuries, for which we praise him in Psalm 136 and so many other places. The second setting is action, in which we work “with Christ in the world,” and seek to build his kingdom. The third setting is suffering, which helps us learn how to depend on and hope in God more, whether it’s we who are suffering or those we love. The final setting is judgment, which is not meant to fill us with dread but with “ble...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

October 25, 2021

Rom 8:12-17, Ps 16, Lk 13:10-17

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* To understand the contrast between Jesus and the leader of the synagogue with regard to the crippled woman in the Gospel, it is worthwhile to grasp the categories given to us by St. Paul in the first reading. And to do that, it’s important to understand it in context with what has come before in the first two weeks of this biennial month-long gift of the Letter to the Romans at daily Mass. We have already seen the distinction between those who view justification by grace received in faith working through love from those who depend fundamentally on their own works. On Saturday, we had the beginning of Chapter 8 of the Letter to the Romans, which is the fulcrum not only of this letter but in my opinion of the Christian life, the distinction between life according to the flesh and life according to the Holy Spirit. That’s advancing the same distinction we have had in previous chapters, between living according to ourselves in our fallenness or living by God and the power of his life. Today St. Paul advances that distinction, saying there is a difference between a spirit of slavery and one of adoption, between fear of God and filiation. The chief of the synagogue in the Gospel, like many of the scribes and Pharisees, basically approached the covenant as a bunch of laws rather than a relationship with a Legislator. They scrupulously wanted to keep to the letter of every prescription, but in doing so they missed the weightier aspects and put the focus on themselves rather than on God and others. Even though they knew that they couldn’t take the Sabbath off from caring for their animals, they failed to exercise similar charity toward a sick woman, criticizing Jesus for caring for her on the Lord’s day. They so lacked a spirit of filiation that they failed to see in her a sister rather than a stranger, as someone far more valuable than all the oxen and donkeys in the world. They also failed to grasp the mind and heart of the Legislator, who happens to be God the Father, failing to see that he would never want us to give up acts of charity in order to honor him. Such acts of love are not only permitted on the Sabbath, but they are particularly made for the Sabbath.

* The sabbath was made for the human person precisely to free us from the spirit of slavery. Four times God told the Jews through Moses that he had given the commandment to keep holy the Lord’s day because they “were once slaves in Egypt” (Deut 5:15, 15:15, 24:18, 24:22). It’s meant to help us to live in right relationship with God and others, to be freed from being owned by our work or what work can lead to. This is why Jesus that curing the woman on the sabbath was not only possible but “fitting,” since the Sabbath is a day of liberation! But the synagogue chief and many others failed to grasp this. And out of fear of the Lord who gave them the Sabbath, they neglected love of neighbor. Jesus came to liberate us from this slavery and help us live as sons in the Son. He came to do for us something even greater than what was done for the woman in the Gospel, curing us of our infirmities and helping us to stand erect before God and glorify him, lifting up our hearts, seeking with the power of the Holy Spirit the things that are above.

* The mind-blowing beauty of this path of divine filiation is given to us at the end of today’s first reading when we realize — consistent with the adoption policies in ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx

30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

October 24, 2021

Jer 31:7-9, Ps 126, Heb 5:1-6, Mk 10:46-52

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.24.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* What do you want me to do for you?” Which one of us would not want the Lord to ask us the question he asks Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel? Bartimaeus’ response is one that has become a common aspiration of Christians through the centuries: “Lord, I want to see!” The early saints saw in this expression more than a cry from a physically blind man. They have seen in it the plea of all those in every generation who have been in any type of darkness. “Lord, I want to see!” See what? We learn from Bartimaeus the purpose of our sight. The Gospel tells us, “Having regained his sight, he followed Jesus on the way.” Just like St. Peter’s mother-in-law, as soon as she had been cured of a severe fever, used her health to serve others (Mk 1:30-31), so Bartimaeus, now that he could see, used the gift of his sight to follow the divine Giver, the Light of the World (Jn 8:2). Our eyes — both our physical eyes and the eyes of our heart — are gifts of God so that we might see Jesus and follow him. Our whole nature has been created by God so that we might say, like those Greeks in the Gospel who had not yet met the Lord but presented themselves to Philip: “We want to see Jesus!” (Jn 12:21).

* We want to see Jesus in prayer. We want to see Jesus in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We want to see Jesus in others, in the faces of those we love, in the faces of those we find difficult to love or like. We want to see Jesus behind the distressing disguises of the poor, the sick, the lonely, the homeless, the abandoned, the blind. We want to behold Christ’s face in the beauties of creation. We want to see him behind each of the commandments, teaching us how to love. We want the eyes to see his will in our daily life, in the present and for the future. Ultimately we want to see him forever face-to-face in heaven, smiling on us with love. But so often we’re blinded. Sin blinds us. Worries blind us. Pain and suffering blind us. Hatred and prejudices blind us. Others, including those we love, can sometimes get in the way and remove our line of sight. Today, the Lord comes to us and asks us, as he asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” As we enter into the scene, we behold not only how Jesus interacted with this particular beggar who was blind, but how he intervenes in each of our vocations and how he seeks to transform us to minister to others. Let’s ponder the various elements of this rich scene together.

* “As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd” — Jericho is the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location. Jesus was passing through the depths of the human experience in order to ascend the 15-mile road up hill that leads to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift us up. There’s no abyss into which Jesus wouldn’t descend for us.

* “Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the road side begging” — Bartimaeus was not born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he uses later — anablepo —asking Jesus in the Greek to “see again.” He hadn’t just lost his sight, however. To some degree, he had lost the dignity he would have had. He was sitting by the roadside begging. He could not rely on himself anymore. He needed help. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

22nd Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form

October 24, 2021

Phil 1:6-11, Mt 22:15-21

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* There are several examples in the Gospel of people who approached Jesus not in order to meet him with faith, not in order to question him sincerely to investigate whether he might in fact be the long-awaited one, but they came in bad faith trying to undermine Jesus and worse. We remember some of the scenes and questions. “Is it lawful for a man to divorce his wife for any reason?” “This woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Should we stone her to death?” “This woman was married successively to seven brothers who died. When she dies, whose wife will she be?” “Under what authority have you cleansed the Temple?” “Which of the 613 commandments in the law is the most important?” “Who is my neighbor?” “Are you the king of the Jews?” They sometimes used to bring disabled people into his presence to see if he would heal on the Sabbath as well. But the most famous episode of this disingenuous dialogue occurs in today’s Gospel, when two groups that were archenemies conspire to entrap Jesus. The Herodians and the Pharisees were both trying to get Jesus out of the way, because both felt threatened by him. They decided to ask him a question about which they themselves were constantly in disagreement — whether it was lawful to pay taxes to or support in any way the Roman empire. The Herodians were laxist sycophants, and, regardless of how they personally felt about a foreign power’s ruling over them, decided that if you couldn’t beat the Romans, you should join them. Herod and his partisans cooperated with the Romans in almost everything, including taxes. The Pharisees, like most of the Jewish people, deeply resented being dominated by a pagan power, and found utterly repulsive the thought of giving a tribute to a foreign ruler who fancied himself a god; to use his currency in which he was depicted as a god was, for them, tantamount to idolatry. Despite their disagreement, however, both groups thought that their long-standing disagreement was a perfect catch-22 by which to nail the carpenter from Nazareth.

* So they approached Jesus and manifested their mendacity and hypocrisy by a barrage of empty flattery that we Christians know was nevertheless true: “Teacher, we know that you are a truthful man, teach the way of God in accordance to the truth, show deference to no one, and don’t play favorites.” Then came the thorny, highly relevant, problematic, controversial, and indeed malicious question: “Is it lawful to the census tax to Caesar or not?” It was the perfect query, they thought, because no matter how Jesus answered it, they had him. If he failed to respond, he would lose authority by ducking one of the most relevant political questions of the day. If he said “yes,” he would forfeit the affection of the masses, who hated the Romans, hated the emperor, and particularly hated being forced to give him any recognition at all. If he said “no,” then they could turn him over to Pontius Pilate for sedition and inciting lawlessness among the people. But Jesus would not be trapped, and would bring good out of their evil. In answer to their hypocrisy, he pointed the path to true human integrity. In response to their deceitfulness, Jesus gave us a truth on which to structure our lives, one that is as relevant today as it ever was.

* After he had asked to see the denarius stamped with the Emperor’s profile used for the tax and they had brought him one — showing that all of them used the money when it served their purpo...