Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

July 31, 2021

Lev 25:1.8-17, Ps 67, Mt 14:1-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.31.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Over the course of the last ten days we have pondered, through the use of Jesus’ seven different parables, what the Kingdom of God is and how we enter it. He taught us about good soil and the three types of insufficient soil: stubborn, superficial and dissipated by pleasure or fear. He taught us that the Kingdom comes into contact with both wheat and weeds, that the dragnet of the Church encompasses both “good” and “bad” fish. We saw these parables played out yesterday in Nazareth, where the stubbornness and superficiality of Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes against both seed and Sower in the synagogue is contrasted with the faith of Mary and Joseph. We see it play out again today in the forest of thorns in the flesh of Herod and the receptivity of St. John the Baptist, who had made God his treasure and pearl. It’s important for us to see the huge contrast between the slavery that bound Herod even though he was externally a free king with the power to determine life and death and the freedom of John the Baptist, even though he was arrested, bound, imprisoned and eventually martyred. And it’s important for us to see the contrast of Herod’s actions and those of God as seen in the practice of the Jubilee in today’s first reading and in Jesus’ words in the Nazarene Synagogue.

* King Herod was so enslaved by lust and ego. We see this in his not only cavorting with but stealing and marrying the wife of his half-brother Philip. The book of Leviticus had said clearly, “You shall not have intercourse with your brother’s wife, for that would be a disgrace to your brother” (Lev 18:16). Herod had gone to Rome to visit his brother and while there seduced his sister-in-law, persuaded her to leave his brother, divorced his own wife and married her. To make the incestuous matters worse, Herodias was Philip’s and Herod’s niece as well. For all these reasons it was not right, as John the Baptist said, for Herod to have Herodias as his wife. His lust led to the eclipse of his conscience. With a string of violent verbs, the evangelist tells us that Herod had John arrested, bound, and imprisoned. He wanted to kill him, St. Matthew tells us, but he feared the people. He was eaten alive by fear. Eventually Herod would kill John when his vindictive putative bride pimped her princess daughter to do a striptease before her step-father/uncle and all his drunken courtiers to seduce him into vowing to give her anything she wanted. And when she asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, Herod gave the command. And to the Aramaic tune of Happy Birthday to You, the soldiers brought in, instead of birthday cake, the Baptist’s severed head and presented it to this lustful, power-hungry, self-important little assassin. But while that day was a tragedy for Herod and all those participating in his Satanic liturgy where lust ruled instead of sacrificial love, where immoral oaths dominated over the truth, it was a triumph for John the Baptist: in essence, his spiritual birthday in which he was born into eternity and we believe leaped for joy again. John the Baptist was free to say the truth because he was free ultimately of the fear of death. When Herod hears of Jesus, eaten alive by fear, he thought he was John the Baptist, saying, “He has been raised from the dead,” the very words the angels will use at the tomb about Jesus’ resurrection.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Blessed Solanus Casey, OFM Cap.

July 30, 2021

Lev 23:1.4-11.15-16.27.34-37, Ps 81, Mt 13:54-58

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.30.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Over the past eight days, Jesus has been illustrating the truth of the Kingdom of God and how to enter it through seven parables of the Sower and the Seed, the Weeds and Wheat, The Mustard Seed, the Leaven, The Buried Treasure, the Pearl of Great Price and the Dragnet. Collectively they were meant to show us how to receive and respond to God’s work in our life: that we should receive his action on good and fruitful soil, seize the incredible privilege given to us like we would a pearl of great price or a treasure buried in a field, watch it grow like a mustard seed, and recognize that our choice has great consequences: that in the Church there will be both wheat and weeds, good (beautiful) fish and bad (rotten) fish, depending upon how we respond to God’s work. Today in the scene from Jesus hometown of Nazareth we see these lessons illustrated.

* When Jesus stands up to read from the prophet Isaiah and give a homily in the Nazarene Synagogue on the Sabbath, the people seem to receive what he says on rocky soil but it really is hardened soil by the wayside. They are astonished, not so much by his words, but by who was saying them.  “Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary? Where did this man get all this?” They were totally hardened to the possibility that someone they had basically grown up around could be the Messiah, as Jesus’ words, remembered for us by St. Luke, attest. And that’s what led to their taking offense at him and eventually seeking to kill him by tossing off of the precipice on which the upper city of Nazareth had been built.

* But in Nazareth, we also find good soil. We find it in the Blessed Virgin Mary, the soil of whose receptive response not just produced fruit, but the Blessed Fruit who is the Word of God made flesh. She was one whom, as soon as she was aware of what God was asking through the Angel Gabriel, replied, “Let it be done to me according to thy word,” the sincere paradigmatic refrain of everyone with truly good soil. We find good soil also in St. Joseph, who, as soon as the Angel told him in not to be afraid to take Mary, his wife, into his home after she had become pregnant by means other than through him, did as the angel of the Lord had commanded. Mary and Joseph show us what good soil looks like, how the wheat grows up in the midst of weeds and how in God’s net are found both “good” and “evil”, how what starts small can save the world, how one or two fiats can lift up the world, and how to consider everything else as loss compared with the joy of choosing God as the treasure and pearl of great price.

* It’s worth noting that Jesus sought to do his work among his fellow Nazarenes in the synagogue on the Sabbath, in the midst of their worship. That’s where Jesus seeks to do so much of his saving work, sowing his seed and hoping to transform those who receive him on good soil, that he can sow them in the world as mustard seeds or place them as leaven who have chosen God as the treasure he is. God seeks to transform us through worship to be able to complete his work in the world. We see that in all of the liturgical feasts he prescribes for the Jews in the first reading. He gives them a list of celebrations, but what’s striking is the rhythm of “work” and “rest” he prescribes and how God seeks to incorpo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York

Thursday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of SS. Martha, Mary and Lazarus

July 29, 2021

Ex 40:16-21.34-38, Ps 84, Lk 10:38-42

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.29.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Joy at the new feast of SS. Martha, Mary and Lazarus, inscribed in the General Roman Calendar by Pope Francis this January 26, 2021.

* We had previously celebrated just Martha on this day, because of the conflation and confusion since the time of Pope St. Gregory of the Great of Mary of Bethany with Mary Magdalene and the anonymous sinful woman who washed Jesus’ feet in the home of Simon the Pharisee (Lk 7). We never celebrated St. Lazarus with a feast. Today we have a chance to celebrate all three.

* But not just to celebrate them. In the Collect (Opening Prayer) that the US Bishops have given for this Memorial, taken from the Common of Saints (4), we pray that God “we, who celebrate the memory of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus, may also imitate without ceasing their deeds.” This is the means by which God will “spur us on to a better life.” So today it is fitting to focus on the deeds of Saints Martha, Mary and Lazarus so as to imitate them non-step.

* We know well the deeds of Martha. She loved the Lord and worked for him. Cleaning. Preparing the Meals. Writing Him. Running Out to See Him after Lazarus’ death. Jesus in today’s Gospel cautions her about doing these deeds of love “worried and anxious” but she did them all the same. In a similar way, we need to work to be hospitable to the Lord and to all he sends. We must do the work he gives us and seek to please him.

* We likewise know well the deeds of Mary. She recognized Jesus had come to their home to feed and not be fed and she sat as his feet as a gourmand to his gourmet. She knew he was the one thing necessary and the better part and chose him. We’re called to imitate that deed of receiving all God wants to give, in our prayer and throughout our life. We also see, as we ponder every Holy Tuesday, that she spent 300 days aromatic nard anointing him out of love for his death and resurrection. We are called ceaselessly to hold nothing back with regard to Jesus, not just to give him something, but to try to give him all we are and have, with love.

* The deeds of Lazarus are inconspicuous but very important. Like St. Joseph, he was not a garrulous man, with no words recorded. All we know about him is that he was raised by Jesus from the dead on the fourth day and thereafter was a marked man, with the same people who were plotting to kill Jesus seeking to kill him. But thereafter, resuscitated, he became a living sign of Jesus’ power over death. To imitate ceaselessly his deeds is to become a living sign of the resurrection, with its joy, its courage, its prophetic hope of eternal life with Jesus.

* As we celebrate their feast and seek ceaseless to imitate their deeds, we do so not just individually but together as they welcomed Jesus into their home, into their lives, and sought to live in friendship with him in their individual work and witness. Today in the first reading we have an image of what they sought to do in Bethany in the description of the Dwelling, which as the place of God’s presence, served as a proto-tabernacle. When the Cloud (the Shekinah) came down upon the dwelling, they stayed with the Lord; when the Cloud left, they followed the Lord. It’s a sign of how we’re supposed to pray with Jesus, like Mary at his feet,

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: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.28.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

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.