Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life

Friday of the 22nd Week of Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Pope St. Gregory the Great

September 3, 2021

Col 1:15-20, Ps 100, Lk 4:33-39

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Four times a year at daily Mass — on the 2nd Monday of Ordinary Time, on the Friday after Ash Wednesday, on the 13th Saturday, and on the 22nd Friday — the Church has us focus on Jesus’ words about feasting and fasting and the parables of the patch and of the wineskins. It is one of the most common themes we have, because it’s central to our life as believers. Jesus, in them, teaches us about how he wishes us to relate to him. He has come to give us new life but the new life is not a minor revision to our “operating system,” to eliminate some “bugs” in the software; rather it’s a thorough revamp. At the time of Jesus there were three purposes for fasting: reparation for one’s sins and those of others; supplication, or prayer in the body, for some petition; and the desire for authentic self-mastery through the capacity to say “no” to one’s appetite for food and “yes” to some other purpose, developing a moral muscle that can help to say no to other temptations in order faithfully to say yes to God. These purposes flowing from Old Testament times were not bad or immoral. But Jesus today gives thoroughly new purpose. He says the purpose of fasting is to help us hunger for him in his absence. When he is “ripped away” — the same verb that is used for his arrest in Gethsemane — it is then that we fast. With regard to fasting, we need to do more than just copy what they did in previous times. We need more than a minor correction or  “patch.” We need a new heart. We need a new longing. We need a new hunger.

* But Jesus teaches us in this passage about the characteristic attitude we should have toward his presence. We similarly need a revolution in our feasting. He says that the “friends of the bridal chamber,” which is what is poorly translated as “wedding guests,” cannot fast when the Bridegroom is with us. Because Jesus the Bridegroom is with us, pouring himself into our life, we must like groomsmen and bridesmaids on a wedding day be full of joy. That’s the first type of wine Jesus wants to pour into us anew. To be a Christian is, to some degree, is to be characterized by joy, it is always to be living out the joy we see on wedding days, as friends of the Bridal Chamber as Christ unites himself to others, and as Bride, as the Bridegroom unites himself to us. Sometimes as Christians we do better at fasting than we do at feasting in the Lord’s presence. We behave as if the Lord is absent more than we live in his presence, pondering in depth what it means. We don’t live our spousal reality. We don’t go into the presence of the Lord with joy, as we say in the Responsorial Psalm. Our joy is meant to be radically new. Each time, as we pray in Psalm 43, we go up to the altar of God, the God who gives joy to our youth, we are supposed to have our joy made more complete. Jesus, who came so that his joy might be in us and our joy made complete, wants to give us his joy each day and have us respond with fresh gratitude. Today is an opportunity to receive new wineskins from Christ so that we might live out that spousal mystery.

* In the first reading today, St. Paul writes that Jesus Christ is the true “icon” of the invisible God, that God had come in the flesh, that Jesus had manifested of God-is-love in Christ’s redemption on the Cross. Those affected by gnosticism in Colossae had, to use Jesus’ image in the Gospel today,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

August 30, 2021

1 Thes 4:13-18, Ps 96, Lk 4:16-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.30.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* There are several passages that are regularly chosen for funerals. The book of Wisdom on how the souls of the just are in God’s hands and the Prophet Isaiah about the banquet the Lord is preparing on his holy mountain are very common first readings. Psalm 23 about the Lord as our Shepherd and Psalm 27 about how the Lord is our light and our salvation is often similarly selected by families. For the Gospel, it’s quite common to have Jesus raising Lazarus, or St. Luke’s version of the death of Jesus, or the beatitudes, which focuses on the path toward the kingdom of heaven. One of the most popular New Testament readings is today’s passage from St. Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians. It’s about Christian grief. St. Paul tells the Christians in Thessalonika about the consequences of Jesus’ death and resurrection “so that [they] may not grieve like the rest, who have no hope.” He speaks first about grief but then about hope. The first is about the importance of grief. Some Christians today don’t grieve, and often aren’t given permission and help to grieve. In various places they’re basically taught that death is a canonization. Funerals are celebrated with white. Certain clerics seem to guarantee that no matter how one lived or died the person is in a “better place.” Some others go to the opposite extreme and make grief thereafter the defining aspect of their life. They mourn as if they’ve lost the most important thing in life. They wear black for the rest of their life and define themselves from that point forward by the death of a loved one. The way God wants us to look at things is to grieve because we love and our life on earth won’t be the same as before, but to mourn in such a way that we believe in God’s mercy and hope that we will be together with our loved one again. What goes for grieving the death of our loved ones similarly goes for other types of grief, like when we lose something else valuable. We can grieve the loss of a job or assignment. We can grieve when we’re transferred someplace else apart from one of our good friends or our family, or one of our friends or family members moves far away from us. We can grieve when someone discerns out of consecrated life. We can grieve when we don’t get the assignment we’re hoping for or don’t get relieved of one we treated as a burden. We certainly grieve for all those lives ended through abortion. There are many forms of grief. But in all of them we’re called to grieve with hope, which is the second point. St. Paul in his Letter to the Ephesians basically defines hope as “living with God in the world,” because hopelessness for him is living without God in the world (Eph 4:10). To grieve with hope is to grieve with Christ, who blesses those who mourn (with him) because they will be consoled. We grieve not alone or abandoned, but with a loving savior, who loves our loved ones even more than we do and died to make eternal life possible. All of us are called to show the Church and the world how to grieve in this way so that they too can learn that they have hope in their grief because of the incarnation of Jesus.

* We focus on the hope that is meant to come from Jesus in today’s Gospel, which is the beginning of our focus on the Gospel of St. Luke, which will accompany us at daily Mass through the end of this liturgical year.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx, NY

Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B

August 29, 2021

Deut 4:1-2.6-8, Ps 15, James 1:17-18.21-22.27, Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Saint James challenges every one of us here today in the same way he challenged the readers of his letter 1950 years ago. After we have just listened to the word of God in Sacred Scripture, the apostle tells us: “Humbly welcome the word that has taken root in you, with its power to save you.” And then he gives us the criterion to help us to determine if we really have welcomed it: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.”

* There obviously must have been several people in his day who liked to come just to listen to the word of God without any intention to put it into practice. But why did St. James say that they were lying to themselves? I think the reason is because if they were thinking that all God cared about was for us merely to show up on the Christian Sabbath and listen to the Scriptures, they were deceived, because God didn’t give us Sacred Scripture to win literary awards, or because he wanted to entertain us, but because he wanted to change our life. And if we come to hear the word of God without desiring for it to have a radical impact on our our life, to act on it, to give full rein to its power to save us, then God tells us that we, like Christians in St. James’ day, are triply-deceived. We’re deceived about its purpose, about its power, and about our dramatic need for it.

* We see a similar truth testified to in today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses conveyed to the Israelites what set Israel apart from other nations: the statutes and decrees the Lord had given them to help them live in fidelity to the covenant God had made with them. But Moses stressed that this gift was not supposed to sit on a metaphorical bookshelf. He repeatedly told them, “Hear the statutes and decrees that I am teaching you to observe,” “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord your God,” and“Observethem carefully.” They were entrusted as words to be done and lived with gratitude. With tremendous pride, Moses asks aloud, “What great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?” They were called to observe the commandments not as slaves merely doing what they’re told, or as followers carry out a burdensome duty, but as people full of love for God and made ever more free the more faithfully they learn through the statutes and decrees to love God with their whole mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. At their best, the Israelites saw the law of the Lord not as a fence to hem them in, but as a signpost pointing the way to true freedom, real love and lasting happiness.

* But Moses gave them a warning with regard to God’s law. He said, “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord, your God, … you shall not addto what I command you nor subtractfrom it.” From the beginning, he was telling them there would be a temptation to change God’s word. It’s pretty easy to see why people might want to subtract from it the parts of it that aren’t easy or pleasant. But there’s also the temptation to change it by adding to it, by using the reverence we have for God to take it in another direction that in fact distorts it.

* This is what happened to the Pharisees and Scribes, whom Jesus confronts in today’s Gospel in the dramatic scene in which the two closely associated groups criticize Jesus and his disciples for not obsessing about t...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, New York, NY

Fourteenth Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form

August 29, 2021

Gal 5:16-24, Mt 6:24-33

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.29.21_EF_Homily.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus calls us to be different from those in the world who place their desires, their hopes, their love, their trust in the things of this world, who serve “mammon,” a Jewish word that means not just money but material possessions. If we’re Jesus followers, we must rather intentionally serve God and place our trust in him. Jesus says that we as his disciples cannot serve mammon, because when we’re serving mammon we cannot be serving God. “No one can serve two Masters,” Jesus says. “You cannot serve God and wealth.”

* Jesus’ message is even more timely for us today than it would have been for his first listeners. We live, as Pope Francis has repeatedly noted, in a culture driven by serving mammon, in which most people spend far more time seeking to become rich in mammon than they do seeking to store up heavenly treasure. We live in a culture in which so many, especially younger adults, say they “have to” work on Sunday but somehow don’t think they “have to” pray and worship the Lord. We live in a culture in which people value high definition televisions more than they do Bibles, in which people obsess over what they’ll give or get in their own or others’ wills and few think about what moral lessons they’ll pass on or receive. The reason why we can’t serve two masters simultaneously, Pope Francis said, is because “in a heart possessed by riches, there’s no longer place for faith, everything is consumed by riches. If on the other hand one gives God the place he expects, the first place, then his love will lead us to share our material possessions.” In other words, we’re either going to place our faith, hope and love in God or in material things. If we place it in mammon, that will suffocate our life with God; if we place it in God, then we will see material things not as stuff to accumulate but means by which to spread God’s love and serve his kingdom.

* New York City is perhaps the most famous place for the making and increase of mammon. But this culture of the worship of the ancient golden calf, when our heart treasures above all material goods, possessions and pleasures, leads to total insecurity in life, to a culture of worrying and anxiety. Even those who are very rich worry that they can lose much of it or even it all if the stock market takes a hit. Those who aren’t rich but who easily have enough to survive worry that if they get sick at the end of their life, the nursing home will take it and so they have to rush to take advantage of various tax structures and trusts in order to ensure that they’ll lose as little as possible for their own care.Those who are just  barely making ends meet can be eaten alive by worry that if their hours are cut, they’ll need to move, dramatically change their lifestyle, or worse.

* Jesus confronts head on this culture of worry that flows from the precariousness of basing one’s existence on the weak foundation of material goods. Immediately after reminding us that we can’t serve both God and mammon, Jesus says, “Therefore, I tell you, do not worry about your life, what you will eat or what you will drink, or about your body, what you will wear. Is not life more than food, and the body more than clothing?” What’s the “therefore” there for? It’s because when we serve material goods, we can’t help but worrying. When we are really serving God on the other hand, when we are really seeking first his kingdom and his holiness,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

August 28, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.28.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s 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, when, after several weeks of focusing on Jesus’ words to us in St. John’s Gospel about Jesus’ self-gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist, we return to St. Mark’s Gospel where Jesus speaks to us about the type of homage he asks of us.

* It’s a dramatic scene in which Jesus and his followers are criticized by the Pharisees for not obsessing about the ritual hand washings traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Jesus, the truth incarnate, responds with force and clarity. He calls them hypocrites and cites the Prophet Isaiah against them, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.” And then Jesus tells the Pharisees: “You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.”

* Jesus’ words that the Pharisees were only seeming to serve the Lord while their hearts and actions were doing otherwise would have come as a great shock to his listeners. The Pharisees were considered as extraordinarily faithful Jews. They went to the synagogue every Saturday. They prayed at least three times a day. They fasted twice a week, rather than just once a year like others on the Day of Atonement. They paid tithes on their whole income, rather than just on the things explicitly mentioned in the Mosaic Law. They used to walk to Jerusalem a few times each year to celebrate the major Jewish feasts like Passover at the Temple. They washed before every meal. They only ate kosher meat. They wore special clothes. And yet in all of this, Jesus says remarkably, “This people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me.” And he was right! The people who did all of these religious deeds were also the ones who ended up conspiring to kill Jesus, working together with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and Romans to have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from him! They were in fact not authentically religious at all, because in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers.

* But they thought they were exemplary believers because of the way they scrupulously adhered to their human traditions above God’s clear commandments. St. Mark describes the complicated and rigorous practice of Jewish ceremonial washings, something that God had not revealed that he wanted done but something that the Scribes in the fourth and fifth centuries BC had developed to foster what they called ritual purity. They needed to wash their hands in two directions with one-and-a-half egg shells of clean water, first from the fingertips down and then with the fingertips at the bottom. This was the religious practice they obsessed about, as if these collectively neurotic, hygienic washings of hands, cups, jugs, kettles and beds were what helped them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other.

* In response to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about the purity God himself wants. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus praised the “pure of heart,” saying, “They shall see God,” and reminded us, “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

August 21, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.21.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the finale of the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus has been having with us over the course of the last month with regard to what is the most important reality in the entire world, his own presence in the Holy Eucharist, and what our reaction is to that reality.

* After several weeks of describing that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink, after encouraging us to work not for perishable food but for this food that endures to eternal life, after describing that this divine gift is far greater and more important for our survival than the manna God used to rain down each day for the Israelites in the desert, we come to the climax, which is just as personal for us as it was for his first listeners: the climax is the choice he wants us to make, the commitment he wants us to give in response to this great divine gift, which is not just to believe his words that he is the true manna, that his body is real food and his blood real drink and that whoever gnaws on his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life and will be raised on the last day, but to structure our lives in accordance with that belief. He’s asking us to live truly Eucharistic lives, drawing our life from him in this supreme gift. He’s asking us to make him the source and the summit of our existence. He’s asking us to choose him who has chosen us, to commit to him who made the ultimate commitment to us, to be as faithful to him as he is faithful to us in the new and eternal Covenant sealed in his body and blood.

* But that’s not easy. It’s certainly not a given. In the Gospel we read that many of the disciples who heard Jesus’ words said, “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” These were not strangers to Jesus. These were people who had been amazed and astonished by his teaching over the previous two years, who had heard him preach like no one ever before. These were people who had witnessed him make blind men see, deaf men hear, cripples walk, lepers restored to the skin of babies, and possessed people exorcised and liberated. These were people who the previous day had just seen Jesus feed a crowd of 5,000 men, 5,000 women and probably 15,000 kids on five buns and two sardines. They were now saying that was Jesus was asking was too hard for them to stomach.

* We have to admit that they were right about Jesus’ teachings being hard. At first glance, they’re disgusting. To eat someone’s flesh and drink his blood smacks of cannibalism. Moreover, for a Jew, they couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure; now Jesus was saying that they needed to drink blood, something that seems straight out of a sick vampire novel. Even 2000 years after the Last Supper when Jesus would show how he would fulfill these words by totally changing bread and wine into his body, blood, soul and divinity, the teaching is still hard. It’s hard to believe that the Creator of the whole World, the Savior of the human race, the miraculous carpenter from Nazareth, is actually hidden under the appearances of simple human food on the altar; that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God; that the Eucharist is not bread or wine, but God. Jesus’ teaching is hard. But does that surprise us? Jesus never pretended that his teachings were easy.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Assumption of Our Lady (B)

August 14, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.14.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we celebrate with joy the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Mother of God, body and soul into heaven.

* The Gospel for the Feast is taken from the scene of the Visitation of Mary to her pregnant cousin Elizabeth, when Jesus was just a few days old in Mary’s womb. We’ll get to why that Gospel was chosen shortly and ponder together some aspects of it. But insofar as our weekly custom is to enter into an impactful dialogue with Jesus’ own words, I hope that you’d permit me to start by mentioning a conversation Jesus had with the apostles on Holy Thursday, because it sets the scene very well for what the whole Church celebrates on the Assumption.

* At the beginning of the Last Supper, Jesus told those closest to him, “In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If there were not, would I have told you that I am going to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come back again and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.” Jesus, through his passion, death, resurrection and ascension into heaven, was preparing for us a place in the Father’s House, from which he would return to take us with him, so that we might be with him forever. His desire is for us to be with him always. He wanted us to believe in this reality, starting the conversation, “You have faith in God; have faith also in me.” And he would finish by indicating to us the means by which he would fulfill that desire: “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me.” He is the way for us to follow to the Father’s house. His truth sets us free to be able to follow. His life is the one we embrace even now and, since his life is eternal, death becomes for us just a passage into a new, fuller sense of life.

* If Jesus was doing this for every believer who follows him as the Way, Truth and Life, for everyone who has faith in God the Father and him, we can certainly see how these words apply to the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is praised by Saint Elizabeth in the Gospel this Sunday, “Blessed are you for your firm believing that what was spoken to you by the Lord would be fulfilled.” Mary is the foremost woman of faith, whose whole life was a commentary on her words to the Angel at the Annunciation, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” She trusted that Jesus was indeed going to prepare a place for her, that he would come back to take her to himself, so that where he had ascended she might also be. This Sunday we celebrate the fulfillment of that promise in Mary’s life.

* In the Gospel we’ll hear at Church, we will ponder Mary’s famous Magnificat, her hymn of praise to God in her cousin Elizabeth’s home. Mary exclaims, “The Lord has done great things for me,” and our first reaction is to praise God for all of the blessings he has given Mary over the course of her life. We see these “great things” of the Lord in her being preserved from all stain of original sin from the first moment of her conception, in her singular privilege of becoming the Mother of God, and, later, in the fact that at the end of her life the Lord did not allow her body to see corruption, but took her up into heaven body and soul.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Blessed Michael McGivney

August 13, 2021

Joshua 24:1-13, Ps 136, Mt 19:3-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.13.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the past two days, we’ve been hearing about mercy and reconciliation, making the first move to go correct and reconcile those who have sinned against us so that we might have union with them, and a willingness to do this 70 x 7 times, to forgive others what they have done to us because God has forgiven us so much more. Reconciliation is necessary for God’s plan for us to be united with him and with each other forever in love.

* Today’s readings continue and build on that theme. In today’s Responsorial Psalm, we list all that God did for the Jews because his mercy endures forever, a list of things that Joshua himself describes in today’s first reading. In the Gospel Jesus points to God’s plan from the beginning in creating us as male and female in God’s image to be a loving communion of persons, how divorce and remarriage contradicts that plan, and how God calls us, like he called the Pharisees, to a conversion from hardness of heart to doing even hard things for the sake of the Kingdom of Heaven. Let’s enter into that drama, which will also help us to appreciate much more the holy one whose feast day the Church celebrates today.

* When the Pharisees approached Jesus in the area across the Jordan from the Holy Land and asked him a question about marriage, it wasn’t a question of curiosity or even to learn. It was likely meant to be a trap. Jesus was in the area where John the Baptist had been preaching and baptizing and to ask him about the lawfulness of marriage was to ask him a political question for which John the Baptist had been killed by Herod Antipas. John had said to Herod that it was not lawful for him to be married to the wife of his brother Philip, not just because this incest by affinity was contrary to God’s plan but because marrying another person’s wife certainly was. Herod thought that Jesus was John risen from the dead. To ask Jesus about marriage was potentially to invite him to criticize the same king and suffer the same consequence.

* Jesus’ reply began in a telling way: “Have you not read…?” The Pharisees, who were scholars of the law and sought to live by every dot in it, obviously had read the Book of Genesis many times, but Jesus was seeking to humble them because they obviously had missed its meaning. Then he described with words that were not just citing Genesis but invoking, in a sense, his own memory of how things were in the beginning when ” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God and the Word was God,” that “from the beginning God ‘made them male and female and said, For this reason a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife, and the two shall become one flesh?’ So they are no longer two, but one flesh. Therefore, what God has joined together, man must not separate.” God’s plan from the beginning of time was for marriage to be the greatest image of God, God who is a loving communion of persons, who seeks to unite man and woman in a faithful, indissoluble, fruitful union that would image the way he would engage the human race by become “one flesh” with us.

* The Pharisees then asked, and we ought to pay attention to the verb they used, “Then why did Moses command that the man give the woman a bill of divorce and dismiss her?” They were trying to pit Jesus against Moses and thereby against God. But Moses had never commanded man to divorce a wife,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the 19th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Jane Frances de Chantal

August 12, 2021

Josh 3:7-11.13-17, Ps 114, Mt 18:21-19:1

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.12.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday we focused on fraternal correction in seeking to bring people back into communion from a wayward life. But it’s not enough merely to correct. There needs to be forgiveness offered as well for genuine reconciliation to be effected, so that people can pray and live “into the name” of Jesus. So, picking up on the theme of yesterday, Peter asks how often must he forgive his brother when his brother sins against him. The Rabbis taught, based on a misinterpretation of passages of the Prophet Amos, that we needed to forgive three times, to give someone a forth chance. Peter multiplied that by two and added one and said, “As many as 7 times?” This would be a very high standard, giving someone an eighth chance, before writing someone off as incorrigible. Jesus replies, “No, Seventy Sevens.” Whether that means 70×7 (490) or 70+7 (77) times really doesn’t matter, because seven in the Biblical mentality is a number already with a sense of infinity. It means to forgive without limit.

* To drive home his point, Jesus then gives us a parable that I think is one of his most powerful for us to understand, if not nearly as well known as it ought to be. He describes two debtors. The first is brought into the King for owing what our translation says is a “huge amount.” The actual term used by St. Matthew is “10,000 talents.” A talent was equivalent to 6,000 denarii and a denarius was a full day’s wage. That means that the man owed 60,000,000 days worth of work, something that would take him 164,271 years to pay off. His request, after he had fallen prostrate on the ground and begged for time to pay it back, was totally absurd. He would need to live to be 165,000 years old. To monetize his debt in today’s terms in order to better understand it, if he were making $100 a day (or $12.50 an hour), he would have owed $6 billion. But the text tells us that when the King saw the man on the ground begging absurdly for time, his “heart was moved with pity” (literally, he was sick to his stomach, his viscera exploded with compassion) and he forgave the entire debt. He didn’t even make him pay what he could. He forgave it all. We’re supposed to see in this what God does for us. He forgives our entire debt. He forgives us 7, 77, 490 times and more.

* But then we see that the servant who had been forgiven billions, who was a billionaire in merciful love, went off and met a servant who owed him 100 denarii, something that could be paid off in about 3 months. This second debtor, using the very same words and actions as the first, fell down begging for time to pay it off. The first debtor must have recognized that the phrase and actions being employed reminded him of his own recent condition. But instead of sharing mercy with the second debtor, he went up and started to choke him in anger and threw him into prison until his family was able to raise the 100 denarii (in today’s money $10,000 at $100 a day for 100 days) to pay him back. At that point the other servants of the King, seeing the behavior of their colleague, were “saddened” and “disturbed” and they went to the Master, not so much to tattle-tale as to let him know of what was happening in his kingdom, that his standard of mercy was not being shown. He called in the first debtor, called him “wicked” and asked the poignant question: “I forgave you your entire debt because you begged me to.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 19th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Clare

August 11, 2021

Dt 34:1-12, Ps 66, Mt 18:15-20

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.11.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we come to the end of the dramatic life of Moses. He was God’s instrument not only to liberate God’s people from slavery in Egypt and lead them through the desert to the promised land but to keep them united in the Covenant with God and in love for each other through the desert. That was, as we’ve seen in recent weeks, very challenging work. Moses often had to correct the people on God’s behalf, to remind them of how they were sinning, how sin destroys communion, and to inspire them to care for the widow, the orphan and the stranger. What Moses did was a prophecy of the work of Jesus, who came down to unite us in a family, to bring us through the communion of saints somehow, mysteriously, according to our condition as creatures, into the communion of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and the Holy Spirit. And to do that, he similarly needed to correct us, to help us repent and believe, and to show us how to follow him toward communion with the Father and with others, praying during the Last Supper that we might be one as the Father and He are one, so that the world might believe that the Father sent the Son and loves us like he loves the Son (Jn 17). When he ascended he left that Mission of constructively correcting and unifying the human race to the Church.

* That’s what we see in today’s Gospel. Jesus shows us the power of unity, telling us that whenever just two or three gather in his name, he’ll be present in the midst; when we pray in his name to the Father, the Father will hear it; when we in his name bind something on earth it will be bound in heaven; when we loose something on earth in his name, it will be loosed in heaven. To pray in Jesus’ name means to pray conscious of the fact that God is with us, that he is with us precisely to save us, to unite us, to save us from rupture and division, to help us to follow him and to become his icon in the middle of the world carrying out God’s plan to restore and unite all things. The devil’s plan, on the other hand, is always to divide. The word diabolos in Greek signifies one who attempts to throw off course. The consequences of sin are always a triple division, a division with God, a division with others, and a division within ourselves. The devil’s work is to get us to try to make a name for ourselves, rather than hallow and pray in God’s name.

* Jesus reveals to us what we wants us to do when we’ve succumbed to the temptations of the great Divider and experienced the division the devil seeks to provoke. It’s what the Church traditionally has called “fraternal correction.” It’s key for us to grasp Jesus isn’t giving this as “good advice” but as a series of imperatives. He commands us to do fraternal correction, so important is it within his saving plans. It’s a form of love, a spiritual work of mercy. Today we can ponder the steps he gives us and why each is important.

* The first step involves a one-on-one encounter. Jesus says, “If your brother sins against you, go and tell him his fault between you and him alone. If he listens to you, you have won over your brother.” Notice that Jesus says, “If your brother sins against you.” He’s telling us if we’ve been hurt by a brother, he wants us not to sit in the corner stewing and sulking as the aggrieved party, but to take the initiative to let the other know the way he has sinned and provide an occa...