Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday in the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Landry, Bishop

June 10, 2021

2 Cor 3:15-4:1.3-6, Ps 85, Mt 5:20-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.10.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

Today in the Gospel, Jesus tells us something that should startle us, especially early in the morning: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” That’s a very tall order.  The Scribes were the experts of Sacred Scripture in its every detail. They consecrated their whole life to knowing the Word of God. The Pharisees were the ones who sought to live the Word of God expounded by the Scribes to the letter. Many of the Scribes were Pharisees and vice versa. They prayed three times a day. They fasted not just the one time prescribed per year but twice a week. They tithed not only the various items that God had instructed but the tithed their whole income. By worldly, even by classically religious standards, their righteousness seemed to be almost unsurpassable. But they were missing something. Their righteousness was fundamentally based on their own efforts, their own study, their own will-power, their own sacrifices. It also featured an extrinsic understanding of being right with God: as long as they did the right things, everything, they thought, was fine with God. As the converted Pharisee St. Paul would once say back to them, they thought that they were saved by their own works of the law, by their own external adhesion to the Mosaic law, and not by God, not by a faith-filled living relationship with God.

When Jesus calls us to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees, he’s doing something shocking, similar today to saying that our holiness needs to surpass the Carthusians and the Poor Clares to enter the kingdom of heaven. What he was doing was not fundamentally calling us to surpass them in memorizing the New Testament along with the Old, in praying four times a day instead of three, in fasting three times a week instead of two, in giving twenty percent of all we have back to God instead of ten. He’s calling us, rather, to three things: first, to have his own relationship to the law in fulfilling the law; second, to grasp that it is all about loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as Christ has loved us (which is why we have today’s Alleluia verse, to help us remember this); and to interiorize the law so that our heart is changed, not just our outward behavior. He’s calling us to allow the Word of God, Love incarnate, to become enfleshed within. He’s summoning us to permit God to give us a new heart, to place his law within us as he pours Himself, the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. God had told us through the Prophet Jeremiah that one day he would write his law in our hearts, and that’s precisely what Jesus came to do. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to accomplish.

Today Jesus begins a series of powerful applications of what this looks like, because these are things on which everyone needs to surpass the Scribes and the Pharisees. The first is with regard to the fifth commandment. The Lord says, “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” Jesus wants to transform the way we relate to others so that we will love them as he has loved us.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Ephrem

June 9, 2021

2 Cor 3:4-11, Ps 99, Mt 5:17-19

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.9.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s first reading, St. Paul focuses on the great gift of the new and eternal covenant made for us by Christ by contrasting it to the former covenant. He calls the first Covenant one “carved in letters on stone,” meaning the Covenant of Sinai, and described it as a “ministry of death” or “ministry of condemnation” because it was meant to help us to learn to die to ourselves, die to our own powers, die to our dream to save us by our own efforts, and open ourselves up to God’s power and his life. St. Paul in his letter to the Galatians would call it a pedagogue, a disciplinarian, a tutor, who, according to ancient custom, would drill us and even “kill us” in lessons so that we might be brought by him to the Master who would build on those foundations. It was to open us up to receive and respond to God’s covenant of salvation by grace received in faith. He says that if the first Covenant was “so glorious,” “how much more” will the new Covenant by the Spirit and the “ministry of righteousness … abound much more in glory.”

* Sometimes when we read such contrasts in St. Paul, who was battling against a tendency among the Pharisees and the “Judaizing Christians” to find salvation in the works of the law rather than by faith in Christ through grace, we can think that the Old Covenant was annulled or even, perhaps, a bad thing. No, it was a great thing and a preparation for the new! As one biblical scholar says, the Old Testament was like an unfinished symphony waiting for Christ to come and bring everything together. That’s what Jesus himself describes in the Gospel today, taken from the Sermon on the Mount. He says, “Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets. I have come not to abolish but to fulfill.” He was coming to respond to all of the Old Covenant hopes, to be the “Yes” as we heard yesterday to all God’s promises, even the littlest: “Amen, I say to you, until heaven and earth pass away,” he continued, “not the smallest letter or the smallest part of a letter will pass from the law, until all things have taken place.” He was going to fulfill all of the typological signs of the Old Testament and bring the entire law to find its fulfillment in Christ’s two-fold command of love, on which all the law and the prophets he would say “hang.” He would do this not just by his words but also by his example. Some of the old forms of the “disciplinarian” would fall away in this fulfillment — like dietary laws, even circumcision! — as we received new wineskins for the new wine of the Covenant, but they would not be “abolished.” They would rather be brought to completion, be fulfilled, in a similar way to how a seed metamorphoses into a tree or an embryo into an infant into an adult.

* And he wants us to follow him, to be united to him, in this fulfillment of every letter, every smallest part of the letter, of the Law. He wants us, like him, not to live the letter by the “letter [that] brings death” but to live the smallest part of the letter by the “Spirit [who] gives life,” cooperating with God as he seeks to unite ourselves to him in love. That’s why Jesus pivots and begins to speak about how he wants us to be great by living by the Spirit in fulfilling the law of love. “Whoever obeys and teaches these commandments,” he said, “will be called greatest in the Kingdom of heaven.” And he wants each of us to be great in this way.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 9, 2021

2 Cor 1:18-22, Ps 119, Mt 5:13-16

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.8.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* There’s an important prehistory to today’s first reading, taken from St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians. Paul had promised to make a return visit to Corinth, but because of sufferings and hardship he had not yet been able to come. Those who were opposed to his message of conversion took upon themselves to try to persuade others that he was unreliable: if he couldn’t even be trusted to keep his word about whether he would be coming to Corinth, how could anything else he said — about God, for example — be reliable? Paul wrote that the source of his veracity is found in God. “As God is faithful,” he said, and then he gave a beautiful witness to how Jesus is the fulfillment, the definitive “yes” to all God’s promises. “For however many are the promises of God,” he wrote, “their Yes is in him.” And Jesus’ yes, he continues, is the source of our own. “The Amen from us also goes through him to God for glory.” God is the one, he asserts, “who gives us security with you in Christ” and “anointed us,” and “put his seal upon us” and “given the Spirit in our hearts.” God is faithful, God fulfills his promises, and our response to God is to reciprocate that fidelity but maintaining our fidelity to his covenants and imitating his yes. Jesus would say in the Sermon on the Mount, “Let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes,’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No.’ Anything more is from the evil one” (Mt 5:37). St. James himself would echo it: “But above all, my brothers, do not swear, either by heaven or by earth or with any other oath, but let your ‘Yes’ mean ‘Yes’ and your ‘No’ mean ‘No,’ that you may not incur condemnation” (James 5:12). As Christians we are not supposed to vacillate. Christ, Paul, James all want to help us imitate God’s fidelity, and when we say yes to God to persevere in it.

* Jesus describes for us in today’s Gospel how he wishes for us to make our life an Amen to God. He wants us to live up to our vocation and commitment to be the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World. What are we saying yes to in responding to these vocations?

* In calling us to be the Salt of the Earth, Jesus summons us to a three-fold fidelity.

* The first is as a preservative. Salt was used to preserve meat or fish from rotting. There was obviously no electricity and therefore refrigeration in the ancient world. If any fish or meat was going to last in the sweltering Middle Eastern climate, it needed to be salted. The salt was different than the meat or the fish, pointing to the fact that as Christians we’re supposed to be distinct from the world, in it but not of it. There was something more. There was an ancient saying that the animal and fish that were being preserved were already dead; salt would serve almost as a life-preserver, something that would keep the meat or fish filets from like likewise dying. It almost had a sense of the resurrection, giving them life whereas they, like the fish or animals from which they came, should be dead. All of this points to the fact that Jesus calls us to be his instrument to prevent the earth from going to corruption, from dying. We’re supposed to keep the world and others good. We all know that there are certain people who when they walk into a room keep others on their best behavior, not because others are afraid of them, but because they lift others to a higher standard by the way they themselves live. Jesus wants us to be like that person.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 7, 2021

2 Cor 1:1-7, Ps 34, Mt 5:1-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.7.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* This Friday, June 11, is the feast of St. Barnabas, but because of the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, it will not be observed. Yet it’s important to focus on the nickname the members of the early Church gave him, “Son of Encouragement,” something we see in a particular way in his support for St. Paul, and a Christian virtue that is needed in every age. Today we can focus on the type of encouragement St. Paul received from God through him and then focus on the encouragement Jesus, through his Sacred Heart, gives us all.

* In today’s first reading, taken from the beginning of St. Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, St. Paul uses the word “encourage” nine different times. He describes how God encourages us in our afflictions precisely so that, having received his strength at those times, we might credibly be able to encourage others with the same encouragement — namely God’s — we have received. St. Paul received this encouragement various times as we see in the Acts of the Apostles and his letters. Right after this passage, he describes how his afflictions were crushing him. But God came to his aid and helped him to see that “If we are afflicted, it is for your encouragement and salvation; if we are encouraged, it is for your encouragement, which enables you to endure the same sufferings that we suffer.” What we prayed in the Psalm happens often: “When the poor one called out, the Lord heard, and from all his distress he saved him.” God permits us to suffer partially so that we might in turn receive his encouragement and then be better equipped to share that blessing with others. That’s part of the good that God wants to bring out of the evil he permits us to endure (since to prevent absolutely our suffering evil would eliminate others’ free will). Most of us have had many examples of this pattern: if we’ve suffered, for example, a physical illness and recovered, we’re able to encourage those suffering the same illness; if we’re gone through a particularly grueling academic program, we can help those who are beginning;  if we’ve had to endure the dark night of the senses in prayer, we can help those who are now just entering into it. God encourages us in our circumstances and thereby equips us to encourage others. His encouragement is both a gift and a preparation.

* We see how Jesus similarly seeks to encourage others in today’s Gospel in sharing the Beatitudes. I normally prefer to preach on the Beatitudes in a straightforward way, contrasting Jesus’ notion of the path happiness from the world’s and using it as an introduction to the entire Sermon on the Mount on which we’ll be pondering for the next almost three weeks. But we can look at it under the aspect of Jesus’ encouragement from within the encouragement he has received from the Father. An important key that unlocks the Beatitudes comes at the very end. In many presentations of the Beatitudes, it’s listed that there are “eight” of them, and under this frame it seems as if Jesus is repeating numbers seven and eight with different words: “Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness” and “Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.” But another way of looking at it is that in the last Beatitude, Jesus is summarizing what he said in all seven that came previously: when we live any of the Beatitudes,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, NY

Day of Recollection for the Leonine Forum Fellows

June 6, 2021

In this day of recollection, held on the Solemnity of Corpus Christi, there was a talk on St. Isaac Jogues and the Eucharist, able to be listened to below. It was followed by a talk on St. Kateri Tekakwitha and the Holy Eucharist, which was unfortunately not recorded. Finally it was followed by a homily at Mass. The conference on St. Isaac and the homily on th Eucharist are below. 

To listen to the conference on St. Isaac Jogues and the Holy Eucharist, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.6.21_Isaac_Jogues_1.mp3

 

To listen to the homily for Corpus Christi, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.6.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, NY

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), Year B

June 6, 2021

Exod 24:3-8, Ps 116, Heb 9:11-15, Mk 14:12-16.22-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.6.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily:

* “Take it; this is my body.” “Take and drink. This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.” These words would have been shocking to the apostles on Holy Thursday night as they prepared for the traditional Jewish Passover meal, which relived the meal they had with loins girt and sandals on their feet the night God finally liberated them from the Egyptians. They were expecting to eat unleavened bread, to drink four symbolic cups of wine and to consume the meat of the Paschal Lamb. They were not expecting Jesus to change the unleavened bread and wine into his own body and blood and to have them consume him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus was fulfilling what he had told them exactly a year earlier when he said, in the synagogue of Capernaum, that we needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood to have life in him, and the one who eats his flesh and drinks his blood will have eternal life. Jesus was inviting them, through Holy Communion, to enter into the definitive passover from death to life, the new and eternal Covenant he was making to giving his Body and shedding his Blood on Calvary for our salvation. With the same verbs, and the same saving love, Jesus tells each of us, “Take and eat.” “Take and drink.”

* Today is a day we thank the Lord for this awesome gift and beg for his help to receive him more worthily and more fruitfully. Corpus Christi, the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of the Lord, is a special day wanted by the Lord Jesus himself. He asked for it in two different stages in the 1200s. He desired that our faith in the Eucharist would pass from our head, to our heart to our knees, that our response to him in this gift would go from theology to devotion, that this day would help us to grow from knowledge of his real presence to passionate love. 800 years ago, people knew the truth of Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist intellectually but for many it really didn’t impact their life the way Jesus wanted. Mass was for most a duty, a duty some fulfilled faithfully, and others neglected. It wasn’t a thing of love. Jesus wanted us to love him back in the Eucharist. He wanted us to receive as much as we possibly can from the gift of himself in the Eucharist, not for his sake, but for ours.

* The first intervention of Jesus in asking for this Feast occurred in the early part of the century, when the Lord Jesus began to appear to a contemplative nun in Belgium, St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon (1193-1258). Beginning from the time she was 15 in 1208, a moon would appear to her throughout the day with a black band in it. She wondered what it meant and the Lord Jesus appeared to her in a dream and mentioned that the moon referred to the liturgical year and the black band to the fact that the liturgical year lacked one thing, a day in honor of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Up until that point, the Church had marked the institution of the Eucharist each year on Holy Thursday, when the Lord gave the Apostles His Body and Blood for the first time and instituted the priesthood so that through His priests, that Body and Blood might be multiplied to every land in every age. But on Holy Thursday, the focus of Christians is divided. Yes, we think about the Eucharist, but we also ponder the imminent betrayal that will occur after the Last Supper. Even the Gospel of the Mass of the Last Supper does not f...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Catherine of Siena Parish, Greenwich, CT

Nuptial Mass of Ryan Connor Von Uffel and Emily Katherine Kuchta

June 5, 2021

Gen 1:26-28.31, Ps 33, Col 3:12-17, Mt 5:13-16

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.5.21_Von_Uffel_Kuchta_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

The beautiful marriage we are celebrating today between Ryan and Emily has a long prehistory. I’m not just talking about the 715-day pandemic-induced wait from Ryan’s well-planned June 22, 2019 proposal on the beach where Emily spent so many summers growing up. The prehistory extends back much further than a mini-college reunion in April 2018 in Manhattan when, as Emily told me, they “completely fell for each other” and began to spend most of their free time together. It goes back much further than when they met in August 2007 in Henniker, New Hampshire, as college freshmen and began a deep friendship that has matured through today. It goes back to the beginning of time.

As we see in the first reading Emily and Ryan chose for their wedding, from the Book of Genesis, when God created Adam, Adam had God all to himself in the garden. All of creation had been made for him to govern. He was perfectly in right relationship with God. Even though he seemed to have everything one could ask for, something — more specifically, someone — was missing. And after God had said in the first six phases of creation, “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” “It was good,” and with the creation of the human person, “It was very good,” God finally thundered, “It is not good…for man to be alone.” So he created Eve, a fitting partner, a helper, symbolically out of his side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before him. When Adam saw her, he exclaimed, “Finally this is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh!,” a Hebrew idiom saying that they shared strengths and weaknesses. As Jesus would reiterate centuries later in the Gospel, this is the reason why a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife and they become one flesh in love.

The upshot of the Creation account is that God, who is love, has created the human person in his image and likeness … in love and for love. Since no one can love in a vacuum, God could not be solitary, there needed to be a Lover and a Beloved, and in God the eternal love between them was so strong as to take on personality. In creating the human person, therefore, as we see in the first reading, God created not just a “him, male and female” but a “them,” a communion between man and woman, whose love for each other could be so strong as to “make love,” to generate new life, as a fruit of their loving communion of persons. From the first marriage of Adam and Eve, to your marriage today, Ryan and Emily, matrimony was created by God to be a sacrament of love, to help you to grow to be more and more like God and at the same time more fully human. Today you not only receive and minister a Sacrament. Today you become a Sacrament, a visible sign, as St. John Paul II used to say, pointing to the invisible reality of the Trinitarian loving communion of persons. Therefore, this day has its beginning in “the beginning,” in God’s plan to create each of you in his image and likeness. At the end of the first reading, Genesis tells us, “God looked at everything he had made, and he found it very good.” He looks at you today, and to the vocation he has given you to marry each other as each other’s fitting helpmate, and finds it “very good.”

But Christian marriage is never just about two people, the husband and the wife. It’s not even just about the family that,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Corpus Christi (B), Vigil

June 5, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.5.21_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 tomorrow on Corpus Christi, the Feast of the Body and Blood of the Lord.

* In some ways, it’s the most important conversation we have. Jesus takes bread and says to the apostles, and to us, “Take it; this is my body.” Then he takes wine in a chalice and says, “This is my blood of the covenant, which will be shed for many.” These words would have been shocking to the apostles on Holy Thursday in the Upper Room. The wonder should never wear off.

* Do we believe Jesus when he says, “This is my body?” and “This is the chalice of my blood?” If we do, these words should change us. They should blow up our earthly priorities.

* That’s the impact they had on me when I was a college freshman. I was away on campus, living on my own for the first time. I was fortunate to have grown up in a very faithful Catholic family, had always gone to Mass on Sundays and Holy Days, and was very involved in my hometown parish. From the time I was four, I had believe in what the Church calls the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and had never disbelieved the truth that after the words of consecration, there’s only Jesus under the appearances of bread of wine. But the consequences of the reality of the Eucharistic Jesus hadn’t struck me. But that September day in 1988, I asked myself, “If it is really Jesus, the eternal Son of God in the Holy Eucharist, is there anything more important that I could be doing on a Monday than receiving him in Holy Communion? Is there anything more important on a Tuesday, or Wednesday, or Thursday, Friday or Saturday?” I recognized that the clear answer to that is that there was nothing more important in the whole world than receiving God inside. And from that day, September 24, 1988 until today — 11,943 days later — I have, by the grace of God, never gone one day without Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. St. Thomas Aquinas’ words from his famous Eucharist hymn, the Panis Angelicus, have always summed up my attitude of gratitude. We sing, “O res mirabilis! Manducat Dominum pauper et servus humilis.” “O what a mind-blowing reality: a poor and humble servant eats the Lord!” That’s what Jesus in the Eucharist makes possible. We creatures eat Creator. We sinners consume our Savior. We lovers become one flesh with the Beloved.

* There has to be consequences to the Eucharist. The Church teaches that Jesus in the Eucharist is meant to be the source and summit of the Christian life, the source, the starting point, from which everything flows, and the summit, the goal, to which everything goes. Jesus in the Eucharist is meant to be the alpha and omega, the beginning and the end, of our whole life. We’re supposed to draw our life from Jesus in the Eucharist.

* Let’s get practical about five various ways:

* First, we should make Sunday Mass by far the biggest priority of our week. There’s the famous story of the martyrs of Abitene from 304. They were told by the Roman prefect that if they assembled on Sunday morning for Mass, they would be arrested and executed. They thanked him for the notice.… but then still all 49 Christians in the town came together on the Lord’s Day. When the flabbergasted prefect asked them why they didn’t heed his warning, one of them, Emeritus,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

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

Friday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

June 4, 2021

Tob 11:5-17, Ps 146, Mk 12:35-37

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.4.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* The Book of Tobit on which we’ve been meditating all week is about God’s healing. The quiet hero of the book is the Archangel Raphael, whose name means “The Healing of God.” We see in the book how God heals both Sarah, as we saw yesterday, and Tobit as we see today. He heals them after some suffering, to perfect them who were already good and virtuous. That’s an important point. They were both “just,” and were permitted by God to suffer in order to help them both advance in faith. God already had set up his medicine for them in the facts of the case: he had had Tobit earn and bury money in Media so that, after Tobit couldn’t go himself, Tobias could, could get bitten by the fish with the healing properties, could meet Sarah and become an instrument of the healing of each of them. We see the particularly “galling” way Tobit was healed in today’s Gospel, by his son’s smearing his cataracted eyes with gall from the fish who had bitten him, the same fish that had supplied the heart and liver that was burned to heal Sarah and Tobias from the wiles of the pagan god of lust in this allegory. There’s a clear sacramental allusion in this healing by something a little gross, much like Jesus would later heal someone of blindness by wiping saliva on his eyes. As soon as Tobit was cured, he rejoiced that he could see his son. He could in fact see much more clearly than he did before he was blinded four years earlier by bird droppings. His vision had been enriched by faith.

* We see Jesus seeking to do a similar healing in the Gospel. He was trying to help the scribes and those around him in the Temple see what God the Father had revealed to St. Peter at Caesarea Philippi, that the Messiah would also be God. That’s what was happening in Jesus’ question, that David who traditionally is understood to be the one who composed Psalm 110 that Jesus quotes, would call the Messiah — who would be his descendent according to the flesh — “Lord.” That’s precisely who Jesus was, not merely David’s descendent according to the flesh, but also his Lord and Creator. Jesus was opening the eyes of the minds of his contemporaries to a much deeper understanding of who the Messiah is, to help them to be able to embrace better what was coming within a few days in his Passion.

* As we receive Jesus, two days before the celebration of Corpus Christi, God wants to heal and open our eyes to see the Eucharist not routinely but with a new vision, especially in terms of how we are called to center our whole life on Jesus whom we receive, to become living walking monstrances carrying God within out to the streets here of Manhattan. St. Ignatius of Antioch called Jesus in the Eucharist “the medicine of immortality.” This is the greatest source of God’s healing, which he places not on our eyes but within us to heal not just our vision but so much more, making it possible for us to become the “gall” that can go out, attached to Him and all his healing power, to help others to see anew as well.

 

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Reading 1 TB 11:5-17

Anna sat watching the road by which her son was to come.

When she saw him coming, she exclaimed to his father,

“Tobit, your son is coming, and the man who traveled with him!”

Raphael said to Tobiah before he reached his father:

Fr. Roger J. Landry

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

Thursday of the Ninth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Charles Lwanga and Companions

June 3, 2021

1 Tob 6:10-11.7:1.9-17.8:4-9, Ps 128, Mk 12:28-34

 

To listen to a recording of this morning’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.3.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Over the last three days all of the major groups of Jewish society had come to Jesus to test him, and even trap him, with tough questions. On Tuesday, the strict Pharisees and lax Herodians conspired to try to trip Jesus up on the question of whether it was lawful to pay the census tax. Yesterday, the elitist Sadducees came to get him on the question of the Resurrection of the dead. Today the last of the major groups, the Scribes, came up to him to ask him which was the greatest of all the commandments. After Jesus’ answer today, St. Mark tells us, “No one dared to ask him any more questions.”

* We’ve heard the answer to today’s question so many times that its difficulty is not always obvious. There were 613 commandments in the Old Covenant. To ask which of them was the greatest was required not only great familiarity with all of Sacred Scripture — something that the scribes had and very few others had — but also great synthesis to discover what in the Old Covenant had the greatest weight of all. As we see throughout the Gospels, the Scribes, Pharisees and many others didn’t have a great sense of the hierarchy of truths, about prioritizing what was most important of all. They often focused far more on how they’d wash their hands, pots and jugs than how to love their neighbor, straining out gnats, to use Jesus’ image that we’ll be hearing about in the next few weeks beginning Monday with the Sermon on the Mount, than avoiding swallowing camels. Jesus, however, answered the question about the most important thing we need to do and then offered a second, which is allied to it, in such a way that the scribe who had asked the question was truly impressed. For us, today, we need to ponder Jesus’ response and what that means in our life.

* The first and the greatest commandment, Jesus said, is to “love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind and with all your strength.” It was to love the Lord not only with part of ourselves, but all of ourselves. So often we can think everything 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.” But Jesus wants everything. And deserves everything. But how can Jesus command us to love? Can anyone be compelled to love or forced to love from the outside? Isn’t that inconsistent with what love is? It would be impossible to command to love if love were just a feeling, because we can’t be commanded to feel something. But love is fundamentally a choice, it’s an act of willing, it’s something in which our freedom is engaged. Jesus can command us to love God with all we are because God gives us himself to help us precisely to love to that degree. He commands and at the same time makes fulfilling the command possible. Pope Benedict took up this question in his beautiful encyclical Deus Caritas Est, saying, “love can be ‘commanded’ because it has first been given.”

* And to keep that commandment to love God with all we are, we need to let that love overflow into two other forms of love, the authentic love of ourselves and the love of our neighbor as we authentically love ourselves. If we love God and God loves us, then we must love ourselves as God loves us, helped of course by God’s own love. Jesus insists in his Last Supper discourse that the F...