Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Claude la Colombière

February 15, 2021

Gen 4:1-15.25, Ps 50, Mk 8:11-13

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today as the Church has us ponder Cain’s killing his brother Abel, we remember that that sacrifice is a type, a foreshadowing, of the killing of Christ, “whose blood speaks more eloquently than that of Abel” (Heb 12:24). We see the start of that fratricide and attempted Deicide in today’s Gospel in the way that the Pharisees were asking Jesus for a sign in order to test him. Jesus had already worked many signs — healings, exorcisms, multiplications of loaves and fish, showing power over the wind and the sea — but they didn’t want to accept any of them. In fact they opposed all the signs he was doing on the Sabbath. They would similarly reject the one sign he elsewhere said he would give them, the sign of Jonah — his suffering, death and resurrection — in which they themselves would partially play the role of Cain. Today they, although outwardly religious, were trying to trap Christ so that they could put him to death. Rather than opening themselves to him, they closed themselves and the murder of this Innocent One was only the conclusion of a process that began with their rejection and envy.

* Jesus’ crucifixion was preceded by homicidal envy. The Book of Wisdom focuses on this well when it prophesies about what was going on in the hearts of those who conspired against him, “Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he opposes our actions, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the Lord. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us. Because his life is not like that of others, and different are his ways. He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. He calls blest the destiny of the righteous and boasts that God is his Father. Let us see whether his words be true; let us find out what will happen to him in the end. For if the righteous one is the son of God, God will help him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With violence and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience.Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.” These were their thoughts, but they erred; for their wickedness blinded them. And they did not know the hidden counsels of God; neither did they count on a recompense for holiness nor discern the innocent souls’ reward. The first witness of this type of murderous envy is in today’s first reading, when Cain slew his brother Abel. On Friday and Saturday, we saw the typical structure of sin and its effects. Today we are able to look at those truths from another angle. There are several steps involved:

* Abel “brought one of the best firstlings of his flock” to sacrifice to God whereas Cain simply brought “an offering,” and God looked with favor on the first and not on the second. The first step in not sinning but rather in growing in relationship with God is to give him our best, to love him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. We don’t have to love him necessarily “more” than someone else, but just give him all we can. God’s favor toward Abel’s sacrifice was not because he was a carnivore; it was because of the spirit with which the sacrifice was given.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Quinquagesima Sunday, Extraordinary Form

February 14, 2021

1 Cor 13:1-13, Lk 18:31-43

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Today on Quinquagesima Sunday, three days before Ash Wednesday, the Church seeks to help us to get our proper orientation for the holy season of Lent. The Word of God proclaimed to us is meant to make us aware of our need for God’s mercy and to come to get it. It’s meant to help us learn how to walk by faith, or, even better as we see in the Gospel, to spring up and run by faith. It’s meant to help us focus on God’s love for us in such a way that we will be transformed to love others by the same standard. Let’s allow what God is teaching us in these readings to sink deeply within so that, like the blind man in the Gospel, we can cry out to Jesus for the help we need and resolve with that assistance to live the best Lent of our life.

* We begin with the Gospel. As rabbis were accustomed to do on the triannual pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. The blind man, whom St. Mark in his Gospel identifies as Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside begging. He was in Jericho, literally the lowest city on earth, a symbol of the depths to which he had fallen. He heard the commotion of the crowd and asked what was happening. Upon hearing that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, he immediately began to bellow. He didn’t cry out for alms. He didn’t cry out at that point for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy. “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ miracles in Galilee and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” indicated he believed Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. The word St. Luke used to describe his shouting refers to an animal cry, something that shows the depth of the existential pain he was in, like a dog hit by a car or an elephant with its trunk caught inextricably in a tree. Hearing his agonizing howling, many of those following Jesus and trying to hear what he was teaching responded not with mercy, but with a rebuke, telling him to shut his trap. But that only led the man to shriek all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me!” Jesus stopped and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than whatever he was teaching at that moment, because it was, in fact, the central message of the Gospel he was proclaiming. Jesus had been telling the perambulating crowds that they were ascending from Jericho to Jerusalem and there everything written in the prophets about the Suffering Servant, about the Just Man being beset by evil doers, about Isaac carrying the wood for the sacrifice, about Abel being slain by Cain, would be fulfilled as he would be betrayed to the Romans, mocked, insulted, spat upon, scourged and killed, but rise on the third day. And all of it was taking place so that through his passion, death and resurrection, Jesus could lift us up from our own Jerichos, heal our own spiritual blindness, and respond definitively to our cries for the Messiah to give us God’s mercy.

* Jesus, however, wanted to involve Bartimaeus, just like he wants to involve us, in the process of healing. After hearing the blind man screaming, it would have been very easy for Jesus to come to meet him exactly where he was begging by the roadside. He was blind after all! Instead Jesus drew near, but then he called Bartimaeus to get up to come to him. This was to engage Bartimaeus’ freedom, to stoke his desire, to exercise his faith,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

February 13, 2021

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* One of the most physically disgusting and repulsive human beings imaginable — a leper — came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away at their flesh and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for life apart from the rest of the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them — except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from their jobs, from the synagogue and from the temple, from love and mercy. They were outcasts, ostracized from all things human. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them easily from a distance. Whenever they needed to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!” They were forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. Anyone who touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, unclean. We can sometimes grumble today about wearing masks or undergoing quarantine and isolation, but these are temporary provisions; for many of the lepers in Jesus’ day, everything was far more severe and could last the rest of one’s life.

* That the man in today’s Gospel broke all convention to come close to Jesus was already a sign of his desperation. What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature on his knees before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch the contagion. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. To the leper’s plea of faith, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” Jesus, filled with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched the leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched him in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “I do will it. Be made clean!” He was thoroughly and immediately made whole. Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure of leprosy so that he, so long an outcast, could legitimately return to the human community.

* This Gospel is a beautiful one to have three days before we begin the Holy Season of Lent. During Lent, each of us is called to approach Jesus with faith, with all our sins that are eating away our soul like Hansen’s disease destroys our bones and skin, and say, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” And Jesus wants to say to each of us in return, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Lent is the time of that cleansing. The practice of prayer helps us to overcome the leprosy of egocentrism to put God first. The practice of almsgiving helps us to conquer the leprosy of selfishness and put others ahead of ourselves. The practice of fasting helps us to triumph against the leprosy pleasure-seeking, of making our bellies our god, so that we can learn how to hunger for what God hungers. It’s a period of purification. Each of us needs to be humble enough, each of us needs to be smart enough, to recognize our state and come to God so that he, moved with compassion, can stretch out his hand and touch us.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass of Mary, The New Eve

Memorial of Blessed James Miller

February 13, 2021

Gen 3:9-24, Ps 90, Mk 8:1-10

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.13.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Today in the first reading, we see many of the results of the Fall, a text that allows us to articulate and appreciate all the more what Jesus seeks to do in all of us through the redemption, a repair project we see in all its beauty and clarity in the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom we honor today under her title of New Eve.

* First, let’s see several consequences of sin in the account of the Fall.

* The first consequence was fear. Adam and Eve began to fear God, to fear each other, and to fear themselves. Prior to the Fall, they were naked and unashamed, not afraid in the least to be exposed before God and the other who loved them, not afraid to be totally transparent toward God or the other because they only responded to the other with love. But after the Fall, they were filled with fear. When God asked Adam where he was — God well knew, but he wanted Adam to grasp that he was lost — Adam replied, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself.” Rather than love, receiving it and reciprocating it, their fundamental response to others was now fear. They were afraid of their vulnerability before the other because they didn’t know whether the other would hurt them. What Christ wanted to do after the Fall was help us not to be afraid, to translate fear of punishment into a reverential awe. In most languages, there are two words for fear: one is a fear of pain, suffering, and punishment, what the Italians call paura, the Portuguese medo, and the Spanish miedo; the other word means an awe that flows from not thinking oneself worthy in front of someone so holy and awe-inspiring, what normally can cause us either to clam up or to speak without thinking in front of someone really famous and important, what the Italians call timore, the Portuguese and the Spanish temor.  We see the transition from the fear of punishment to a reverential awe when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary at the Annunciation, greeting her, “Do not be afraid, Mary,” — don’t be intimidated by holy awe — “because you have found favor with God and you will conceive in your womb and bear and Son…” Part of the redemption is the replacement of a fear of God and fear of others with a holy reverence for God himself and for God in others.

* The second consequence of the Fall was a total lack of personal responsibility. When God asked Adam who told him he was naked and helped him to see it was evidence that he had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, rather than admitting his sin, rather than banging his chest and confessing that he had greatly sinned through his own grievous fault, he said, “The woman whom you put here with me, she gave me fruit from the tree and so I ate it.” It wasn’t his fault, he was claiming, but hers, and ultimately God’s, because God had put the woman there! And when the Lord asked Eve why she had done such a thing, she refused to take responsibility either: “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.” It was the devil’s fault — and, again, ultimately God’s because he allowed the serpent to squirm through the garden. Jesus came to redeem us first by taking responsibility for us and then helping us to take responsibility for ourselves and for others. We see at the beginning of the Gospel today. He says,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

February 12, 2021

Gen 3:1-8, Ps 32, Mk 7:31-37

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.12.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus works a great miracle of healing a deaf-mute in such a way that the people were astonished and exclaimed, “He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” The same miracle Jesus worked in the Decapolis he works all over the world. He worked it in your life and mine on the day of our baptism. He didn’t use spit, but through his minister he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the priest or deacon said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the glory and praise of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. The graces of baptism not only touched these organs but the entirety of our being to be receptive to God in fulfillment of the prayer made in the Alleluia verse, “Open our hearts, O Lord, to listen to the words of your Son.” He wants us to listen to him with hearts full of love, to treasure his word, to be transformed by it, so that through that transformation we might transform the world. Everything begins with hearing God speak to us and responding with faith.

* This is important for us to grasp in order to understand the nature of sin. In today’s first reading, we encounter the blow-by-blow details of what we call the “original sin,” but in it we see the essential physiognomy of any sin.

* It begins with listening to God poorly, rather than attentively and lovingly, rather than hanging on his every word. God had told Adam that he wasn’t to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but as he passed that on to Eve, the details changed, as Eve said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’” Even though Adam’s and Eve’s eternal life depended on it, they hadn’t listened to God accurately. God had said nothing about not touching it. Every sin begins with a sin of listening. Pope Benedict mentions this in Verbum Domini, “Quite frequently in both the Old and in the New Testament, we find sin described as a refusal to hear the word, as a breaking of the covenant and thus as being closed to God who calls us to communion with himself. Sacred Scripture shows how man’s sin is essentially disobedience and refusal to hear.… For this reason it is important that the faithful be taught to acknowledge that the root of sin lies in the refusal to hear the word of the Lord, and to accept in Jesus, the Word of God, the forgiveness that opens us to salvation” (26). In Hebrew, the same word is used for “hearing” and “obeying,” because it was inconceivable that one could hear God asking something and refuse to obey. In Latin the same relationship is stressed. The word to listen in Latin is audire and to obey is ob-audire, which means to listen intentively, to eavesdrop. The first step in sin is to fail to listen to “every word that comes from God’s mouth,” not to treat what he says as the “words of everlasting life.”

* The second aspect of the devil’s temptation was to get them to distrust God and trust him more than God. He said that they wouldn’t die if they totally did the opposite of what God had commanded and declared that God gave the command simply bec...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes

February 11, 2021

Gen 2:18-25, Ps 128, Mk 7:24-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.11.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* “It is not good for the man to be alone.” These words from today’s first reading come in the Genesis account after God says, throughout creation, “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,” and with the creation of the human person,  “It is very good.” Finally God exclaims,  “It is not good for the man to be alone,” but he waited to make this judgment, we can say, until man himself had had this awareness. Even though man was in relation with God and with the animals he had named, there was still something missing. He needed a “suitable partner,” a “fitting helper” for him. And that’s what God gave him in the creation of Eve. God created such a fitting helper, so that the two of them could help each other as the image of God, live in true communion, and grow more and more into God’s loving image. This points to two existential realities: first, each of us needs help and it’s not good for us to be without this help; second, we are created as a helper for others. We are created as fitting helpers likewise always in need of suitable help.

* We also see in the passage the basic complementarity at work in this helping and being helped. God didn’t create merely someone to kill time with, or even a generic helper, but rather a “suitable helper,” a “partner,” someone who makes up for our weaknesses with strength and someone who draws from us our strength to remedy his or her weaknesses. God created Eve out of Adam’s side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. The rib symbolizes what covers the heart (the loving center of the person) and the lungs (what is necessary to breathe and survive). Adam exclaims, “Finally this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” a Hebrew expression meaning “strength of my strength and weakness of my weakness,” that they are like each other in strengths and weaknesses and need to help each other. The type of help that is needed is not just in terms of a “hand” in ordinary life, but with regard to their living as the image and likeness of God. They can’t grow in love without each other and without the analogy of human love, Adam had already discovered that he couldn’t really receive and reciprocate (however asymmetrically) divine love. The most suitable help given is with regard to their living in a fully human way in the divine image. That’s what human marriage, par excellence, is supposed to be, when a man and a woman, like Adam and Eve, fittingly help each other to become who they are. That’s why Christ raised marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament, to give his help so that they might resemble the love in the heart of the Trinity, which Christ came as Bridegroom to make possible anew.

* But the help we need extends to more than marriage. It’s not good for any of us to be alone, we all need fitting helpers, and we all need, to some degree, the complementarity between man and woman to remedy the ways in which, by original differentiation, we are not fully human. That’s why gender ideology is so harmful to human anthropology, because it suggests masculinity and femininity are mental conceptions rather than divinely ordered, complementary realities. St. John Paul II talked about the “archetypical masculine” and the “archetypical feminine” and the way that men receive love by giving love and women give love by receiving love and how man’s relative strengths in comp...

Fr. Roger J. LandryVisitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanWednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint ScholasticaFebruary 10, 2021Gen 2:4-9.15-17, Ps 104, Mk 7:14-23

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

In the Gospel today Jesus asks the disciples, “Are even you likewise without understanding?” Lest we fail to understand the absolutely revolutionary point Jesus is making in today’s Gospel, let’s take some time to do what he asks, “Hear me, all of you, and understand.”

Jesus was continuing his conversation with the Scribes and the Pharisees after their criticism that Jesus’ disciples ate their meals with ritually unwashed hands. The Scribes had determined that in order for someone to be pleasing to God they needed to obsess about ritual impurity, washing their hands twice with one-and-a-half egg shells full of water, and washing pots, jugs, beds, themselves and any other thing that had touched Gentiles or things not consecrated to the Lord. Jesus yesterday called them hypocrites because the word hypocrite means actor and they were, frankly, just pretending to be faithful to God, substituting human precepts for God’s word and will. Today Jesus extended the conversation to something that would have astonished the disciples, something that would have been totally revolutionary. He said, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” This point was revolutionary because it was precisely things from the outside that the Jews of Jesus’ day thought would make them impure. We remember that Judas Maccabeus and so many of his heroic contemporaries were willing to lay down their lives on the battlefield because the Greeks, 150 years before Christ, were trying to force the Jews to eat pork. They refused. Many people were martyred. Many Jews today still refuse to eat meat unless it’s kosher, unless all the blood has dripped out. Jesus was saying that the food we eat ultimately can’t make us impure before God. In doing this, St. Mark comments, “He thus declared all foods clean.” This is something that would take even the disciples a long time to come to grips with: St. Peter, for example, needed a vision in Joppa to help him to recognize that Jesus was not asking that Jews follow the scribal dietary laws.

What does make us impure before God? Jesus says it’s “the things that come out from within,” and then he defines them: “Evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” It’s from the tree of the heart that either good fruit or bad fruit comes. And where a person’s treasure is, there will the heart be. Does the heart treasure God and the things of God or does it desire evil? God wants us not to have “hearts far from” him, but hearts that are fully united to him. The type of purity he cares about is a pure heart that leads to pure hands, to pure speech, to pure vision, to thoughts, words and deeds of pure love.

In the first reading, we see the beginning of an illustration of what happens when one’s heart is not purely united to the Lord. We see where sin comes from. In the account of our beginnings in the Book of Genesis, we see that God placed Adam in the garden and gave everything over to him, to cultivate and care for God’s creation. He gave him only one restriction: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” God didn’t place the tree there as bait to tri...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass in Thanksgiving to God for the Gift of Human Life

February 9, 2021

Gen 1:20-2:4, Ps 8, Mt 7:1-13

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.9.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s reading from the first chapter of the Bible, we come to one of the most important things ever said: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” We are made in God’s image and God ordered everything else in creation toward us.

* This is a truth that should first fill us with wonder. In the Responsorial Psalm, we see that astonishment, commenting on Creation in the Genesis narrative: “When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place,” the Psalmist prays, “What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him? You have made him [as your image] little less than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him rule over the works of your hands, putting all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, yes, and the beasts of the field, The birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, and whatever swims the paths of the seas.” We ought never to stop expressing our wonder not just at Creation in general but at how God made us in his image to exercise his dominion over creation!

* Secondly, this truth should drive us to unveil more and more the mystery it means.

* Over the course of centuries, for many the expression “imago Dei” meant two things that distinguished us from the rest of creation. We are rational; we can think like God. And we are free; we can choose like God. We are called, therefore, to think with the mind and thoughts of God and to choose the good as God always does. How often do we seek to purify our mind of earthliness so that we may “put on the mind of Christ” (Phil 2:5),  as St. Paul exhorts us in the second chapter of his Letter to the Philippians? How often do we seek to live according to the divine freedom, knowing that it is only in the truth that we will be set free (Jn 8:32) and that the purpose of our freedom is to love?

* St. John Paul II brought the notion of the image of God to greater light when he said that when we look at the Book of Genesis, we can see that to be made in the imago Dei is to exist in a loving communion of persons. God is Trinitarian. He lives in eternal communion.  He says in today’s text, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Jews reading this for centuries tried to come up with explanations as to why God spoke in the first person plural when in almost the entirety of the rest of the Hebrew Bible he spoke in first-person singular. When Jesus eventually came and revealed that He and the Father were one, that they would send us the Holy Spirit and then send us out to baptize in the name (not names) of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we began to understand better the meaning of the first person plural (even though there are three persons in one God). The second indication is what happened when God actually created man in his image: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” The eternal God is neither male nor female. Until the Incarnation, there was never a body. To create man in his own image male and female is an indication he was creating man to live a Trinitarian existence, to live in a loving communion of persons. Male and female, man and woman, are meant to live in a nuptial communion that is similar to the way the lo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Josephine Bakhita

February 8, 2021

Gen 1:1-19, Ps 104, Mk 6:53-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.8.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* After having completed a four-week meditation on the Letter to the Hebrews, by which we’re able to see everything in the light of God’s definitive Word, Jesus Christ, and learn how to keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, today we begin a study of the beginning of the Book of the Beginning — Genesis — that will accompany us until the beginning of Lent in nine days. It has an opportunity for us to “re-read” the beginning with the prism of what we have just learned in Hebrews. It’s also a chance for us to prepare for the holy season by which Jesus seeks not just to bring us back to Eden but forward to an even deeper type of bond with him.

* Genesis begins with a focus on the phases of Creation and how good it was. After the creation of light and its separation from darkness, after the creation of the sky and the earth, after the creation of the waters from land, after the creation of vegetation and fruit, after the creation of the Sun and the moon and the stars, Genesis says “God saw how good it was.” Tomorrow we’ll continue seeing this goodness in the creation of the creatures of the sea and the animals, which likewise were good, and arrive at the culmination of the human person whom God saw was “very good.” The goodness of creation leads us to exclaim in the Psalm, “May the Lord be glad in his works!” It ponders the earth, the ocean, the mountains, the streams, the wind, the mountains, the birds, the trees, and then exults, “How manifold are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you have wrought them all— the earth is full of your creatures; Bless the Lord, O my soul!” How important for us spiritually to enter into a hymn of praise for the essential goodness of creation.

* In the Gospel, however, we see the breakdown. It’s a corruption of that goodness we’ll see on Friday with the account of the original sin and Eve and Adam. Even though creation was ontologically good, moral evil entered. And that brought about a disharmony that was never originally intended. It partially ruptured the communion that was meant to exist between creatures and God, between creatures and each other, and within creatures themselves. That breakdown caused by sin was the source of the introduction of illnesses and what they lead to, death. We get a glimpse of that pain and suffering in the Gospel. As Jesus disembarked in Gennesaret, “people immediately recognized him. They scurried about the surrounding country and began to bring in the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. Whatever villages or towns or countryside he entered, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch only the tassel on his cloak.” Such enormous pain and suffering! It was like whole towns were hospitals. And they came to the Divine Physician. They must have heard about the miracle of the woman with the hemorrhage who was cured of her 12-year illness by touching the edge of his garment because St. Mark tells us that they were all trying to touch even the tassel of his cloak with faith and that as many as touched it were healed.

* There was a tremendous physical transformation that points to an even greater spiritual one. Jesus’ physical healings — as well as his preaching and all of his other miracles — were all signs of a deeper spiritual one he was accomplishing, the redemption of the world. This is something that should fill us with wonder and...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

February 6, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.6.21_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday when we will have a chance to examine the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry and get a glimpse of an ordinary day in his life. His priorities can help us examine our own, both with regard to how we’re receiving his work in our life as well as how we’re continuing his work.

* Jesus began this day by preaching for a long time in the synagogue on the Sabbath, which as any priest will tell you after a Sunday morning, must have been somewhat exhausting all-day work since people would return home normally only at sunset. Then he went to Simon’s house where he healed his mother-in-law.

* Then, after sundown, they brought to Jesus “all who were ill or possessed by demons.” St. Mark tells us that the “whole town was gathered around the door.” Jesus cured the sick and cast out demons. It was likely very grueling work, because in no part of the Gospel did Jesus ever do “general healing services,” but cured the ill or the possessed one-by-one so that he could establish a personal relationship with each grateful recipient and hopefully bring them from a physical cure to a far more important spiritual one. It was probably close to midnight by the time he finished. He arose the next morning, “very early before dawn,” and went to a deserted place to pray. St. Mark tells us that Simon and his companions “hunted” for Jesus, and when they found him said, “Everyone is looking for you.” Without question the hordes had brought many other of the sick and the possessed from surrounding regions to Jesus and were hoping for a sequel for what they had witnessed the night before.

* “Everyone is looking for you.” We might have expected that Jesus’ response would have been one of jubilation. After all, he would later say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will refresh you” (Mt 11:28).  He wanted people coming to him with their burdens. He wanted to give them refreshment. But Jesus, when told that everyone was looking for him, didn’t respond by saying, “Hallelujah!” Rather he said, much to their surprise, “Let us go on to the nearby villages, so that I may preach there also; for this purpose I have come.” Jesus had come to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. He probably realized in prayer that morning how urgent the task was for him to accomplish the mission the Father had given him. He probably grasped as well that the people were coming him not so much to receive what he wanted to give them, but to obtain from him what they themselves wanted. The crowds looked at him as a wonder-worker, as a powerful exorcist and an unbelievably effective and shockingly free physician. But Jesus had a different set of priorities than the crowds. He wanted them to accept him on his own terms, not theirs. He wanted them to come to him not principally as the doctor of their mortal bodies, but as the Savior of their immortal souls.

* Jesus’ priorities get us to focus, first, on ours with regard to him. Do we hunger for what hewants to give us or for what we want himto give us? Do we seek to accord our priorities with His, or His with ours? It’s still common today that many people, like those in today’s Gospel, come to the Lord mostly as a miracle worker,