Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

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

Solemnity of the Ascension, Year B

May 13, 2021

Acts 1:1-11, Ps 47, Eph 1:17-23, Mk 16:15-20

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.13.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily:  

* Today we can look at the three principal things that the Church normally marks on the Ascension, the three chief aspects of this mystery we ponder when we meditate on the second glorious mystery of the Rosary: the reality of heaven and Christ’s ascent there; his great commission to the apostles and the Church to continue his work; and the parting gift, the perpetual blessing he gives us to help us complete that mission and one day join him in heaven with many others, the Holy Spirit. And as the Ascension this year falls on May 13, the Feast of Our Lady of Fatima, we can examine how Our Lady helps us to live each of these three realities.

* The first reality we celebrate today is heaven. Today we celebrate the day Jesus returned home, to the place from which he came to earth to save us. He returned differently than he left, taking our human nature with him across the threshold of death into life. 43 days before his Ascension, during the Last Supper, Jesus told his closest followers about this connection between his ascension and our assumption. He said, “I am going to the Father, … the one who sent me” (Jn 14:17, 16:5). But he also said, “You have faith in God, have faith also in me. In my Father’s house there are many dwelling places. If it were not so, would I have told you that I go to prepare a place for you? And if I go and prepare a place for you, I will come again and will take you to myself, so that where I am, there you may be also.” Heaven is the place where Christ has prepared for us so that we might rejoice with him forever. “He mounts his throne to shouts of joy” and he wants us to be able to experience that joy. Jesus often spoke about the great joy of heaven. He took his contemporaries’ most popular celebration — an eight-day sumptuous wedding banquet — and used it time and again to describe the unending joy of the eternal wedding banquet (Mt 22, Mt 25, Lk 12, Rev 19, Rev 21). St. Paul and Isaiah affirm that “eye has not seen, ear has not heard, nor the human heart conceived what God has prepared for those who love him” (1 Cor 2:9; Is 64:4). This is what St. Paul prayed that the Ephesians realize in today’s second reading, “I pray that the God of our Lord Jesus Christ, the Father of glory, may give you a spirit of wisdom and revelation as you come to know him, so that, with the eyes of your heart enlightened, you may know what is the hope to which he has called you, what are the riches of his glorious inheritance among the saints.” Heaven is our hope. Heaven is our glorious inheritance. But it’s a hope and an inheritance to which we’re “called.” To obtain it, we have to respond to that call, by following Christ the Lord all the way, through a life of faith in him, in imitation of the love with which he loved us. And that begins with our desire. Our focus on Jesus’ Ascension, not just today but every few days when we pray the Glorious mysteries of the Rosary, is meant to stoke our desire. We heard St. Paul tell us on Easter Sunday: “If then you have been raised with Christ, seek the things that are above, where Christ is, seated at the right hand of God. Set your minds on things that are above, not on things that are on earth” (Col 3:1-2). We are called to seek the things that are above, to hunger for heaven, for God, for eternity. This Solemnity of the Ascension is meant to stoke our desire for Christ’s face, to see him with the eyes of our heart enlightened.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Memorial of SS. Nereus and Achilleus, St. Pancras, St. Leopoldo Mandic, Blessed Alvaro del Portillo

May 12, 2021

Acts 17:15.22-18:1, Ps 148, Jn 16:12-15

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.12.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel, on the eve of the “Decenarium of the Holy Spirit” that begins tomorrow on the Solemnity of the Ascension,  Jesus speaks to us about how the Holy Spirit “will guide you to all truth” because “I have much more to tell you, but you cannot bear it now.” Kindergarteners are not taught calculus, quantum physics or advanced semiotics for a reason, because they cannot handle it yet. There are various steps in learning and assimilation and God knows how he has made us. The transition from natural religion to the Covenants of the Old Testament was an enormous step in the learning curve; from Old Testament to New Covenant another. But that learning continues. It continued for the Church at the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, helping Christians not only to understand the significance of so much Jesus taught and did but to learn how to align their lives to that truth. That growth continues for each of us. The Holy Spirit continues to want to lead us to all truth, making explicit what was implicit in what has already been given and making vibrant what has remained dormant. Are we open to that continued formation?

* This is a key work of the Holy Spirit. St. John Paul II, in his encyclical Dominum et Vivificantem, he uses the expression “Spirit of Truth” 42 times and how the Holy Spirit helps us to know, love and live the truth another 56, far more than any other expression. In a relativistic age, and one desperate for a New Evangelization, St. John Paul II focused on the mission of the Holy Spirit with regard to the truth more than under any other title. He wrote there, “It becomes clear that this ‘guiding into all the truth’ is connected not only with the scandal of the Cross, but also with everything that Christ ‘did and taught.’ For the mystery of Christ taken as a whole demands faith, since it is faith that adequately introduces man into the reality of the revealed mystery. The guiding into all the truth is therefore achieved in faith and through faith: and this is the work of the Spirit of truth and the result of his action in man. Here the Holy Spirit is to be man’s supreme guide and the light of the human spirit.”

* We see the Holy Spirit’s work in and through St. Paul as together with the Spirit the Apostle sought to lead the Athenians from what they knew into something much deeper. He began with their religiosity, surrounded by the statues of all the pagan gods, and praised their wisdom in the statue dedicated to the god they didn’t know. The statue to the Unknown god comes from the time of Epimenides who, according to Athenian legend, had been brought by them from Crete to rescue Athens after one of the leading families had murdered someone at the altar in the temple and soon the city began to suffer from political strife, a plague and various sorts of pollution, all of which the Athenians understood as a curse. Epimenides suggested that there might be a god unknown to them who would be willing to help Athens if proper sacrifices were made to him, and so the Athenians built many altars and made many sacrifices and the city was saved. Epimenides as a poet had written, “They fashioned a tomb for you, holy and high one, Cretans, always liars, evil beasts, lazy gluttons. But you are not dead: you live and abide forever, for in you we live and move and have our being.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, New York, NY

Tuesday of the Sixth Week of Easter

May 11, 2021

Acts 16:22-34, Ps 138, Jn 16:5-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.11.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus says something truly shocking, something that is one of the most important things ever said about the Holy Spirit: “I tell you the truth, it is better for you that I go. For if I do not go, the Advocate will not come to you. But if I go, I will send him to you.” Jesus is basically declaring that if we have a choice between Him and the Holy Spirit, we should choose the latter. That’s how important he says the Holy Spirit is. The great joy is that we don’t have to have to choose between the two. It is crucial, however, for us to ponder the role of the Holy Spirit in the Christian life and to examine whether we’re docile to the help He wants to give us to live by faith.

* The Holy Spirit remains the “great unknown” not just in the life of so many of the Christian faithful. Next Monday we will encounter the scene in the Acts of the Apostles when St. Paul came to Ephesus and met some disciples. He asked, “Did you receive the Holy Spirit when you became believers?” They responded, “We have never even heard that there is a Holy Spirit.” Pope-emeritus Benedict, at World Youth Day in Australia in 2008, said, “The Holy Spirit has been in some ways the neglected person of the Blessed Trinity,” and confessed that it was only as a young priest teaching theology that he began not only to recognize the importance that the Holy Spirit should play in his life as a priest and professor but that he came to know him intimately. He added, “It is not enough to know the Spirit; we must welcome Him as the guide of our souls, as the ‘Teacher of the interior life’ who introduces us to the Mystery of the Trinity, because He alone can open us up to faith and allow us to live it each day to the full.” And we don’t have to be a member of the Charismatic Renewal to allow the Holy Spirit to become that teacher and guide. If we wish to understand the faith, if we wish to live it, if we wish to pass it on, we must allow ourselves to be led by the Holy Spirit, even if we, like Joseph Ratzinger, are beginning as adults. For us, the “great unknown” must become the “great known,” the teacher, the leader, the consoler, the advocate.

* The importance of the Holy Spirit in our life as Catholics cannot be overstated. Jesus tells us this in today’s Gospel when he emphasized that it was good that he left us because in comparison with the gift of His ongoing recognizably physical presence, the gift of the Holy Spirit’s presence in our life is more important. That’s how crucial the Holy Spirit is meant to be in our life as disciples and apostles. Benedict told the Church down under, “The Holy Spirit is the highest gift of God to mankind.”

* As Catholics, especially as we prepare for the decenarium of the Holy Spirit that will begin in two days on the Ascension, we need to ask ourselves how should we be seeking to grow in our docility to this highest gift of God?

* Jesus in the Gospel today says about the Holy Spirit that “when he comes he will convict the world in regard to sin and righteousness and condemnation: sin, because they do not believe in me; righteousness, because I am going to the Father and you will no longer see me; condemnation, because the ruler of this world has been condemned.” We learn three very important works of the Holy Spirit, among others:

* He will convict the world with regard to sin. Sin, Jesus says, is ultimately the failure to believe in him.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Sixth Week of Easter

Memorial of Saint Damien of Molokai

May 10, 2021

Acts 16:11-15, Ps 149, Jn 15:26-16:4

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.10.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus continues to teach us, in the continuation of his Last Supper Discourse in John 15, the means by which we will remain in him as branches on the vine and remain in his and the Father’s love by keeping his commandment to love others as he has loved us, to the point of laying down our life for them. On Saturday he told us that we would be persecuted and hated by all. In today’s Gospel, he says that we will be expelled from houses of worship and that people will kill us thinking that they’re doing a divine service. These will all be means to enhance our trust in him. He says that he has told us all of this — on the eve of his Crucifixion, but which the Church looks back on now in the light of the Resurrection — so that “when their hour comes you may remember that I told you” and “not fall away” out of fear. In the midst of those challenging words, he does give us an extraordinary remedy: God the Holy Spirit. “When the Advocate comes whom I will send you from the Father, the Spirit of truth who proceeds from the Father,” Jesus tells us, “he will testify to me. And you also testify, because you have been with me from the beginning.” We will not be orphans. We will be assisted by God himself to give a joint testimony of fidelity to Christ and enter into his faithful witness to the Father. This joint testimony, no matter the circumstances, is the heart of the Christian life.

* In the first reading, we see that witness taking place for the first time in Europe, as Paul, Silas, Timothy and Luke went to Philippi to proclaim where the Jews would assemble on the Sabbath when there was no Synagogue, by the river. Even though obviously none of those evangelists had been with Jesus physically “from the beginning” of his public ministry, they had been with him in a far more meaningful way, with him, the Word, from before the foundation of the world. He had them in mind from before the foundation of the world to receive Him within and to bring Him to the ends of the earth. And one of the Holy Spirit’s tasks was to remind them of everything Jesus had taught. Jesus, similarly, has had each of us in mind from that same beginning and the same Holy Spirit has been sent to us.

* There’s a beautiful and theologically very rich expression that St. Luke uses to describe Lydia who had come to the river that day from Thyatira. St. Luke tells us that she was a dealer in purple cloth, which meant she was very wealthy, because purple was pretty much restricted to the imperial family since purple dye was so costly to obtain, needing to be harvested one drop at a time from a toxic Aegean shellfish. Therefore, in Christianity, she would have had a lot to “lose” insofar as Christians were so generous in sacrificing what they had for the needs of the brothers and sisters. St. Luke tells us that “the Lord opened her heart to pay attention to what Paul was saying.” Not her ears, but her heart. It means she was interiorizing into the center of her personality what Paul was saying, that she was loving, willing and embracing what she was coming to know. The same Holy Spirit who was testifying with and through Paul and his companions was opening up her heart at the same time so that she would be able to receive the seed of the word on good soil and bear much fruit. Lydia heard with great attentiveness of heart,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, NY

Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B

May 9, 2021

Acts 10:25-26.34-35.44-48, Ps 98, 1 Jn 4:7-10, Jn 15:9-17

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.9.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* It is a wonderful joy, on this Mothers’ Day, to open the season of Masses at this Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs. As we pray with gratitude to God for all our mothers living or deceased through whose yes to life we were conceived, born, nourished, raised and nurtured in faith, we also thank God the Father for the Woman he chose to be the mother of Jesus and whom Jesus himself chose on Calvary to be our mother. Like Saint John at the foot of the Cross and beyond, here at this beautiful shrine, we gratefully receive anew the gift of the Mother who can the martyrs like Rene Goupil, Jean de Lalande and Isaac Jogues strong until death and can make young people like Kateri Tekakwitha seek to know and do the will of God in holiness all their days.

* Mother’s Day is one in which we contemplate the gift of love: unmerited, limitless, sacrificial, patient, kind, enduring, faithful, hopeful, truthful and joyful (see 1 Cor 13:4-7). And that contemplation necessarily brings us to the source of such love. St. John tells us in today’s second reading that motherly love, in fact all human love, comes from God. “In this is love,” he told the first Christians, “not that we have loved God, but that he has loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” He summons us, “Let us love one another, because love is of God. Everyone who loves is begotten of God and knows God.” All love essentially goes back to the one who told us through the prophet Isaiah that his love for us is greater than the combined love of all mothers for their old children. “Can a mother,” God asked, “forget her infant, be without tenderness for the child of her womb? Even should she forget,” he emphatically declared, “I will never forget you” (Is 49:15).

* And so today, we ponder not just the love of our moms, not just the love of our spiritual mother, Mary, Queen of Martyrs, but the far greater love of God that inspires and makes all love possible. And that brings us to today’s Gospel, which I think contain the most powerful words ever enunciated.

* Jesus tells us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us. Since as St. John tells us in the second reading, “God is love,” God wishes to bring us into his interpersonal, Trinitarian communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.

* We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I remember when I was a high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a Mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double windsor knot perfect, with every strand of hair shampooed and combed or gelled in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (B), Vigil

May 8, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.8.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into what I think may be perhaps the most consequential conversation of all time, in the Risen Lord Jesus’ words to the apostles that constitute our Gospel passage this Sunday.

* Jesus tells us, “Just as the Father loves me, so I love you.” We know that God the Father cannot possibly love God the Son more perfectly, or deeply, or better than he does. And Jesus is saying that he loves us just as much, just as profoundly, just as completely as God the Father loves him. This is the true foundation of the Christian life, to live in the love of God. God the Father so loved us that he gave his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. God the Son loved us by freely and lovingly giving that life in order to save ours. God the Holy Spirit is that love between the Father and the Son and hence, since Jesus loves us like the Father loves him, the Holy Spirit is, by application, mysteriously the love between Jesus and us. Since God is love, he wishes to bring us into that communion of love, and that’s what Jesus’ and the Holy Spirit’s missions seek to achieve.

* We all know how being loved can turn someone’s life right side up. I remember when I was a high school chaplain. Boys who used to come to high school with their shirts sloppy, their ties crooked, their hair a Mess, would all of a sudden come in with shirts and pants pressed, the double-windsor knot perfect, with every hair shampooed and coiffed in place. When I would note the positive change that had taken place within them and ask, “What’s her name?,” they would think I was a soul-reading genius. But what was going on was crystal clear. They had fallen in love and that love gave meaning to everything they did, including how they prepared for school. If this is what can happen with a teenage crush, imagine what is supposed to happen when God loves us permanently? If the words “I love you” can make a dramatic difference in someone’s existence, what about Jesus’ saying, “I love you just as the Father loves me?”

* In one of the most famous passages of his pontificate, Saint John Paul II stated, “Man cannot live without love. He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” If this is true about the human love we find in the family, in friendships, and in romantic relationships especially marriage, how much more is it true about the love of God? There’s a reason for this: we’re made in the image and likeness of God who is love, who exists in a loving communion of persons. If we don’t live in love, if we don’t dwell in a loving communion of persons, then we’re lost before God, before others, and within ourselves. That’s why Jesus says to us, emphatically, that he loves us, and that he loves us as purely and perfectly as the Father loves him.

* But the consequential conversation with Jesus doesn’t stop there. He tells us, “Remain in my love.” He knows that many of us run away from love in general and his love in particular. Burning love from someone else can make us feel uncomfortable because we don’t think we’re worthy of it, because we perhaps know that the only response to love is to love back and we fear we’re not ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

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

Friday of the Fifth Week of Easter

May 7, 2021

Acts 15:22-31, Ps 57, Jn 15:12-17

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.7.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Throughout this 15th chapter of St. John’s Gospel, recounting what Jesus said during the Last Supper, Jesus has been focusing on the type of communion he came into the world to bring about, communion with him and with others. He began with the image of the Vine and the Branches. Yesterday and today he has focused on how that ontological union with him (brought about by the sacraments) is meant to lead into a moral union, a union based on communion in his love.

* Yesterday he said the most important words ever uttered, that just as God the Father loves him, so he loves each of us individually. He calls us to remain in that love, to hunger for it, to choose it, and tells us the means by which we will is through keeping his commandments, the commandments that precisely train us to love God and love others. All the law and the prophets, all the commandments in other words, hang on the two-fold imperative to love God with all we are and to love our neighbor as ourselves. And he tells us that remaining in his love in this way is the path to true and unending happiness, so that Jesus’ joy may be in us and our joy complete.

* Today he specifies more clearly what his commandment is in which we are supposed to abide. He gives us “his” commandment, which he also calls “new.” It’s the summary of the Christian moral life. “This is my commandment: love one another as I have loved you.” Jesus loves us, he told us yesterday, as much as the Father loves him, which is a total, self-sacrificial love to the extreme. Jesus didn’t call us to love him as he loved us, but to love others at the level of total self-sacrificial love. Jesus wants us to be able to say to others in body language, “Just as Jesus has loved me, so I love you.” Jesus teaches us this same truth after the resurrection when he gives St. Peter three times to reconstitute his fidelity after his three fold denial. Jesus asks three times whether he loves him more than everything else and three times Peter replies that he does. Jesus, in response to each, doesn’t stop there in mutual love. He says, “Feed my sheep.” “Feed my lambs.” “Tend my sheep.” Peter’s love for Jesus would be shown in how he cares for those Christ has entrusted to him, both old (sheep) as well as young or vulnerable (lambs). And Jesus told Peter, using a euphemism for crucifixion, that when he would grow old, he would love the Lord and others in imitation of Christ. It’s the same way with all of us. Our love for the Lord will be shown by our love for others and not just by any old feelings of sympathy, but by our willingness to give our lives for others, which begins with giving our time, using our talents, and willingly putting others’ lives above our own. Three years ago, when this Gospel came up at daily Mass, Pope Francis made this point: “Jesus says something remarkable to us: ‘Greater love has no man than this, that a man lay down his life for his friends.’ Love always takes this path: to give one’s life. To live life as a gift, a gift to be given — not a treasure to be stored away. And Jesus lived it in this manner, as a gift. … We must not burn out life with selfishness.”

* Jesus tells us today that he has chosen us, he has given us the vocation, precisely to love in this way. “I have chosen you and appointed you to bear fruit, fruit that will last.” The fruit he is talking about are acts of Christ-like self-giving and the way we bear fruit is by attaching our...

Fr. Roger J. LandrySacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, New York, NYThursday of the Fifth Week of EasterMay 6, 2021Act 15: 7-21, Ps 96, Jn 15:9-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.6.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

Today in the Gospel Jesus says what I believe are the most important words in the history of the world. They’re important whenever anyone says them, but the fact that God himself said them in the way that he said them, and then put them into his own body language, makes them the most life-changing phrase ever: “I love you,” he tells us. We need to stop and ponder the reality of those words! “I love you.” But then Jesus puts them into a context that ought to astound us: “Just as the Father loves me, I love you.” The Father loves him perfectly, profoundly and intimately — and Jesus tells us that he loves us in that same way. And he doesn’t merely love us “all” in that way, but he loves each of us in that way, as St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Galatians, “He loved me and gave his life for me” (Gal 2:20).

Grasping this reality is essential not only for the Christian life but for human life. “Man cannot live without love,” St. John Paul II wrote in his first encyclical Redemptor Hominis. “He remains a being that is incomprehensible for himself, his life is senseless, if love is not revealed to him, if he does not encounter love, if he does not experience it and make it his own, if he does not participate intimately in it.” This is true for love in general. We need the love of family, the love of friends, the spousal love of a husband or wife (either human or mystical), the total self-giving love of someone who values us that much. Without it, we’re lost. Many people who don’t experience this love spend their lives looking for it in places they won’t find it. If they haven’t experienced the love of a mom or dad, they often get themselves into trouble seeking that love in relationships that will never truly substitute. If they’ve suffered violence in relationships that should have been loving, often they’ll get involved in lifestyles that will try to reconstruct the love that should have been present in the first place.

And what is true in terms of human love is also true in terms of divine. There are many people — and many Catholics — who have never really experienced the love of the Lord. Their notion of God is perhaps an angry God, or a distant, negligent God, or a God who is a stern taskmaster making sure they fulfill all their duties lest they be punished, or even an indulgent God who doesn’t care about them enough to concern himself with their self-destructive choices. They haven’t experienced a loving God. Many people are filled with a type of self-pity or self-hatred because they have never experienced God’s love and often don’t believe they are lovable by God or anyone else, that they can never please him, that they’re constantly letting him, themselves and everyone else down. Today Jesus says to them, and to all of us, “I love you … just as my Father loves me!” And he shows them how much he loves them by telling them that he will lay down his life for them out of agapic philia, which we will have in tomorrow’s continuation of today’s Gospel: “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.” He will love them to the extreme of his self-giving.

After Jesus says the most important words in history he then gives us the most important command of the Christian life. “Remain in my love.” As much as he loves us, he knows that many of us run away from that love. That type of burning love can make us uncomfortable because we don’t think we’re worthy of it,

Fr. Roger J. LandryVisitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanWednesday of the Fifth Week of EasterMay 5, 2021Acts 15:1-6, Ps 122, Jn 15:1-8

 

To listen to today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.5.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

Today in the Acts of the Apostles, we come to one of the most pivotal events not only in the history of the early Church but the history of the Church, period. It’s the Council of Jerusalem, the first such Council in the history of the Church. It came about because “there arose no little dissension and debate” after some Christians coming from Judea were telling the Gentile Christians in Antioch, “Unless you are circumcised according to the Mosaic practice, you cannot be saved.” The question was far broader than merely of circumcision, but about the ground of salvation, the way we relate to God, the role of the Mosaic law in the faith and the manner in which Jewish and Gentile Christians were to behave with regard to each other. So Paul, Barnabas and others went up to Jerusalem to confer with the apostles and priests about it.

St. Paul was once a Pharisee and believed that salvation happened through rigid observance of the Mosaic Law in all its details. But after he was converted on the road to Damascus, converted from a false notion of the holy life to a true one, he began to see that one is saved by Christ and not by our own actions obeying all 613 commands and all the other precepts of the Mosaic law. We’re saved by God’s mercy rather than by our merit. He would spend most of his apostolic life proclaiming this truth. He wrote two letters (one to the Romans and another to the Galatians) explaining in detail how Christ, rather than the law, is our Savior, and he spent parts of two other letters (Colossians and Philippians) talking about how baptism rather than circumcision enters us into the life of faith and the Covenant with God. He brought all of these inspirations to the Council in Jerusalem and we’ll see later how the Holy Spirit led the early Church to the solution with regard to the Gentiles.

We learn in this scene two essential truths. First that we’re saved by God’s action to which we freely respond, not principally by our own action. The Mosaic law functions to help us prepare to receive the fullness of that saving action in Christ, when he comes to bring us fully into communion with God through his passion, death and resurrection and through the sacraments he instituted so that we might enter into his life. Second, we learn how to relate to each other. One of the reasons why this dispute between Jews and Gentiles was such a big deal was not simply the question of whether Gentiles needed to be good Jews before they could be good Christians, but it was because stricter Jews, like the Pharisees, had no interaction with Gentiles. They avoided them as if they were lepers. They didn’t eat with them. They didn’t enter into their houses. That was the background as to why the Hellenist widows were being neglected in the daily distribution of the bread, because many of the Jewish Christians would just keep their cultural tradition of complete separation. That obviously couldn’t work in the communion of the Church. The Council of Jerusalem was crucial so that Christians would live in communion with each other, which is what Jesus intended from the beginning, that we would be one as he and the Father is one.

And that brings us to the Gospel, where Jesus gives us the powerful and beautiful image of the Vine and the Branches, which is an image of the type of unity we’re all supposed to have in Jesus, an image of how our works are supposed to flow from our saving bond with him rather than detached from him and his redeeming grace,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Easter

May 4, 2021

Acts 14:19-28, Ps 145, Jn 14:27-31

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.4.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

One of the greatest paradoxes in the Christian faith, one of the most important things for us to grasp and live, involves the reality of God’s peace in the Christian life, especially in times of persecution. Jesus tells us in the Gospel today and reiterates for us in every Mass, “Peace I leave with you, my peace I give to you.” He was saying these words to the apostles just hours before he would be arrested and on the vigil of his being massacred by Roman soldiers. He wanted them to remain at peace during all that would transpire, just as he would be at peace. At the beginning of this discourse, which we heard on Friday, Jesus said, “Do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God. Have faith also in me.” Today he repeats those words, “Do not let your hearts be troubled or afraid.” He reiterates that he is going away but will come back and has given them these words of peace before everything would transpire “so that when it happens you may believe.” Now that it has happened, and the Church reflects on these words in the light of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead, it’s important to check how deeply we believe in these words about peace (and everything else) Jesus tells us. He reminds them that the “ruler of this world is coming” but clarifies that “he has no power over me.” Jesus will allow everything that will occur to happen to him so that the world will know “that I love the Father and that I do just as the Father has commanded me.” Jesus peacefully underwent even his crucifixion in order to show his love for the Father, because real love is shown in trial.

Jesus was able to say these words because, as we’ve been talking about all Easter season long, by his resurrection he would show that not even a brutal crucifixion is enough to take one’s peace away, that there’s nothing truly to be afraid of, that in the end God triumphs and all of us who live and die in him will share that victory. That’s the ultimate ground for the peace he gives us and leaves with us. Our peace is grounded in our living relationship with him, the Prince of Peace. It is made possible by the peace treaty he signs in his own blood with God the Father through his mercy. It’s made possible by the gift of the Holy Spirit that he and the Father send. We see both fully on display on Easter Sunday evening when Jesus enters the closed doors of the Upper Room, twice wishes his startled followers peace, and then says “Receive the Holy Spirit” and “those whose sins you forgive are forgiven.” Pope Francis said several years ago in a homily in the Vatican that the peace Jesus leaves and gives is fundamentally the Holy Spirit, remembering that when Jesus in the Upper Room wished the apostles “peace be with you” he then breathed on them and said “Receive the Holy Spirit.” The peace that Jesus leaves with us, the peace that the world can’t give or rob, is the peace that flows from our grounding our entire life on God. If God is our treasure, if God is our foundation, if Jesus is our way, truth and life, if we’ve constructed our existence on him the cornerstone, if we are living by the Holy Spirit, then persecution, trouble, or even crucifixion can’t take that peace away but rather can confirm it.

If this is true, why is there such lack of peace in the world, in our country, in so many of our families, religious communities, parishes and dioceses, even in our own hearts? That’s because the vast majority of people haven’t tr...