Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Chapel of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Agnes, Virgin and Martyr

January 21, 2021

Heb 7:25-8:6, Ps 40, Mk 3:7-12

 

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 in the Gospel we see something on which we can never focus enough: the great attractiveness of the Lord Jesus. St. Mark tells us that such a large crowd of people were following Jesus that he needed to have a boat ready to push a little bit away from the shore so that the people wouldn’t crush him. They were coming from Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the Transjordan, Tyre and Sidon. For those who don’t know the geography of the Holy Land very well, those locations might just be names. But Galilee was in the north and Judea in the south of the Holy Land. Idumea was even further to the South. The Transjordan was the pagan inhabited region on the eastern side of the Jordan River and Sea of Galilee. Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities way to the north along the Mediterranean. To get a sense of the message St. Mark was communicating it would be as if Jesus were here in Manhattan and that people were walking to see him from Maine, Connecticut and as far away as Washington, North Carolina, Portland, Maine and the Outer Long Island, and it wasn’t just Catholics coming but also atheists, secularists, and those of other religions. They were all pressing upon Jesus, who was curing and teaching. Even the demons couldn’t resist. When they saw him, they fell down before him — in other words, in begrudging adoration — and shouted, “You are the Son of God.”

* We need constantly to ask whether Jesus maintains this attraction for us and others. There are many today for whom Jesus has become a little like Abraham Lincoln, a revered figure of the past but not someone with whom one has a personal relationship. Just like many won’t make the sacrifice to go to Springfield, Illinois, or to the Lincoln Memorial in DC, so many won’t even make the effort to go to Church to spend an hour with him in adoration or, sometimes, even go to meet him at Mass. Many say they believe in him, but what they likely mean is that they believe he existed; they don’t really live by faith, committing themselves to him and being drawn fundamentally not by duty but by fascination, by love, by attraction. Those who are fascinated by Jesus will hunger for his word and become men and women whose lives are drenched by the daily dew of the Gospel. Those who are attracted by Jesus will come to him in adoration and say, as Samuel said on Sunday, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” Those who truly believe in what Jesus has said and done and who love him will seek to come to meet him at Mass every day they can and in confession to say sorry as often as they sin. Those who take Jesus seriously will, in union with him, go out as Good Samaritans to care for a wounded world. Jesus has never lost his attractiveness. He’s as attractive today as ever. But many times our lives, our hearts, our minds, are so saturated with worldly cares and anxieties, with lesser hopes, with false gods that we place first in our lives, that the type of wonder, fascination, love and attraction we’re supposed to have toward Jesus is extinguished partially or fully. Today is a great day to ponder anew the real person of Jesus who is alive in the Sacraments, who speaks to us in his Word and in prayer, who is present in his image in others, especially in the needy, and to make the effort — even the crazy effort of walking from our own Tyre or Idumea to the Sea of Galilee — to draw close to him.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

January 16, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.16.21_Landry_ConCon.m4a

 

The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, in which he will help us enter into the inner nature of the Christian calling. With the various convulsions and confusions happening in the United States, it is urgent for Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, to live out our Christian vocations to the full, and truly become the salt of the earth, the light of the world and the leaven our beloved country needs. And it’s crucial for us to ponder with Jesus today the three main stages of growth in any Christian vocation and to mature to full stature in him.

* The first stage of this divine drama is curiosity, wonder, and a eventually a certain amazement. When St. John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!,” two of those who had been following and helping John the Baptist — Andrew, and “another disciple” who very likely was John the Evangelist — were obviously intrigued. As good Jews, they knew the significance of the Paschal Lamb from the Passover rite to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt, which they reenacted each year. When John pointed out Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” they couldn’t help but be curious. So they did what curious people ordinarily do: they tried to find out more. Enquiring minds want to know. They began to follow Jesus, but they, being fishermen, were not particularly adept as private investigators. Jesus, aware that they were on his tail, turned around and asked them “What are you looking for?” Caught off guard, they asked, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Jesus didn’t respond with a direct answer to their small talk. He did not want to meet them at the level of curiosity; on the other hand, he didn’t want to kill that curiosity either, by admitting what he would say later, that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20). So he responded by trying to bring them from their curiosity to something higher: “Come and see!,” he said. He invited them to follow him more closely and to spend time with him.

* That brings us to the second stage of the growth in vocation: to come to be with Jesus, to follow him to where he is. We call this stage discipleship. “Disciple” is the Greek word for “student.” We come to Jesus the Master to learn from him. We come not just to learn facts from him or other information that we then ignore or forget later. We come to him to learn how to live, how to die, and how to live forever. At Jesus’ invitation, Andrew and John came and saw his homeless mansion. St. John gives us a very interesting detail (which is one of the reasons why he was almost certainly the “other disciple” he names, because it would have been hard for him to know it otherwise): “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” This detail shows us first how much of an impression that meeting with Jesus had in his life that he would never forget the precise time he met Jesus for the first time. It also shows us that this meeting wasn’t brief. Scholars convincingly have shown, based on the text of St. John, that it was probably a Friday when this encounter happened, and once Jews reached about 4:00 pm, the Sabbath would begin and travel would be prohibited. So it’s likely that Andrew and John got to spend not just an hour or two with Jesus but a little more than a full day with Jesus, peppering him with questions, answering his questions, laughing, praying,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Baptism of the Lord (B)

January 9, 2021

 

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

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The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord.

* The Advent Season, as you remember, always features John the Baptist at the Jordan calling us to conversion, to make straight the paths for Christ to come to us. The Christmas season finishes with the feast of the Lord’s baptism, in which Jesus, at the end of his hidden life, brings to fulfillment what John was prophesying by his deeds. John had foretold Jesus’ eventual coming, promising, as we will hear in the Gospel, “One mightier than I is coming after me. … I have baptized you with water; he will baptize you with the Holy Spirit.” And so it happened that at the end of decades of hidden life, Jesus’ full identity was revealed at the Jordan when the Holy Spirit descended upon him and God the Father spoke from heaven saying, “You are my beloved Son, with you I am well pleased!” There, Jesus received a baptism and another baptism — and more significant and efficacious one — was announced. The baptism he received from John — like all of the other baptisms John was doing — was merely a sign of repentance as Jesus, who came to the world to take away the sins of the world, foreshadowed in the waters of the Jordan what he would later accomplish in the baptism of blood on Calvary. This is the baptism Jesus inaugurated at the Jordan, when he by his own baptism made the waters of baptism capable of delivering on what they signified: not just representing the need for the forgiveness of sins, but actually forgiving those sins. This is the baptism that Jesus, in his valedictory address immediately before ascending into heaven, gave as his “great commission” to the disciples, whom he entrusted with the completion of his own salvific mission: “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go therefore and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:18-20).

* Countless generations before us put those words into action and eventually each one of us was brought to that saving stream of life-giving water, where Christ, through a minister, cleansed us of our sins and filled us with God’s own life. On the day of our baptism, God claimed us as his own; we were made members of Christ’s own body (1Cor 12:12ff) we entered into his death and own risen life (Rom 6:3-5); the Holy Spirit came down upon us and made us each a “temple of the Holy Spirit” (1Cor 6:19); God the Father lovingly adopted us as his beloved children and inaudibly but truly said of us what he said of Christ, “You are my beloved son, you are my much-loved daughter, with whom I am well-pleased.”

* The key for us, though, is not to forget who we truly are. Pope St. Leo the Great, in his 5th-century homily for the Christmas season that comes to a close on Sunday, exhorts us to live up to the identity we receive in baptism. St. Leo urges us: “Christian, remember your dignity! Now that you share in God’s own nature, do not return by sin to your former base condition. Bear in mind who is your head and of whose body you are a member. Do not forget that you have been rescued from the power of darkness and brought into the light of God’s kingdom. Through the Sacrament of Baptism you have become a temple of the Holy Spirit.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Joseph Church, Farmington, Missouri

Nuptial Mass for Brent Cunningham and Emily Damba

January 2, 2021

Song of Songs 2:8-10.14.16; 8:6-7, Ps 34, Rom 12:1-2.9-18, Jn 17:20-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.2.21_Cunningham_Damba_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

A Marriage Not Just in Farmington, but in Bethlehem

Today we are marking the ninth day of Christmas and we cannot help but remember, as we look at the beautiful Christmas crèche, that when God took on our humanity so that we might participate in his divinity, when he came — as the first reading prophesied — “springing across the mountains, leaping across the hills” in order to say to the human race, “Arise, my beloved, my beautiful one and come!,” he deliberately chose to do so within a family. He was conceived and born within a family of an already committed husband and wife. He could have come as a 30-year-old adult, or a teenager, or a 90-year-old. He could have chosen to be born of a single mom, or raised by two bachelors or two girl friends, or some other arrangement. He chose, however, to be born within a family comprised by a marriage of a man and a woman. Why? Precisely in order to redeem the family and make the family an instrument of salvation and sanctification. The family, made in the image of God, is meant to be the world’s greatest sign of God as a communion of persons in love, a living representation of the loving union for which Jesus prayed in the Gospel we just heard, a tangible reminder of the love that exists between Christ and his Bride the Church.

That’s why it’s so beautiful and important, Brent and Emily, that you chose to get married within the short Christmas season. Because of that decision, everyone of your anniversaries, like your wedding day, will be marked by poinsettias and Christmas lights, by praesepios and mistletoes, and perhaps, as we’ve experienced over the last couple of days, by snow, ice and cold. But much like Joseph, Mary and the infant Jesus huddled together in love in the cave of Bethlehem, all the elements of the Christmas season including the weather will be an opportunity for you and, we pray, the family with which God blessed you, to draw closer in the domestic Church the Lord is making of you here and now.

And so today in this beautiful Church of St. Joseph, within the Year of St. Joseph to mark the 150th anniversary of his being named patron of the universal Church, during a nuptial Mass in which after Holy Communion you will consecrate yourselves in a particular way to the Blessed Virgin Mary as Queen of the Family, and as Jesus is preparing to make of your love through the Sacrrament of Matrimony something sacred and sanctifying, it is fitting that we ponder a little the lessons you and every couple can learn from the Holy Family of Jesus, Mary and Joseph.

Saint John Paul II wrote in his beautiful document on the family 40 years ago, “Through God’s mysterious design, it was in that family that the Son of God spent long years of a hidden life. It is therefore the prototype and example for all Christian families. … Its life was passed in anonymity and silence in a little town in Palestine. It underwent trials of poverty, persecution and exile. It glorified God in an incomparably exalted and pure way. And it will not fail to help Christian families-indeed, all the families in the world-to be faithful to their day-to-day duties, to bear the cares and tribulations of life, to be open and generous to the needs of others, and to fulfill with joy the plan of God in their regard” (Familiaris Consortio, 86). Thanks to the cooperation of Mary and Joseph,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany (B)

January 2, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.2.21_Landry_ConCon.m4a

 

The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, his “manifestation” to all the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi coming from afar.

* The Lord’s epiphany was also an epiphany of the men whom tradition has always called “wise,” as essential aspects of their true character was revealed. It’s key for us to ponder the response of the wise men, go on pilgrimage with them to Bethlehem, and learn from them invaluable lessons about how we’re called to relate to the coming of God into the world. As we are just after the first of the year, the lessons that we learn from this feast can easily turn into New Year’s Resolutions to help make this new year a true year of the Lord. This Sunday we can ponder seven lessons.

* The first thing we learn from the wise men is the importance of seeking God.

* When they saw the star at its rising, they not only interpreted that God was trying to communicate something to them in general, but that God was specifically heralding the birth of the newborn King in the east, who would be a universal king. The stars as we know were incredibly important to ancients. 2000 years ago, in the deserts of the Middle East and on the seas, people were highly dependent on the fixed stars in the sky as references for their direction. They firmly believed that God had made them this way for that reason. Whenever anything happened in the sky that was new — like the appearance of a comet, or meteor shower, or a planet’s or star’s shining more brightly — the ancients thought that it had to bear some message from God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. When they saw a star at its rising, they didn’t respond as curious astrologers but as those who hungered to find what they sought. Led by the star, and their simple faith in its meaning, the wise men went on a journey toward the Holy Land. We don’t know how long their pilgrimage took, but the Gospel gives us indications that it wasn’t brief. After Herod asked them the exact time of the appearance of the star, and then, a short time later, after they did not return to him, he proceeded to kill every boy in Bethlehem under two years of age. So the time of their preparation and the journey to get there probably took 18-24 months. Whether they walked or had the help of animals, we don’t know, but they came. The made a journey of many months each way because they believed God was speaking to them through the star.

* Do we search for God as ardently as they did? .

* The second thing the wise men show us is that the life of faith is a pilgrimage.

* The wise men were ready to move. Even though they must have had good lives where they were since they could afford a long journey and precious gifts at their arrival, they accounted being with the newborn universal king more important than staying where they were. They were willing to leave everything behind and make a long, difficult journey, following the star they had seen in the East.

* Are we ready to make the continuous journey of faith, a spiritual pilgrimage?

* Third, they show us that this pilgrimage of life is not one that we’re supposed to make alone.

* The wise men didn’t journey solo. They walked together. They knew that it order to make the destination they needed ea...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Mass of December 29, Fifth Day in the Octave of Christmas

Memorial of St. Thomas Becket, Martyr

December 29, 2020

1 John 2:3-11, Ps 96, Lk 2:22-35

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.29.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today, on the fifth day of Christmas, the Church gives us what happened on the 40th day after Jesus’ birth, his presentation in the temple. There Simeon, moved by the Spirit, whose whole life was an Advent for the long-awaited Messiah, encountered him. And when he embraced the Anointed Child in his arms, he called him, a “light to reveal you [God] to the nations and the glory of your people Israel.” Jesus came as “light of the human race” (Jn 1:4), as the “refulgence of eternal light” (Wis 7:26) and the “refulgence of [God’s] glory” (Heb 1:3). This was indeed good news of great joy for all the people, but at the same time some treated this gift as bad news of great foreboding. As St. John would say, “The light came into the world but people preferred darkness to light” (Jn 3:19). The glory of God took on our flesh but people were seeking their own glory rather than God’s and God’s glory might get in the way. That’s why as soon as Simeon testified that his eyes has seen God’s salvation in the one named “God saves” (Jesus), as soon as he had said he was God’s light and glory, he turned to say to Mary, “This child is destined for the fall and the rise of many in Israel and to be a sign that will be contradicted… so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” The response to Jesus’ light and glory would unveil what was in people’s hearts. Even though Jesus had come to save everyone, not everyone would accept that gift. Simeon said that rather than everyone’s following and echoing Jesus’ word, many would contradict what he said in words and in body language. He would become the cause of the “ruin” and the “resurrection” of many, depending upon their response to Jesus’ word, his light, his glory, and his offer of salvation. And so it’s important for us to examine during this Christmas octave what the response of our heart is to Jesus.

* St. John in the first reading helps us to do so concretely. Throughout his first letter, St. John calls Jesus the “light” and summons us to live in the light and walk in the light. St. John describes three stages of the incarnate Jesus’ progressive illumination in our lives. At one level, they all say essentially the same thing about the type of communion Christ seeks to form with us; but on another, they go progressively deeper.

* The first level has to do with God’s word, his commandments, his truth, which are a light for our steps and a lamp for our soul. St. John says, “The way we may be sure that we know Jesus  is to keep his commandments.  Whoever says, ‘I know him,’ but does not keep his commandments is a liar, and the truth is not in him. But whoever keeps his word, the love of God is truly perfected in him.” If we’ve become one with God, we’ll become one with his word, with his will, with the Truth he enfleshes. To know Jesus Christ is to become united with him in doing the will of God, which is fleshed out in the commandments, in the word of God, in what Jesus has taught, what the prophets taught in anticipation of him, what the apostles have taught in application of his life and lessons. Do we see God’s word, do we view the commandments as God’s light and glory, do we allow ourselves to experience Jesus’ resurrection through conforming our life to this truth, or do we contradict the teaching of the Lord conceptually by saying God is wrong or existentially by living accord...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family (B)

December 26, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.26.20_Landry_ConCon.m4a

 

The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Family.

* On Friday we celebrated Christmas, which is first and fundamentally the celebration of how God so loved the world and every human being that he took on human nature himself so that he might fully restore us to the divine image and likeness. The priority of Christmas is always on God’s coming into our world and our following the Shepherds, the Wisemen, the angels and the animals to adore him. We make a spiritual pilgrimage to Bethlehem and, filled with awe, praise and thank God for the greatest of all gifts. This year, in the midst of the pandemic and all of its collateral hardships and losses, we recognize our need for God even more and we are filled with gratitude that God-with-us, Emmanuel, has not left us alone, but has entered our reality in order to fill our darkness with his light and even death with life.

* To celebrate the feast of Christmas well, however, we also need to look at how we receive the gift of God. That’s why the Church always has us celebrate the Solemnity of the Holy Family on the Sunday within the Octave of Christmas, because we see in the Holy Family of Joseph and Mary how to respond to the gift of God, not just as individuals but in the communion of our own family, of the family of the Church, and, even more broadly, in the human family.

* It’s highly significant that when the Son of God became man, when the Word became flesh, he chose to be conceived and born within a family of an already committed husband and wife. He didn’t choose to come as a 30-year-old adult, or a teenager, or an 80 year old. He didn’t choose to be born of a single mom, or raised by two men or two women, or some other arrangement. He chose to be born within a family … precisely in order to redeem the family. The family is always in need of redemption. We see with the first family of Adam and Eve how the devil succeeded in separating husband and wife from God and from each other, and we see the immediate consequences of the devil’s work in the next generation when Cain slew his brother Abel. Because the family is meant to be the world’s greatest image of God as a communion of persons in love, the devil never ceases to go after the family. We see it in how Herod sent his henchmen to try to assassinate the baby Jesus, terrorizing not only the Holy Family but all the families of ancient Bethlehem.

* Surveys across the globe have shown that the devil has been rather effective in his attack on the family. During the pandemic, while some families have had the beautiful opportunity to spend far more time together, not just with each other but in prayer to God, many others have been attacked by the evil one, leading to much higher rates of divorce, domestic violence and other problems.

* We can spend many homilies focusing on the problems confronting the family today, but it’s more important to consider how God wants to strengthen the family. The feast of the Holy Family allows us to reflect together on the purpose of the family, what it means to be a husband and father, a wife and mother, a child and brother or sister. The family has a purpose in God’s plan; it’s meant to be a school of love, a domestic Church, a gift of God to help all of the members of the family grow into the realization of who God created each of them to...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Mass for December 24

December 24, 2020

2 Sam 7:1-5.8-12.14.16, Ps 89, Lk 1:67-69

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.24.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* The essence of the human response to the Christmas mystery is to get ready to respond to what Zechariah calls the “tender compassion of our God,” the mercy he promised to the Jews through so many covenants, the mercy that would dawn for Zechariah in Jesus in the womb in his own house, the mercy that his own son John the Baptist would announce, “salvation through the forgiveness of their sins.” On this last day of Advent, we enter into this mystery of God’s merciful action, as John the Baptist his Son, even at eight days old, completes through his father’s words the task of making straight the paths for us to embrace our Merciful Savior.

* In today’s first reading, a millennium before the angels would sing “Hark!” in Bethlehem, King David tells the prophet Nathan that he is intending to build a temple, a fitting house for the Lord, asking Nathan to confirm that that would be pleasing to God. Nathan’s first reply was simply to have David go for it, that of course such a construction project would please God. But the Lord came to Nathan and told him to return to David saying that rather than have David build a house for the Lord, the Lord himself would mercifully establish a house for David, saying, “I will up your heir after you, sprung from your loins, and I will make his Kingdom firm. I will be a father to him, and he shall be a son to me. Your house and your Kingdom shall endure forever before me; your throne shall stand firm forever.” One-thousand years later, God would make good on that promise. When the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary, he said, “Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end.” The Lord had spent a millennium preparing to give us that gift! David intended to do something for God and God far outdid David’s intended generosity.

* At the time of Christmas, those of us who remember that Jesus is the reason for the season, often make all types of good plans and resolutions about what we will give to God. We imitate the Shepherds in going with haste to the manger. We emulate the Magi in giving the Lord the best we have and falling down before him in prayerful homage. We model ourselves on Mary and Joseph in loving him. We echo the angels in announcing him. We strive to make loving crèche displays in our homes and convents and Churches as a sign of our loving expectation, receptivity and response in the temple we have become through baptism. But to all of this work, God says to us as he said to David, “Should you build me a house to dwell in?” God, in response builds us a house, builds us a dwelling place in him, a dwelling that will be secure forever. Christ has come in order to build that house so that where he is we may be with him (Jn 14:1-6). And the house he builds for us is even greater than the house he builds for David. Jesus would say 30 years later that John the Baptist was the greatest born of woman but the least in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than he. The Lord wants to build us something even greater than what he did for David. The Messiah and Son of God doesn’t descend from us according to the flesh, but by baptism he makes us spiritual sons not of an earthly King but of the King of Kings.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Mass of December 23

December 23, 2020

Mal 3:1-4.23-24, Ps 25, Lk 1:57-66

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.23.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* In today’s final O Antiphon, we turn to Jesus and pray, “O Emmanuel, rex et legisfer noster, espectatio gentium et salvator earum: veni ad salvandum nos, Domine Deus noster,” “O Emmanuel, king and lawgiver, expectation and Savior of the nations, come and save us, Lord our God.” God-with-us comes to rule us, to show us how to love God and others, as the fulfillment of our longings for salvation. And in today’s readings we sense not only his proximity but what he will do when at last he comes.  “Lift up your heads and see: your Redemption is near at hand,” we pray in the Responsorial Psalm. We lift our heads, our hearts, our hands and our voices, because God is coming to be with us to redeem us in his kingdom and through his two-fold law of love.

* We see two aspects of this redemption in the readings today. The first is purification. The Prophet Malachi tells us that the Messiah — “the Lord whom you seek” who would “suddenly … come to the temple” — would be “like a refiner’s fire, … refining and purifying silver. … He will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or silver that they may offer due sacrifices to the Lord.” Jesus’ essential work in us is to purify the treasure we hold in clay vessels (2 Cor 4:7). That process of purification is implicitly alluded to in today’s Gospel scene. At a superficial level, the reason why we have the birth and naming of St. John the Baptist two days before Christmas is that, historically, it preceded the birth of Christ, and since December 17, we have been traversing all of the proximate historical events of that first Advent. But the birth and naming of the precursor both point to the birth and naming of the one John came to announce, Jesus. John’s Mission was to purify, to help the people prepare the path for the Messiah to come, who would say at the Jordan, “Even now the ax lies at the root of the trees. Therefore every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. I am baptizing you with water, for repentance, but the one who is coming after me is mightier than I. I am not worthy to carry his sandals. He will baptize you with the holy Spirit and fire. His winnowing fan is in his hand. He will clear his threshing floor and gather his wheat into his barn, but the chaff he will burn with unquenchable fire” (Mt 3:10-12).

* The second aspect of redemption is intergenerational love. Malachi announces the mission of John the Baptist, the new Elijah, and the Messiah to whom he would point. About John, God says, “Lo, I am sending my messenger to prepare the way before me … to turn the hearts of the fathers to their children, and the hearts of the children to their fathers.” The mission of the precursor was to prepare the way and the day of the Lord, who would seek to reunite us as one family. Malachi talks about intergenerational reunion that begins not just with dry duties of familial piety and an extrinsic obedience to the fourth commandment, but something altogether full of love, that the hearts of parents and the hearts of kids would be turned lovingly toward each other. That’s one of the things that the Lord wants to have happen at every Christmas, that children, parents, grandparents, great grandparents, extended families all come together to be reunited in worshipping God-with-us. We know that the disunity that happens in families occurs because of sin,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Mass for December 22

December 22, 2017

1 Sam 1:24-28, 1 Sam 2:1.4-8, Lk 1:46-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.22.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* For me, the most evocative phrase of the second phase of Advent is a line we pray in the Advent Preface the Church prays on Gaudete Sunday and at all of the Masses between December 17 and 24: “The Virgin Mother longed for him with love beyond all telling.” Advent is a season of longing, of desire, and no one shows us that desire better than Mary, not only as Daughter Zion summing up in herself the longings of the Jewish people across the centuries awaiting the coming of the Messiah, but also as the Mother chosen by God the Father to conceive and bear that Messiah, that Son of the Living God. So many first-time moms are bursting with excitement for the birth of their child. Mary’s longing was, the Preface reminds us, beyond all description. She wants to help us enter into that holy longing.

* Today’s O Antiphon is a commentary on Advent longing. The Church prays,  O Rex gentium et desideratus earum, lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum: veni et salva hominem, quem de limo formasti. “O King and Desired One of the Nations, O Cornerstone who makes one from both [who unites the house of Israel with all the nations]: come and save the human person whom you formed from the clay.” In this O Antiphon we first make explicit what is implicit in the O Adonai of December 18 when we refer to Christ not only as the “leader of the house of Israel” who gave the Israelites the law, but also the “Adonai” or Lord who spoke as Yahweh (I am who am, the God of every being) to Moses in the burning bush. Jesus is king of all nations, not just Israel, and he comes to unite Israel with all of the nations in the worship of the one true God as one family. He is the Desideratus gentium, the Desired One of the Nations, who implanted within us a holy longing for him and for the redemption he alone brings. And we pray in this O Antiphon for him to fulfill this Mission. Just as he is the creator of us all, having breathed into our common ancestors at the beginning of time the breath of life, our soul, so he wants to remake us and reunite all of us he formed from the clay as one family.

* Today we see what’s supposed to happen with the soul he has breathed into us. It shows us what our response is supposed to be when God fulfills our longing for him with love beyond all telling. We’re called to burst with praise and thanksgiving. Mary shows us this in her famous Magnificat, when she exclaims, “My soul proclaims the greatness of the Lord; my spirit rejoices in God my Savior.” Our souls are meant to magnify God and God, in fulfilling our desires, has given us so many reasons for soul-bursting praise. The Almighty has done great things for us and holy is his name! At the same time, we see in Mary’s Magnificat, that in order to praise and thank God aright, we need to experience longing for him and for the gifts that come from his generous hand. Mary describes how God looks on us in our lowliness, how he defends the innocent, the weak and the small with the strength of his arm, how he lifts us up the lowly, how he fills the hungry with good things, how he routinely and mercifully comes to the rescue of Israel. Each of these situations — poverty, hunger, weakness, even desperation — increases our recognition of our need to be saved and stokes our longing. And then when God comes in response to the prayers made out of that longing, how can our souls remain quiet? In her Magnificat,