Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Second Week of Easter

April 14, 2021

Acts 5:17-26, Ps 34, Jn 3:16-21

 

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

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The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* Today in the readings we see illustrated for us in words and deeds the great Christian paradoxes between love and rejection, salvation and judgment, light and darkness. We see the full meaning of Jesus’ resurrection but at the same time we witness how some people prefer to continue to live as spiritual cadavers rather than experience the risen life Jesus has come to give us. This is the essential drama of human life.

* St. John begins today by giving us the most beautiful — and probably famous — synthesis of the Gospel: “God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God loves us so much that he himself died so that we would live forever. He didn’t want to lose any one of us. The incarnation, life, preaching, passion, death and resurrection of Jesus were all one big rescue mission. “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,” St. John continues, “but that the world might be saved through him.”

* Despite, however, Jesus’ not coming into the world to condemn it, there is still a condemnation, there’s still a judgment. It’s the condemnation and judgment that happens when we refuse to accept Jesus’ rescue. St. John describes it in these terms: “Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed.” We see so much here. Everything begins with faith but faith must become operative, it must be faith working through love (Gal 5:6). The work of the evil one is often the reverse: he starts with getting us to do deeds contrary to our faith and then to have the shame over such Christian misbehavior start to lead our whole life into darkness. We do one deed of darkness and prefer to keep it hidden. That leads us more and more into a life of darkness such that we begin to hate the light.

* Later Jesus would add, in an excised passage, “Whoever believes in the Son has eternal life, but whoever disobeys the Son will not see life, but the wrath of God remains upon him.” Judgment, condemnation and the wrath of God sadly remain on the one who does not respond with faith to Jesus and enter into his light and life not because that’s what God wants — he wants all to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth — but because in freedom others have chosen to reject God’s work of salvation. The “wrath” of God basically means a state of alienation from God, brought about not by the act of divine punishment but by the choice of people to live and walk in darkness out of a self-love so strong that it turns on God and as a consequence “hates” his light. Those who live in the peace of God, on the other hand, believe in Jesus, believe in what he says, choose to align their life to the truth he reveals and come to see and experience all things in his holy light. St. John says, “Whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” The aim of the Christian life, the aim of faith, is to live in communion with Christ who is the truth, to believe in him is to believe in what he says and try with all o...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Second Week of Easter

Feast Day of Blessed Margaret of Castello

April 13, 2021

Acts 4:32-37, Ps 93, Jn 3:7-15

 

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, Jesus continues his dialogue with Nicodemus, the “reluctant disciple,” who came to Jesus by night because even though he knew that God was working through Jesus, he wasn’t courageous enough to make a commitment and risk being seen with him during the day, something that might compromise his prestige and status among the members of the Sanhedrin. In yesterday’s excerpt of their conversation, Jesus told him that unless one is “born from above” he cannot see the Kingdom of God. But rather than trying to assimilate what Jesus was indicating with images and how the analogy of physical birth related to the mystery of spiritual regeneration, Nicodemus responded by trying to treat the mystery of rebirth as an absurdity: “How can a man once grown old be born again?,” he asked. “Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?” Nicodemus was too smart not to grasp that that was not what Jesus was implying.

* So Jesus tried to help him to accept the fact of the need for rebirth from above without the necessity of understanding how by means of another analogy, the one that begins today’s reading. “Do not be amazed that I told you, ‘You must be born from above,’” Jesus said. “The wind blows where it wills and you can hear the sound it makes but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” When we feel a cool breeze outside, we don’t spend time wondering whether it originated in Chicago or Philadelphia or whether it’s on its way to Connecticut or to New Jersey. We just accept acknowledge the breeze and are grateful for it. Jesus says we should approach the way the Holy Spirit blows with the same acceptance and not get distracted by how the Holy Spirit is bringing about our spiritual rebirth or where he wants to blow us later. We’re called to acknowledge what he’s doing with trust.

* But Nicodemus doesn’t buy that either. “How can this happen?,” he retorts. That’s where Jesus seeks to humble him, because it was his pride that was preventing him from being a true disciple in the light. “You are the teacher of Israel,” a Pharisee and a member of the Sanhedrin, “and you do not understand this?” … If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?” He wasn’t really even buying what Jesus was saying about the wind; how could he accept what Jesus was saying about the divine Ruah (Holy Spirit)? Jesus indicated the reason why he wasn’t understanding: because he wasn’t accepting Jesus as a witness who spoke the truth. “Amen, amen, I say to you, we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen, but you people do not accept our testimony.” Because he wasn’t humbly accepting Jesus as a divinely sent witness to these things, he wasn’t accepting what Jesus said. Jesus would point to a similar truth elsewhere in the Gospel with regard to his teaching by parables. He taught spiritual truths by using images of mustard seeds, yeast, soil, and wedding banquets so some may understand but others may “hear but not understand [and] look but never see” because their heart was “fat” and didn’t want to convert (Mt 13:10-17). Jesus used images as spiritual litmus tests to expose people’s hearts and see whether people would put in the time to search for the truth the images contained,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

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

Monday of the Second Week of Easter

April 12, 2021

Acts 4:23-31, Ps 2, Jn 3:1-8

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.12.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today there’s a huge contrast between the spiritual timidity of Nicodemus, a powerful member of the Sanhedrin, in the Gospel and the spiritual audacity of the apostles and members of the early Church in the Acts of the Apostles. These readings are given to us as we begin, with this second Monday of Easter, the period of mystagogy in the Church, helping all of the newly baptized, along with all baptized members of the Church, to appreciate the change that has occurred in us through baptism, the change that’s supposed to take place from Nicodemus to a Christian like Peter and John and the other first disciples.

* Let’s begin with Nicodemus. He comes to Jesus at night. He’s too afraid to come to Jesus by day because Jesus was a controversial figure and he didn’t want publicly to be associated with him. We’ll see the same thing when Jesus is being tried. He’ll ask a question to try to slow down the proceedings, but he doesn’t defend Jesus whom he knows is innocent of the charges being made against him. He’s obviously struggling with understanding the full import of Jesus’ miracles. “No one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him,” and it seems he wants to believe, but his main problem — like we were analyzing with the apostles after the resurrection last week — is not of his mind but of his heart: he doesn’t yet have the courage to become a disciple in the light. Jesus points to the reason why: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” He needs God’s help. He can’t process what’s happening by former categories. He needs new wine skins. Nicodemus seeks to ask a question about entering anew into a mother’s womb — which was not a question of curiosity or modality, as if that were possible, but one in which he seemed to be suspending disbelief to engage in silly talk —  but Jesus was describing the rebirth God needs to give us, so that one may live by the Spirit rather than by the flesh. This is what happens to us when we are reborn by water and the Holy Spirit in baptism, which is meant to be the reality of Christians. As St. Paul told us during the Easter Vigil, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death,  so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life.” That’s our rebirth. And it’s carried out by the work of the Holy Spirit, the “pneuma” (Greek) or “ruah” (Hebrew) — words meaning both “spirit” and “wind” — who “blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” To be a disciple of Christ is to put up our sails to allow the Holy Spirit to blow us where he wishes us to go. It’s a docility, confidence and boldness that comes from life according to the Spirit. It’s something that the future Pope Francis, in a 2006 retreat to Spanish Bishops, said in very strong language that Nicodemus, “the reluctant disciple,” did not have.

* We see that type of Spirit-led life in the members of the early Church. In today’s first reading we behold how the first Christians relied on and responded to the Holy Spirit at a time of persecution. Peter and John had just been released from prison after having been sternly warned not to speak in Jesus’ name.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Divine Mercy Sunday or Dominica in Albis in Octava Paschae

April 11, 2021

1 John 5:4-10, John 20:19-21

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.11.21_EF_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* In the moving Gospel we just heard, we witness what Jesus did on the evening of the day he triumphantly rose from the dead. He walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and he said to them, “Shalom!,” “Peace be with you!” Jesus had come down from heaven to earth and had sacrificed his life to give us peace, but it was a special kind of peace, one the world can’t give or take away. “Not as the world gives peace do I give it,” Jesus had said during the Last Supper. The peace Jesus leaves and gives us is not the mere absence of war or conflict, but harmony with God through the forgiveness of sins. Without this type of peace, no other form can endure, because it is sin that destroys interior peace, the peace of the home, the peace of friendship, the peace of communities, the peace of nations. And so Jesus, wasting absolutely no time to set the next stage of his peace plan in motion, on the night of his resurrection divinely empowered the apostles as his peacemakers to bring that gift, and the joy to which it leads, to the ends of the earth.

* It’s important for us to pay close attention to the various steps Jesus took in today’s Gospel so that we can understand better the divine foundation of the Sacrament of his Mercy, better advantage of it and better explain it to all those, Protestants and some Catholics alike, who say that they can confess their sins to God alone without the Sacrament. Jesus began by saying to the apostles, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you!” We know that the Father had sent Jesus as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world and Jesus was sending his apostles to continue that saving mission of mercy. Since we know that only God can forgive sins against Him (see Mk 2:7), however, Jesus needed to impart to the apostles that divine power. So he breathed on them as he said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He gave them God the Holy Spirit so that they might forgive sins in God’s name, just as we hear every time the priest pronounces those beautiful words in the Sacrament of Penance, “God, the Father of Mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has … sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.” And then Jesus did something that refers to the essential structure of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. He said, “Those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; those whose sins you retain, they are retained.” Since Jesus didn’t give the apostles the capacity to read hearts and souls, the only way they — and their successors and their priestly collaborators — would be able to know which sins to forgive or to retain would be if people told them. And that’s what happens in the Sacrament of Confession.

* It’s so fitting that Jesus established this Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter Sunday Evening because he wanted to link the joy of his resurrection to the joy of forgiveness. He had pointed to the connection between the two when he gave us the unforgettable Parable of the Prodigal Son. When the lost son returns to the Father to give his rehearsed speech of repentance, the Father interrupts him and erupts with happiness. He covers his son with the finest robe, adorns him with a ring and sandals, and kills the fattened calf. When the jealous older son asked why his dad was pulling out all the stops at the return of his brother, the Father replied, “We must celebrate with joy,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Divine Mercy Sunday (B), Vigil

April 10, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.10.21_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 the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us. It’s a dialogue that happened on the night Jesus triumphantly rose from the dead. It’s a colloquy that reveals Jesus’ true priorities, why he entered the world, why he suffered, died and rose. He did it all to impart Divine Mercy. And as we prepare to celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday, the exclamation point of the Easter Octave, let us enter much more into that great mystery and gift.

* On Easter Sunday evening, Jesus walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and said to them, “Shalom!,” “Peace be with you!” Jesus had come down from heaven to earth and given his life to give us peace, but it was a special kind of peace, one the world can’t give or take away. “Not as the world gives peace do I give it,” Jesus had said during the Last Supper. The peace Jesus leaves and gives us is not the mere absence of war or conflict, but a definitive peace treaty with God through the forgiveness of sins. Without this type of peace, no other form can endure, because it is sin that destroys interior peace, the peace of the home, the peace of friendship, the peace of communities, the peace of nations. And so Jesus, wasting absolutely no time to set the next stage of his peace plan in motion, on the night he rose from the dead divinely empowered the apostles as his peacemakers to bring that gift, and the joy to which it leads, to the ends of the earth.

* It’s important for us to pay close attention to the various steps Jesus took so that we can understand better the divine foundation of the Sacrament of his Mercy and better explain it to those who have been poorly catechized about the Sacrament or who claim that they can confess their sins to God alone without the Sacrament. Jesus began by saying to the apostles, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you!” We know that the Father had sent Jesus as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world and Jesus was sending his apostles to continue that saving mission of mercy. Since we know that God alone can forgive sins against Him (see Mk 2:7), however, Jesus needed to impart to the apostles that divine power. So he breathed on them as he said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He gave them God the Holy Spirit so that they might forgive sins in God’s name, just as we hear every time the priest pronounces those beautiful words in the Sacrament of Penance, “God, the Father of Mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has … sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.” And then Jesus did something that refers to the essential structure of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. He said, “Those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; those whose sins you retain, they are retained.” Since Jesus didn’t give the apostles the capacity to read hearts and souls, the only way they — and their successors and their priestly collaborators — would be able to know which sins to forgive or to retain would be if people told them. And that’s what happens in the Sacrament of Confession.

* It’s so fitting that Jesus established this Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter Sunday Evening because he wanted to link the joy of his resurrection to the joy of forgiveness. He had pointed to the connection between the tw...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life

Friday of Easter Week

April 9, 2021

Acts 4:1-12, Ps 118, Jn 21:1-14

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.9.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances all had a purpose: to strengthen the disciples and apostles in the reality of the Resurrection so as to help them to become living signs of the Resurrection — of the mercy, joy and life associated with it — to all the nations. But that transformation was a radical one and took time. As we’ve been seeing all week, with Mary Magdalene, the disciples in Emmaus, and the apostles in the Upper Room, the Risen Jesus meets with initial incredulity, then shows him that his resurrection is real, teaches them how it was the fulfillment of all he and the prophets had foretold, sees them respond with faith, and gives them a mission to bring news of his resurrection and all that he had told them to others. Today Jesus doesn’t meet with initial incredulity but lack of recognition and then leads Peter and the other six disciples on a journey of growth in faith in order to strengthen them for the mission of witnessing to Christ before others. Part of this journey was to reconstitute them in the meaning of their calling after the lack of confidence coming from their initial response to his Passion, death and Resurrection.

* Jesus had told Mary Magdalene to ask his apostles to meet him in Galilee, as we just sang in the Easter Sequence. Finally Peter and the others were in Galilee and Peter decided to spend the night catching upcoming meals. The other apostles decided to join him. But just as happened the first time he had met Jesus three years earlier, Peter toiled all night but caught nothing. In the morning, amidst what was probably normal haze and fog, a supposedly unfamiliar voice came from the shore telling them to cast their net on the other side of the boat. Jesus’ voice, just like his other sensible appearances, had mysteriously changed after the resurrection. The fishermen obliged and they caught so many fish that their nets were at the breaking point. That’s when St. John recognized by faith that it had to be the Lord who had called out to them. St. Peter, so excited it was the Lord, put his clothes back on and hopped into the water and swam 100 yards to be with the Lord as soon as possible — just like he exuberantly had hopped overboard during a storm to meet Jesus who had been walking toward them on the water.

* When the apostles reached the shore, Jesus had breakfast going with fish and bread on a fire and asked for them to bring some of the fish they had caught. Jesus was teaching them that after his resurrection, he was with them in their work, with them as he provided for their meals, and with them in basically all good aspects of their life. But he was particularly showing them that he would be with them in their continuance of his work as fishers of men. St. John tells us that they caught 153 fish. In addition to being the actual number of fish they caught — a sign that they took every one as precious, because 153 is not an estimate but a sign they actually counted each one — 153 had symbolic significance: it was both the number of known nations in the world at that time and what the ancients believed was the number of species of fish. For that reason, the early saints of the Church interpreted it as Jesus’ showing that he was sending them out as “Catholic” as “universal” fishers of men to all 153 nations, to catch all “153” types of men, women, boys and girl (fish).

* But he also had a deeper mission in mind for Peter.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan, NY

Easter Thursday

April 8, 2021

Acts 3:11-26, Ps 8, Lk 24:35-48

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.8.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* At Easter, Jesus wants to work a transformation in us like he worked in the first disciples. And as we’ve been seeing during these days, there’s a very familiar pattern to the metamorphosis he worked on Easter that we’ve been seeing in each of the readings this Easter week:

* At first the disciples who encounter Jesus are bewildered, shocked, fearful, unbelieving in his resurrection; no matter how many times Jesus told them exactly what would occur to him, they still didn’t believe when they saw him a couple of days after his brutal execution.

* The second stage is that Jesus convinces them that he’s real, that he’s alive, that he’s risen from the dead and he begins to instruct them, to show them that everything that happened to him was supposed to happen to him.

* Third, once they hear and see Jesus, they come to faith in his Resurrection and living Presence in front of them.

* Lastly, Jesus sends them out on a mission to complete his own mission.

* On Monday and Tuesday we see how this happened with Mary Magdalene from the perspectives of St. Matthew’s and St. John’s Gospels respectively. Yesterday we saw it with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus. And in today’s Gospel, we see these same four stages occur with the apostles in the Upper Room.

* Jesus enters the other room while Cleopas and the other disciple are briefing them on what just happened on their journey home to Emmaus. The disciples were “started and terrified and thought they were seeing a ghost.” They couldn’t believe that it was Jesus, even after the witness of the Emmaus disciples, of Mary Magdalene and the other Mary whom Jesus met on the way. Just like the two disciples of Emmaus, their hearts were slow to believe: their will wasn’t yet in it, they were too dejected, too afraid, too holding on to their wounds and hurt feelings. Jesus confronts those fears and that hardness straight on. He says, “Peace be with you!” He asks, “Why are you troubled? And why do questions arise in your hearts?” He asked not about their minds but their hearts. Then he removed their cardiac doubts about his physical reality by saying, “Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself. Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones as you can see I have.” After showing them his wounds and his feet, he proves that he’s not a ghost even more powerfully by eating a piece a baked fish, which only a real person could digest. And then he started to do for them what we saw him do with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus yesterday. He reminded them that he had to suffer, just as he and the prophets had foretold. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.” St. Luke stresses that, having opened their hearts, he then opened their minds to understand the Scriptures, saying, “Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” Doubtless their own hearts began to burn like the hearts of the Emmaus disciples and their minds got that warmer blood of faith and they began to believe. Then Jesus gave them their mission as he similarly opened their mouths: “You are witnesses of these things.” They were to be witnesses of Christ’s resurrection,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Easter Sunday (B), Vigil

April 3, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.3.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Happy Easter, everyone! This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to wish you and your family a Happy Easter as we enter into the consequential conversation the Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, wants to have with each of us. He wants to meet us like he met Mary Magdalene in the Garden and call us by name. He wants to converse with us like he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, to make our hearts burn as he explains the word of God to us, and help us to recognize him in the Breaking of the Bread. He wants to speak with us like he spoke with the fearful apostles in the Upper Room, to wish us peace, to show us his hands and his side, to impart to us the Holy Spirit, and to send us out from the Upper Room, like he sent them. Jesus ultimately wants to change our lives this Easter and help us to enter more deeply than ever before into his triumph of light over darkness, joy over sadness, love over hatred and life over death. For this to occur, however, we can’t live Easter in a routine way, as just another important day that will be over within 24 hours. We can’t live it just as an Octave or a 50 day season. We really have to let what Easter means sink deeply within us so that it changes our thinking, our being, our doing, our loving. We have to enter into the Easter metamorphosis.

* After the incarnation when God the Son took on our nature and entered the world, Easter is the most important occurrence and fact in the history of the world. It’s a fact that, even though the prophets like Ezekiel foretold it, even though Jesus explicitly mentioned it on several occasions, the disciples and apostles were slow to believe. Mary Magdalene thought Jesus’ cadaver was stolen and didn’t even recognize him initially when he spoke to her in the Garden. Peter, when he ran to the tomb, saw the burial cloths and thought they were evidence not of the resurrection but of the theft. Thomas, even after the other ten apostles told them Jesus had appeared to them, refused to believe unless he could probe his sacred stigmata with his own hands.

* Easter is a fact, moreover, that many have actively opposed. It started in the ancient world with some of the religious leaders of the Jewish people who tried to bribe the guards to say that Jesus’ disciples just came to steal his body. It happened in ancient Corinth where many, including those who claimed to be disciples, said that it didn’t really matter whether Christ physically rose from the dead, because the only important thing is whether we believe he did, a foolish idea that still pops up in heterodox theology faculties at various universities and in scores of articles and documentaries around this time in which so-called “experts” who try to claim that Jesus’ resurrection is just a myth. But St. Paul replied that if Christ didn’t rise from the dead, our faith is vain, it’s worthless, it’s nothing more than a belief in a fairy tale. And worse than that, he says, we’d still be in our sins and we’d still be doomed to die eternally.

* As Christians, we have to be vigorous in believing, explaining and defending the fact of the resurrection. The early Christians knew clearly what they were professing about the resurrection and why. They had to, because they were continually ridiculed for believing that a god could die or a man rise from the dead. The Romans deemed them insane, much like we today would view someone who claimed...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of Holy Week

March 30, 2021

Is 49:1-6, Ps 71, Jn 13:21-33.36-68

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.30.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the opening prayer of today’s Mass, we asked God the Father for the grace “so to celebrate the mysteries of the Lord’s Passion that we may merit to receive your pardon.” We can never strictly speaking merit the Lord’s mercy — because it’s always gratuitous — but we can merit, in a sense, to cooperate with it, to receive it well, to correspond to what God wishes to do in us through it. And today’s readings help us to know how to celebrate the mysteries of the Lord’s Passion in that way. We have in the first reading a look at what is happening from God’s perspective through the fulfillment of what he said through the Prophet Isaiah; and in the Gospel we have the historical perspective of what was happening and how the intended recipients were meriting or failing to merit God’s pardon. They reveal to us the strong contrast between glory and betrayal and not just the paradoxical connection between them but also the way to go from the latter to the former, namely the way of receiving and responding to God’s gift of pardon. Grasping this connection is essential for us to enter into the depth of mysteries we celebrate in Holy Week.

* In the first reading we encounter the second of four of the Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah. We heard the first yesterday, will hear the third tomorrow, and on Good Friday will hear the last and most powerful of all. Today the Prophet begins by describing his own biography and foretells Jesus’ own: “The Lord called me from birth, from my mother’s womb he gave me my name,” something that happened when the Archangel appeared to Mary. Describing Jesus’ hidden life in Nazareth and the way he would be a “two-edged sword penetrating even soul and spirit” (Heb 4:12), he continued: “He made of me a sharp-edged sword and concealed me in the shadow of his arm. He made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me.” Then he turns to the tribulations he has suffered in his public ministry — the rejection of so many, the labelling of his words as diabolical, the hardened, rocky and thorny soil in response to what he was planting — and how God will bring good out of them. “Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the Lord, my recompense is with my God.” The purpose of all of these hardships is to save Israel and save the world. “For now the Lord has spoken who formed me as his servant from the womb, that Jacob may be brought back to him and Israel gathered to him. … It is too little, he says, for you to be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” This lumen gentium is going to be for his glory and for God the Father’s glory. God pronounced earlier in the passage, “You are my servant … through whom I show my glory” and here through his service in mercifully gathering back not only the lost tribes but the entire human race, that glory of God will be shared with his servant: “And I am made glorious in the sight of the Lord, and my God is now my strength!” That’s what’s happening from God’s perspective.

* In the Gospel today, Jesus picks up on that message of the glory of God and of his suffering servant. “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him,” Jesus exclaims. “If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him at once.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of Holy Week

March 29, 2021

Is 42:1-7, Ps 27, Jn 12:1-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.29.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As we enter more deeply into this holiest week of the year, the Church gives us an important frame of how we’re supposed to see what God is doing this week from his perspective and how we’re supposed to respond. We see this in the two different anointings of Jesus that the readings describe today. They show us how Christ was anointed as Messiah precisely to restore us to our relationship with God and others and how we, too, filled with the gift received, will naturally want to show how lavish is our gratitude.

* The first anointing we see is the one God the Father does of his Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s spoken of today in the first reading from the Prophet Isaiah. (This reading is the first of the four “Suffering Servant Songs” found in Isaiah, which are the most explicit prophecies of what Jesus himself would suffer and accomplish for us this week out of merciful love. Today we ponder the first of the four, from Isaiah 42. Tomorrow, we tackle the second, from Isaiah 49. Wednesday we’ll discuss the third, from Isaiah 50. And finally on Good Friday, we’ll have the fourth and most moving of all, from Isaiah 52-53.) Today we see what God himself says and does. “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased, upon whom I have put my Spirit,” he tells us through the Prophet. The Father has anointed the Son, as we see occur at Jesus’ baptism, when the Holy Spirit comes down upon him like a dove. Earlier in Isaiah, with words that were fulfilled in Jesus, Isaiah says, “The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:1).

* Today a job description that flows from that anointing is given to us, a description Jesus will fulfill to the letter this week: “He shall bring forth justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street. A bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench, until he establishes justice on the earth.” We know that several times during his publicly ministry Jesus shouted out against the hypocrisy of the Scribes and the Pharisees. We know that he overturned money changers’ tables and drove out animals from the temple area with a whip. But this week, he didn’t cry out as he was carrying his Cross through the streets. This week he didn’t exert any force sufficient to break a frail reed. He was doing this to establish justice on the earth — a right relationship between us and God — taking all the sin upon himself so that he could take that poison away from us and have us life.

* As he was doing this, he was not alone. God the Father and the Holy Spirit was with him, guiding him, every step along the way of the Cross. “I, the Lord, have called you for the victory of justice, I have grasped you by the hand.” And he foretold that he would guide him to this fulfillment from his earliest days in Mary’s womb: “I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.” Jesus would become the light and salvation — as we prayed in the Psalm —  not just of the Jews, but of the nations, whom he would lead from confinement and dark dungeons into the light of life. He would not just seal a Covenant between God and man but becom...