Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 27, 2021

Ezek 37:21-28, Jer 31:10-13, Jn 11:45-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.27.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the readings right before we enter into the holiest week of the year, we first see abject evil, then we see how God brings good out of that evil, and then we see the mystery of how we’re supposed to cooperate in God’s work of bringing good out of evil, something that should frame for us very powerfully what we’re going to relive this week.

* First we see evil in all its ugliness. Word has just been brought to the members of the Sanhedrin about the miraculous raising of Lazarus on the fourth day. Rather than rejoicing, however, the Sanhedrin get nervous that if they don’t do anything, “all will believe in [Jesus], and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.” The reason why they would say that is because the Romans used to be brutal in crushing divisions among their far-reaching territories and the Sanhedrin recognized that if Jesus became too popular, there would be division. Why would there be division? Because they themselves wouldn’t accept him and division would ensue. The crowds looked to Jesus as the Messiah but the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t accept Jesus because he didn’t fit into their rigid categories, and the politically-connected and wealthy Chief priests and Sadducees didn’t want to accept Jesus because it would perhaps mean the end of their privileged influence. So lest there be division on account of their unwillingness like the crowds to accept Jesus, they decided to eliminate him.

* Caiaphas, the high priest that year, shows the corruption that had invaded their hearts, behaving far more like a Machiavellian politician than a man of God. After insulting his fellow members of the Sanhedrin, saying, “You know nothing,” he then laid out why he accounted it like nothing to sacrifice an innocent man — one who had been working miracles, one who had been fulfilling all of the job description of the Messiah, one who was certainly fulfilling the role of a prophet, one who was raising people from the dead. Caiaphas is the patron of all those who think that a good end justifies the evil means.  “It is better for you,” he said, “that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” And we’re told that from that day forward, they sought to kill Jesus, a plan that would accelerate when Judas Iscariot would come and ask what he could get for betraying him.

* We can note parenthetically Caiaphas’ and the Sanhedrin’s total miscalculation. They thought nothing of murdering Jesus to keep external peace so that the Romans wouldn’t come in and crush the people beginning with their leaders, but it was Jesus who had come to bring that peace. If they had accepted Jesus and lived in the way he was indicating, they likely would not have suffered the terrible destruction of Jerusalem by the Romans in 70 AD, precipitated by the same evil divisions that rejected God and his prophets and his Son. Jesus the Prince of Peace had come to restore them and help them live in peace, but they rejected him just like they rejected others. No wonder why Jesus had wept over Jerusalem saying, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together, as a hen gathers her young under her wings, but you were unwilling! Behold, your house will be abandoned, desolate.” That would happen when the Temple was destroyed by the Romans and dismantled stone by stone becaus...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 26, 2021

Jer 20:10-13, Ps 18, Jn 10:31-42

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.26.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted: 

* We enter more deeply today the third and final phase of the Lenten lectionary. The first phase is from Ash Wednesday through the Second Saturday of Lent, when we ponder the “repent” in “repent and believe,” looking at both our need for conversion, the temptations we face, the means to overcome them (including prayer, fasting and almsgiving), and the recourse to God’s mercy. The second phase focuses on the “believe” of the “repent and believe,” in which we help prepare those adults getting ready for baptism about the faith that precedes and flows from the saving waters and revivify in those who have been baptized already the graces and promises of the sacrament and remind them of the commitments. This third phase is dedicated in the first readings to the predictions of the Lord’s passion and death and in the Gospel to the machinations that led to it.

* Today we see in Jeremiah’s words and suffering a typological reference to what would occur to Jesus, something we can already see in the Gospel today. Jeremiah begins by saying he’s surrounded by plots against him, even the betrayals of those whom he thought were his friends: ” I hear the whisperings of many: ‘Terror on every side! Denounce! let us denounce him!’ All those who were my friends are on the watch for any misstep of mine. ‘Perhaps he will be trapped; then we can prevail, and take our vengeance on him.’” It would have been very easy in those circumstances for Jeremiah simply to flee in order to save his life, for him to give up on the mission God had entrusted to him. It might have been tempting for him to strike his persecutors before they had the chance to strike him. Instead, he entrusted himself to the Lord, saying to him, “To you I have entrusted my cause!” He knew that God was just and wouldn’t let evil win. He knew that God would right the wrongs. He knew that God would ensure that the evildoers wouldn’t triumph but stumble. And so he entrusted himself to the Lord whom he called his “champion” and the Psalm called our “strength, rock, fortress, deliverer, shield, stronghold and horn of salvation.” Jeremiah said that he was waiting to “witness the vengeance” that the Lord would take on him.

* That “vengeance” — a vengeance he also prayed to see in the first reading last Saturday (Jer 12) — would be fulfilled in Jesus and it would be done in a way that Jeremiah would not have been able to foresee. Jesus, like Jeremiah, could have done so many things to escape from harm or to annihilate his persecutors in anticipation of their coming after him. Instead, he totally entrusted himself to his Father in order to witness his vengeance, the vengeance that would totally restore justice to the disorder caused by sin. That holy revenge was mercy. As Jesus’ persecutors were hammering him to a Cross he cried out, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” Jesus took upon himself all of the justice owed to us because of our sins and paid the price. We witness God’s “vengeance,” God’s justice, united to his merciful love every time we look at the Crucifix!

* But Jesus wanted an even greater vengeance than what most people ponder on Good Friday. He wanted us to share in his holy retaliation by receiving his mercy and passing it on, drawing good out of the evil we have done and suffered, and helping others to become similar co-redeemers. We can see in today’s Gospel two particular ways he wants us to participate in the “vengeance” he came into the wo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 24, 2021

Dan 3:14-20.91-92.95, Dan 3:52-26, Jn 8:31-42

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.24.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Lent is about liberation. In Lent we retrace at a much deeper spiritual level the liberation of the Israelites from slavery as Jesus, the new Moses, seeks to lead us by means of the new and eternal Passover on a journey with him through the desert of life, through even death, into the eternal promised land. Lent is about being set free from the domination of the temptations of the evil one by spending 40 days with Jesus in a spiritual desert. It’s about journeying from the self-imposed pigsty back to the Father’s house. The three practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving all point to this liberation: liberation from egocentric self-dependence through putting God in his proper place in prayer, from giving into our lower appetites by the self-mastery that comes via fasting, from obsessing about our needs wants and needs by sacrificing for those whose needs are greater in giving of ourselves, time and possessions.

* Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks about liberation and slavery and describes three great interconnected means by which he wants to help us in Lent experience the freedom he came into the world to give us.

* The first great means is faith. There are many who believe that faith enslaves, that it binds us by commandments, that it leads us to depend on something or someone other than what we can empirically verify, but faith helps us to recognize that what we can perceive through our senses is not all that there is. We see the liberating power of faith in the three young men in the fiery furnace in today’s first reading from the Book of Daniel. Even though they were bound and thrown into the white hot oven, they were interiorly free through faith, which liberated them from the fear of Nebuchadnezzar, which liberated them from the fear of pain and suffering, which liberated them even from the fear of death. It even freed them from the sin of presumption. With faith, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar, “If our God, whom we serve, can save us from the white-hot furnace and from your hands, O king, may he save us! But even if he will not, know, O king, that we will not serve your god or worship the golden statue that you set up.” The courage came from their fidelity. And their fidelity coupled to God’s fidelity led to a great conversion of the King and many others as they were rescued by what seems to have been an angel of God. Nebuchadnezzar would exclaim at the end, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted [had faith] in him; they disobeyed the royal command and yielded their bodies rather than serve or worship any god except their own God.” Lent is meant to help us grow in that type of faith so that no matter what white hot furnaces of suffering we may need to endure, we may remain true to the Lord, asking him to save us in this world and even more importantly save us forever from the fiery furnace of Hell.

* The second great means is his word of truth. It’s important for us to grasp that weak faith is not enough. Jesus addressed these words to those who “believed in him,” but who nevertheless would seek to have him killed. Faith alone, understood as believing something to be true, is not enough. The act of faith essentially involves believing something on the basis of our trust in someone, and for us that means a trust in God, who sent his Son.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 23, 2021

Numbers 21:4-9, Ps 102, Jn 8:21-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.23.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* We always learn a great deal from the penances God imposes — for example, the silence imposed on Zechariah, John the Baptist’s father, or God’s having the Israelites consume the dust of the golden calf they had made — because they’re always primarily medicinal and therefore teach us a great deal about the deeper nature of the sin that elicited the penance. Today in the first reading from the Book of Numbers, we see the sin of the Israelites in the desert. They were complaining against God and against Moses. Taking up their familiar refrain, they wondered aloud whether God had worked all of his miracles freeing them from slavery in Egypt only to have them die in the desert. Even though God had been feeding them daily with manna from heaven in the morning and quails in the evening and quenching their thirst with water from the rock, they still said, “We are disgusted with this wretched food!” Some people can complain even about the menu at the Last Supper! So God sent among the Israelites saraph serpents who bit them, such that many of them died. It finally brought the people to acknowledge God, to acknowledge their sinful ways and to seek God’s help. They said to Moses, “We have sinned in complaining against the Lord and you. Pray the Lord to take the serpents away from us!” So Moses did. And God gave him what would seem at first glance a strange command in response to their prayers and predicament. “Make a saraph and mount it on a pole, and whoever looks at it after being bitten will live.” And that’s what he did. The Book of Numbers tells us, “And whenever anyone who had been bitten by a serpent looked at the bronze serpent, he lived.”

* What was this penance about sin and remedy all about? There was a part of it that looked backward and another that looked forward.

* The retrospective part of it involved the sin. It looked back to the Garden when Adam and Eve were tempted by the serpent and sinned against the Lord. By sending serpents among the Israelites, God was reminding them precisely about the presence of the devil and how he was slithering among them to lead them to complain and distrust God. He was out to kill them by poisoning them with his venom and that’s precisely what happened. He had bitten them and infected them even before the saraph serpents appeared. The remedy the Lord proposed, making a bronze serpent, mounting it on a pole and having everyone look at it was a means by which to see precisely what had caused their predicament — their sins, their having been bitten by the serpent represented by the saraph serpents — so that they might turn their back on sin, repent of their evil choices and turn anew with trust to the Lord. Anyone who looked upon the bronze serpent would live, but God didn’t say that he or she would be healed immediately. Those bitten would still have some of the poison in them and need to work to get better, but they would be saved. The cure began, however, with looking at the bronze serpent. If they refused to look at the remedy God had given, they would die of the poison.

* That remedy is the prospective part of what God asked Moses to do. It pointed forward to Christ’s own saving action to which he alludes in today’s Gospel. Jesus tells the Pharisees that they were infected with a mortal wound. “I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin.” He said that they would be unable to follow him and would die because they would not le...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 22, 2021

Dan 13:1-9.15-17.19-30.33-62, Ps 23, Jn 8:1-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.22.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s powerful readings of the rescue of people from stoning through accusations of adultery can and ought to be looked at four different levels: the literal sense in which God rescued the innocent Susanna and the anonymous adulterous woman; the way that God similarly rescues us, whether guilty or innocent; the way that these actions point to the betrayal of Jesus by the “elders” whose consciences had been corrupted; and the way that God wants to transform us to have a similar care for those facing accusation, trial and even death.

* Let’s begin with the literal sense of these passages, which requires the majority of our attention since they are the basis for the others. In the first reading, we see the utter corruption of two old men — judges of the people chosen to exact justice — in the story of Susanna. The opposite of love is not hatred but lust, and in contrast to the beauty of self-giving love we see today the real hideousness of rapacious iniquity. Either these judges would assassinate her soul through adultery or they would have her tried and killed by a false accusation if she didn’t succumb to their advances. While the desires of the flesh may attenuate over time, the lust for power, for control, for satisfying the insatiable desires of a corrupt heart can actually grow, as the conscience gets more and more deadened, such that it’s no longer a crime of the flesh but of calculation, using one’s prestige and office to do evil rather than good, to do injustice rather than implement justice. Daniel says that they “suppressed their consciences. They would not allow their eyes to look to heaven [in prayer], and did not keep in mind just judgment.” They had been thoroughly corrupted and their sins against the sixth commandment led, as they routinely do, to sins against the eighth, against the fifth and obviously against the first.

* In the Gospel we see similar wickedness. Another set of elders with a reputation for being religious and fair brought to Jesus a woman caught in the very act of adultery, using her to make a point, as a pawn, for their own lust for power. Two things stick out initially about their catching her and bringing her to Jesus. First, how did they catch her in the very act of adultery unless their eyes were already on her? And how come they didn’t bring the guy who was her partner in sin, but just her? Is it possibly because they excused the male because they themselves had often committed adultery with this woman in their own hearts? They brought her before Jesus to try to entrap him with the question as to whether she should be stoned in accordance with the law of Moses. If Jesus had replied, “No,” he would be setting himself up against the Mosaic Law and they could use that against him with faithful Jews. If he said, “Yes,” not only would he lose the support of the sinners he had come to call, save and reconcile, but he would put himself against the Roman authorities who had taken to themselves the sole authority to implement capital punishment. In their sinfulness, they were using her as a pawn to try to bring down Jesus.

* But God rescued each of them. Susanna said to herself, “I am completely trapped. If I yield, it will be my death; if I refuse, I cannot escape your power. Yet it is better for me to fall into your power without guilt than to sin before the Lord.” The early saints said that it was better to die than to sin.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Passion Sunday

March 21, 2021

Heb 9:11-15, Jn 8:46-59

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.21.21_EF_Homily_1.mp3

 

This is the text that guided today’s homily:

Today the Church celebrates with Passion Sunday the beginning of the brief liturgical season called in the extraordinary form Passiontide, during which the Church turns all of her attention more explicitly toward the betrayal of the Lord, toward his sufferings and death. It’s meant to help us to prepare well to enter deeply into the mystery of, and receive more fruitfully than ever before, what the Lord accomplished for us during his passion, death and resurrection. Regardless of how the Season of Lent has gone until now — whether it’s been what it should have been, a season of conversion through more intense prayer, fasting, and sacrifice; or whether it’s been a series of missed opportunities — now is the time the Church wants to help us to focus, to get serious, to change our priorities, to make sure we’re not just bystanders of the sacred mysteries we’re preparing to mark, but active participants, zealous recipients, and passionate sharers of Christ’s saving work.

The readings today help to set our coordinates. In the Letter to the Hebrews, we see laid out the consequences of what Jesus accomplished through his Passion: he obtained our “eternal redemption” by his blood, so that “our consciences [might be cleansed] from dead works to worship the living God” and so that we might “receive the promised inheritance.” Jesus died so that we might be able to worship the living God aright and experience the full riches of our inheritance and sons and daughters of God.

The letter contrasts what Jesus did with what happened on the Jewish Day of Atonement in his day and prior. On Yom Kippur, there were three ritual sacrifices: a bullock that, following the Book of Leviticus (16:15,21-22), the priest offered for his sins; a goat that he offered for the sins of the people; and, following what God dictated in the Book of Numbers (Numbers 19), a red heifer whose blood would be sprinkled in front of the tabernacle area and whose ashes would be placed in a clean place outside the camp. The Jews believed that those sacrifices, whether in the temple or in the desert, were necessary and sufficient for taking away their sins.

Within this context, the Letter to the Hebrews says, “If the blood of goats and bulls and the sprinkling of a heifer’s ashes can sanctify those who are defiled so that their flesh is cleansed, how much more will the blood of Christ!” It adds, comparing Jesus to the Jewish High Priest, that “when Christ came as high priest of the good things that have come to be, passing through the greater and more perfect tabernacle not made by hands, … he entered once for all into the sanctuary, not with the blood of goats and calves but with his own blood.” The tabernacle Christ entered was ultimately the tabernacle of the holy of holies of heaven, which was anticipated in his own body, in which God — in the accurate translation of “the Word became flesh and dwelled among us” from St. John’s prologue that we say at the end of every Mass and that we will ponder especially this Thursday on the Solemnity of the Annunciation —  “tabernacled” himself among us.

And so the Letter to the Hebrews helps us to appreciate what Jesus accomplished as our high priest: he made forgiveness of sins possible for us by himself becoming not only our high priest but making himself the victim, the sacrifice, by whose blood that atonement was achieved. The Letter also makes clear what our response has to be: Jesus by his Passion has cleansed our consciences from sin,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), Vigil

March 20, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.20.21_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in the Gospel this Sunday, the Fifth Sunday of Lent, which occurs after some Greeks approach the Apostle Philip saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went to Andrew and Andrew went to tell Jesus. Jesus’ response to the Greeks’ desire to see him is not just surprising but outright shocking. He announced that they would see him glorified, but glorified not in the way everyone would might have expected as an exalted civil leader, not like he was during the Transfiguration or as he will be at the end of time. No, Jesus said they would see him glorified when he would be lifted up from the earth on the Cross, when he would fall like a grain of wheat to the ground and die before being raised as the new Tree of Life. To see Jesus, to find Jesus, we need to be prepared to seek him in humility on the Cross. And to see him enduringly, we must be prepared to follow him. He tells us, “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find him we must follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it. We must deny ourselves rather than affirm ourselves, pick up our Cross and die to ourselves on it, in order to follow him to real fruitful, unending life. This second point may seem equally shocking to us, just as shocking as Jesus’ glorification on the Cross.

* Pope Benedict commented on Jesus’ words in Sunday’s Gospel back in 2006 in his first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est). He called Jesus’ path — which is supposed to become our path in faith — the “essence of love and indeed of human life itself.” Listen to the deep words of our former Holy Father: “Love is… a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: ‘Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it,’ as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.”

* The new and eternal covenant that Jesus himself establishes, the new Passover on which Jesus wants to lead us, is, Pope Benedict says, an “exodus from the inward looking self to liberation through self-giving, authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” We will only see God, we will only find our life, when we leave self-centeredness behind, when we stop trying to “preserve our life” in the rear-view mirror and rather learn to give our life as a grain of wheat, dying to ourselves in order to bear great fruit for God and others. This is the only path, Pope Benedict says, to the discovery of God and true self-discovery.

* So the first application of Sunday’s Gospel is to ourselves who wish to see Jesus and love him in this world and forever in the next. In order to do that we need to travel this exodus from saving our life to losing it,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent

March 20, 2021

Jer 11:18-20, Ps 7, Jn 7:40-53

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.20.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were considered in the homily: 

* The readings today help us to focus on the dramatic circumstance in the life of Jeremiah in which he placed his trust in God, and how his dependence was a prophecy of the type of self-entrustment Jesus himself would make, above all on Calvary. “Like a trusting lamb led to the slaughter,” Jeremiah writes in words that were applied by the evangelists to Jesus, “they were hatching plots against me,” trying to “destroy the tree in its vigor, cut[ting] him off from the land of the living so that his name may be spoken of no more.” We see those plots against Jesus getting fulfilled in today’s Gospel. The temple guards were sent out by the Jewish leaders to arrest Jesus because, as we’ve been seeing in recent days, the leaders considered Jesus an untrained blasphemer or worse. They were in fact seeking to kill him because they were convinced that he was an agent of the devil, working miracles not by the power of God but by the power of Beelzebul to destroy the Jewish religion by violating the Sabbath through works of charity, driving money changers out of the temple and speaking about the Temple’s destruction and rebuilding, befriending notorious sinners, pretending to forgive sins, and various other practices that conveyed by which Jesus was showing not only that he was acting with divine authority but that he believed himself to be the actual Son of God. Rather than being filled with joy when Jesus reconciled sinners, or made the lame walk, made the blind see, made the deaf hear, or freed the possessed of their demons, they responded with envy, anger and unholy homicidal thoughts.

* But not everyone obviously saw Jesus this way. St. John tells us today there was “division because of him.” Some thought he was “the Prophet,” the fulfillment of Moses’ words that after him someone would come to whom they should listen and obey just like the listened to and obeyed him (Deut 18:15). Others said, “This is the Messiah (Christ).” Others retorted that the Messiah could never come from Galilee, because he was prophesied to come from Bethlehem. None of those critics ever bothered to ask Jesus where he was born. They heard he was a Nazarene and that’s all they needed in order to dismiss him as the Messiah because they didn’t want to accept the type of Messianic reign he was heralding, one far different than the Messianic kingdom for which they aspired.

* It’s important for us to grasp that Jesus always provokes division. He himself said elsewhere in the Gospel, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household” (Mt 10:34-36). While at the same time he is the Prince of Peace who came to give and leave us his peace and establish the definitive peace treaty between us and God through the forgiveness of sins (Jn 14:27), he at the same time knew that he would be a “sign of contradiction” (Lk 2:34), as Simeon prophesied at his presentation, because no one would be able to remain neutral in response to him. We would either be “with him” or “against him,” we’d either “gather with him” or “scatter” (Mt 12:30). It’s not that he would personally cause division because he had come to bring peace; but division would ensue because of him, because there would be some who would accept and follow...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

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

Solemnity of St. Joseph

March 19, 2021

2 Sam 7:4-5.12-14.16, Ps 89, Rom 4:13.16-18.22, Mt 1:16.18-21.24

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.19.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: [to be filled out]

* Today’s solemnity of St. Joseph is particularly special this year as the Church marks the Year of Saint Joseph, called to mark the 150th anniversary, last December 8, of St. Joseph’s being declared patron of the universal church by Blessed Pius IX. It’s an opportunity for us to express our gratitude for, and receive more deeply, the protection and provision God wants to give us through Saint Joseph, entrusting or consecrating ourselves to his spiritual fatherhood. The best way to mark this great feast — like the feast of any saint — is to seek to imitate St. Joseph in his holiness, profiting from his intercession to do so. As Pope Leo XIII wrote, “There is no doubt that [Joseph] approached nearer than any other to that super-eminent dignity of [Mary] by which the Mother of God surpasses all created natures.” For Pope Leo, St. Joseph is second on the hierarchy of holiness right behind his immaculate and sinless spouse. Today we can ponder ten special features of his holiness.

* First, St. Joseph is just — St. Matthew writes that St. Joseph was a “just” or “righteous” man, a synonym for “holy,” a person in a right relationship with God. He may not have been flashy on the outside but he shone on the inside. St. Frances de Sales once said about him, “He was ‘a just man,’ and so his will was at all times attuned, conformed and united to the will of God.” As Pope Benedict once said in a rare play on words, St. Joseph “ad-justed” his life to the word of God. His whole life was in relationship to God. He shows us how to attune our lives fully to God’s will.

* Second, he is faithful based on total trust in God— Like Abraham, to whom he is implicitly compared in today’s second reading, St. Joseph is a “father in faith” to us. His example invites us to imitate his loving trust, his total abandonment to divine Providence, to take God “at his word,” that is, without clearly seeing his design. When the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home,” he did as the angel had commanded him precisely because he believed. Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet commented in his famous 17th-century panegyrics, “The Bible commends Abraham to us as the pattern of perfect faith (Rom. 4:11), but Joseph’s faith was greater: Abraham is praised because he believed that a barren woman would bear a child (Gen. 15:6); Joseph believed the same of a virgin, and in simplicity accepted that inscrutable mystery of child-bearing maidenhood.” Pope Benedict said 12 years ago today in Cameroon, “Throughout all of history, Joseph is the man who gives God the greatest display of trust, even in the face of such astonishing news.” To say that his is the greatest display of trust of all is something extraordinary, considering he was married to the Blessed Virgin! But that’s a worthy description for his heroic faith. He wants to help us live by faith too.

* Third, he was obedient — St. Joseph was “righteous” precisely because he was docile and obedient to God and was “faithful” because he did with trust what the Lord asked him.  We see his prompt obedience in his response to the angel of God’s interventions in his dreams. When God sent his angel in a dream to tell him not to be afraid to receive Mary into his home because the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Joseph awoke and “did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Memorial of St. Cyril of Jerusalem

March 18, 2021

Ex 32:7-14, Ps 106, Jn 5:31-47

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.18.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the first reading we have a powerful witness of intercessory prayer. The Israelites had given into idolatry and worshipped a golden calf and Moses begged God to forgive their sin. Like with Abraham’s prayer to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten just people were found there, so Moses’ intercession has always been considered a model of prayer. Back in 2011, Pope Benedict, in his great catecheses on Christian prayer, said about it: “Just as for the two cities in Abraham’s day, the punishment and destruction — in which God’s anger is expressed as the rejection of evil — demonstrate the gravity of the sin committed; at the same time, the request of the intercessor is intended to show the Lord’s desire for forgiveness. This is God’s salvation which involves mercy, but at the same time also the denunciation of the truth of the sin, of the evil that exists, so that the sinner, having recognized and rejected his sin, may let God forgive and transform him. In this way prayers of intercession make active in the corrupt reality of sinful man divine mercy which finds a voice in the entreaty of the person praying and is made present through him wherever there is a need for salvation. Moses’ supplication was wholly based on the Lord’s fidelity and grace. He referred first to the history of redemption which God began by bringing Israel out of Egypt and then recalled the ancient promise made to the Fathers. The Lord brought about salvation by freeing his people from slavery in Egypt; so ‘why,’ Moses asked, ‘should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’’ (Ex 32:12). Once the work of salvation has been begun it must be brought to completion; were God to let his people perish, this might be interpreted as a sign of God’s inability to bring the project of salvation to completion. God cannot allow this: he is the good Lord who saves, the guarantor of life, he is the God of mercy and forgiveness, of deliverance from sin that kills. Hence Moses appealed to God, to the interior life of God against the exterior judgement. But, Moses then argued with the Lord, were his Chosen People to perish, even though guilty, God might appear incapable of overcoming sin. And this he could not accept. … The intercessor wanted the People of Israel to be saved because this people was the flock which had been entrusted to him, but also because it was in this salvation that the true reality of God was manifest. The prayer of intercession is permeated by love of the brethren and love of God, they are inseparable. Moses, the intercessor, is the man torn between two loves that overlap in prayer in a single desire for good.   … The intercessor did not ask for his people to be excused of their sin, he did not list any presumed merits, either the people’s or his own, but appealed to God’s bounty: a free God, total love, who does not cease to seek out those who have fallen away, who is always faithful to himself, who offers the sinner a chance to return to him and, through forgiveness, to become righteous and capable of fidelity. Moses asked God to show himself more powerful than sin and death, and with his prayer elicited this divine revelation of himself. … With prayer, wanting what God wanted, the intercessor entered more and more deeply into knowledge of the Lord and of his mercy,