Catholic Preaching

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: 

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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,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

Feast of St. Patrick, Patron of the Archdiocese of New York

March 17, 2021

Is 49:8-15, Ps 145, Jn 5:17-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.17.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* From Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent through Tuesday of Holy Week, we will ponder the Gospel of St. John at morning Mass. These passages focus on Jesus’ conversations with the “Jews,” mainly his critics among the Scribes and Pharisees, and contain some of Jesus’ most complex and deepest monologues. It’s important as we enter into them that we remember two central coordinates that should guide our interpretation just as they have been guiding our Lenten preparation for Easter.

* First, the whole point of Lent is to help us enter into Communion with God the Father. Jesus called us to pray, fast and give alms differently than all the rest: he taught us to pray not for others to see but in intimacy with the Father in our inner room, whether we’re all alone inside a house or in the midst of a crowd; he told us to fast not so that others may notice but so that we can come to share God’s hunger to care for all his sons and daughters; he instructed us to give alms not to win others’ praise but as an extension of the Father’s providential care for us. The entire point of Lent is for us to realize what both the younger and the older sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son failed to grasp: the enormous treasure of the love of the Father who gives us everything he has and to live in communion with that love. We will see that in today’s readings very clearly.

* Second, during this second of three phases of Lent, from the third Monday through the Fourth Friday of Lent, we have readings that are meant specifically to help the Elect to prepare for Baptism and for the Baptized to renew their baptismal promises, not just in words, but in the way they go about every aspect of life, so that they might live it with the “newness of life” to which Baptism introduces and calls us. In Baptism, we become God the Father’s beloved sons and daughters. The devil we reject in Baptism is the one who tries to tempt us, like he tempted Jesus, “If you really are the Son of God…” to distort our relationship with the Father through sin and presumption. The path of defeating the devil is to follow Jesus, to “listen to him,” as God the Father says to us on the Second Sunday of Lent in the Transfiguration.  Today Jesus will be describing for us his work of bringing us to life through Baptism and the Sacraments so that we may have life to the full.

* These considerations help us understand what Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel. He is teaching us about the Father, about himself as the image of the Father, and about how we’re supposed to live made in God’s image and likeness, as sons in the Son. Jesus is the icon of the Father who came to reveal to us the Father’s love. But that love was shocking to the various older brothers among the religious class of scribes and Pharisees who wanted to make God in the image of their own rigid ideas. When Jesus healed the man crippled for 38 years in the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath, they thought it was a huge sin rather than a manifestation of God’s goodness. They believed that God who rested from creation on the Sabbath would take a day off from loving his sons and daughters on the Sabbath — just as the Scribes and the Pharisees, who had made the Sabbath an idol, were doing. That was the launching pad for Jesus to begin to describe, to their easily-scandalized shock and homicidal horror,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

March 16, 2021

Ezek 47:1-9.12, Ps 46, Jn 5:1-16

 

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: 

* As I have been mentioning for the last nine days, the second phase of Lent — from the third Sunday through the fourth Friday — is an intense preparation of the Elect for baptism and a mystagogical course for the baptized to renew and live out better our baptismal promises and identity that are at the core of the Christian life. In today’s readings, we have a chance to ponder far more deeply what that baptismal journey is about, how we’re supposed to desire it, and how it is supposed to be life-long.

* Let’s begin with the desire we are supposed to have for God’s mercy and its transformative power. Today in the Gospel Jesus says to the man crippled for 38 years, “Do you want to be well?”  At first glance, it’s a strange question. It’s like asking a starving man if he’d like a sandwich, a man in prison if he’d like a pardon, a post-partum woman if she’d like to hold her newborn. The answer is totally obvious: of course the man would want to be made well. He was, after all, at the Pool of Bethesda to participate in a superstitious race with the blind, lame, crippled to be the first one into the pool when the waters were stirred, believing that that was the path to be restored to wellness. But Jesus asked the question at a deeper level, trying to solicit the man’s deepest desires, so that the man’s will would be involved in the cure. The man didn’t respond the way one might think he would, with an emphatic “Yes, I obviously would like to be made well!” Instead, he acknowledged that he needed help to be cured — he needed someone, he thought, to place him into the pool when the water became “alive.” Jesus had come to help and cure him with another type of living water, the living water enlivened by the Holy Spirit he had announced to the Samaritan woman.

* Jesus, in curing him and us, always wants to engage our will and our freedom. That’s why he asks whether we want to be made well. The problem with this man was that he was embittered, complaining, defeated. His will had been crushed. In response to Jesus’ simple, straightforward question, he blurted out how crippled his spirit was. “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.” What should have been an immediate response, “Of course I want to be made well!” had morphed into a “woe am I” self-pitying violin solo. This Lent Jesus asks us, “Do you want to be well?” He doesn’t want us to reply with apathy, with a broken down, “I’ve tried to live a great Lent before with prayer, fasting and almsgiving, but I’m never able to keep my resolutions to unite myself to you in your prayer, fasting, and almsgiving, and so I have lowered my expectations lest I disappoint myself, you or others.” He doesn’t want us to say, “No matter how often I try, I just can’t avoid falling into sin.” He wants us to respond, rather, with hunger, thirst, enthusiasm, “Yes, Jesus! I do want to be totally spiritually healed! Please help me!” To say, “Yes, Jesus, I trust in you!” Jesus’ words to this man are almost identical to what he said to the paralytic he healed in Capernaum, “Rise, take up your mat and walk,” because there is a great similarity between the miracles. In Capernaum, Jesus first forgave the paralyzed man’s sins. In Jerusalem, Jesus told the man, “Lord, you are well. Do not sin any more.” In each miracle, Jesus did not cure merely a physical paralysis but a spiritual o...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent

March 15, 2021

Is 65:17-21, Ps 30, Jn 4:43-54

 

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: 

* As we continue in this second phase of Lent, focused on the catechumen/elect’s preparation for baptism and all the faithful’s renewal of baptismal promises, today we focus on the journey of faith toward the reality promised. In today’s first reading, we encounter the prelude to yesterday’s Laetare Sunday. The Church on the Fourth Sunday of Lent begins the Liturgy with God’s message, “Laetare, Ierusalem!,” found in the 66th chapter of the Prophet Isaiah. Today we read from what immediately preceded that holy imperative in the 65th chapter, God’s promise to the Jews in Babylonian exile, the promise that would make them rejoice: that he was going to make a new heaven and a new earth that would be full of joy. Similarly, through baptism and its renewal by grace, God wants to recreate us, to renew us, to give us a totally new start. The prayers of today’s Mass are all about this renewal. We started Mass praying, “O God, who renew the world through mysteries beyond all telling.” When we offer the gifts to God, we’ll ask him to receive them and grant us the grace to “be cleansed from old earthly ways and renewed by growth in heavenly life.” After Communion, we’ll pray that the gift of the Mass will “give us life by making us new, and by sanctifying us, lead us to things eternal.” The whole purpose of the Lenten season from God’s perspective is to make us new — a source of great joy! — and the whole purpose of the Lenten season from our perspective ought to be to cooperate in that renewal. The renewal God wants to give us is a renewal in faith, to help our faith grow. He assists to grow in faith, to journey with him more and more deeply into the life of faith, as we see with the royal official in today’s Gospel, and through him all the members of his household.

* This royal official, as soon as he heard that Jesus had returned to Galilee, went out to meet him. The distance between Capernaum and Cana is 20 miles and the father, out of love for his son, walked it in search of Jesus. It was quite humbling what the dad did, not only journeying that distance but desperately placing his trust in a Jewish carpenter, something that for a royal official likely could have brought him derision and possibly have been a terrible career move. He journeyed out of desperate hope, but Jesus was going to avail of the situation not only to heal the man’s son but to bring him and his family to faith. Jesus was going to test this man in a similar way to how he helped the Syro-Phoenician mother, whose daughter was possessed by a demon, grow in faith in Tyre. The royal official asked him “to come down and heal his son,” to make the long journey with him and touch his son to cure him like he had heard Jesus had done to many others in Capernaum and elsewhere. But Jesus responded, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Seeing would be believing for him. Much like Elisha did for Naaman in the passage we read a week ago, smashing his expectations over how a miracle would work and trying to control it as much as possible rather than walk by faith, so Jesus was doing the same thing here for the Royal Official, who, like Naaman, probably believed he would come, say some prayers over the son, and touch him. Jesus wanted the challenge the man to greater truth and faith. Jesus would say after the resurrection to doubting Thomas, “You have believed because you have seen me.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Fourth Sunday of Lent, Extraordinary Form

March 14, 2021

Gal 4:22-31, John 6:1-15

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

The Fourth Sunday of Lent is traditionally called Laetare Sunday. That name is taken from the first words of today’s Introit from the Prophet Isaiah: Laetare Jerusalem: “Rejoice, O Jerusalem, and come together all you who love her. Rejoice with joy you who were in sadness, that you may exult and be filled from her consoling breast.” A few verses later in the passage from the 66th Chapter of Isaiah God tells us, “As a mother comforts her child, so I will comfort you; in Jerusalem you shall find your comfort. You will see and your heart shall exult.” These words were given as a promise to those who were in exile in Babylon that they would return to God’s holy city and both they and the city would have their sadness turned into joy as they received from the temple God’s comfort and consolation.

That command to rejoice and the reason for it constitute an important promise of hope for us as we continue our Lenten journey in the state of the desert and our lifetime exile in this valley of tears. God wants us to know the end of the journey. He wants us to grasp that he is with us to strengthen and console us. Even those of us who are mourning, those of us who are sad over problems in the world, in the Church, or within, God wants us to know that he desires to console us like a loving mom and embolden us like a strong dad.

Today’s readings drive that point home. The first reading about Hagar and Sarah, Ishmael and Isaac, Sinai and Jerusalem, and the earthly versus heavenly Jerusalem, is an allegory, a typical form of analogical rabbinical argumentation that St. Paul employs in his Letter to the Church in Galatia. He did so essentially to reinforce the main point of his Letter, which is about how Christians are saved by faith in God not by the works of the Mosaic Law; therefore they can be said to descend spiritually from Isaac, the son promised to Abraham through whom God would make Abraham the father of many nations. After God had made that promise to Abraham when Abraham was 75 and Sarah was 71, he had them wait for 25 years for its fulfillment. Sarah lost hope and asked Abraham to use her servant Hagar to conceive a child, which he did, and named him Ishmael. But Ishmael was a son of the flesh, as St. Paul calls it, a son of human work. God, however, eventually visited their home through three angels and fulfilled the promise he had made: Sarah conceived and Isaac was born. Based on Sarah’s long-awaited joy, St. Paul is able to state that God says to each of us in the Church, “Rejoice you barren one who born no children; break forth and shout, you were not in labor; for more numerous are the children of the deserted one than of her who has a husband.” Just as Isaac was a miracle baby, so each of us, as sons and daughters of God born “not by natural generation nor by human choice nor by a man’s decision but of God” as we pray at the end of the Mass in the Last Gospel, born in the womb of the Church at baptism, are a miracle, a chosen one. But the allegory can be extended further. Just as Isaac at the age of 13 would carry the wood of the sacrifice to Mt. Moriah in Jerusalem to be sacrificed, it seemed, by Abraham, so Christ, and we with him, head toward the same mountain, as the Lamb God the Father provided, carrying the Cross, and participate there in the triumph of the supreme sacrifice of love. We rejoice over our spiritual genesis. We rejoice over our vocation. We rejoice at how fruitful the Church has been as we make so many spirit...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

March 13, 2021

 

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

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in the Gospel this Sunday, the Fourth Sunday of Lent, which the Church calls Laetare Sunday, a title taken from the first word of the entrance antiphon for Mass: “Laetare, Ierusalem”: “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. Be joyful, all who were in mourning: exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast.” Those words of consolation, originally given to the exiled Jews in Babylon, are just a small sign of the far greater liberation and joy that Jesus was going to bring into the world, a liberation from the exile and alienation caused by sin, and a freedom from the captivity to which sin leads, death. That’s a message that’s supposed to make not just Jerusalem rejoice, but New York, Washington, Los Angeles, Rome, Paris and every city.

* That joy is because of the unfathomable love of God that would stop at nothing to redeem us. The Church has us ponder that love in the Gospel this Sunday, when St. John tells us, “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish, but might have eternal life.” The Evangelist adds, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,” to render to us strict justice on account of our sins, “but so that the world might be saved through him.” While the human race was in a far worse situation than the Jews in Babylon, God himself sent someone greater than the King of Persia to set us free. He sent his own Son. When God the Father had a choice to allow us to die in eternal exile or allow his Son to take our place on death row and be brutally mocked and crucified, he loved us in some sense even more than his Son. He chose to save our life by allowing his Son to give his. This indescribable love is an incredible cause for joy! That love of God that would pull out all the stops in order to save us is the root of all Christian joy.

* But it’s important for us not to hear this message in a softened and sentimentalized way. It’s great that so many plaster “John 3:16” on football stadiums around the country proclaiming our joy that God loves the world and us so much, but at the same time, sometimes many don’t find a contradiction when during those same football games, some players are stomping with their cleats on their adversaries and cursing in huddles as fans are getting plastered in the stands watching scantily clad cheerleaders stoke their concupiscence like Herod Antipas and his drunken courtiers watched his step-daughter dance. For us to enter into the joy that comes from Christ’s love, we need to grasp what it cost, and what response it demands.

* Jesus describes that cost in his conversation with Nicodemus in the Gospel passage this Sunday. For those of you who have watched the crowd-funded television series The Chosen, which I recommend and a very moving visual meditation on the Gospels, you know that much is made of Jesus’ conversation with Nicodemus, who not only is a member of the Sanhedrin, but also a searcher for the truth. Jesus challenges him a lot to open his mind to the truth that he came into the world to bring. Jesus challenges Nicodemus first about the need for baptism. Then he challenges him in Biblical language about what he would do on the Cross to make Baptism effect what it signified.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Third Week of Lent

March 13, 2021

Hos 6:1-6, Ps 51, Lk 18:9-14

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.13.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* Today we continue to enter more deeply into the second phase of Lent, which extends from the third Sunday through the end of the fourth week, with its focus on the meaning and consequences of baptism, to help those preparing to enter the saving waters at the Easter Vigil and to help all of us renew in depth our baptismal promises and covenantal commitments. Today the Church helps us to focus on the growth God wants from us in baptism. Normally, we can focus on that with the help of the Prophet Ezekiel’s image of the water flowing from the Eastern side of the Temple, first a trickle, then up to the ankles, knees, waist and above the head of the prophet, giving life in the Arabah and even raising the Dead Sea to life. This is an image of what happens through the blood and water flowing from the side of the true Temple Jesus as he hung upon the Cross, the source of baptism and the Sacramental Life of the Church. That was a gift of God’s merciful love at the beginning of our life as Christians, but we’re called to let that mercy inundate us and bring to life everything in us that is dead. “I desire mercy!,” God says to us today through the Prophet Hosea and that we repeat in the Responsorial Psalm. God desires mercy! He desires it in two ways. First he desires to share with us his mercy. God’s greatest joy is forgiving, Pope Francis continually repeats, following what Jesus teaches us in the three parables of the Lost Sheep, Coin and Son. He wants us to receive that gift of his compassionate love. But he also desires us, having received it, to be transformed so that we, too, may pass on that mercy together with ours to others. He says he desires mercy instead of sacrifice, with sacrifice understood as the slaughtering of animals as an external act of repentance. The type of sacrifice he wants, we pray in today’s Psalm, is a “contrite spirit,” for “a heart contrite and humbled” God will never spurn. We seek to come before the Lord with that type of spirit and heart, made so by his mercy that wipes out our offenses, thoroughly washes us from our guilt and cleanses us of our sins.

* God wants us to grow in our receiving his mercy and our sharing in it. That’s what’s pointed to in the image of Hosea in today’s first reading. God says that the piety of those in Ephraim and Judah is “like a morning cloud, like the dew that early passes away.” It’s a powerful image. In context, their faithfulness to receiving and sharing his merciful love is like dew on the grass that just doesn’t last. It evaporates as the day draws near. It passes away in the middle of the day and as life goes on. They started out faithfully early in life but that piety dissipated. God was saying through the prophet that he wanted to show mercy, but that they weren’t open to receiving it. They weren’t persevering in receiving it. Hosea instructed them that the Lord had been trying to bring them to conversion, but they were superficial like the dew. “Come, let us return to the Lord, it is he who has rent, but he will heal us; he has struck us, but he will bind our wounds. He will revive us after two days; on the third day he will raise us up, to live in his presence [a clear reference to how he will do it through Jesus’ passion, death and resurrection!] … He will come to us like the rain, like spring rain that waters the earth.” Sometimes our life, sometimes our day, can begin like the beautiful refreshing dew,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Day of Recollection for the Priests of the Archdiocese of Miami

March 12, 2021

 

To watch a video of the meditation, please click below: 

 

 

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Ite ad Joseph, Saint Joseph a Model for Priests in Lent and Always

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Third Week of Lent

March 12, 2021

Hos 14:2-10, Ps 81, Mk 12:28-34

 

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

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.12.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* On Ash Wednesday, the first day of Lent, God made a special appeal to each of us through the Prophet Joel: “Return to me with your whole heart.” He asked us to “rend our hearts,” to rip them open to receive his merciful love and to share his compassion with others, a summons that not only can influence the way we read today’s Gospel, but is also important in this second phase of Lent — from the 3rd Sunday through the end of the 4th week — when we ponder the meaning of baptism. We can read today’s reading in a baptismal key, for this is one of the most commonly chosen readings for the celebration of baptism, since it shows us what the purpose of a Christian life is and how we can keep our end of the baptismal Covenant with the Lord. When asked what the greatest commandment is, Jesus responds, “The first is this: ‘Hear, O Israel! The Lord our God is Lord alone! You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, with all your soul, with all your mind, and with all your strength.’ The second is this: ‘You shall love your neighbor as yourself. There is no other commandment greater than these.’” Today Jesus reminds us that the whole point of the Lenten season, the whole point of the Christian life to which Lent is meant to restore us, is to return with our whole heart in love to God, and not just our heart, but to return to him with our whole soul, mind and strength as well, to receive his mercy without any obstacles and then to learn how to let that mercy we’ve received become the way which we respond to others.

* It’s important that we truly confront what Jesus is asking of us. There are many Christians who believe they love the Lord simply because they have good thoughts about him, they admire him, they think that he’s kind, merciful and generous. But Jesus is calling for much more than this. Love is more than having good feelings or impressions about another; love is the unconquerable benevolence that leads to willing, to choosing consistently, the good of the other for the other’s sake. Love is opting as a habit to sacrifice oneself for another, putting someone else ahead of us, like Jesus would say during the Last Supper and put into action the following afternoon: laying down one’s life for one’s friends, in little ways or supremely. There are many Christians who love God to the point of sacrificing for him, but as today’s Gospel shows us, it’s not enough to sacrifice some of the time and gifts that he’s given us for him and his glory. It’s not enough to give God some of our mind, heart, soul and strength. Jesus is calling us to love God with all we’ve got. Today he says that that’s worth more than all sacrifices. To get to that type of love requires a deep conversion on our part. It means that our hope is not just to be good people but to be really holy people.

* We should make this practical.

* Jesus calls us to love him with all our mind. How much of our mind do we dedicate to God? Do we try to think as God thinks in our decisions? Do we truly fill our minds with his thoughts through prayer and reading the Bible and good spiritual books or do we fill them with the world’s thoughts through reading the paper more than the Bible and surfing the internet or watching television more than we pray?

Jesus likewise calls us to love him with all our heart. Do we really love God more than we love everything and everyone else in our life?

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Third Week of Lent

March 11, 2021

Jer 7:23-28, Ps 95, Lk 11:14-23

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.11.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

* Yesterday we pondered how great a gift of God’s mercy it is that God has spoken to us in his word and his commandments. Moses exclaimed, “For what great nation is there that has gods so close to it as the Lord, our God, is to us whenever we call upon him? Or what great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law that I am setting before you today?” He added that the Israelites should rejoice in that gift of mercy and pass it on to their children and grandchildren as a means by which to grow closer to the God who through his word and commandments has drawn near to us. Jesus himself in the Gospel said he came to fulfill that law and that the greatest in his Kingdom would be those who put that word into practice and taught others to do the same. The fulfillment of the law leads to the fulfillment of human persons.

* What did the vast majority of the Israelites do in response to that gift of mercy God had given them? The Lord himself summarizes it through the Prophet Jeremiah at the beginning of today’s first reading: “This is what I commanded my people: Listen to my voice; then I will be your God and you shall be my people. Walk in all the ways that I command you, so that you may prosper. But they obeyed not, nor did they pay heed.” Then he uses four body parts to describe graphically their response. “They turned their backs, not their faces, to me.” This was a sign of betrayal and abandonment. “They have stiffened their necks and done worse than their fathers.” They wouldn’t heed the Lord when he sent the prophets toward them; they would resolutely keep doing what they wanted to do like horses running with blinders. “They walked in the hardness of their evil hearts.” Their hearts, which were meant to be sponges for God’s words, had become sclerotic, impenetrable even to God.

* We see an illustration of this type of resistance in the Gospel reading. Jesus had just exorcised a boy, one in a long line of deliverances from the devil, but those Scribes and Pharisees who had already hardened their hearts, stiffened their necks and turned their backs toward Jesus refused to accept that any of the incontestable exorcisms happened by the finger of God. They accused Jesus of working exorcisms by the power of the prince of devils. Their hardened hearts had led to a hardening of the brain. Jesus exposes their foolishness in two ways. First, since they admitted that some of their own number were exorcising, if he cast out by the devil, then they were suggesting that their own number might be exorcising by Beelzebul, too, something of course they would never believe or admit. Second, since the devil is trying to win, not forfeit, the possession our hearts, backs, necks and faces, it would make no sense for him to be defeating himself through exorcism. Their response to Jesus’ liberation of the boy from the devil, however, shows what God was describing about the Israelites and their treatment of the prophets sent in God’s name. They didn’t want to turn back to God. No matter how often they had prayed today’s Responsorial Psalm, “If today you hear the voice of the Lord, harden not your hearts,” that’s precisely what they did when they heard the voice of God through Jeremiah, and it’s precisely what the Scribes and Pharisees did when they heard Jesus’ voice.

* Now we turn to us. If we want to prevent what happened to them from happening to us,