Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

February 20, 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 joy to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the first Sunday of Lent, as we as we journey with Jesus into the desert.

* Most people have no desire to go to the desert, certainly for no more than a tourist visit. But after all the snow in the last month and the subzero temperatures in most parts of the U.S., many of us would admit that the desert is looking a lot more appealing! At a spiritual level, however, we should always have a great love for the desert, because the desert is what helps us to understand the 40-day pilgrimage of Lent, in which we join and imitate Jesus in the desert and ponder the fruits of what he learned and experienced there upon his return. Every Lent, the same Holy Spirit whom we read in today’s Gospel drove Jesus into the desert wants to drive us into the desert with him. Lent is meant to help us recapitulate Christ’s 40 days away from everything so that we, apart from every distraction, can focus on our relationship with God and others and on who we are — and, with Christ’s help, can confront and overcome the way that the devil seeks to distort those relations and that image.

* To go into the desert is increasingly difficult for people today. We’re so connected that if we are out of cell phone range we can easily feel totally lost. While the Lord is not calling us all physically to go to the sands of Nevada, he is calling us to the state of the desert, removing ourselves from distractions, from the television, computer, radio, newspaper, and the various things that may be fine in themselves but crowd our lives with noise so that we can’t hear God and with clutter so that we can’t see God. The first temptation we face in Lent is to refuse to go into the desert with Christ, to think that our Lent can be complete if, for example, all we do is give up chocolate and potato chips. The first big hurdle is for us to hear Christ’s voice from the desert saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31).

* The next lesson we need to grasp is what is supposed to be the fruit of that time in the desert. What does the Holy Spirit who drives us to this Lenten desert experience want to help us to achieve? Jesus shares this lesson with us as soon as he finished that first 40 day retreat. He returned saying, “Repent and believe in the good news.” These are the words he shared with us earlier this week, as we were marked with ashes. To repent — what metanoia means in Greek — is to revolutionize the way we look at things, at the world, at ourselves, at others, so that we might put on the way Christ looks at things. It means to turn one’s thoughts upside down, or better right side up. It’s as if we’ve been going in one direction and Jesus tells us, “Stop, turn around and go in the opposite direction.” He’s not calling us to a slight course correction, not to a one or two degree turn, but to something far closer to 180 degree turn, a radical conversion. He wants us to examine all those parts of our life that are not in alignment with him and convert in such a way that we begin to turn with him (which is what con-vertere means).

* When we look at the way the devil tried to tempt Jesus in the desert, we see the three fundamental ways we can get out of spiritual alignment and can learn from Christ how in ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Leonine Forum Lenten Day of Recollection

Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan

Saturday after Ash Wednesday

February 20, 2021

Is 58:9-14, Ps 86, Lk 5:27-32

 

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

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* “Teach me your way, O Lord, that I may walk in your truth,” we prayed several times today in the Responsorial Psalm. And the Truth incarnate responds in the Gospel, first for Matthew and then for all of us, by coming into our lives and saying, “Follow me!”

* Follow me! Those words mean that we have to change course, we can no longer go our own way and do our own thing. Once Christ calls us, once he teaches us his way, we must walk in his truth. That’s the call to conversion. Conversion literally means turning with Jesus. When he turns to the right, we turn with him. When he turns to the Father, we turn with him. When he turns to his mother, so do we. When he turns to our neighbor, we follow him across the road. When he sets his face firmly on Calvary, we walk with him along that way of the Cross. There are two types of people with two different standard reactions to Jesus’ command. Some people are in Matthew’s circumstance, where it’s obvious to them and everyone else that they have been going in the opposite direction of the Lord. These words come as nothing short of a revolution. Many will stubbornly continue to go their own way. Others, like St. Matthew today, will seize the summons as a once in a life time opportunity. We’ll return to him in a moment. The second main group of people hear Jesus’ words, “follow me!” as nothing revolutionary at all. They think that, even if they might have some diversions here and there, from time to time, they “basically” follow the Lord. They can claim, for example, that they’re devout Christians and yet use their high offices to expand the slaughter of the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters in the womb, or turn hardened hearts to Jesus’ brothers and sisters at the border.  They assert they follow Jesus but don’t really make time for him each day in prayer or come to be with him and receive him worthily in the Holy Eucharist. They say they follow him but they think he’s going the wrong way on various issue controversial to our woke age, like his teachings on sexual morality, or his choice to call only men as his apostles despite his exaltation of his mother and many other women, or his affirmation of loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, and forgiving seventy times seven times. This latter group is somewhat like St. Peter after Jesus had revealed Peter’s vocation to be the rock on whom Jesus would build his Church. When Jesus announced for the first time that he would be betrayed, tortured and crucified, Peter said, “No such thing will ever happen to you, Lord!,” and Jesus rebuked him, saying, “Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God thinks but as human beings do.” After having changed his name from Simon to Peter, Jesus changed it again to Satan, because, like Satan in the desert, Peter was trying to lead Jesus, not follow him. He was thinking according to worldly logic, not divine. He was not interested in the Lord’s teaching him how to walk in the truth, but in his own teaching the Lord the way things should go. And many are in this category, where they believe they’re following the Lord — and, like Peter, they’ve made various big choices to follow him — but they don’t follow him yet fully. They still want sometimes to be in charge of the relationship.

Father Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday after Ash Wednesday

February 19, 2021

Is 58:1-9, Ps 51, Mt 9:14-15

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the readings from Sacred Scripture the Church gives us today, she wants us to ponder the true meaning of the fasting to which we’re called in Lent and in life. Two days ago on Ash Wednesday, Jesus told us that he wanted us to fast differently from all the rest who look gloomy, neglect their appearance and even put white paste on their face to make them appear more pallid so that everyone else may recognize they’re fasting. Jesus tells us that the type of fasting he wants of us is meant to be done for and in communion with the Father who relates to us in secret. He wants us to anoint our head and wash our face so that no one will be able to notice that we’re fasting. God wants a different type of fasting from us.

* On the surface of today’s Gospel, Jesus implies that he was preaching but not practicing his teaching on fasting. His contemporaries perhaps had heard rumors that before his public ministry, Jesus had fasted for 40 days in the desert, but it didn’t appear that he and his followers were fasting at all now. That’s why the disciples of St. John the Baptist came to him to ask why his disciples weren’t fasting the way John and the Pharisees fasted. John, we know, was an heroic faster, living basically off of locusts and wild honey, and we can presume that many of his disciples were imitating his asceticism. Unlike the Pharisees who used to criticize Jesus to try to entrap him, John’s disciples seemed to have a genuine interest in the truth about what they needed to do and were shocked that Jesus and his disciples seemed to be lax when it came to this spiritual discipline. Delicately and respectfully, they asked Jesus why his “disciples” were not fasting, as if Jesus himself, the Lamb pointed out by John, might be an exception to the discipline. Jesus, in response, gave us an important principle: “Can the sons of the wedding chamber [the loose translation “wedding guests” doesn’t do justice to the Greek, which I’ve translated literally above and can more loosely and accurately be translated groomsmen] mourn as long as the bridegroom is with them? The time will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them and then they will fast.”

* In giving us this principle, Jesus highlighted two things:

* First, he identified himself, basically, as the long awaited Bridegroom of the People Israel described by the Prophets Isaiah and Hosea and defines the apostles as the groomsmen awaiting the time when the Bridegroom would go to meet the Bride and the bridesmaids and take them for the wedding reception. It was not a time of mourning — one of the two purposes of Jewish fasting, mourning over one’s sins; the other was supplication — but of celebration. Jesus points out here that the fundamental attitude of those who associate with him needs to be celebration at his presence. We Christians are sons of the wedding chamber heading toward the eternal wedding banquet and we need to be marked by the joy that always is associated by those in the wedding party.

* Second, Jesus mentions that a time will come when the Bridegroom is violently ripped away from them — which happened in the Garden of Gethsemane and then on Calvary — and they would fast (and mourn) on that day like a bride if her husband were kidnapped or killed.

* The question we should ask as Christians, however, is why are we fasting today? Why do we fast throughout Lent?

Father Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday after Ash Wednesday

February 18, 2021

Dt 30:15-20, Ps 1, Lk 9:22-25

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.18.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Throughout Lent, we focus first and foremost on God’s desire to save us and to recognize, as we heard yesterday with St. Paul, that “now is the day of salvation.” This Lent, today, is the time to respond. “God so loved the world,” St. John tells us in his most famous passage, “that he sent his only Son so that all who believe in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” God does not want us to perish. He didn’t even spare his own Son, but handed him over for us all, as St. Paul reminds us in Romans, so that we might not perish but have life to the full. But God’s will is not enough, because he willed to make us free. We need to respond to that offer. Todays’ readings, on our second day in the pilgrimage of Lent, are about the choices we are called to make in response to that offer and to the grace God gives us that St. Paul appealed yesterday that we wouldn’t take in vain.

* The choice is framed by Moses in today’s first reading. The Israelites were drawing toward the end of their 40 year pilgrimage in the desert. Moses had led the Israelites from slavery in Egypt, accompanied them through the desert for four decades and now they were on the opposite side of the Jordan from the long-awaited Holy Land. God had told Moses that he would die before crossing, so Moses, in today’s first reading, was giving as a sort of last will and testament, a summary of what God had done for them and taught them. As the long experience of their time in the desert had taught them, God’s wondrous actions were not enough. The ten plagues weren’t enough. Their passing through the Red Sea on dry land wasn’t enough. The manna from heaven, the daily quails, the water from the rock and the theophanies associated with giving the Ten Commandments were not enough. None was sufficient to keep many of the Jews faithful. Many of them complained that they should have remained with their fleshpots in Egypt, others made a golden calf, even Aaron the high priest fell into the clutches of a wavering faith. So Moses want to urge them to choose and choose wisely. He framed the decision facing them as it truly was, a decision of life and death: “Today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and doom. If you obey the commandments of the Lord, your God, which I enjoin on you today, loving him, and walking in his ways, and keeping his commandments, statutes and decrees, you will live and grow numerous, and the Lord, your God, will bless you in the land you are entering to occupy. If, however, you turn away your hearts and will not listen, but are led astray and adore and serve other gods, I tell you now that you will certainly perish; you will not have a long life on the land that you are crossing the Jordan to enter and occupy. I call heaven and earth today to witness against you: I have set before you life and death, the blessing and the curse. Choose life, then, that you and your descendants may live, by loving the Lord, your God, heeding his voice, and holding fast to him.” He reminded them that the choice for God is a life-giving choice, a choice full of blessing; and that the choice against God — even if it might seem at first a choice that leads to life and happiness — is actually fatal. This is not something, of course, that they recognized. Throughout the desert they complained that they had left their fleshpots in Egypt behind just to perish in the desert by following the Lord. Along the way,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Ash Wednesday

February 17, 2021

Joel 2:12-18, Ps 51, 2 Cor 5:20-6:2, Mt 6:1-6.16-18

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.17.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Many have experienced the last year, living through the pandemic, as an extended Lent of various forms of penance, fasting or going without so many things we had become accustomed to taking for granted. This year in some places, people were asked to go without even the normal form of the distribution of ashes we were used to, as a sign of the cross on our forehead (like at our confirmation), in favor of the European sprinkling of ashes on the forehead. Here in the Archdiocese of New York — not to mention because I’ve had COVID, and you all live together — we are given permission to impose them in the normal way. But it is nevertheless important for us as we begin this Holy Season to look at pandemic-imposed asceticism through spiritual eyes — despite our fatigue at masks, and social distancing, quarantines and isolation — with the eyes of faith and incorporate them into our Lenten practices so that they can make our Lent more profound.

* Since this year, we necessarily have even greater appreciation for ashes, we should remember their three-fold meaning:

* First they are a sign of our mortality, that we are dust and unto dust we shall return, as we heard last week in the Book of Genesis in the account of the Fall. Lent reminds us that we will die and so, like at the beginning of creation, we need to be infused with the breath of life, with God’s life. Yes we will die, but God wants to raise us, even now. Lent is not just about a minor course correction in our life but about a death and resurrection, Christ’s and ours in him.

* Second, they are a sign of repentance. We see them used this way by the prophet Jonah with the Ninevites, by Job, by Daniel, by the Maccabees. They are a summons to repent and believe in the Gospel.

* Third, as we see in Esther, they are a means of supplication, of prayer, for others, for their salvation. Jesus cites them in this way in his words to Chorazin and Bethsaida, how if the works he had done there had been done in Tyre and Sidon, they would long ago have repented in sackloth and ashes.

* Ashes are about all three of these things: a reminder of death because of sin, an external sign of repentance of that sin, appealing to God in mercy, and a means of prayerful supplication and reparation. They show that we seek to repent and believe the Gospel. They evince that we are attempting to return to the Lord with our whole heart and to beg him to spare his people. They are an acknowledgement, as we pray in the Psalm, that we have sinned and a petition for a clean heart. They are a manifestation that we are seeking not to receive the grace of God in vain, but seizing this day, this season, as the day of salvation because we know we desperately need to be saved.

* Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks to us about the three practices that help us to seize salvation, to return to the Lord wholeheartedly, to repent and with faith turn to the Lord for him to restore in us to full measure the breath of life.

* Prayer helps us die to our ego so that we may live for and with him, putting on his mind.

* Almsgiving has us think of others’ needs and act to help them, rather than be obsessed about our own pleasures.

* Fasting checks the domination of our appetites over us and makes possible our hungering for what God hungers.

* They are a means by which we enter into Jesus’ prayer,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass of St. Joseph

February 16, 2021

Gen 6:5-8.7:1-5.10, Ps 29, Mk 8:14-21

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.16.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* “Do you still not understand?” So Jesus asks the disciples and asks us. The specific context was about yeast when he warned them about the leaven, the corrosive teaching and example, on the one hand of the rigorist Pharisees and on the other the laxist Herodians. He wanted them to have, rather, the leaven of faith, conscious that a tiny bit of faith when placed in the “dough” of God’s power was able to accomplish great things. Jesus showed what a little bit of this leaven could do in the two miracles of the multiplication of the loaves and fish. He wants us to trust that with faith the size of a mustard seed we can move mountains, with some water in jars at a wedding we can have wine, with 12 relative nobodies we can have a message go out to all of the world. “Do you still not understand?,” he asks.

* Noah in today’s first reading is an example of this leaven of faith. God asks Noah to build a huge ark and to do so, not in a big ship building place, but in the middle of nowhere far from the ocean. The dimensions of the ark — 300 x 50 x 30 cubits, with a cubit being 18 inches or half a yard — were huge and would have taken some time to build. For weeks and months, people around him must have thought he was nuts. Imagine trying to build the Queen Elizabeth II on a farm in Iowa or up in the Rocky Mountains, far from water. But Noah trusted in the Lord and built. He, with his faith in God, was the leaven for the renewal of creation. God always starts small and builds. We see that with the Israelites, with the tribe of Judah within God’s people, with the “remnant” at the time of the exile, ultimately with Mary and Joseph, and then with the apostles. Many get corrupted by the leaven of the world or pseudo-religion. God always looks for the leaven of faith.

* As the Fathers of the Church were accustomed to preach, the Church is meant to function as Noah’s Ark, bringing everybody to salvation on the barque of Peter despite the storms of life on the water. The “nave” of a Church is named because the Church is meant to be the “navis” or ship like the ark as a means of rescue. Christ is like Noah on that boat.

* As we prepare to start Lent tomorrow, we can draw various practical lessons:

* Our Lenten practices are supposed to help us become leaven of faith, not the leaven of Pharisaical rigor or Herodian laxity. We need to recognize, for example, that fasting is far more than about “having no bread,” but hungering for what God desires. As we unite ourselves to Christ in the desert in his prayer, fasting, and giving of his life for us, we become more and more capable of spreading our faith contagiously, like yeast in bread.

* We need to be filled with greater wonder for the incredible miracles God has worked, most especially our redemption and the gifts of the sacraments. Just as he encouraged the apostles in the boat to draw the right conclusions from the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish, so he wants us to draw the right conclusion from the miracles we experience to which that multiplication of the loaves and fish point. We need to go from knowledge about them to understanding. Lent is a time for us to ponder the mystery of our redemption and sanctification more deeply.

* We are called to be filled with gratitude over having been chosen for the ark of the Church and be filled with zeal for others ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Sixth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Claude la Colombière

February 15, 2021

Gen 4:1-15.25, Ps 50, Mk 8:11-13

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.15.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today as the Church has us ponder Cain’s killing his brother Abel, we remember that that sacrifice is a type, a foreshadowing, of the killing of Christ, “whose blood speaks more eloquently than that of Abel” (Heb 12:24). We see the start of that fratricide and attempted Deicide in today’s Gospel in the way that the Pharisees were asking Jesus for a sign in order to test him. Jesus had already worked many signs — healings, exorcisms, multiplications of loaves and fish, showing power over the wind and the sea — but they didn’t want to accept any of them. In fact they opposed all the signs he was doing on the Sabbath. They would similarly reject the one sign he elsewhere said he would give them, the sign of Jonah — his suffering, death and resurrection — in which they themselves would partially play the role of Cain. Today they, although outwardly religious, were trying to trap Christ so that they could put him to death. Rather than opening themselves to him, they closed themselves and the murder of this Innocent One was only the conclusion of a process that began with their rejection and envy.

* Jesus’ crucifixion was preceded by homicidal envy. The Book of Wisdom focuses on this well when it prophesies about what was going on in the hearts of those who conspired against him, “Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us; he opposes our actions, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training. He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the Lord. To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us. Because his life is not like that of others, and different are his ways. He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure. He calls blest the destiny of the righteous and boasts that God is his Father. Let us see whether his words be true; let us find out what will happen to him in the end. For if the righteous one is the son of God, God will help him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With violence and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience.Let us condemn him to a shameful death; for according to his own words, God will take care of him.” These were their thoughts, but they erred; for their wickedness blinded them. And they did not know the hidden counsels of God; neither did they count on a recompense for holiness nor discern the innocent souls’ reward. The first witness of this type of murderous envy is in today’s first reading, when Cain slew his brother Abel. On Friday and Saturday, we saw the typical structure of sin and its effects. Today we are able to look at those truths from another angle. There are several steps involved:

* Abel “brought one of the best firstlings of his flock” to sacrifice to God whereas Cain simply brought “an offering,” and God looked with favor on the first and not on the second. The first step in not sinning but rather in growing in relationship with God is to give him our best, to love him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. We don’t have to love him necessarily “more” than someone else, but just give him all we can. God’s favor toward Abel’s sacrifice was not because he was a carnivore; it was because of the spirit with which the sacrifice was given.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Quinquagesima Sunday, Extraordinary Form

February 14, 2021

1 Cor 13:1-13, Lk 18:31-43

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.14.21_EF_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Today on Quinquagesima Sunday, three days before Ash Wednesday, the Church seeks to help us to get our proper orientation for the holy season of Lent. The Word of God proclaimed to us is meant to make us aware of our need for God’s mercy and to come to get it. It’s meant to help us learn how to walk by faith, or, even better as we see in the Gospel, to spring up and run by faith. It’s meant to help us focus on God’s love for us in such a way that we will be transformed to love others by the same standard. Let’s allow what God is teaching us in these readings to sink deeply within so that, like the blind man in the Gospel, we can cry out to Jesus for the help we need and resolve with that assistance to live the best Lent of our life.

* We begin with the Gospel. As rabbis were accustomed to do on the triannual pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. The blind man, whom St. Mark in his Gospel identifies as Bartimaeus, was sitting by the roadside begging. He was in Jericho, literally the lowest city on earth, a symbol of the depths to which he had fallen. He heard the commotion of the crowd and asked what was happening. Upon hearing that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, he immediately began to bellow. He didn’t cry out for alms. He didn’t cry out at that point for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy. “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ miracles in Galilee and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” indicated he believed Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. The word St. Luke used to describe his shouting refers to an animal cry, something that shows the depth of the existential pain he was in, like a dog hit by a car or an elephant with its trunk caught inextricably in a tree. Hearing his agonizing howling, many of those following Jesus and trying to hear what he was teaching responded not with mercy, but with a rebuke, telling him to shut his trap. But that only led the man to shriek all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me!” Jesus stopped and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than whatever he was teaching at that moment, because it was, in fact, the central message of the Gospel he was proclaiming. Jesus had been telling the perambulating crowds that they were ascending from Jericho to Jerusalem and there everything written in the prophets about the Suffering Servant, about the Just Man being beset by evil doers, about Isaac carrying the wood for the sacrifice, about Abel being slain by Cain, would be fulfilled as he would be betrayed to the Romans, mocked, insulted, spat upon, scourged and killed, but rise on the third day. And all of it was taking place so that through his passion, death and resurrection, Jesus could lift us up from our own Jerichos, heal our own spiritual blindness, and respond definitively to our cries for the Messiah to give us God’s mercy.

* Jesus, however, wanted to involve Bartimaeus, just like he wants to involve us, in the process of healing. After hearing the blind man screaming, it would have been very easy for Jesus to come to meet him exactly where he was begging by the roadside. He was blind after all! Instead Jesus drew near, but then he called Bartimaeus to get up to come to him. This was to engage Bartimaeus’ freedom, to stoke his desire, to exercise his faith,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

February 13, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.13.21_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* One of the most physically disgusting and repulsive human beings imaginable — a leper — came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away at their flesh and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for life apart from the rest of the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them — except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from their jobs, from the synagogue and from the temple, from love and mercy. They were outcasts, ostracized from all things human. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them easily from a distance. Whenever they needed to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!” They were forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. Anyone who touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, unclean. We can sometimes grumble today about wearing masks or undergoing quarantine and isolation, but these are temporary provisions; for many of the lepers in Jesus’ day, everything was far more severe and could last the rest of one’s life.

* That the man in today’s Gospel broke all convention to come close to Jesus was already a sign of his desperation. What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature on his knees before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch the contagion. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. To the leper’s plea of faith, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” Jesus, filled with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched the leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched him in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “I do will it. Be made clean!” He was thoroughly and immediately made whole. Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure of leprosy so that he, so long an outcast, could legitimately return to the human community.

* This Gospel is a beautiful one to have three days before we begin the Holy Season of Lent. During Lent, each of us is called to approach Jesus with faith, with all our sins that are eating away our soul like Hansen’s disease destroys our bones and skin, and say, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” And Jesus wants to say to each of us in return, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Lent is the time of that cleansing. The practice of prayer helps us to overcome the leprosy of egocentrism to put God first. The practice of almsgiving helps us to conquer the leprosy of selfishness and put others ahead of ourselves. The practice of fasting helps us to triumph against the leprosy pleasure-seeking, of making our bellies our god, so that we can learn how to hunger for what God hungers. It’s a period of purification. Each of us needs to be humble enough, each of us needs to be smart enough, to recognize our state and come to God so that he, moved with compassion, can stretch out his hand and touch us.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass of Mary, The New Eve

Memorial of Blessed James Miller

February 13, 2021

Gen 3:9-24, Ps 90, Mk 8:1-10

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.13.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Today in the first reading, we see many of the results of the Fall, a text that allows us to articulate and appreciate all the more what Jesus seeks to do in all of us through the redemption, a repair project we see in all its beauty and clarity in the Blessed Virgin Mary, whom we honor today under her title of New Eve.

* First, let’s see several consequences of sin in the account of the Fall.

* The first consequence was fear. Adam and Eve began to fear God, to fear each other, and to fear themselves. Prior to the Fall, they were naked and unashamed, not afraid in the least to be exposed before God and the other who loved them, not afraid to be totally transparent toward God or the other because they only responded to the other with love. But after the Fall, they were filled with fear. When God asked Adam where he was — God well knew, but he wanted Adam to grasp that he was lost — Adam replied, “I heard you in the garden; but I was afraid, because I was naked, so I hid myself.” Rather than love, receiving it and reciprocating it, their fundamental response to others was now fear. They were afraid of their vulnerability before the other because they didn’t know whether the other would hurt them. What Christ wanted to do after the Fall was help us not to be afraid, to translate fear of punishment into a reverential awe. In most languages, there are two words for fear: one is a fear of pain, suffering, and punishment, what the Italians call paura, the Portuguese medo, and the Spanish miedo; the other word means an awe that flows from not thinking oneself worthy in front of someone so holy and awe-inspiring, what normally can cause us either to clam up or to speak without thinking in front of someone really famous and important, what the Italians call timore, the Portuguese and the Spanish temor.  We see the transition from the fear of punishment to a reverential awe when the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary at the Annunciation, greeting her, “Do not be afraid, Mary,” — don’t be intimidated by holy awe — “because you have found favor with God and you will conceive in your womb and bear and Son…” Part of the redemption is the replacement of a fear of God and fear of others with a holy reverence for God himself and for God in others.

* The second consequence of the Fall was a total lack of personal responsibility. When God asked Adam who told him he was naked and helped him to see it was evidence that he had eaten of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, rather than admitting his sin, rather than banging his chest and confessing that he had greatly sinned through his own grievous fault, he said, “The woman whom you put here with me, she gave me fruit from the tree and so I ate it.” It wasn’t his fault, he was claiming, but hers, and ultimately God’s, because God had put the woman there! And when the Lord asked Eve why she had done such a thing, she refused to take responsibility either: “The serpent tricked me into it, so I ate it.” It was the devil’s fault — and, again, ultimately God’s because he allowed the serpent to squirm through the garden. Jesus came to redeem us first by taking responsibility for us and then helping us to take responsibility for ourselves and for others. We see at the beginning of the Gospel today. He says,