Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

February 12, 2021

Gen 3:1-8, Ps 32, Mk 7:31-37

 

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: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus works a great miracle of healing a deaf-mute in such a way that the people were astonished and exclaimed, “He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” The same miracle Jesus worked in the Decapolis he works all over the world. He worked it in your life and mine on the day of our baptism. He didn’t use spit, but through his minister he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the priest or deacon said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the glory and praise of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. The graces of baptism not only touched these organs but the entirety of our being to be receptive to God in fulfillment of the prayer made in the Alleluia verse, “Open our hearts, O Lord, to listen to the words of your Son.” He wants us to listen to him with hearts full of love, to treasure his word, to be transformed by it, so that through that transformation we might transform the world. Everything begins with hearing God speak to us and responding with faith.

* This is important for us to grasp in order to understand the nature of sin. In today’s first reading, we encounter the blow-by-blow details of what we call the “original sin,” but in it we see the essential physiognomy of any sin.

* It begins with listening to God poorly, rather than attentively and lovingly, rather than hanging on his every word. God had told Adam that he wasn’t to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but as he passed that on to Eve, the details changed, as Eve said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’” Even though Adam’s and Eve’s eternal life depended on it, they hadn’t listened to God accurately. God had said nothing about not touching it. Every sin begins with a sin of listening. Pope Benedict mentions this in Verbum Domini, “Quite frequently in both the Old and in the New Testament, we find sin described as a refusal to hear the word, as a breaking of the covenant and thus as being closed to God who calls us to communion with himself. Sacred Scripture shows how man’s sin is essentially disobedience and refusal to hear.… For this reason it is important that the faithful be taught to acknowledge that the root of sin lies in the refusal to hear the word of the Lord, and to accept in Jesus, the Word of God, the forgiveness that opens us to salvation” (26). In Hebrew, the same word is used for “hearing” and “obeying,” because it was inconceivable that one could hear God asking something and refuse to obey. In Latin the same relationship is stressed. The word to listen in Latin is audire and to obey is ob-audire, which means to listen intentively, to eavesdrop. The first step in sin is to fail to listen to “every word that comes from God’s mouth,” not to treat what he says as the “words of everlasting life.”

* The second aspect of the devil’s temptation was to get them to distrust God and trust him more than God. He said that they wouldn’t die if they totally did the opposite of what God had commanded and declared that God gave the command simply bec...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Our Lady of Lourdes

February 11, 2021

Gen 2:18-25, Ps 128, Mk 7:24-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.11.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* “It is not good for the man to be alone.” These words from today’s first reading come in the Genesis account after God says, throughout creation, “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,” and with the creation of the human person,  “It is very good.” Finally God exclaims,  “It is not good for the man to be alone,” but he waited to make this judgment, we can say, until man himself had had this awareness. Even though man was in relation with God and with the animals he had named, there was still something missing. He needed a “suitable partner,” a “fitting helper” for him. And that’s what God gave him in the creation of Eve. God created such a fitting helper, so that the two of them could help each other as the image of God, live in true communion, and grow more and more into God’s loving image. This points to two existential realities: first, each of us needs help and it’s not good for us to be without this help; second, we are created as a helper for others. We are created as fitting helpers likewise always in need of suitable help.

* We also see in the passage the basic complementarity at work in this helping and being helped. God didn’t create merely someone to kill time with, or even a generic helper, but rather a “suitable helper,” a “partner,” someone who makes up for our weaknesses with strength and someone who draws from us our strength to remedy his or her weaknesses. God created Eve out of Adam’s side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. The rib symbolizes what covers the heart (the loving center of the person) and the lungs (what is necessary to breathe and survive). Adam exclaims, “Finally this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” a Hebrew expression meaning “strength of my strength and weakness of my weakness,” that they are like each other in strengths and weaknesses and need to help each other. The type of help that is needed is not just in terms of a “hand” in ordinary life, but with regard to their living as the image and likeness of God. They can’t grow in love without each other and without the analogy of human love, Adam had already discovered that he couldn’t really receive and reciprocate (however asymmetrically) divine love. The most suitable help given is with regard to their living in a fully human way in the divine image. That’s what human marriage, par excellence, is supposed to be, when a man and a woman, like Adam and Eve, fittingly help each other to become who they are. That’s why Christ raised marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament, to give his help so that they might resemble the love in the heart of the Trinity, which Christ came as Bridegroom to make possible anew.

* But the help we need extends to more than marriage. It’s not good for any of us to be alone, we all need fitting helpers, and we all need, to some degree, the complementarity between man and woman to remedy the ways in which, by original differentiation, we are not fully human. That’s why gender ideology is so harmful to human anthropology, because it suggests masculinity and femininity are mental conceptions rather than divinely ordered, complementary realities. St. John Paul II talked about the “archetypical masculine” and the “archetypical feminine” and the way that men receive love by giving love and women give love by receiving love and how man’s relative strengths in comp...

Fr. Roger J. LandryVisitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanWednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint ScholasticaFebruary 10, 2021Gen 2:4-9.15-17, Ps 104, Mk 7:14-23

 

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: 

In the Gospel today Jesus asks the disciples, “Are even you likewise without understanding?” Lest we fail to understand the absolutely revolutionary point Jesus is making in today’s Gospel, let’s take some time to do what he asks, “Hear me, all of you, and understand.”

Jesus was continuing his conversation with the Scribes and the Pharisees after their criticism that Jesus’ disciples ate their meals with ritually unwashed hands. The Scribes had determined that in order for someone to be pleasing to God they needed to obsess about ritual impurity, washing their hands twice with one-and-a-half egg shells full of water, and washing pots, jugs, beds, themselves and any other thing that had touched Gentiles or things not consecrated to the Lord. Jesus yesterday called them hypocrites because the word hypocrite means actor and they were, frankly, just pretending to be faithful to God, substituting human precepts for God’s word and will. Today Jesus extended the conversation to something that would have astonished the disciples, something that would have been totally revolutionary. He said, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” This point was revolutionary because it was precisely things from the outside that the Jews of Jesus’ day thought would make them impure. We remember that Judas Maccabeus and so many of his heroic contemporaries were willing to lay down their lives on the battlefield because the Greeks, 150 years before Christ, were trying to force the Jews to eat pork. They refused. Many people were martyred. Many Jews today still refuse to eat meat unless it’s kosher, unless all the blood has dripped out. Jesus was saying that the food we eat ultimately can’t make us impure before God. In doing this, St. Mark comments, “He thus declared all foods clean.” This is something that would take even the disciples a long time to come to grips with: St. Peter, for example, needed a vision in Joppa to help him to recognize that Jesus was not asking that Jews follow the scribal dietary laws.

What does make us impure before God? Jesus says it’s “the things that come out from within,” and then he defines them: “Evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” It’s from the tree of the heart that either good fruit or bad fruit comes. And where a person’s treasure is, there will the heart be. Does the heart treasure God and the things of God or does it desire evil? God wants us not to have “hearts far from” him, but hearts that are fully united to him. The type of purity he cares about is a pure heart that leads to pure hands, to pure speech, to pure vision, to thoughts, words and deeds of pure love.

In the first reading, we see the beginning of an illustration of what happens when one’s heart is not purely united to the Lord. We see where sin comes from. In the account of our beginnings in the Book of Genesis, we see that God placed Adam in the garden and gave everything over to him, to cultivate and care for God’s creation. He gave him only one restriction: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” God didn’t place the tree there as bait to tri...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass in Thanksgiving to God for the Gift of Human Life

February 9, 2021

Gen 1:20-2:4, Ps 8, Mt 7:1-13

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.9.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s reading from the first chapter of the Bible, we come to one of the most important things ever said: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” We are made in God’s image and God ordered everything else in creation toward us.

* This is a truth that should first fill us with wonder. In the Responsorial Psalm, we see that astonishment, commenting on Creation in the Genesis narrative: “When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place,” the Psalmist prays, “What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him? You have made him [as your image] little less than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him rule over the works of your hands, putting all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, yes, and the beasts of the field, The birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, and whatever swims the paths of the seas.” We ought never to stop expressing our wonder not just at Creation in general but at how God made us in his image to exercise his dominion over creation!

* Secondly, this truth should drive us to unveil more and more the mystery it means.

* Over the course of centuries, for many the expression “imago Dei” meant two things that distinguished us from the rest of creation. We are rational; we can think like God. And we are free; we can choose like God. We are called, therefore, to think with the mind and thoughts of God and to choose the good as God always does. How often do we seek to purify our mind of earthliness so that we may “put on the mind of Christ” (Phil 2:5),  as St. Paul exhorts us in the second chapter of his Letter to the Philippians? How often do we seek to live according to the divine freedom, knowing that it is only in the truth that we will be set free (Jn 8:32) and that the purpose of our freedom is to love?

* St. John Paul II brought the notion of the image of God to greater light when he said that when we look at the Book of Genesis, we can see that to be made in the imago Dei is to exist in a loving communion of persons. God is Trinitarian. He lives in eternal communion.  He says in today’s text, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Jews reading this for centuries tried to come up with explanations as to why God spoke in the first person plural when in almost the entirety of the rest of the Hebrew Bible he spoke in first-person singular. When Jesus eventually came and revealed that He and the Father were one, that they would send us the Holy Spirit and then send us out to baptize in the name (not names) of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we began to understand better the meaning of the first person plural (even though there are three persons in one God). The second indication is what happened when God actually created man in his image: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” The eternal God is neither male nor female. Until the Incarnation, there was never a body. To create man in his own image male and female is an indication he was creating man to live a Trinitarian existence, to live in a loving communion of persons. Male and female, man and woman, are meant to live in a nuptial communion that is similar to the way the lo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Josephine Bakhita

February 8, 2021

Gen 1:1-19, Ps 104, Mk 6:53-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.8.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* After having completed a four-week meditation on the Letter to the Hebrews, by which we’re able to see everything in the light of God’s definitive Word, Jesus Christ, and learn how to keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, today we begin a study of the beginning of the Book of the Beginning — Genesis — that will accompany us until the beginning of Lent in nine days. It has an opportunity for us to “re-read” the beginning with the prism of what we have just learned in Hebrews. It’s also a chance for us to prepare for the holy season by which Jesus seeks not just to bring us back to Eden but forward to an even deeper type of bond with him.

* Genesis begins with a focus on the phases of Creation and how good it was. After the creation of light and its separation from darkness, after the creation of the sky and the earth, after the creation of the waters from land, after the creation of vegetation and fruit, after the creation of the Sun and the moon and the stars, Genesis says “God saw how good it was.” Tomorrow we’ll continue seeing this goodness in the creation of the creatures of the sea and the animals, which likewise were good, and arrive at the culmination of the human person whom God saw was “very good.” The goodness of creation leads us to exclaim in the Psalm, “May the Lord be glad in his works!” It ponders the earth, the ocean, the mountains, the streams, the wind, the mountains, the birds, the trees, and then exults, “How manifold are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you have wrought them all— the earth is full of your creatures; Bless the Lord, O my soul!” How important for us spiritually to enter into a hymn of praise for the essential goodness of creation.

* In the Gospel, however, we see the breakdown. It’s a corruption of that goodness we’ll see on Friday with the account of the original sin and Eve and Adam. Even though creation was ontologically good, moral evil entered. And that brought about a disharmony that was never originally intended. It partially ruptured the communion that was meant to exist between creatures and God, between creatures and each other, and within creatures themselves. That breakdown caused by sin was the source of the introduction of illnesses and what they lead to, death. We get a glimpse of that pain and suffering in the Gospel. As Jesus disembarked in Gennesaret, “people immediately recognized him. They scurried about the surrounding country and began to bring in the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. Whatever villages or towns or countryside he entered, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch only the tassel on his cloak.” Such enormous pain and suffering! It was like whole towns were hospitals. And they came to the Divine Physician. They must have heard about the miracle of the woman with the hemorrhage who was cured of her 12-year illness by touching the edge of his garment because St. Mark tells us that they were all trying to touch even the tassel of his cloak with faith and that as many as touched it were healed.

* There was a tremendous physical transformation that points to an even greater spiritual one. Jesus’ physical healings — as well as his preaching and all of his other miracles — were all signs of a deeper spiritual one he was accomplishing, the redemption of the world. This is something that should fill us with wonder and...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

February 6, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.6.21_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 when we will have a chance to examine the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry and get a glimpse of an ordinary day in his life. His priorities can help us examine our own, both with regard to how we’re receiving his work in our life as well as how we’re continuing his work.

* Jesus began this day by preaching for a long time in the synagogue on the Sabbath, which as any priest will tell you after a Sunday morning, must have been somewhat exhausting all-day work since people would return home normally only at sunset. Then he went to Simon’s house where he healed his mother-in-law.

* Then, after sundown, they brought to Jesus “all who were ill or possessed by demons.” St. Mark tells us that the “whole town was gathered around the door.” Jesus cured the sick and cast out demons. It was likely very grueling work, because in no part of the Gospel did Jesus ever do “general healing services,” but cured the ill or the possessed one-by-one so that he could establish a personal relationship with each grateful recipient and hopefully bring them from a physical cure to a far more important spiritual one. It was probably close to midnight by the time he finished. He arose the next morning, “very early before dawn,” and went to a deserted place to pray. St. Mark tells us that Simon and his companions “hunted” for Jesus, and when they found him said, “Everyone is looking for you.” Without question the hordes had brought many other of the sick and the possessed from surrounding regions to Jesus and were hoping for a sequel for what they had witnessed the night before.

* “Everyone is looking for you.” We might have expected that Jesus’ response would have been one of jubilation. After all, he would later say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will refresh you” (Mt 11:28).  He wanted people coming to him with their burdens. He wanted to give them refreshment. But Jesus, when told that everyone was looking for him, didn’t respond by saying, “Hallelujah!” Rather he said, much to their surprise, “Let us go on to the nearby villages, so that I may preach there also; for this purpose I have come.” Jesus had come to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. He probably realized in prayer that morning how urgent the task was for him to accomplish the mission the Father had given him. He probably grasped as well that the people were coming him not so much to receive what he wanted to give them, but to obtain from him what they themselves wanted. The crowds looked at him as a wonder-worker, as a powerful exorcist and an unbelievably effective and shockingly free physician. But Jesus had a different set of priorities than the crowds. He wanted them to accept him on his own terms, not theirs. He wanted them to come to him not principally as the doctor of their mortal bodies, but as the Savior of their immortal souls.

* Jesus’ priorities get us to focus, first, on ours with regard to him. Do we hunger for what hewants to give us or for what we want himto give us? Do we seek to accord our priorities with His, or His with ours? It’s still common today that many people, like those in today’s Gospel, come to the Lord mostly as a miracle worker,

Fr. Roger J. LandryVisitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanSaturday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year IFebruary 6, 2021Heb 13:15-17.20-21, Ps 23, Mk 6:30-34

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

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.6.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

We have been pondering the letter to the Hebrews for the past four weeks. The climax of it happened earlier this week — we didn’t read it this year because Tuesday was the Feast of the Presentation with its proper readings — when the sacred author tells us, “Since we are surrounded by so great a cloud of witnesses, let us rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us and persevere in running the race that lies before us while keeping our eyes fixed on Jesus, the leader and perfecter of faith.” The point of the Letter, the point of the Christian life, is to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, to learn from him, to follow him, to see where his eyes and heart turn. It’s to keep our eyes fixed on him who was tempted in every way we are but never sinned. It’s to keep our eyes fixed on him who is our high priest piercing the veil so that he can lead us all of the way home.

Today as we keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, we zero in on his heart. The Gospel tells us that Jesus’ “heart was moved with pity for the crowds for they were like sheep without a shepherd.” Jesus’ viscera explode with compassion on the crowds. And today as we look at him, we see how he addresses our most fundamental needs as Good Shepherd. Receiving and responding to that help is what will make us good sheep. Imitating Jesus in caring for others as he does will be the way that we can in him come Good Shepherds. Today in the readings are highlighted five ways he seeks to shepherd us.

We see, first, that he takes us apart to be with him. “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while,” he says to the apostles after they had returned from a journey. The Good Shepherd knows that we need time of prayer. Jesus wants us to have rest, but a particular type of rest. In the Psalm we pray, “In verdant pastures he gives me repose. Beside restful waters he leads me; he refreshes my soul.” Jesus does this in prayer and he’s always, every day, seeking to lead us apart from the crowds for a while to refresh us in this way. He says elsewhere, “Take my yoke up you and learn from me, for I am meek and humble of heart, and you will find rest for yourselves.” Prayer is a time to yoke ourselves and all we do to him, because it’s by taking upon his yoke that we will find that rest.

Second, he teaches us, just like he “began to teach them many things.” We pray in the Psalm, “He guides me in right paths for his name’s sake.” Jesus has come to teach us about God, about ourselves and about how to become like God. That work of teaching never ends. Teaching is a great act of mercy.

Third, yoking us to himself on the inside, he wants to teach and help us to do the Father’s will within us as a result of this communion. He wants to instruct and assist us to turn our work and all our actions into prayer. In today’s first reading from the conclusion of the Letter to the Hebrews, we read that God the Father “who brought up from the dead the great shepherd of the sheep” seeks to “furnish [us] with all that is good, that you may do his will.” And he does this by “carry[ing] out in you what is pleasing to him through Jesus Christ.” This is why the Letter says to us about prayer, “Through Jesus, let us continually offer God a sacrifice of praise, that is, the fruit of lips that confess his name.” The praise we offer is through lips confessing his name, not silently, not merely in prayer, but among others,

Fr. Roger J. LandrySacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanFriday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year IMemorial of St. AgathaFebruary 5, 2021Heb 13:1-8, Ps 27, Mk 6:14-29

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.5.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

Today, as we come to the penultimate lesson of the Letter to the Hebrews that we’ve been pondering for the last four weeks, the author helps us to consider the characteristics of a Christian who keeps his or her eyes firmly fixed on Jesus and of a Christian leader who guides people to Jesus. These are lessons we see very much on display in the life and death of St. John the Baptist from today’s Gospel and in St. Agatha, one of the great cloud of witnesses whom the Church remembers today.

The first reading highlights five qualities that the sacred author appeals to Christians to excel in even in the midst of the persecution they were enduring.

The first is brotherly love. Christians are always to be distinguished by the love that we have together, which is likewise a sign that God sent Jesus and loves us just as much as he loves Jesus (Jn 17). Jesus calls us to love one another as he has loved us (Jn 15) and to care and feed each other out of love for him (Jn 21). When we keep our eyes firmly fixed on Jesus the guide and perfecter of our faith, we see him in others and love him in others.

The second is hospitality. Not only do we sometimes “entertain angels,” but we welcome Christ himself, who identifies with every stranger we take in.

Third is a particular care for those in prison, just as Jesus himself was imprisoned and called us to visit him in the disguise of anyone imprisoned (Mt 25). The early Christians were steadfast in caring for those who had been imprisoned on account of the faith, on account of their poverty, or other reasons. They sought to “redeem” or buy back the freedom of those in slavery or in debt. They risked their lives for those in prison, identifying themselves as Christians during times of persecution. Our care for those in these circumstances is always supposed to be excellent.

Fourth, Christians are distinguished by their purity, for the pure of heart that allows them to see God in others. That’s why the author tells them to honor marriage and never let the marriage bed be defiled but adultery or immorality. Christ the Bridegroom teaches us how to love faithfully and we should never commit adultery in the covenant of love with him by adulterous or sinful sexual thoughts or deeds.

Lastly, we’re called to be grateful and content with God in our life, rather than love money or to seek to place our faith, hope and love in mammon. As we’ve focused on earlier in this Letter, we Christians permit even the plundering of our property because we have a better possession, namely God. When we’re firmly fixed on Christ as our pearl of great price, we’re not overly attached to the stuff of this world. These are the qualities that the author wants us to focus on.

* With regard to Christian leaders, they do all of this and three things more.

* The first is that they speak the word of God.

* The second is that the teach us how to live and die well. We consider the outcome of their way of life.

* The third is that they instruct us by their example of faith in all circumstances, and hence we should imitate it, knowing Christ is always the same regardless of changing times and worldly values, and so our fidelity must similarly be the “same yesterday, today and forever.”

* When we look at the life of St. John the Baptist, we see someone who was the greatest of all the prophets speaking t...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

February 4, 2021

Heb 12:18-19.21-24, Ps 48, Mk 6:7-13

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.4.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus gives instructions to the Twelve as he was preparing to send them out to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom. Normally, when we go on a trip, especially if we’re not accustomed to traveling, we prepare a list of the things we need to pack in our suitcase so that we don’t forget anything. Jesus likewise prepares a list for the apostles, but it’s precisely a list of things not to take. He tells them to take nothing except a walking stick (something that would give them greater stamina for the mission), no food, no sack of clothes and toiletries, no money. Why? He knew they needed to preach the Gospel not principally by their words but by their witness, by who they were. If they were going to be preaching that God cares for us more than he cares for the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, then they needed to manifest that trust in his divine Providence. If they were going to be preaching his kingdom — St. Matthew’s version of the same sending out reminds us that Jesus instructed them, “As you go, make this proclamation, ‘The kingdom of heaven is at hand.’” — they needed to be living in that kingdom themselves.

* When Jesus himself preached the kingdom, as we see at the beginning of his public ministry, he proclaimed: “The time is fulfilled. The kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The kingdom of God is ultimately God and to enter the kingdom we need to turn away from what keeps us from the kingdom and believe in the fact that God is truly with us. That’s why St. Mark tells us today that the twelve “went off and preaching repentance,” at the same time attacking the devil and his lies and works head on, “driving out many demons.” In today’s Responsorial Psalm, we speak about God’s temple, his dwelling place, the heart of his kingdom, as a place of conversion and mercy. “O God, we ponder your mercy within your temple!” It’s through God’s mercy that we come to dwell in his kingdom!

* But as Jesus himself often prayed, the Kingdom of God is both now and not yet, it’s a present reality because the King is with us, but it’s also not fully revealed and we haven’t entered into it yet definitively. That’s why Jesus gives us various parables about the Kingdom of Heaven, including under the image of a spousal banquet for which we need to be prepared. He did so to stoke our hunger for it so that like the wise virgins we may be ready for it. He wanted to get us properly dressed for it, cleansed for it by his blood in the Sacrament of Baptism and keeping that garment unstained so that we may arrive properly dressed.

* To proclaim the Gospel adequately, we need to proclaim its eschatological significance. Pope Benedict in his beautiful encyclical on Christian hope, Spe Salvi, said that we don’t preach enough about the “great hope” we Christians have for the fulfillment of God’s kingdom. For that reason, we fill our lives with so many lesser hopes and goals, themselves often fine, but always relative. Pope Benedict wrote, “Anyone who does not know God, even though he may entertain all kinds of hopes, is ultimately without hope, without the great hope that sustains the whole of life (cf. Eph 2:12). Man’s great, true hope that holds firm in spite of all disappointments can only be God—God who has loved us and who continues to love us ‘to the end,’ until all ‘is accomplished’ (cf. Jn 13:1 and 19:30).

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Blase, Bishop and Martyr

February 3, 2021

Heb 12:4-7.11-15, Ps 103, Mk 6:1-6

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.3.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As we’ve been noting for the past three-and-a-half weeks in our daily meditation on the Letter to the Hebrews at Mass, this letter was written to the early Christians at a time in which many had undergone fierce persecution and when much more persecution was anticipated. We’ve seen that Christ, the definitive Word of the Father, took on our flesh and entered into our world to lead us to eternal glory, to perfection as sons and daughters, but that he would do so precisely through uniting our suffering and death to his salvific suffering and death. He pierced the veil of the heavenly holy of holies precisely to give us confidence that follow him along this path. In the past few days, we’ve been talking about the holy hypomone — the sacred stamina or endurance — that we need to live the faith in the midst of hardships and difficulties. The Letter to the Hebrews has inspired us by focusing on the persevering faith of so many in a great cloud of witnesses.  Yesterday, if we didn’t have the proper readings for the Feast of the Presentation, it would have reminded us to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, to consider how he despised the shame of the Cross and endured opposition, so that we may not grow weary and lose heart. Today it gives us a third motivation: to endure our trials “as discipline,” as the training that will make us holy disciples.

* Quoting Proverbs 3:11-12, the Letter exhorts us: “My son, do not disdain the discipline of the Lord or lose heart when reproved by him; for whom the Lord loves, he disciplines; he scourges every son he acknowledges.” Therefore, he says, “Endure your trials as ‘discipline’; God treats you as his sons. For what ‘son’ is there whom his father does not discipline?” He tells us that discipline isn’t fun, but it’s important if we’re ever going to mature: “At the time, all discipline seems a cause not for joy but for pain, yet later it brings the peaceful fruit of righteousness to those who are trained by it.” Then he gets to the punch line, to get over any potential self-pity party, or diabolical temptation that because we’re suffering God mustn’t love us, by appealing: “So strengthen your drooping hands and your weak knees. Make straight paths for your feet, that what is lame may not be dislocated but healed.” And he makes an appeal for the means by which we are to use our restored hands, feet and knees, not just through folding them as we kneel down in prayer, but precisely through genuine love of neighbor: “Strive for peace with everyone, and for that holiness without which no one will see the Lord. See to it that no one be deprived of the grace of God, that no bitter root spring up and cause trouble, through which many may become defiled.”

* We don’t like discipline because many of us aren’t deeply docile. We don’t think we need to learn or sometimes want to learn, at least in ways we don’t want to learn. We may not think we’re opposed to discipline, just the discipline that we don’t want… We’re resistant to being surprised by the Lord. We see that in the Gospel. In Nazareth, they were not willing to become disciples of one of their own, one with whom they grew up, one whose furniture and perhaps even houses he had made. From initial amazement at his words, they turned to taking offense at him and as we’ll see in St. Luke’s account, they’d even reach homicidal rage.