Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

October 13, 2020

Gal 5:1-6, Ps 119, Lk 11:37-41

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* There seems to be a serious contradiction in today’s readings. In the Responsorial Psalm, we expressed a great love for the law of the Lord. “In your ordinances is my hope and I will keep your law continually,” we prayed, “because I seek your precepts. I will delight in your commands which I love, and I will lift up my hands to your commands and meditate on your statutes.” Yet in the first reading St. Paul implies that the law is a “yoke of slavery,” that circumcision, which featured prominently in the law, “does not count for anything,” and that those who are “trying to be justified by law” are “separated from Christ” and “fallen from grace.” In the Gospel, Jesus scandalized the Pharisee who had invited him to dinner because he didn’t undergo the elaborate hand-washing ritual that the Scribes prescribed had to be done before eating, pouring a half egg-shell’s worth of water down his folded hands from fingers to wrists, drying the water by making a fist and rubbing the other hand, only to repeat the gesture of another half egg-shell of water poured from wrists to finger tips. Jesus replied by calling the Pharisees “fools.” What is it? Is the law our hope, delight, and meditation or is it worthless and foolish?

* This leads us to two central truths that need to be grasped in our faith. The first is the purpose of the law of God. As Jesus would say elsewhere in the Gospel, the entirety of the law and the prophets hangs on the two-fold command to love God with all we are and have and to love our neighbor. The second is that, on occasion in salvation history, some began to look at the law not within this lens of helping us to love God and others, but as an end in itself, almost even an idol. People, like the Scribes and the Pharisees Jesus confronts and the Judaizers against whom St. Paul battles, began to focus more on the law than on the Legislator and those made in his image and likeness. Over time they began to create a system of interpretations and “fences” around the law (to try to prevent someone from even getting close to breaking it) that often directly opposed love of God and neighbor. We see this often in the Gospel when Jesus is accused of doing evil because he healed people on the Sabbath day, as if the only day we couldn’t love our sick neighbors was on the day of the Lord. The harmony that flows out of the apparent contradiction in today’s readings is that we are called to hope, seek, delight in, love, meditate upon and keep the law of the Lord continuously, but what God means by this is his law of love for God and for all those God loved enough to take on our human nature and die before. Some aspects of the law, like St. Paul described for us last week, were a “tutor” that meant to train us out of our fallen nature and love God and neighbor in little things, preparing us to accept what Jesus himself would come to teach as a fulfillment of that preparation. The law of circumcision, for example, consecrated human generation to God’s plans so that men and women would not forget that human love was meant to be part of the Covenant, but the physical act of consecration was surpassed in the new Covenant by the spiritual dedication: a circumcised heart was far more important than the snipping of foreskins (Deut 10:16; Deut 30:6; Jer 4:4). The dietary laws were likewise meant to consecrate one’s appetite for food to God’s plan, to train them to recognize that it was God who gave animals life (and hence the need to drain them of blood, which symbolizes life) and therefore that they should be slaughtered with a sense of gratitude to God and reverence...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the 28th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Blessed Carlo Acutis

October 12, 2020

Gal 4:22-24.26-27.31.5:1, Ps 113, Lk 11:29-32

 

To listen to the audio homily, please click below: 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the first reading, we continue to explore the sharp contrast St. Paul makes in his Letter to the Galatians between Judaized Christians who think we’re saved by our own efforts to keep all the precepts of the Mosaic Law, and the Christians he worked to form who grasp that we’re saved by God, by our response to the manifold graces he gives us. Using an allegorical style of interpretation he learned in rabbinical school, he described the two spiritualities flowing from Hagar through Ishmael and Sarah through Isaac as a “yoke of slavery” versus a “freedom” in response to God’s “promise” (grace through the promised coming of the Messiah and his incarnation, passion and resurrection of Jesus) for which Christ has set us free. The Christians in Galatia were being persuaded by the Judaizers that they couldn’t be good Christians unless they yoked themselves entirely to the Mosaic law like the Scribes and Pharisees did. The law was lived by them not as an experience of freedom to love God and others maximally, but as a straightjacket in which many focused far more on the law — and all of the binding interpretations of the law made by the Scribes — than on God. St. Paul stressed that Christ, in fulfilling the Mosaic law, freed us from that slavery, and in the new and eternal Covenant, sought to help us live by faith in the freedom of the truth as beloved sons and daughters of God.

* These two different spiritualities provide a context for us better to grasp what was happening in today’s Gospel. Many of the Jews who had been influenced by the Scribes and the Pharisees were seeking signs from Jesus, despite the fact that Jesus had been working many signs. Immediately before this scene, as we saw in Friday’s Gospel, Jesus had exorcised a demon from a possessed man, but Jesus’ critics refused to accept that sign as pointing to what it obviously spotlighted, that Jesus was working for God and trying to free people from the domain of the evil one. Instead, they pretended as if the miracle were a sign of another agency, that Jesus was casting out demons by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons. Likewise these same critics weren’t accepting any of Jesus’ other signs, his many miracles of healing and feeding. They were essentially only looking for signs that corresponded to their preconceived prejudices, that if Jesus were the Messiah, then he would work signs that pointed to his liberating them from the Romans and establishing a political renewal of the Davidic Kingdom. If he were the Messiah, then everything he did, they thought, would be signs corresponding to and indeed confirming what they were laying the foundations to establish. The Messiah couldn’t possibly work signs that would contradict what they were expecting and doing, they thought. So on the one hand, they sought miracles, but only those miracles that confirmed what they wanted confirmed. None of Jesus’ miracles seemed to be doing this, which is why they continued to seek signs. They were like children of Hagar. In contrast, we had on Saturday Jesus’ response to the shout of the anonymous woman, “Blessed is the womb that bore you and the breasts that nursed you,” when the Lord responded about the real thing that makes Mary most blessed of all, “Blessed rather are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” Jesus was looking for those who would receive the Word of God with faith and act on that saving word. These were children of Sarah … and of Mary.

* These two scenes set us up for Jesus’ words today when he says,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Twenty-Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

October 10, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.10.20_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The text that guided the homily was: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday.

* In the Gospel, Jesus speaks to us about the kingdom of heaven, the invitation he has given us to join him there forever, and about how we need to respond to that invitation. He does so within the context of a parable about salvation history in which he illustrates for us, basically, how not to respond. He concludes the parable by saying, “Many are invited, but few are chosen.” We obviously want to be numbered among the “chosen few.” The chosen ones are not those whom God somehow favors over others. They are those who respond fully to having been chosen by God. Therefore it’s important for us to pay close attention to what Jesus tells us today that we will respond to his invitation, choose him who has chosen us, and help the “many” we know also learn how to become among the chosen as well!

* Jesus compares the kingdom of heaven to a wedding banquet a king is throwing for his son. God wants all to come to this feast, he wishes all people to be saved, but there are three parts of this parable that we need to ponder:

* The first is the invitation. Jesus says that the King sent his servants to call those who had been invited to the wedding banquet, but they would not come. When they didn’t respond the first time, he gave them a second chance. He sent other servants, saying, “Tell those who have been invited: Behold, I have prepared my banquet, my calves and my fattened cattle have been slaughtered, and everything is ready; come to the feast.’” But again they made light of it. One went to his farm, another to his business, and yet others seized his servants, mistreated them and killed them. The servants that Jesus has been describing up until now are the prophets who had been sent by God to invite the Jews to this feast, but, as we talked about last week in Jesus’ parable of the tenant farmers in the Master’s vineyard, all of the prophets were mistreated and killed by the people receiving this invitation to communion with God. Only some, like obviously the Blessed Virgin, St. Joseph, the Apostles and those who became Jesus’ disciples, responded to Jesus’ invitation.

* But God kept inviting still.  The servants went out a third time and “gathered all whom they found, both good and bad,” Jesus says, “so the wedding hall was filled with guests.” This is the mission of the Church. We don’t have a Church only for the good and the holy. All are invited. We shouldn’t be surprised, therefore, that in the Church we find great saints and great sinners, that we find the faithful and the hypocrites. Some respond to the invitation by showing up but without conversion. They are invited, but not chosen, because they cooperate with God’s desire to choose them. We see this in what Jesus says about the wedding garment: “When the king came in to meet the guests, he noticed a man there who was not dressed in a wedding garment, and he said to him, ‘Friend, how is it that you came in here without a wedding garment?’ And the man was speechless. Then the king said to the attendants, ‘Bind his hands and feet and cast him into the darkness outside, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth.’”

* At first glance, it might seem that the King is both crazy and cruel. He commanded his servants to invite the man to the feast and then he’s picky about what he’s wearin...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

October 10, 2020

Gal 3:22-29, Ps 105, Lk 11:27-28

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, an anonymous woman from the crowd sought to praise Jesus’ mother Mary. “Blessed is the womb that carried you and the breasts at which you nursed!,” she called out. If any womb was blessed, it was the immaculate womb of Mary of Nazareth that tabernacled for nine months the Creator and Savior of the world. If any breasts were blessed, it would have been those who nursed and fed the one who gives us each day our daily bread. But Jesus wasn’t going to limit the praise of the mother whom he daily honored to her inimitable physical bonds to the Son of God made man. He replied to the woman by highlighting a far greater source of blessing, something that each and every one of us not only can emulate but is called to emulate: “Rather, blessed are those who hear the word of God and observe it.” The profoundest source of Mary’s beatitude was her faithful listening and response to God in her life. St. Athanasius described that before Mary had ever conceived the Word of God in her womb, she had already conceived Him in her heart through faith. So many medieval depictions of the Annunciation and the miraculous virginal conception of Jesus in the Incarnation show the Holy Spirit entering through Mary’s ears, to highlight just this faith. In a parallel scene, when Mary had come to see him together with many of his cousins from Nazareth, they told Jesus inside a crowded house where he was teaching and healing that his mother and relatives were outside waiting for him. Taking advantage of the teaching moment, he replied, “Who is my mother? Who are my brothers?” And stretching out his hand toward his disciples, he said, “Here are my mother and my brothers. For whoever does the will of my heavenly Father is my brother, and sister, and mother” (Mt 12:46-50). Mary is the paradigm of all those who do the will of God the Father, who hear what he asks and who act on it. To be a true brother or sister of Jesus in the family he came from heaven to earth to found, it’s not really enough just to be baptized, although that’s an essential start. We also have to listen to him as he describes for us the will of God and then, just as he did, say, mean and lovingly do the words “Thy will be done!”

* In the first reading, we see how Saint Paul describes that the entire Old Testament, the Covenant God made with the Jews, was meant to train them to hear and observe the Word of God. “The law was our disciplinarian for Christ,” he says, “that we might be justified by faith.” The word “disciplinarian” in English is the word “pedagogos” in Greek. A pedagogue was a tutor who generally lived with the family of the student, supervised his homework and lessons, and took him to class with the master. The law prepared us, he was suggesting, to meet Jesus the Master, to hear what he was saying and to put it into practice. So many times throughout the Hebrew Bible we hear God say to the Jews through Moses or the Prophets, “If you hear my voice and observe the commandments I am giving you today.” All of God’s revelation was to prepare us to hear and obey, knowing that to hear and to obey are the same word in Hebrew. One area in which we’re called to hear and obey the Master is with regard to communion with each other based on communion with God. We focused earlier this week when we pondered the Our Father God’s will for us to be one family in prayer. Yesterday we had a chance again to focus on it in Jesus’ words about how the devil seeks to divide and he comes to gather into one. But many of us,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. John Henry Newman

October 19, 2020

Gal 3:7-14, Ps 111, Lk 11:15-26

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s Gospel was the first Gospel I ever had the privilege to proclaim and today’s readings were the first ones about which I ever preached, 22 years ago today, the day after I was ordained a deacon, at a Mass at the Chapel of Our Lady of Fatima in the Dorothean Sisters’ Casa Fatima across from the North American College in Rome. I’ve always thought that God was very good to me in giving me these readings because they’re not particularly easy to preach on, and so from the first time I ever had the chance to act on what I was instructed at my diaconal ordination, to “Believe what you read [and] teach what you believe,” I had to do so explicitly with far greater dependence on God, far greater cooperation with the Holy Spirit. Whenever I have had the chance to preach, therefore, on the readings of the 27th Friday of Ordinary Year Year II, it always reminds me of the summons God gives to turn to him for light not just for these readings but every time I preach.

* Today we have the joy to celebrate for the first time the Memorial of Saint John Henry Newman, canonized last October 13 in Rome. In light of his life, I’d like to focus on two huge lessons from today’s readings.

* The first is about faith. In today’s reading from St. Paul’s letter to the Galatians, the apostle talks to us about faith, saying that it is those who have faith who are children of Abraham. St. Paul was writing this to the Christians he had evangelized on his first and second journeys, but whose faith had then been reprogrammed by Judaized Christians coming from Jerusalem, those who thought that in order to be a good Christian, you first had to be a perfect Jew. They didn’t realize that the Mosaic Law was a gift to prepare God’s people for the advent of the Messiah and who he would bring the law to perfection. St. Paul will call it, as we’ll see, a pedagogue or tutor, someone would travel with you to class to the master or professor, and then, after class, go over all of the lessons. St. Paul was stressing throughout this letter as well as his letter to the Romans that we are saved by God through faith: it’s God work that we receive through the gift of faith. The Judaizers, like the Pharisees of which he was once one, thought we were saved by our actions of fidelity to God’s law. We’re judged by them, but not saved by them. We’re saved by God that we receive through faith. But the big takeaway is not just why the Judaizing Christians were wrong. The great takeaway is how we’re supposed to live. We’re supposed to live by faith just like Abraham. We’re constantly being asked by God to make journeys of faith like Abraham did at 75, leaving Ur of the Chaldeans, his security, his life as he knew it until then and journey to a place God would show him. God didn’t tell him the destination, but Abraham trusted in him enough to go. God promised that he would become the father of many nations and showed him the stars of the sky as a confirmation of how many descendants he’d have, but the text of Genesis is clear that he was asked to look into the heavens when the sky was blue, not dark, because dusk came afterward. Abraham knew the stars were there, but couldn’t see them, which is a good image of what faith means, a certainty without seeing with worldly eyes. He didn’t know that he would have to wait 25 years for the fulfillment of that promise, but he continued to believe.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

October 8, 2018

Gal 3:1-5, Lk 1:69-75, Lk 11:5-13

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday when the disciples asked Jesus to teach them to pray, he began by teaching them that the secret of prayer is to approach God as a loving Father. Once we do, almost everything flows. We begin to seek the glory and sanctification of his name and the building of his kingdom not only because we love Him but also because we know that, as his sons and daughters, we share that name and are heirs of that kingdom. Once we relate to him as a Loving Father than we trust in his providence to give us each day what we need and in his mercy to forgive us when we err because he loves us more than he detests the sins that hurt us and wound our relationship with him. When we relate to him as a Loving Father we trust him not to put us in a position in which we’ll fail the ultimate test but to challenge us and help us to meet those challenges that are beyond what we think are possible.

* Today Jesus continues his responding to our request to teach us how to pray by illustrating for us how to persevere in prayer. He gives us a parable based on Middle Eastern customs of hospitality. Especially during the summer months when the sun is most brutal, many Jews would travel at night and so it was not unheard of that a guest would arrive at your home — in the days before not only phones, texts and emails but also before a postal system that was affordable and efficient — unannounced at night, famished after a long journey. Because bread was baked normally in the morning, it’s possible that all the bread had already been eaten. That’s why you’d go to your neighbors to ask if they had anything to share. The second thing to understand about Middle Eastern culture is that their doors were open all day long but when they were shut and locked, that meant that the entire family and all their animals had gone to bed. They’d sleep together in an interior part of the house to stay warm during the typical middle eastern radiational cooling at night. To get up to answer the door when a neighbor was knocking at midnight meant that one might be stepping on one’s children, one’s animals and waking everyone up. It’s understandable that one would want to wait to share bread until the morning. But Jesus says that because of the perseverance of the neighbor, “I tell you, if he does not get up to give him the loaves because of their friendship, he will get up to give him whatever he needs because of his persistence.” Jesus mentions this as a lesson in prayer precisely in order to contrast that motivation with one of God. He was saying, “If a neighbor would eventually give in because of harassment, think about how God will respond out of love?” That led Jesus to say, “I tell you, ask and you will receive, seek and you will find, knock and the door will be opened to you, for everyone who asks receives, everyone who seeks finds, and to the one who knocks the door will be opened.” Notice that he doesn’t say that one will receive, find or have the door opened immediately. He also doesn’t say that one will receive and find exactly what one expected to find. But he does promise God will respond, precisely because God is a loving Father who always responds first and foremost by giving himself. That’s why Jesus said, “What father among you would hand his son a snake when he asks for a fish? Or hand him a scorpion when he asks for an egg? If you then, who are wicked, know how to give good gifts to your children, how much more will the Father in heaven give the Holy Spirit to those who ask him.” God sends the Holy Spirit not just to those who ask for the Holy Spirit but for those who ask, seek,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Our Lady of the Rosary

October 7, 2020

Gal 2:1-2.7-14, Ps 117, Lk 11:1-4

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday we pondered the example of Mary of Bethany sitting at Jesus’ feet, allowing him to feed her. She had chosen the better part and the one thing necessary, the activity more important than all others. Today we see Jesus sitting at the feet of his Father in prayer. His example of prayer brought the disciples to ask him, “Lord, teach us to pray just as John [the Baptist] taught his disciples.” Jesus had already taught them much about prayer by his parables describing the need to pray with perseverance, patience, humility, purity of intention, faith, without show and in his name. He had taught them much by his example of prayer, constantly going out at night or early in the morning to pray. But they were asking for some direct instruction, to have Jesus open up to them the mystery of intimacy with God. Today we also learn how to sit at Jesus’ feet in the school of Mary his Mother as we celebrate the Feast of Our Lady of the Rosary, and within Mary’s contemplative heart, ponder the Blessed Fruit of her Womb, the central mysteries of his life, and the central love of his sacred heart.

* We should be conscious that the Rosary grew over time. At the beginning, Christians accustomed to praying the 150 Psalms, began to substitute 150 Our Fathers when they didn’t have the Psalter with them, especially as they were walking on long journeys. Some began to do the same with 150 Angelic Salutations, the first half of the Hail Mary. Eventually the Rosary as we now have it, particularly through the preaching of the Dominican Order, began to grow. As St. John Paul II wrote in his beautiful exhortation on the Holy Rosary 18 years ago, that in praying the Rosary, “it is natural for the mind to be lifted up towards the Father. In each of his mysteries, Jesus always leads us to the Father, for as he rests in the Father’s bosom (cf. Jn 1:18) he is continually turned towards him. He wants us to share in his intimacy with the Father, so that we can say with him: “Abba, Father” (Rom 8:15; Gal 4:6). By virtue of his relationship to the Father he makes us brothers and sisters of himself and of one another, communicating to us the Spirit that is both his and the Father’s.” He cites Blessed Bartolo Longo, whose feast day we remembered two days ago, who saw in the Rosary beads “a ‘chain’ that links us to God. A chain, yes, but a sweet chain; for sweet indeed is the bond to God who is also our Father. A ‘filial’ chain that puts us in tune with Mary, the ‘handmaid of the Lord’ (Lk 1:38) and, most of all, with Christ himself, who, though he was in the form of God, made himself a ‘servant’ out of love for us (Phil 2:7).”

* This is a prayer we’re called to take up. Twenty-five years ago today, St. John Paul II, before he would bless the offices of the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See to the UN, prayed the Rosary in St. Patrick’s Cathedral in the presence of the first Sisters of Life, other religious and a representative from each of the over 400 parishes in the Archdiocese. He spoke to those present, and the whole Church, about the importance of praying the Rosary in the family, saying, “One prayer in particular I recommend to families: the one we have just been praying, the Rosary. And especially the Joyful Mysteries, which help us to meditate on the Holy Family of Nazareth. Uniting her will with the will of God, Mary conceived the Christ Child, and became the model of every mother carrying her unborn ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Blessed Marie Rose Durocher; Memorial of St. Bruno

October 6, 2020

Gal 1:13-24, Ps 139, Lk 10:38-42

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday Jesus gave us the Parable of the Good Samaritan, praising the one who made the effort to take care of another in contrast to those who did nothing. In several other places in the Gospel he praised service of others: he said that he himself had come among us as one who serves (Lk 22:27); he washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper and told them to do the same (Jn 13:12-14); he promised to gird himself with an apron and wait on those at the heavenly banquet (Lk 12:37); and he said that the greatest among us would be the one who serves the rest (Mt 23:11). And so in today’s Gospel, Jesus was clearly not castigating Martha for her loving service. What he was saying to her, however, was that none of those efforts was strictly-speaking essential, that therefore there was no reason to get worked about them, and that there was something more important, something that Mary realized and that Martha as yet hadn’t.

* Both Martha and Mary loved Jesus very much. As an expression of that love, Martha worked very hard to prepare a meal for him, something that was much more time-consuming in the ancient world without stoves, or refrigerators, or blenders or ready-made cooking supplies than it is today. She likely also cleaned her house, which, too, was much more challenging in the age before vacuum cleaners, running water, and so forth. It’s natural that she would have been exasperated doing all of this work while her sister Mary seemed to be doing nothing. After she complained to Jesus, however, Jesus corrected not Mary but Martha, telling her that she was anxious and concerned about many small things but only one was necessary. Mary had chosen the better part, the one thing necessary — Jesus himself — and it was not going to be taken away from her to focus on relatively less important things. What Mary grasped that Martha didn’t is that Jesus had come to their home primarily to feed and not to be fed, to serve rather than to be served, and it was Mary who understood this and sat at his feet as he not only fed her with the nourishment of his word and presence but cleaned her interior house by his own purity.  The welcome he sought most was their time, their friendship, their love, their open ears and receptive hearts. Mary intuitively grasped this and sat at Jesus’ feet listening to him as if nothing in the rest of the world really mattered — because, in fact, Jesus implies, nothing in the rest of the world really does matter anywhere near as much. Jesus once said in a parable, “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Mt 13:45-46). Jesus was for Mary that pearl of great price more valuable than everything else in the jewelry collection of her life. Mary showed how much she understood the practical consequences of Jesus’ value when he and his apostles visited their home again, just a few days before his death. St. John gives us the scene: “Six days before the Passover Jesus came to Bethany, the home of Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. There they gave a dinner for him. Martha served [some things never change!], and Lazarus was one of those at the table with him. Mary took a pound of costly perfume made of pure nard, anointed Jesus’ feet, and wiped them with her hair. The house was filled with the fragrance of the perfume” (Jn 12:1-8). The aromatic nard would have cost Mary almost a full year’s salary, but she spent it entirely on Jesus because she knew he was worth ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the 27th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Dedication of St. Patrick’s Cathedral

Memorial of St. Faustina Kowalska, Bl. Francis Xavier Seelos, Bl. Bartolo Longo

October 5, 2020

Gal 1:6-12, Ps 111, Lk 10:25-37

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* On Saturday, in a prayer to God the Father, Jesus contrasted the “wise and the clever” from those who accept the Kingdom like like children. Today in the Gospel, we meet one of those who is “wise and clever.” A scholar of the law approaches to test Jesus about what he needs to do to inherit eternal life. Jesus flips the question around and asks the scribe from his study of the law what he thinks the answer is. He gives the same synthetic answer that Jesus would give elsewhere (Mt 22:34-40): to love God with all we have and to love our neighbor like we love ourselves. Jesus told him that he had answered correctly, but he added something else: “Do this and you will live.” It was clear that the scholar knew what needed to be done, but Jesus, seeing his heart, recognized the struggle for this scribe would have to put into practice what he knew. Salvation isn’t dependent so much on our intelligence, on what we know, but who we are, and our character is forged by our action. We see how right Jesus was in the scribe’s follow-up question. Wishing to justify himself, he asked, “And who is my neighbor?” At first glance, the question might seem one of sincere curiosity, but behind it is the premise that there are some people who are his neighbors and some who are not. The typical Jews of the time thought that they were to love their neighbor and hate their enemy (Mt 5:43), that they were supposed to care for those Jews who followed the law, but cut themselves off from sinners, from Samaritans, from Gentiles and from basically everyone who didn’t toe the line. The scribe wanted to be justified in not loving certain of his neighbors. That’s why Jesus told him the Parable of the Good Samaritan to teach him who really loves his neighbor, before adding, “Go and do the same.”

* Jesus changed the way that the Scribe (and the people of the time) looked at loving our neighbor from “objectively” seeking to define who was and was not our neighbor that we should treat with love, to “subjectively” becoming a neighbor to everyone, to being willing to love and treat with mercy whomever we meet. St. John Paul II wrote in Love and Responsibility that a human being is someone to whom the only worthy response is love. That’s what it means to become a neighbor: a person who sees everyone as someone to whom one should show love and mercy, someone who recognizes everyone is in his neighborhood. This is what Jesus did to us, drawing close to us when we were dying, left in a ditch, mugged by the evil one, left for dead. He bound our wounds, carried us on his shoulders, poured his precious blood into us, brought us to the inn of the Church and promised to repay everyone who is kind to us at his second coming. And he as a Good Samaritan continues to come to us with all our wounds every morning. He wants us to follow him in loving like this.

* Insofar as we, too, need not just to love God with all we are but to become Good Samaritans to all in order to inherit eternal life, it’s important for us to enter more deeply into this parable of Jesus. Jesus describes a mugged man left in a ditch dying. A priest and a Levite journey by that route — two people who were religious, who should have been living by God’s command to love their neighbor — but, seeing the dying man, pass by the other side. Perhaps they were late for an appointment at the temple. Perhaps they didn’t want to become ritually impure by touching the man’s blood,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

October 3, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.3.20_Landry_ConCon.mp3

 

The text that guided today’s homily was: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will give us another parable about a vineyard, this time one that is leased out to tenants who, rather than paying their rent, beat and kill the servants sent to collect it and even kill the owner’s son when he comes to speak to them. What Jesus says has both a very important historical meaning as well as a crucial actual meaning. For us to understand its present significance, though, we first need to grasp the historical lessons Jesus was teaching his original listeners.

* With the image of the vineyard, Jesus was summarizing God’s relations with the Jewish people. As God himself said through the prophet Isaiah in this Sunday’s first reading: “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel, and the people of Judah are his pleasant planting.” The vineyard is ultimately all of God’s people, all of the children he has created. And we are meant to work and cultivate that vineyard.

* But God gave the house of Israel more than just this stewardship over the great natural endowment of creation. He also made them stewards of a greater gift, the Covenant he had established with the human race.  Through Isaiah, we see how much personal care God took in preparing the vineyard of Israel. He “dug it and cleared it of stones, and planted it with choice vines; he built a watchtower in the midst of it, and hewed out a wine vat in it.” God himself, in other words, had done all of the hard work building the “infrastructure” of the vineyard, clearing it so that it can bear fruit, putting a watchtower in it to guard for animals coming to eat the fruit, establishing a wine press so that fruit can immediately produce joy. He gave the “house of Israel” the relatively light task of maintaining that vineyard and bearing fruit from that Covenant. But what happened? God tells us through Isaiah that “he expected it to yield grapes, but it yielded wild grapes.” It had the appearance of growth, the outward show of fruit, but the fruit was worth nothing. “Fruit” is always to be interpreted as acts of love, justice, goodness, and faith. This is not what God found. He found, rather, bloodshed. So the owner of the vineyard — God the Father, as Jesus tells us in the parable — sent his servants the prophets to them to remind them of the need to produce good fruit from all God’s gifts and to teach them by word and example how to do so. But their reaction was to beat and kill the messengers. So God the Father sent others, “more than the first, and they treated them in the same way.” This is precisely what happened to God’s prophets; almost all of them were killed. Jesus, in fact, would later lament over the holy city, Jerusalem, because it was the site of the execution of so many prophets: “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, the city that kills the prophets and stones those who are sent to it!” (Mt 23:37).

* Jesus tells us that after all of those unjust deaths his Father the landowner sent his son to them, saying, “They will respect my son.” But rather than respond with gratitude for yet one more chance, they said to themselves, “‘This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.’ So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.”  When Jesus said those words, he was telling them precisely what was occurring in their hearts at that moment a...