Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Our Lady of Mercy

September 24, 2020

Eccl 1:2-11, Ps 90, Lk 9:7-9

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we begin three days pondering the Book of Ecclesiastes. There has been debate over the course of time as to whether this book is inspired and therefore whether it should be part of Sacred Scripture. Is everything a “vanity of vanities?” Is there “nothing new under the sun?” Does man “profit nothing” from all his labor? Is everything just cyclical, where what has been will recur and what has been done will be done again? Is there no remembrance of men of old and no hope that others will remember us? The Christian faith is ready to reject what these questions imply, but before we do, we should ask again why the Church would consider this text nevertheless inspired. The fundamental reason is because it shows the meaningless of a life without reference to God and eternal life and shows the longing of all created reality for the radical newness that the kingdom of God will bring.

* St. Paul talked about this vanity of a life without the Risen Christ in the passage we had a week ago: “For if the dead are not raised, neither has Christ been raised, and if Christ has not been raised, your faith is vain; you are still in your sins. Then those who have fallen asleep in Christ have perished. If for this life only we have hoped in Christ, we are the most pitiable people of all.” The Exultet each Easter proclaims the same truth: “Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed!” Jesus himself mentions it in the image of building an earthly grain bin, or in placing our treasure in the things of this world, or in trying to take our possessions through the eye of the needle.

* We see an image of the vanity of earthly life and the newness that happened with the resurrection in today’s Gospel, where there are several references to raising from the dead. The paranoid Herod Antipas worried that Jesus was John the Baptist or one of the other prophets risen from the dead, but for him and for the people of his day, to be risen basically meant resuscitated, only to die anew. If John were really resuscitated, the Herod could just chop off his head again at a lustful whim. But Jesus’ resurrection really was something new, something that gave meaning to suffering, crucifixion and death. It was truly a new life that gave all things meaning. In response to Ecclesiastes’ pessimism that we can never really say truthfully, “See this is new!,” Christ, risen from the dead, says in Revelation, “Behold, I make all things new!”

* How does that revolution happen from vanity to newness and meaning? It happens through the mercy of God, the mercy received in Baptism, in Confession, in the new life of conversion. Jesus speaks to this in his conversation with Nicodemus about being born anew. He speaks about it when he tells us to work not for the food that perishes but for the food — his Body and Blood — that leads to eternal life. Christ seeks to bring us into communion with him through the grace, through the Sacraments, and to innest us on Him who is the Vine and the Resurrection and the Life. Once again from the Easter Praeconium, “Our birth would have been no gain had we not been redeemed!” But we have been Redeemer. And we praise the Mercy of the Redeemer!

* Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of Our Lady of Mercy, in which we see the meaning of a life lived in communion with the mercy of God. This feast has a special meaning for me not merely because I, like you, love our Lady and am so grateful for her maternal merciful love for me in the ways I’m aware of ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Pio of Pietrelcina

September 23, 2020

Prov 30:5-9, Ps 119, Lk 9:1-6

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the Gospel Jesus sends out the Apostles to “proclaim the Kingdom of God” by word and deed. In the first reading from the Book of Proverbs we see two essential elements for that proclamation in every age. The credibility of the messenger depend on them.

* The sage who prays turns to God and begs, “Two things I ask of you, deny them not to me.” The first is truthfulness: “Put falsehood and lying far from me.” This is echoed in the Psalm when we pray, “Remove from me the way of falsehood, and favor me with your law” and “Falsehood I hate and abhor.” Earlier in the passage we have an allusion to Eve, when Proverb says, “Add nothing to his words, lest he reprove you and you will be exposed as a deceiver.” That was at the root of Eve’s sin. She added to the word of God, who had instructed her and Adam not to eat the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good or Evil, but as we see in Genesis, when she told the Serpent what God had commanded, she added, “and neither shall you touch it.” That happened because either she wasn’t paying close attention or was an embellisher. In either case she failed to appreciate the importance of each word God had said. She failed to recognize that “every word of God is tested.” When Christ sends us out he sends us out to proclaim that the Kingdom of God is at hand, he sends us as disciples of the One who “came to give witness to the Truth,” of Him who ultimately is the Truth. His Kingdom is a kingdom of truth, of light, of saying “yes” when we mean “yes” and “no” when we mean “no.” Jesus praised Nathanael for being “an Israelite without guile,” and he wants us all to be without guile. The devil is the “father of lies,” who always wants to get us to add or subtract to God’s word, to do anything except live off of every word that comes from the Father’s mouth. The credibility of the proclamation of the Gospel is shot when people doubt the truthfulness of the messenger. How can anyone forget Archbishop Gregory’s sad but necessary words during his press conference announcing his appointment to Washington in April 2019 when he said, “I will always tell you the truth as I understand it?” He needed to say it because many had concluded that his two predecessors had lied to them. Those who announce the Kingdom of God must demonstrate total transparency and verifiable truthfulness. They must be icons of Christ the Truth incarnate. Otherwise no one may believe anything they say, including the Gospel. This is one of the reasons why the whole Church must pray, “Put falsehood and lying far from me.”

* The second thing that the sage asks is, “Give me neither poverty nor riches; provide me only the food I need, lest, being full, I deny you, saying, ‘Who is the Lord?,’ or, being in want, I steal and profane the name of my God.” The request is for a total trust in God’s providence, for we cannot serve both God and mammon. If we have more than we need, the trust we need to have in God’s care can disappear as we place our faith, hope and love in mammon and what mammon can obtain. But he’s also not asking for destitution, for nothing whatsoever. He’s asking us for what Jesus taught us to pray: “Give us today our daily bread.” Jesus is describing that trust in God’s providence necessary in those who proclaim God’s kingdom when he instructs the apostles in today’s Gospel, “Take nothing for the journey, neither walking stick, nor sack, nor food, nor money, and let no one take a second tunic.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 25th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

September 22, 2020

Prov 21:1-6.10-13, Ps 119, Lk 8:19-21

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Last Saturday, Jesus spoke to us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, which is a means by which to assess our receptivity and responsiveness to Christ’s words and work in our life. Today we see a beautiful illustration of that parable in the reference to Jesus’ mother, who not just conceived the Word made flesh in her womb, but conceived the Word of God in faith. When the people told Jesus that his mother and his relatives (there’s no separate word in Aramaic and Hebrew to distinguish siblings from cousins) were outside wishing to see him, he replied, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and act on it.” This was not a violation of the fourth commandment and a put down of his mother, but, like we’ll hear later in St. Luke’s Gospel in the scene of the anonymous woman from the crowd blessing the mother who bore and nursed him, Jesus was giving the real secret to his mother’s greatness: she was the first of all those who would “hear the word of God and act on it,” someone whose whole life developed in accordance with the word of God. Jesus came from heaven to earth to found a family and that family would be constituted by loving obedience to God’s will, in communion with Jesus’ obedience. St. John in his prologue focused on the connection between these two realities as well: that Jesus came unto his own, but his own did not receive him, but to those who did receive him, he gave power to become children of God. As we accept Jesus by his own grace, he constitutes and confirms us as children of God.

* So the first thing we need to ponder today is how we hear and act on the word of God. In Hebrew there is no distinction between “hear” and “obey” when it comes to God: to hear him speaking as God is to will to obey him. To listen to God and then to question the truthfulness or goodness or helpfulness of what he says would be contradictory. There wasn’t fully developed by this time St. Paul’s distinction about the difficulty of doing the good — of not doing the good we desire or not avoiding the sin we detest — but I think it’s still helpful for us to have an attitude that when we listen to God’s word, we listen to it as words to be done. In the Psalm today, we see the attitude we should have before God’s word: We want to walk in the Lord’s law, to understand the way of his precepts, to meditate on his wondrous deeds, to choose the way of truth, to observe his law and keep it with all our heart, to delight in the path of God’s commands and to keep his law continually. This is a life without blame, we say at the beginning of the Psalm. This is the path on which God himself wants to guide us. God’s word is the GPS of our life, and so much more. In the first reading — one of only three days in two years in which the Church ponders the Book of Proverbs (and yesterday we lost because of the Feast of St. Matthew) — I’d like to focus on two of the most relevant pearls of wisdom. The first is, “To do what is right and just is more acceptable to the Lord than sacrifice.” The way we please the Lord most is not by “knowing” but by “doing” what is right and just, by living in right relationship with him and others. The Lord wants to praise us like he praised Mary for hearing and acting on God’s word. The second passage is, “The just man appraises the house of the wicked: there is one who brings down the wicked to ruin.” At the end of the Sermon on the Mount when Jesus talked about the two houses, he said that the wise man built on the rock of hearing his word and acting upon it, while the foolish one built upon the sand of hearing his word...

Fr. Roger J. LandryVisitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, ManhattanFeast of St. Matthew, ApostleSeptember 21, 2020Eph 4:1-7.11-13, Ps 19, Mt 9:9-13

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

The following points were attempted in this homily:

St. Paul in today’s first reading — as well as the Office of Readings — urges us to live in a manner worthy of the calling we have received and to come to full maturity in Christ. He describes various attributes of the proper mature response to our divine calling. Jesus, however, in the Gospel, brings us back to what is most important: he has come to call sinners, he desires mercy and enfleshed himself to share it, and full maturity means receiving that gift, growing in that gift, and sharing it, so that we might grow to become as merciful as our Father is merciful. Jesus, the Divine Physician, wants to heal us with his medicine and send us out as his nurses. Our call and the cure for our sinfulness are coextensive.

In the calling of St. Matthew and in every vocation except that of the Blessed Virgin, Jesus acts on his words, “I desire mercy” and “I have come to call … sinners.” Matthew’s vocation is a powerful manifestation of this desire for mercy. Christ indeed came to call not the healthy but the morally sick, not the just but sinners, to repentance. Matthew, the formerly despised tax collector and traitor to his fellow Jews, would forever be a walking advertisement of how great the Lord’s forgiveness really is. And he matured very fast in this school of mercy: St. Matthew immediately began to bring his friends to receive that same gift from Jesus. He is an example of good soil who received the gift of the Lord’s mercy and immediately started bearing fruit. He put into practice from the beginning the lesson he would eventually write down from Jesus’ Parable of the Two Debtors: he who had been forgiven 10,000 talents would bring everyone else to receive the same. The Pharisees, on the other hand, had hardened soil. As Jesus’ response to them in the Parables of the Lost Coin, Lost Sheep and Lost Sons shows (Lk 15:1-32), they were resistant to the need for mercy in their own lives and weren’t happy when that mercy reached even those they knew were sinners. Jesus was seeking to help them understand with his words today that they cannot respond to God’s call except through mercy.

I don’t think many of us ponder this truth enough. Many in the world think that when someone receives a vocation to the priesthood or to religious or consecrated life, he does so because we must be somehow canonizable, that we are more in the image of the Blessed Virgin Mary, for example, than we are in the mode of St. Matthew, or St. Peter (whose first words to the Lord were “Depart from me for I am a sinful man”) or St. Paul (who used to hunt down and execute Christians). One of the reasons that others occasionally beatify us is because we often don’t speak enough about how much and why we, too, desperately need God’s mercy. I don’t think we ponder enough St. Paul’s words to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God” (1 Cor 1:27-29). God has called us to be Christians, not to mention priests or religious, because he comes to call sinners and the sick, the foolish, weak, lowly, despised, nothing-counters! But then at the same time he exalts the humble by associating us with his holiness as he calls us to be saints!

This was made plain 67 years ago today in the call of Jorge Bergoglio to be a priest while he ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Twenty-Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

September 19, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.19.20_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 which Jesus will show us how he is calling all of us to help him take harvest men and women, boys and girls, in his kingdom. He does so by means of a parable in which a foreman goes out to summon laborers for his vineyard at dawn, mid-morning, noon, mid-afternoon and an hour before shutting time. Then the owner of the vineyard gives them all the same full-day’s pay. .

* The frame for what God wishes to teach us is summed up by the Prophet Isaiah, who will speak to us in the first reading. Through him, God tells us, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are my ways your ways.” Each of us can see the validity of this truth by the typical reaction we have to the parable to Jesus’ parable. Without the prodding of any labor union, we’re prone to agree with the beef of those who worked a grueling 12-hour day but who didn’t receive a penny more than those who worked only one hour. In order to have our thoughts become more like God’s thoughts and our ways resemble His ways, however, we first must understand the context of the parable, get to the root of why on various levels it offends us, and then examine what it’s teaching us about God, ourselves, and the kingdom he wants us to enter and help him build.

* Let’s first understand the parable. When we compare the men who worked twelve hours and those who worked for one, we think that the latter group had it better, especially since they all received the same pay. But this manifests our jaundiced view of human work, in which we don’t regard it often as a blessing but rather a necessary evil. Work is a part of our vocation, given to us before the Fall, as a means God gives us to live in his image and grow. As we do honest work, we not only make something, but we make ourselves, we build our character, through the qualities we bring to our work. Moreover, if we understand the way work happened in the ancient world, we see that work really was a blessing. Men used to go to the market place in the morning hoping to be hired as day workers. They did all they could to be chosen, arriving with all their tools, running up to meet those who were hiring, selling themselves as hard-workers, much as men in our country did during the Great Depression. They and their families were living on the semi-starvation line. Those hired at five would easily have traded in 11 hours of work in the fields for the eleven hours of anxiety waiting in the square.

* These considerations bring us to the first application of the parable. Jesus was using this story to preach to the Jews about salvation. By the time of Jesus, the Jews had already been God’s chosen people since the age of Abraham, about 1800 years prior, inspired by the promise of the covenant. All of a sudden a carpenter from Nazareth, who was working all types of miraculous signs to back up the authority of his potent preaching, was saying that others — gentiles, even converted prostitutes and tax collectors, were going to get the same “life’s wage” — the full pay of salvation — that the Jews were. Even though they too could be saved, it just didn’t seem fair to them. After all, weren’t those who had kept the Mosaic Law with such exactitude and rigor for centuries entitled to something special? The Lord’s generosity in freely offering salvation to others,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of Our Lady of La Salette

September 19, 2020

1 Cor 15:35-37.42-49, Ps 56, Lk 8:4-15

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s readings and feast are all about various forms of sowing and they provide an opportunity for us to consider our receptivity to God’s sowing in us and our generosity of sowing his word, His very person and ourselves to others.

* The first sowing is what Jesus himself does. He first sows the seed of his word, hoping that he will find in us not tough soil by the path that signifies a shut mind and a hardened heart that refuses to allow the word to penetrate and change; not the superficial rocky soil with just a think layer of soil over a thick subterranean layer of limestone that initially receives the seed with joy but doesn’t nourish it to make sure it grows; not the thorny soil full of the weeds of worldly cares, anxieties, riches and the pleasure of life that can suck up the energy that should be dedicated to the growth of the seed, but rather the good soil that hears the word, embraces it with a generous and good heart and bears manifold fruit through perseverance. Today is an opportunity for us to take again a soil sample of our heart to whether the word of God that Jesus seeks to sow in us daily changes our lives in 30, 60, 100 ways or more, or whether we’re resistant, superficial or existentially distracted from allowing our whole life to develop in accordance with what God proclaims.

* But that’s just the first way Jesus sows. He goes beyond it by sowing himself. In St. John’s Gospel, he says that “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit” (Jn 12:24). He is the Grain of Wheat who fell to the ground on the way of the Cross and died on Calvary to bear much fruit in us. He inseminates himself in us in Holy Communion and wants to transform us totally from the inside out, changing us in an astronomical number of concrete ways to become more and more like him, as we seek to respond to this gift by aligning our entire life with Him with Whom we enter into communion, knowing that there are far more than 100 ways in which we’re not presently like him. What’s our receptivity to that sowing with Him in his Risen life?

* St. Paul in the first reading talks about one of the effects that Christ’s sowing himself and his word in us is meant to have. Just like a seed grows and matures into a plant or tree and eventually bears fruit that contains other seeds that then can be sown, so Jesus’ sowing in us is meant to lead to our seeking to sow his word in others and to sow ourselves as grains of wheat. St. Paul talks about the way we’re supposed to imitate Jesus’ Eucharistic sowing of his own body for God and for others in the way we die. Death is not supposed to be something that just happens to us. It’s supposed to be something with which we actively cooperate, imitating Jesus in freely laying down our life for him and for others. Answering the questions of the Corinthians who wondered what the resurrected body would be like, St. Paul turns to the image of sowing, writing, “What you sow is not brought to life unless it dies. And what you sow is not the body that is to be but a bare kernel of wheat, perhaps, or of some other kind; but God gives it a body as he chooses, and to each of the seeds its own body.  … So also is the resurrection of the dead. It is sown corruptible; it is raised incorruptible. It is sown dishonorable; it is raised glorious. It is sown weak; it is raised powerful. It is sown a natural body; it is raised a spiritual body. If there is a natural body,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St Joseph Cupertino

September 18, 2020

1 Cor 15:12-20, Ps 17, Lk 8:1-3

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s the Gospel, we see Jesus’ peripatetic preaching, journeying with the Twelve apostles from one town to another preaching and proclaiming the good news of the Kingdom. This was a snapshot of his ordinary life, what occupied most of his days. He was announcing the kingdom and inviting people to enter. In the midst of all of their sufferings, hardships and up-until-then unfilled hopes, he was proclaiming the good news. He was helping them to see that Sacred Scripture was being fulfilled in their hearing, inviting them to strive to enter through the narrow gate, encouraging them to buy the treasure buried in a field and selling everything they have for the precious pearl of the kingdom. But St. Luke adds another detail, a very important one. He said that some women were accompanying Jesus and the apostles, women who had received Jesus’ healing power — they “had been cured of evil spirits and infirmities” — and wanted to spend their life, with faith and constancy, assisting him to heal others and raise them up. Three get named — Mary Magdalene, Joanna, the wife of Herod Antipas’ epitropos or money-man Chuza, and Susanna — but he also says “and many others,” who “provided for them out of their resources.” They were the ones who, to some degree, made possible Jesus’ and the apostles’ preaching, so that Jesus everyday wouldn’t have to multiply loaves and fish, so that they wouldn’t have to appall the hypersensensitive Scribes and the Pharisees by plucking heads of grain while walking through the fields. Like the widow with her two lepta placed in the Temple treasury, these women were giving all they had not just to make possible but to assist the preaching of the Gospel. They were the ones who were providing drink to lubricate Jesus’ and the apostles’ vocal chords. They were the ones who were making sure that they would have the necessary bread within to be able to preach man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from God’s mouth. St. Paul’s in the passage from the First Letter to the Corinthians that is for Monday of the 24th Week describes how the Holy Spirit inspires us all to cooperate for the building up of Christ’s body the Church. There’s a division of labor — apostles, prophets, teachers, administrators, etc. — like there is in a body between organs. For the body to be healthy, each of the parts must do its function. And these women were making possible everything that Jesus and his disciples were doing. This was not a group of bored do-gooders who figured that these wandering 13 men would be lost without their feminine genius and maternal practicality. Having received much from the mercy of Jesus, as we heard yesterday, they loved much, and they wanted to give Jesus and his mission all the love, the time and the material goods they could.” They’re a model for all of us.

* What was the purpose of Jesus’ preaching and the apostles’ preaching? It was to lift people up, to lead them ultimately from death to eternal life, from sin to sanctity, from light to darkness, from the kingdom of the world to the kingdom of God, from ignorance to a knowledge (conoscere) of God the Father and his Son Jesus the Resurrection and Life that would know no end. And they spent themselves fully with faith and constancy to preaching this reality, as did St. Paul. In today’s first reading, St. Paul is describing the reality of the resurrection to the Jewish and Greek Christians in Corinth who were doubting or denying it. There were doubtless some Jews who, like the Sadducees,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Robert Bellarmine

September 17, 2020

1 Cor 15:1-11, Ps 118, Lk 7:36-50

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday, we examined St. Paul’s beautiful canticle of love from his First Letter to the Corinthians, in which St. Paul described that love is patient, kind, not jealous, pompous inflated, rude, self-interested, quick-tempered, brooding, or focused on wrong-doing rather than the truth, but how it unfailingly bears, believes, hopes and endures all things. He called love the “greater spiritual gift,” the “still more excellent way,” and said that without it, speaking in human and angelic tongues, comprehending all mysteries, having faith to move mountains, giving away everything, and handing one’s body over to torturers in witness to the faith amount to nothing. That’s how important love is.

* Today in the Gospel, Jesus teaches us how to become great in love. Great in love for him and greater in love for others in spreading love of him. It’s one of the most beautiful scenes in the Gospel. Jesus is received by a leading Pharisee, Simon, into his home, but isn’t welcomed with the three typical gestures with which guests were always greeted, with an embrace on the shoulder, the washing of feet with cold water, and a pinch of incense or smell of roses on the head. Simon, it seems, not only took typical hospitality for granted but took Jesus for granted.

* A sinful woman who heard that Jesus was there, however, did not take him for granted. As Jesus lay reclining with the others at the table, she anointed his feet with oil, then washed them with her tears — think about how copious she must have been weeping! — and then dried them with her long hair. Simon’s reaction was that Jesus couldn’t have been a prophet if he didn’t realize this woman was a sinner, but Jesus in fact recognized they both were and drew an important and obvious lesson we shouldn’t miss as he prepared to forgive her sins and send her away in peace: The one who has been forgiven more, loves more. “But the one to whom little is forgiven, loves little.” For us to love Jesus much, we need to be forgiven much.

* Pope Francis stresses this point in a book length interview before he became Pope. “For me, feeling oneself a sinner is one of the most beautiful things that can happen, if it leads to its ultimate consequences” the future Pope Francis said in El Jesuita. “When a person becomes conscious that he is a sinner and is saved by Jesus,” Cardinal Bergoglio stated, “he proclaims this truth to himself and discovers the pearl of great price, the treasure buried in the field. He discovers the greatest thing in life: that there is someone who loves him profoundly, who gave his life for him.” Many Catholics, he said, have sadly not had this fundamental Christian experience. “There are people who believe the right things, who have received catechesis and accepted the Christian faith in some way, but who do not have the experience of having been saved, … who therefore lack the experience of who they are,” he lamented. “I believe that only we great sinners have this grace.”

* That’s why it’s essential for us to have this experience of our desperate need for Christ’s mercy and for us to come, like the woman in the Gospel, to weep at Jesus’ feet, conscious that, as we prayed in the Psalm, “his mercy endures forever” and that he has done everything he did to forgive us our sins. If we remain aloof, like Simon the Pharisee, we’ll never really understand who Jesus is or who we are. We’ll never understand how much we’re loved. We’ll never really learn therefore how to love ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the 24th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of SS. Cyprian and Cornelius, Martyrs

18th Anniversary of Cardinal François Xavier Nguyen Van Thuan

September 16, 2020

1 Cor 12:31-13:13, Ps 33, Lk 7:31-35

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily: 

*  In today’s Gospel, Jesus compares the people of the generation to whom he was preaching as “children who sit in the marketplace.” He says they call out to each other, “We played the flute for you, but you did not dance. We sang a dirge for you, but you did not weep.” Jesus was essentially correcting them about two aspects of childish immaturity that was preventing their becoming disciples. The first is that they were seated. They were not willing to get up and follow Jesus along the way of discipleship. They were not willing to change. The second is that that they wanted to be the ones playing the tune to which others would dance. If they were playing a joyful tune on the flute, they wanted people to dance a jitterbug; if they were playing a dirge or a fado, they wanted people weeping. They were not willing to align themselves to the ever new song, the lyrics (Word of God) and melody (tone) that Jesus was playing rather than domesticate him by getting him to conform his message to their music.

* Jesus compared the generation to a group of spoiled, fickle children, because they had hardened their hearts totally to the message of God, trying to control and judge God rather than obey and love him. He said that when John the Baptist came to them, rather than focus on his message of conversion, they criticized him for “neither eating food nor drinking wine,” because he fasted, ate wild honey and consumed locusts. They “classified and conquered” him and refused to convert at his message. When Jesus came with a totally different approach, “eating and drinking” because he was the Bridegroom and wanted to teach them how to feast in God’s presence rather than fast — we would fast when the Bridegroom would be taken away — they criticized him for not fasting and for not abstaining, calling him a “glutton and a drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners.” Again, they avoided his message by judging the messenger, coming at him from a position of superiority rather than docility. The upshot is that no matter whom God sent to them, they weren’t prepared to accept him, but they’d find something to criticize, something to give them the excuse to remain seated, something that would keep them in control of the jukebox or playlist.

* Jesus is forcefully calling us and the people of our generation to be something far different from “children sitting in the marketplace.” He calls us to be spiritually childlike, a son or daughter who lovingly trusts God, who believes what he says is true, recognizes what he or she doesn’t know, and who seeks to become like chips off the old (divine) block. When Jesus says at the end of today’s episode,  “wisdom is vindicated by all her children,” he is communicating that he wants us to be his vindication by living according to his wisdom as sons in the Son, eating and drinking, fasting and abstaining, dancing and making music, and doing everything in union with him and at his lead.

* The truth is that there are many in our own generation who behave before God like the spoiled children Jesus mentions in his image. We judge God, we judge his Church, we judge those whom he sends us by our own criteria. We make our preferences the most important thing of all. Many choose Churches based on whether they play the music they like, whether chant, or polyphony, or hymnody, or polka, or rock, or contemporary praise and worship, or whether there’s no music at all,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Memorial of Our Lady of Sorrows

September 15, 2020

1 Cor 12:12-14.27-31, Ps 116, Jn 19:25-27

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Yesterday we celebrated the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. We focused on the Lord’s victory. Unlike on Good Friday when we ponder his sufferings upon the Cross, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross not only celebrates the rediscovery of the Cross after it was stolen in the early Church but the rediscovery, in a sense, of the meaning of Jesus’ triumph on the Cross as something in which we should glory rather than be ashamed.

* But today, the day after celebrating Jesus’ victory on the Cross, we ponder his mother weeping and sorrowful. It’s a little bit of a jarring juxtaposition, one that ought to get us to ask why we would contemplate her in this way. The fundamental reason why we ponder Mary’s sorrows today is because her tears are not over her Son’s victory but over so many of us who have not yet entered into his victory. It’s not over what her Divine offspring accomplished on Calvary, but how many of us allow his gifts to go in vain.

* The Church has long pondered the suffering and joys of the Blessed Virgin Mary as she accompanied her Son and shared in his redeeming work. There has for centuries been devotion to her “Seven Sorrows”: The prophecy of Simeon, when he announced not only that Jesus would be a sign of contradiction pointing to the ruin and resurrection of many but that her own heart would be pierced with a sword; the flight into Egypt after Herod’s henchmen were trying to assassinate her and God’s little boy; the loss of Jesus for three days at the age of 12; meeting Jesus on the Way to Calvary; seeing Jesus suffer and die on the Cross; receiving Jesus’ body into her arms at the foot of the Cross; and placing Jesus’ body in the tomb.

* Today is a day, first, on which we ponder Mary’s suffering for her Son, what it must have felt like to have her heart and soul pierced in these ways. As we prayed in the Stabat Mater Sequence before the Gospel, “Is there one who would not weep, ‘whelmed in miseries so deep, Christ’s dear Mother to behold?” But our meditation is not supposed to stop there. By God’s grace it’s meant to lead us to compassion, to suffering with Mary. We pray in that Sequence words we should take seriously: “O sweet Mother! font of love, touch my spirit from above, make my heart with yours accord. Make me feel as you have felt; make my soul to glow and melt with the love of Christ, my Lord. Holy Mother, pierce me through, in my heart each wound renew of my Savior crucified. Let me share with you his pain, who for all our sins was slain, who for me in torments died. Let me mingle tears with thee, mourning him who mourned for me, all the days that I may live. By the cross with you to stay, there with you to weep and pray, is all I ask of you to give. Virgin of all virgins blest! Listen to my fond request: let me share your grief divine. Let me to my latest breath, in my body bear the death of that dying Son of yours.” Today we ask her for the grace to share her grief divine, to join our tears to hers, to bear in our body the death of Jesus so that we might in turn share his life.

* But Mary’s heart is pierced not only by the sufferings of her divine Son Jesus, but also all her spiritual sons and daughters given to her in the third Annunciation carried out by her Son hanging upon the Cross, when he, seeing Mary and his beloved disciple, St. John, at the foot of the Cross said, respectively, “Woman, behold your son” and “Behold your mother.” And like any Mother, this “Holy Mother” mourns and weeps and suffers whenever she sees any of her children suffer. A couple of weeks ago we pondered the example of St.