Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Lorenzo Ruiz and Companions, Martyrs

September 28, 2020

Job 1:6-22, Ps 17, Lk 9:46-50

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Jesus never says to us merely “Do what I say,” but always, “Come, follow me!” He sets the example for us to follow. That’s why, if in today’s Gospel, he tells us that the path to greatness is to receive children in his name, it’s because he himself has received us as children. We don’t ponder Jesus’ “fatherhood” enough because we always look at him as Son in relation to God the Father, but many Fathers of the Church looked at him as the perfect icon of the paternity of God the Father, pondering how Jesus gives us life through his passion, death and resurrection and the sacraments that flow from them. He wishes to receive us as children. But the resistance we put up is to try to be grown-ups. That’s the essential sin found in the Parable of the Prodigal Son: the younger son wants to treat the Father as if he’s dead, as if he no longer needs him in his life. For us to become great, we first need to exercise our divine filiation to the full, allow Jesus to receive us as children, and then, learning from Jesus’ love for us, similarly extend that same, loving, often unrequited gift of self to all those children of God sent to us.

* One of the saints who shows us best how to do this is St. Therese of the Child Jesus and the Holy Face, whose feast the Church will celebrate on Thursday. She became a doctor of the Church, even though she never graduated high school, because she was filled with Divine Wisdom and simplicity and showed us all how to respond to God like beloved children. She taught what she described as her little way of spiritual childhood, the little way of trust and love, by linking two passages in Sacred Scripture about the Kingdom of God. The first is that if we wish to enter the kingdom, we “must convert and become like little children.” Paradoxically to grow in full stature in Christ is to become more childlike. The second passage is “Blessed are the poor in spirit for theirs is the Kingdom of Heaven.” The essence of spiritual childhood is spiritual poverty, totally dependence on God, approaching him in everything with open hands and recognizing that everything we’ve received is a gift.

* Today’s first reading from Job shows us a particular aspect of that way of spiritual childhood. After Job has lost all his oxen, asses, herdsman, sheep, shepherds, camels and those tending them, sons, daughters and house — everything but his wife, health and life — his response was not to curse but to praise God: “Naked I came forth from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I go back again. The Lord gave and the Lord has taken away; blessed be the name of the Lord!” The Lord should be blessed when he gives and when he strips. Spiritual childhood is a way of trust and love that recognizes that both things that seem propitious and adverse are meant to be united with God. It’s easy to blessed God for the obvious gifts in life, like oxen, asses, herdsman, sheep, shepherds, camels, loyal employees, sons, daughters and houses. It’s much harder when he takes them away. But that’s what Job does. St. Therese taught us that God often loves us by “subtraction.” When a novice once sighed, saying,“When I think of everything I still have to acquire!” Therese replied, “You mean, to lose! Jesus takes it upon himself to fill your soul in the measure that you rid it of its imperfections. I see that you have taken the wrong road; you will never arrive at the end of your journey. You are wanting to climb a great mountain and the good God is trying to make you descend it; he is waiting for you at the bottom in ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

17th Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form

September 27, 2020

Eph 4:1-6, Mt 22:34-46

 

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

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Paul, in today’s passage from his Letter to the Ephesians written when he was chained to a wall in Rome, made an appeal to the Christians there and to Christians everywhere and at all times. “I, then, a prisoner for the Lord, urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received.” The call about which he is speaking is the vocation to follow Christ, to be holy, to live with faith according to the Holy Spirit, and to share the gift of faith as of the first importance with others. Jesus makes that calling very plain in today’s Gospel.

* A lawyer asks Jesus, “What is the greatest of all the commandments?,” and Jesus replies by describing for him the human being’s vocation, the single most important thing we need to do in life. If we do everything else but don’t do this, we will not have lived life well. If we do this but don’t get to everything else, we will still have passed the test of life with flying colors. We’ve heard Jesus’ response so many times that we can think that the question was a soft ball, but it was really a 100 mph slider. There were 613 commands in the Old Testament. To choose which of them was the greatest was something that the scholars of the law had found difficult for centuries. Jesus’ answer came from what God had inspired Moses to teach the Jewish people after God had rescued them from Pharaoh. From that point forward, faithful Jews have recited it every day: “Hear, O Israel: The LORD is our God, the Lord alone. You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might.” Then God through Moses gave them instructions to keep hammering this reality home every day: “Keep these words that I am commanding you today in your heart. Recite them to your children and talk about them when you are at home and when you are away, when you lie down and when you rise. Bind them as a sign on your hand, fix them as an emblem on your forehead, and write them on the doorposts of your house and on your gates” (Deut 6:4-9). Even though Jesus’ contemporaries recited this when they awoke and went to bed, even though they made a phylactery to hang it down from their hair so that it would be an emblem on their forehead, even though the put it on a scroll and installed it next to their front door, Jesus’ Jewish interrogators still hadn’t realized its supremacy, in other words, why God had them do all of these things. It was precisely because loving God with all we are and have is not just the most crucial thing we need to do in life but the way by which we most grow in his image by opening ourselves up to his love. The command makes clear that it’s not enough to love God only with some, half, most of, or even almost all of our mind, heart, soul and strength. God gives us himself, he gives us his grace, precisely so that we can love him with as close as possible to 100 percent of all we are and have. He gives us his own love to make it possible for us to love like him, to sacrifice for God with agape like he sacrificed for us.

* But then Jesus added something else, unsolicited. He knew that if he stopped merely with the love of God, many people would think that they were doing just fine, because so many of us think we love God by the simple fact that we acknowledge him, revere him and have feelings of affection and gratitude toward him. Jesus wanted to give a clear means by which we could evaluate whether we are truly loving God, because to love him means to love what and whom he loves. Jesus said that there is a second commandment, taken from the Book of Leviticus, that is similar to the greatest: “You shall love your neighbor as yours...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A)

September 26, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.26.20_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.

* Jesus will give us another parable this week, popularly called the parable of the two sons. As he did last week, he employs the image of working in a vineyard. Last week he spoke to us about his calling all hands on deck, going out at 6 and 9 am, noon, 3 and 5 pm, to call laborers into his vineyard, because he wants us all working. This time he focuses on two brothers called by their Father to work in his vineyard. The first son initially refuses when his father tells him, “Son, go out and work in the vineyard today,” but afterward he changes his mind and goes to work. After the parable, Jesus implies that this is the proper way to understand those prostitutes and tax collectors and other types of sinners, who even though for lengthy periods of time they said “no!” to the sixth, seventh and other commandments, eventually converted and were now living and working in the Lord’s vineyard, building up and entering into his kingdom. The second son responds to his father’s command saying respectfully, “I will go sir,” but never acts on that promise. Jesus says that this applies precisely to those he was addressing, the scribes and the Pharisees, who so many times very publicly prayed in the temple chanting their loud “amens!” to God, but who were not following through on their covenantal commitments. The Pharisees, scribes and elders, who with their lips were saying yes to the Father’s will but with their actions were not, ended up showing where this hypocrisy can lead: they ended up framing Jesus and having him tortured, crucified and killed.

* It’s obvious that the Lord wants all of us today to reflect not only on what we say to God, but especially on how we follow through on our commitments. We’re listening to this program dedicated to growing in faith because we are people who have said “yes” to God many times over the course of our lives. On the day of our baptism, our parents and godparents spoke up for us and made our baptismal promises. At our Confirmation, we stood up and renewed those promises to reject Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and to believe in the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, forgiveness of sins, resurrection of the body and life everlasting; we also made the commitment at our Confirmation to go to work in the Lord’s vineyard, with tongues of fire, to proclaim the Lord’s Gospel with ardent passion. The Lord wants us to ask ourselves today whether we’ve been following through on those commitments and been getting down to work in his vineyard. If we have not been following through, if we’ve been saying “no” to the Lord with our bodies despite the “yes-es” of our lips, then he wants to help us to learn from the example of the first son. It’s not fundamentally words that matter, but deeds of conversion and faith. For many of us sons and daughters of God, our “yes” in faith has become routine. We say it so naturally and readily that we have ceased to understand the meaning of what we’re saying and to act on that commitment. Every week we say “Amen!” to the words, “The Body of Christ,” but do we really structure our lives in a way consistent with this affirmation? We say, “Thanks be to God!” when the Word of God is proclaimed at Mass, but do we show that gratitude for this incredible gift ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

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

Memorial of SS. Cosmas and Damian

September 26, 2020

Eccl 11:8-12:8, Ps 90, Lk 9:43-45

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s readings are about death and life, about what really matters and what doesn’t, about wisdom and foolishness, about eternity and evanescence. In the Responsorial Psalm, we prayed to God, “Teach us to number our days aright, that we may gain wisdom of heart.” It’s only when we know that we don’t have all the time in the world, it’s only when we realize that our days are numbered, it’s only when we grasp that today may be the last day in our earthly sequence, that we begin to live the right way, for what really matters. It’s only when we begin to recognize that God has given us a finite time here on earth that we begin to get our true priorities straight.

* In the first reading, we finish our brief examination of the Book of Ecclesiastes, which focuses on the vanity of living just for this world. “Vanity of vanities,” it concludes, repeating a refrain from earlier in the Book, “All things are vanity!” Vanity means worthless or futile from the Latin word vanus or “empty.” It’s common understanding of “conceited” is derivative, flowing from getting puffed up by worthless things. Through the Book of Ecclesiastes Qohelet describes the various vain things in which human beings place their treasure. Today he focuses on the vanity of youth and he counsels us to remember our Creator in the days of youth, never to forget that we will age and die, and that “God will bring [us] to judgment” for the way we lived. He was encouraging us to live for God, the one type of life that is not vain.

* Jesus teaches us this path in the Gospel by his own example. After he has worked a great miracle of curing a boy whose diabolically-induced attacks would lead him repeatedly to the brink of suicide, “all were amazed at his every deed.” It would have been the time for Jesus to ride the wave of popularity, if that’s what he was seeking. But he wasn’t. At that moment of earthly acclaim, Jesus told the disciples: “Pay attention to what I am telling you. The Son of Man is to be handed over to men.” He was telling them for the second time that he was going to die. We had the first time in yesterday’s Gospel. Right after Peter proclaimed Jesus to be the Christ or Messiah, Jesus announced to them that he would be a suffering Messiah: “The Son of Man must suffer greatly and be rejected by the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised.” Peter, according to St. Matthew’s eyewitness account, vainly protested, even rebuking Jesus and telling him that there was no way any such thing would happen to him. This second time they didn’t understand it any better, but “they were afraid to ask him about this saying,” because they didn’t want to know the answer, because it seemed to go against the vain desires they had for cabinet positions in his worldly messianic administration. Jesus was keeping them focused, however, on the vanity even of the gift of human life if not lived for and together with God. He, too, would die, and if they wanted to live for what mattered, they not only needed to accept that fact but live that truth. They needed to learn not to have their life taken from them but freely to lay it down (Jn 10:18) as a ransom for many (Mk 10:45). For their life to have meaning, they needed to “lose” it for Jesus’ sake and the sake of the Gospel being shared. All of the apostles except Judas eventually got that lesson.

* St. Paul would be the one who would explain it best, when he wrote to the Philippians,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

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

September 25, 2020

Eccl 3:1-11, Ps 144, Lk 9:18-22

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s first reading, the sacred author of Ecclesiastes says that there’s a time, a “kairos,” for everything under the heavens, and lists several of them. He shows time more or less as the undulating waves of opposites, from night to day, without end, without direction, almost in a circle of endless repetition. This is what life may seem to those who live life without God: everything can seem pointless, where the human person accomplishes nothing from all his labors and sufferings in life, a vanity of vanity. But the author then shifts gears and says that God “has put the timeless into their hearts, without man’s ever discovering.” God has placed his eternal self within us in a way that far exceeds our knowledge or comprehension. This placement of God happened with the appearance of Jesus as the Messiah of God in the “fullness of time,” as St. Paul describes in his Letter to the Galatians.

* In today’s Jesus asked a question about what the people were saying about him not because he was curious but because he wanted to lead them on a journey of faith to recognize that the long-awaited time had really come. After Peter, however, moved my God the Father had courageously confessed his faith in Christ, Jesus announced the type of Messiah he would be in the fullness of time: a Messiah who would suffer and die in order to bring us salvation, a Messiah who would summon us to be co-redeemers with him precisely through entering into his suffering, his death, and his resurrection. This is the Messiah we are called in every time and in eternity to confess. In his Passion, we have a shift from death to life, from darkness to light, from sin to salvation, but one that is not cyclical but ultimately linear. There is a time to die but also a time to rise and the advantage that comes from all this toil is eternal reward. This happens, as the Psalm indicates, when we build our life on God as our rock, mercy, fortress, stronghold, deliverer and trustworthy shield. Even though man’s life is like a breadth and his days on earth like a passing shadow, the Lord notices him and takes thought of him, and comes to make his days not a passing shadow but an eternal life. There is indeed “an appointed time for everything,” but in birth and death, planting and uprooting, weeping and laughing, rending and sowing, silence and speech, God’s grace is given to unite those moments to God so that they may all enhance the way we build our life on God as a stable, secure Rock and thereby confess him to be the long awaited Messiah and Savior, the “same yesterday, today and forever.”

* After Peter’s confession as the Messiah in the Gospel, Jesus told the apostles “not to tell this to anyone.” It wasn’t the kairos yet for them to tell everyone they met directly about the Messiah’s coming. Later it would be the time for them to proclaim the Gospel to every creature. But both were done in obedient love of the one who entered time so that we might enter eternity. Today at Mass, as we prepare in time to receive within the “Timeless One,” we ask him for the grace to recognize, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation,” and seize this time to love and confess him with constant faith, hope and love.

 

The readings for today’s Mass were:

Reading 1 ECCL 3:1-11

There is an appointed time for everything,

and a time for every thing under the heavens.

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,