Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

June 25, 2020

2 Kings 24:8-17, Ps 79, Mt 7:21-29

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus concludes his most extensive homily on living in his kingdom by his distinctive Christian way of life by helping us to resolve not just to know about it but to do it. He tells us that the one who will enter into his kingdom is not the one who refers to him as Lord, not the one who prophesies, or exorcizes or works miracles in his name, but the one “who does the will of my Father in heaven.” This was the way by which we would come to “know him,” through doing his will not as a dry extrinsic command but in tandem with him as we preach, act and live in his name, which means in — within — his person. Jesus calls us to listen to his words and act on them, a move he compares to a wise man’s building his own on a solid foundation that will remain firm when tested by rains, floods and gale force winds. The winds will come, the storms of life are inevitable, but Jesus wants us to build our existence on him the Cornerstone so that when they come we will be able to face them together with him who can calm the storms and lead us even through death to life. To build our existence on any other foundation than him, that the life he has indicated to us by his words, is to build on sand that will not hold up during a storm.

* Jesus, of course, was a tekton and the foster-son of a tekton, a construction worker. He knew that in the Holy Land some seeing a smooth sandy bed in the dry season found it a nice easy place to build, rather than a jagged series of rocks, but when the rains would come all of the water and the howling winds moving from the Mediterranean toward the Sea of Galilee would come into that plain and wash away a house. It’s a reminder to us that sometimes the foundation we are building our life on seems smooth and easy, but if God is not really the foundation, we’re setting ourselves up for ruin.

* He wants us to build our life on what he has revealed to us in the Sermon on the Mount, as we’ve been discussing over the last two and a half weeks. It’s not enough for us to pass a quiz on the Beatitudes. We must, with God’s help, become poor in spirit, meek, peacemaking, and pure of heart; we, like Jesus, must love others enough to mourn when they are physically or spiritually in pain, we must hunger and thirst for holiness, we must be willing to be persecuted for the sake of Jesus. We must really become with him the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We must live the seven antitheses Jesus announced, not hating others, not lusting, not divorcing and remarrying, being truthful always, reconciling with brothers and sisters, not seeking vengeance, loving our enemies and being good and praying to those who persecute us. We must refuse to serve mammon and to seek after material goods but seek first the kingdom of God and his holiness. We must pray to and relate to our Father as he taught, knowing that he knows what we need, knowing that he loves us more than the sparrows and the lilies, knowing that he won’t give us a stone when we ask for bread. In short, we must in Jesus, become perfect as a Father is perfect, which means to grow to full stature in Christ together with Christ. Not to do so is foolishly to build the house of our life out of cardboard on a foundation of quicksand.

* Today Jesus calls us to examine whether our lives are really built on the words he has taught us, whether we’re really living in the way God intends. Many of us, including priests and religious, “sort of” live by Jesus’ words. We’ll put “some” of them into practice. But it would honestly be an exaggeration to say our entire life is built on them....

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

June 25, 2020

2 Kings 24:8-17, Ps 79, Mt 7:21-29

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today Jesus concludes his most extensive homily on living in his kingdom by his distinctive Christian way of life by helping us to resolve not just to know about it but to do it. He tells us that the one who will enter into his kingdom is not the one who refers to him as Lord, not the one who prophesies, or exorcizes or works miracles in his name, but the one “who does the will of my Father in heaven.” This was the way by which we would come to “know him,” through doing his will not as a dry extrinsic command but in tandem with him as we preach, act and live in his name, which means in — within — his person. Jesus calls us to listen to his words and act on them, a move he compares to a wise man’s building his own on a solid foundation that will remain firm when tested by rains, floods and gale force winds. The winds will come, the storms of life are inevitable, but Jesus wants us to build our existence on him the Cornerstone so that when they come we will be able to face them together with him who can calm the storms and lead us even through death to life. To build our existence on any other foundation than him, that the life he has indicated to us by his words, is to build on sand that will not hold up during a storm.

* Jesus, of course, was a tekton and the foster-son of a tekton, a construction worker. He knew that in the Holy Land some seeing a smooth sandy bed in the dry season found it a nice easy place to build, rather than a jagged series of rocks, but when the rains would come all of the water and the howling winds moving from the Mediterranean toward the Sea of Galilee would come into that plain and wash away a house. It’s a reminder to us that sometimes the foundation we are building our life on seems smooth and easy, but if God is not really the foundation, we’re setting ourselves up for ruin.

* He wants us to build our life on what he has revealed to us in the Sermon on the Mount, as we’ve been discussing over the last two and a half weeks. It’s not enough for us to pass a quiz on the Beatitudes. We must, with God’s help, become poor in spirit, meek, peacemaking, and pure of heart; we, like Jesus, must love others enough to mourn when they are physically or spiritually in pain, we must hunger and thirst for holiness, we must be willing to be persecuted for the sake of Jesus. We must really become with him the salt of the earth and the light of the world. We must live the seven antitheses Jesus announced, not hating others, not lusting, not divorcing and remarrying, being truthful always, reconciling with brothers and sisters, not seeking vengeance, loving our enemies and being good and praying to those who persecute us. We must refuse to serve mammon and to seek after material goods but seek first the kingdom of God and his holiness. We must pray to and relate to our Father as he taught, knowing that he knows what we need, knowing that he loves us more than the sparrows and the lilies, knowing that he won’t give us a stone when we ask for bread. In short, we must in Jesus, become perfect as a Father is perfect, which means to grow to full stature in Christ together with Christ. Not to do so is foolishly to build the house of our life out of cardboard on a foundation of quicksand.

* Today Jesus calls us to examine whether our lives are really built on the words he has taught us, whether we’re really living in the way God intends. Many of us, including priests and religious, “sort of” live by Jesus’ words. We’ll put “some” of them into practice. But it would honestly be an exaggeration to say our entire life is built on them....

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

June 24, 2020

Is 49:1-6, Ps 139, Acts 13:22-26, Lk 1:57-66.80

 

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

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Why’s John’s Birthday so important? 

Today we celebrate the solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist. Only three times in the Church’s year do we celebrate birthdays. December 25th is the most obvious birthday we commemorate. Daily Mass goers know that on September 8 we mark the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but we mark it rather quietly in comparison to the solemnity with which we celebrate her Immaculate Conception nine months earlier. Today, June 24th, we celebrate the birth of the famous son of Zechariah and Elizabeth. The Archangel Gabriel had said to Zechariah about the son his elderly and presumably barren wife would conceive, “Many will rejoice at his birth!” (Lk 1:14) and today we join that in that jubilation. Jesus would later say, “Among those born of women no one is greater than John” (Luke 7:28), and the Church’s liturgical calendar puts that truth into prayer: after Jesus, no one born of woman, not even the Blessed Virgin, has a more solemn celebration associated with his worldly-visible debut than John the Baptist.

It’s important to ask why the Church has always considered this feast so important. I think the fundamental answer is because the Church considers the life of John the Baptist so important and considers the events of his conception, gestation and birth highly significant aspects of his life. John’s vocation to give witness to the Lord, to go before him to prepare his way, began not when he appeared at the Jordan in camel’s hair, but in the womb. The Archangel Gabriel told his father, “Even before his birth, he will be filled with the Holy Spirit” (Lk 1:15). We saw an effect of this at the Visitation, when John leaped in the womb of his mother pointing out the presence of the prenatal Lamb of God within Mary (Lk 1:44). What God said to Jeremiah in the first reading of the Vigil of this Solemnity, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” and to Isaiah in today’s, “The Lord, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him,” could just as easily be said about John. He was formed in the womb and consecrated to be a prophet to the nations in order to bring God’s people back to Him, and he was already carrying out that consecrated mission from his earliest days.

John’s Mission and Ours

These truths about a consecrated mission from the womb, however, apply not just to Jeremiah, Isaiah and John the Baptist. The truth is that the Lord knows every one of us that intimately before he forms us in the womb. This is a truth to which you give witness in your daily proclamation by words and deeds of the Gospel of Life. We can all exclaim with the words of today’s Psalm, “Truly you have formed by inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb!” None of us is a number, a census statistic, just a random biological happening to God. Just like John the Baptist had a vocation and a mission from before he was born, each of us is formed by God with a divine destiny and given a vocation and mission in this world to achieve that destiny and help others achieve their own. While there will be specific differences between your and my mission and John’s, there are several characteristics in common.

* Like John’s, our mission is given by God as part of God’s plan for us from the beginning.

* Like John, the Lord fills us with the Holy Spirit at our baptism to help us accomplish this mission.

* Like John, we are called to recognize who God is, that he is so great and holy that none of us is worthy to loo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Solemnity of the Nativity of St. John the Baptist

June 24, 2020

Is 49:1-6, Ps 139, Acts 13:22-26, Lk 1:57-66.80

 

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

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

Why’s John’s Birthday so important? 

Today we celebrate the solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist. Only three times in the Church’s year do we celebrate birthdays. December 25th is the most obvious birthday we commemorate. Daily Mass goers know that on September 8 we mark the birth of the Blessed Virgin Mary, but we mark it rather quietly in comparison to the solemnity with which we celebrate her Immaculate Conception nine months earlier. Today, June 24th, we celebrate the birth of the famous son of Zechariah and Elizabeth. The Archangel Gabriel had said to Zechariah about the son his elderly and presumably barren wife would conceive, “Many will rejoice at his birth!” (Lk 1:14) and today we join that in that jubilation. Jesus would later say, “Among those born of women no one is greater than John” (Luke 7:28), and the Church’s liturgical calendar puts that truth into prayer: after Jesus, no one born of woman, not even the Blessed Virgin, has a more solemn celebration associated with his worldly-visible debut than John the Baptist.

It’s important to ask why the Church has always considered this feast so important. I think the fundamental answer is because the Church considers the life of John the Baptist so important and considers the events of his conception, gestation and birth highly significant aspects of his life. John’s vocation to give witness to the Lord, to go before him to prepare his way, began not when he appeared at the Jordan in camel’s hair, but in the womb. The Archangel Gabriel told his father, “Even before his birth, he will be filled with the Holy Spirit” (Lk 1:15). We saw an effect of this at the Visitation, when John leaped in the womb of his mother pointing out the presence of the prenatal Lamb of God within Mary (Lk 1:44). What God said to Jeremiah in the first reading of the Vigil of this Solemnity, “Before I formed you in the womb, I knew you, and before you were born I consecrated you; I appointed you a prophet to the nations” and to Isaiah in today’s, “The Lord, who formed me in the womb to be his servant, to bring Jacob back to him,” could just as easily be said about John. He was formed in the womb and consecrated to be a prophet to the nations in order to bring God’s people back to Him, and he was already carrying out that consecrated mission from his earliest days.

John’s Mission and Ours

These truths about a consecrated mission from the womb, however, apply not just to Jeremiah, Isaiah and John the Baptist. The truth is that the Lord knows every one of us that intimately before he forms us in the womb. This is a truth to which you give witness in your daily proclamation by words and deeds of the Gospel of Life. We can all exclaim with the words of today’s Psalm, “Truly you have formed by inmost being; you knit me in my mother’s womb!” None of us is a number, a census statistic, just a random biological happening to God. Just like John the Baptist had a vocation and a mission from before he was born, each of us is formed by God with a divine destiny and given a vocation and mission in this world to achieve that destiny and help others achieve their own. While there will be specific differences between your and my mission and John’s, there are several characteristics in common.

* Like John’s, our mission is given by God as part of God’s plan for us from the beginning.

* Like John, the Lord fills us with the Holy Spirit at our baptism to help us accomplish this mission.

* Like John, we are called to recognize who God is, that he is so great and holy that none of us is worthy to loo...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

2 Kings 19:1-11.14-21.31-36, Ps 48, Mt 7:6.12-14

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As we begin to approach the end of our annual 16-installment prayerful reexamination of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, the Master, begins to summarize for us what he has been revealing to us over the previous two weeks. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ Magna Carta of Christian morality, the way he wants to form us to live like him, with a holiness surpassing that of the Scribes and Pharisees and virtuous pagans. Tomorrow, if we didn’t have the Solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist, he would use the image of becoming a good tree that bears good fruit. On Thursday, he will summarize with the image of building our life on the rock. Today he gives us three images.

* The first is to recognize the treasure he is giving us. He says, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, or throw your pearls before swine.” His teaching is an extraordinary gift. It is the path to life. Just like we would never put diamonds in a toilet or priceless masterpieces in a doghouse, so we need to treasure his words and protect them within. We should never take them for granted. While we are obviously called to spread the faith and share Jesus and his teachings with others, we should at the same time do so with reverence for what we are transmitting. In the early Church, this passage was often used to refer to the Holy Eucharist. The Didache said, “Let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist except those baptized into the name of the Lord; for, as regards this, the Lord has said, ‘Give not that which is holy unto dogs.’” We need to treat every word that comes from God’s mouth in a similar way, treasuring it and not just throwing it away or giving it to others the way we could give food we cannot finish or don’t want to eat to salivating dogs at our lap. Jesus wants us to grasp that in sharing this gift with us, he is not throwing pearls before swine, but accentuating our dignity. He wants us to treasure both the gift and the recipient. That’s what he’s asking of us here in terms of the way we will live and transmit his words.

* The second image is what we call the Golden Rule. Jesus summarizes everything he has been teaching us in the update, the interiorization, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, as “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the Law and the Prophets.” Often it is said that the Golden Rule exists in many religions but that is false. God has given the seeds of the word to many over the course of the centuries, but it was always in some version of the “Silver Rule”: “Don’t do to others what you would not want them to do to you.” Jesus was far exceeding that here. He wants us to treat others as we would want to be treated. If we want to be loved, we love. If we want to be forgiven, we forgive. If we want to be thanked, we thank. If we want to be helped when we’re in need, we help. It translates everything from a principle of justice to one of love. St. John of the Cross would translate this principle as, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will draw love out.” “I must not harm,” is much different from “I must love.” Not to hurt others is quite possible for everyone; but to love others by the standard of the golden rule is something that requires God’s help, it requires the love of God within. To obey this command in short is to become a new person, to look at the world in a new way. It means to look at things the way Christ does, when he loves us first in the way he would have us love others. Christ ultimately calls us to what we might term the “platinum rule,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

2 Kings 19:1-11.14-21.31-36, Ps 48, Mt 7:6.12-14

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As we begin to approach the end of our annual 16-installment prayerful reexamination of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, the Master, begins to summarize for us what he has been revealing to us over the previous two weeks. The Sermon on the Mount is Jesus’ Magna Carta of Christian morality, the way he wants to form us to live like him, with a holiness surpassing that of the Scribes and Pharisees and virtuous pagans. Tomorrow, if we didn’t have the Solemnity of the Birth of St. John the Baptist, he would use the image of becoming a good tree that bears good fruit. On Thursday, he will summarize with the image of building our life on the rock. Today he gives us three images.

* The first is to recognize the treasure he is giving us. He says, “Do not give what is holy to dogs, or throw your pearls before swine.” His teaching is an extraordinary gift. It is the path to life. Just like we would never put diamonds in a toilet or priceless masterpieces in a doghouse, so we need to treasure his words and protect them within. We should never take them for granted. While we are obviously called to spread the faith and share Jesus and his teachings with others, we should at the same time do so with reverence for what we are transmitting. In the early Church, this passage was often used to refer to the Holy Eucharist. The Didache said, “Let no one eat or drink of your Eucharist except those baptized into the name of the Lord; for, as regards this, the Lord has said, ‘Give not that which is holy unto dogs.’” We need to treat every word that comes from God’s mouth in a similar way, treasuring it and not just throwing it away or giving it to others the way we could give food we cannot finish or don’t want to eat to salivating dogs at our lap. Jesus wants us to grasp that in sharing this gift with us, he is not throwing pearls before swine, but accentuating our dignity. He wants us to treasure both the gift and the recipient. That’s what he’s asking of us here in terms of the way we will live and transmit his words.

* The second image is what we call the Golden Rule. Jesus summarizes everything he has been teaching us in the update, the interiorization, the fulfillment of the Law and the Prophets, as “Do to others whatever you would have them do to you. This is the Law and the Prophets.” Often it is said that the Golden Rule exists in many religions but that is false. God has given the seeds of the word to many over the course of the centuries, but it was always in some version of the “Silver Rule”: “Don’t do to others what you would not want them to do to you.” Jesus was far exceeding that here. He wants us to treat others as we would want to be treated. If we want to be loved, we love. If we want to be forgiven, we forgive. If we want to be thanked, we thank. If we want to be helped when we’re in need, we help. It translates everything from a principle of justice to one of love. St. John of the Cross would translate this principle as, “Where there is no love, put love, and you will draw love out.” “I must not harm,” is much different from “I must love.” Not to hurt others is quite possible for everyone; but to love others by the standard of the golden rule is something that requires God’s help, it requires the love of God within. To obey this command in short is to become a new person, to look at the world in a new way. It means to look at things the way Christ does, when he loves us first in the way he would have us love others. Christ ultimately calls us to what we might term the “platinum rule,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of SS. John Fisher and Thomas More

June 22, 2020

2 Kings 17:5-8.13-15.18, Ps 60, Mt 7:1-5

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today as we ponder the 13th of the 16 part focus on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is trying to get us to live by his standards, not those of the righteous scribes and Pharisees or the virtuous pagans. This week we’ll get to his synthetic conclusions. Today he tell us, “Stop judging that you may not be judged,” promising us that “as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” He is communicating to us that our receptivity, our openness, to his grace is dependent on the way we treat others. For us to receive the love of God, in other words, we must be opened through loving our neighbor. For us to receive God’s mercy, we must be merciful. That’s why Jesus tells us not to judge others, because we cannot truly be merciful unless we stop judging our brothers and sisters.

* Jesus isn’t indicating that we shouldn’t judge between right and wrong and leave all of that judging exclusively to God. God has given us the moral law precisely so that we can make moral judgments about actions. In today’s first reading, we see how God himself judges the actions of the Israelites at the time of the Assyrian invasion. Israel in the north and Samaria in the center of the Holy Land were both run over by the Assyrians “because the children of Israel sinned against the Lord their God,” the Second Book of Kings tells us, “and because they venerated other gods.”  What they did was wrong. God saw it and wants us to see it. When we see people worshipping other gods, when we see people taking advantage of the vulnerable and innocent, when we encounter people telling baldfaced lies, when we encounter terrorists trying to kill the innocent, when we see mobs vandalizing and looting stores or tearing down statues of founding fathers, when we see police officers kneeling on innocent people’s necks, he wants us absolutely to pronounce, as he does, that such actions themselves are evil.

* But while he wants us to share his judgment on the moral quality of actions, Jesus forbids us to judge people. We must leave that to God, because while we can see externally whether their action conforms or not to what God has taught us or in conscience we know to be good or evil, we can’t judge the agents, since we can never know everything that is going on inside of them. We don’t know all the interior facts. This is true for deeds that are clearly wrong: we cannot know why a person, for example, is stealing, or even why a soldier is hammering an innocent carpenter’s legs and feet to a Cross. It’s also true for deeds that are clearly good: we cannot know if someone giving alms to the poor is doing it for vainglory, if a man defending an elderly woman being attacked has ulterior motives, if a person showing up for Eucharistic adoration is doing so to hide from responsibility, family members or even the police.

* Instead of judging our neighbor, Jesus wants us to love our neighbor and show mercy to our neighbor. To do that, he tells us, we need humbly to recognize that often the temptation to judge our neighbor comes from a desire to deflect the attention from our own thoughts, behavior and sins. He says, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of SS. John Fisher and Thomas More

June 22, 2020

2 Kings 17:5-8.13-15.18, Ps 60, Mt 7:1-5

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today as we ponder the 13th of the 16 part focus on Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount in which Jesus is trying to get us to live by his standards, not those of the righteous scribes and Pharisees or the virtuous pagans. This week we’ll get to his synthetic conclusions. Today he tell us, “Stop judging that you may not be judged,” promising us that “as you judge, so will you be judged, and the measure with which you measure will be measured out to you.” He is communicating to us that our receptivity, our openness, to his grace is dependent on the way we treat others. For us to receive the love of God, in other words, we must be opened through loving our neighbor. For us to receive God’s mercy, we must be merciful. That’s why Jesus tells us not to judge others, because we cannot truly be merciful unless we stop judging our brothers and sisters.

* Jesus isn’t indicating that we shouldn’t judge between right and wrong and leave all of that judging exclusively to God. God has given us the moral law precisely so that we can make moral judgments about actions. In today’s first reading, we see how God himself judges the actions of the Israelites at the time of the Assyrian invasion. Israel in the north and Samaria in the center of the Holy Land were both run over by the Assyrians “because the children of Israel sinned against the Lord their God,” the Second Book of Kings tells us, “and because they venerated other gods.”  What they did was wrong. God saw it and wants us to see it. When we see people worshipping other gods, when we see people taking advantage of the vulnerable and innocent, when we encounter people telling baldfaced lies, when we encounter terrorists trying to kill the innocent, when we see mobs vandalizing and looting stores or tearing down statues of founding fathers, when we see police officers kneeling on innocent people’s necks, he wants us absolutely to pronounce, as he does, that such actions themselves are evil.

* But while he wants us to share his judgment on the moral quality of actions, Jesus forbids us to judge people. We must leave that to God, because while we can see externally whether their action conforms or not to what God has taught us or in conscience we know to be good or evil, we can’t judge the agents, since we can never know everything that is going on inside of them. We don’t know all the interior facts. This is true for deeds that are clearly wrong: we cannot know why a person, for example, is stealing, or even why a soldier is hammering an innocent carpenter’s legs and feet to a Cross. It’s also true for deeds that are clearly good: we cannot know if someone giving alms to the poor is doing it for vainglory, if a man defending an elderly woman being attacked has ulterior motives, if a person showing up for Eucharistic adoration is doing so to hide from responsibility, family members or even the police.

* Instead of judging our neighbor, Jesus wants us to love our neighbor and show mercy to our neighbor. To do that, he tells us, we need humbly to recognize that often the temptation to judge our neighbor comes from a desire to deflect the attention from our own thoughts, behavior and sins. He says, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye, but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own eye? How can you say to your brother, ‘Let me remove that splinter from your eye,’ while the wooden beam is in your eye? You hypocrite, remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

June 21, 2020

Jer 20:10-13, Ps 69, Rom 5:12-15, Mt 10:26-33

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today the Liturgy of the Word begins with fear. The prophet Jeremiah describes hearing the whispers of many, “Terror on every side!” as those who were his friends prepare to denounce him and watch for every misstep to take vengeance on him. The reason for their persecution, he could say with the words of the Psalm, was, “For your sake,” O Lord, “I bear insult and shame covers my face. I have become an outcast to my brothers, a stranger to my mother’s children. … The insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.” And that had led him to being assailed by fear at the cost of preaching, living and witnessing to faith.

* In the Gospel, Jesus is giving the instructions to the apostles right before sending them out to proclaim the Kingdom for the first time. He knows they, too, are full of fear. They know that Jesus himself has already been attacked by the learned Scribes, the meticulous Pharisees, the lax Sadducees and the corrupt Herodians and they had too much common sense not to know what awaited them. And so Jesus spoke right to those fears, saying, “Fear no one. … What I saw to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; be afraid, rather, of the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.”

* At first glance it seems contradictory for him to say, almost in the same sentence, “Fear no one” and then “Be afraid of the one who can destroy body and soul.” But that depends on whom he is referring to as the annihilator of body and soul. If we think it’s the devil, then it would be contradictory, but the devil can harass and torment but not destroy. The one who can destroy is solely the One who created in the first place, God. And Jesus, immediately after saying, “Fear no one” to “Be afraid of [God],” pivots to talking about that God’s qualities to show what type of fear we should have. He asks, “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. … You are worth more than many sparrows!” Sparrows were inexpensive, almost worthless, at Jesus’ time. When one was bought, another would often be thrown in for free, because the owner was looking for an opportunity to get rid of them. But they weren’t insignificant to God. God would pay attention to anyone’s falling to the ground or flying upward. In the same way, he cares about our every movement. We are precious to him. The second image is, for those like me who have God as a barber, even more evocative. Jesus says, “Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” Blondes have 150,000 follicles, brunettes 110,000, black-haired people 100,000, red-haired men and women 90,000. The typical young adult and adult loses 25 a day. My first year in seminary, I would look at the pillow each morning and notice hundreds. Yet God keeps track. He loves us that much. And so when Jesus says we need to fear him, we don’t have to be afraid of him like we fear torturers or the devil. We have to have a holy awe of him. This is the gift of fear of the Lord that the Holy Spirit gives us. Rather than being afraid of those who can harm the body, we need to be pay far greater attention to God, Jesus is saying, because he is the one who gives us courage.

* The answer to our fears comes from recognizing and remaining in the love of God the Father whom Jesus came to reveal. This is the Father who, in response to the sin and death that entered the world through the trespass of Adam, gave a “gift … not like the transgression,” namely, “the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ” who for...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

June 21, 2020

Jer 20:10-13, Ps 69, Rom 5:12-15, Mt 10:26-33

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today the Liturgy of the Word begins with fear. The prophet Jeremiah describes hearing the whispers of many, “Terror on every side!” as those who were his friends prepare to denounce him and watch for every misstep to take vengeance on him. The reason for their persecution, he could say with the words of the Psalm, was, “For your sake,” O Lord, “I bear insult and shame covers my face. I have become an outcast to my brothers, a stranger to my mother’s children. … The insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.” And that had led him to being assailed by fear at the cost of preaching, living and witnessing to faith.

* In the Gospel, Jesus is giving the instructions to the apostles right before sending them out to proclaim the Kingdom for the first time. He knows they, too, are full of fear. They know that Jesus himself has already been attacked by the learned Scribes, the meticulous Pharisees, the lax Sadducees and the corrupt Herodians and they had too much common sense not to know what awaited them. And so Jesus spoke right to those fears, saying, “Fear no one. … What I saw to you in the darkness, speak in the light; what you hear whispered, proclaim on the housetops. And do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; be afraid, rather, of the one who can destroy both body and soul in Gehenna.”

* At first glance it seems contradictory for him to say, almost in the same sentence, “Fear no one” and then “Be afraid of the one who can destroy body and soul.” But that depends on whom he is referring to as the annihilator of body and soul. If we think it’s the devil, then it would be contradictory, but the devil can harass and torment but not destroy. The one who can destroy is solely the One who created in the first place, God. And Jesus, immediately after saying, “Fear no one” to “Be afraid of [God],” pivots to talking about that God’s qualities to show what type of fear we should have. He asks, “Are not two sparrows sold for a small coin? Yet not one of them falls to the ground without your Father’s knowledge. … You are worth more than many sparrows!” Sparrows were inexpensive, almost worthless, at Jesus’ time. When one was bought, another would often be thrown in for free, because the owner was looking for an opportunity to get rid of them. But they weren’t insignificant to God. God would pay attention to anyone’s falling to the ground or flying upward. In the same way, he cares about our every movement. We are precious to him. The second image is, for those like me who have God as a barber, even more evocative. Jesus says, “Even all the hairs of your head are counted.” Blondes have 150,000 follicles, brunettes 110,000, black-haired people 100,000, red-haired men and women 90,000. The typical young adult and adult loses 25 a day. My first year in seminary, I would look at the pillow each morning and notice hundreds. Yet God keeps track. He loves us that much. And so when Jesus says we need to fear him, we don’t have to be afraid of him like we fear torturers or the devil. We have to have a holy awe of him. This is the gift of fear of the Lord that the Holy Spirit gives us. Rather than being afraid of those who can harm the body, we need to be pay far greater attention to God, Jesus is saying, because he is the one who gives us courage.

* The answer to our fears comes from recognizing and remaining in the love of God the Father whom Jesus came to reveal. This is the Father who, in response to the sin and death that entered the world through the trespass of Adam, gave a “gift … not like the transgression,” namely, “the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ” who for...