Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) (Vigil)

June 20, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.20.20_Landry_ConCon_1.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.

* After the Easter Season, Pentecost and the Feasts of the Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi, we return to the Gospels of ordinary times and pick up in the tenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus says to us paradoxically something very consoling as well as something a little disconcerting before teaching us how the two go together. On the one hand, Jesus tells us not to be afraid, because our Father in heaven loves us more than all the sparrows in the world and knows us intimately down to our last strand of hair. Fifteen times in the Gospel, in fact, Jesus tells us not to be afraid, and almost every time he returns to the reason not to fear, because our Father in heaven — like any good father whom we remember on this Father’s day! — will provide for us and protect us. In the Sermon on the Mount, he tells us not to worry about what we will eat or drink or wear — things we really need — because that same Father who clothes the lilies of the field knows what we need and will take care of us (Mt 6:28-32). He tells us today that he doesn’t even want us to fear suffering and physical death, because not even death can separate us from our Father’s love (Rom 8:38-39). These words are even more important at a time in which so many fear the coronavirus and its consequences, the tenuous state of the world stability, and various worrisome trends in culture, law and politics.

* At the same time Jesus says that there’s one fear we should have: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” This being who seeks to DESTROY us in hell is the devil, someone who would rather us ignore his existence and many in our age and even sometimes in the Church do. Out of love for us, Jesus tells us, very directly, that the devil exists, that he seeks to kill us, and that we should therefore have a healthy fear of him. St. Peter compares the devil to a type of wild beast: “Your adversary, the devil, is prowling the world like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). That someone he longs to consume is you and me.

* Jesus wants us to have a healthy fear of the evil one, which involves two elements:

* First, we need to know how the devil seeks to attack us. The devil has no power over us unless we give him that power. He cannot kill our soul unless we become his accomplices and allow our souls to be killed through mortal (deadly) sin, which separates our souls from the source of life, who is God. The way the “Father of lies” (Jn 8:44) seeks to accomplish this assisted suicide is by getting us to succumb to one of his lies, just as he did with Eve and Adam in the Garden (Gen 3). A healthy fear of the devil involves no paranoia, but a sane vigilance against his lies and against all his temptations to induce us to sin.

* Second, once we know that and how he’s out to get us, we have to know what the remedy is to defeat his attempt to defeat us forever. That remedy is a deep trust in God that expresses itself in saying yes to God in everything. The evil one got Adam and Eve to sin first by getting them to distrust God and his promises and then to do what God told them not to do; therefore, the antidote to the devil’s machinations is to accentuate the opposite of what t...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of Mary

June 20, 2020

Is 61:9-11, 1 Sam 2:1.4-8, Lk 2:41-51

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in today’s homily:

* In 1969 Pope Paul VI moved the Feast of the Immaculate Heart of Mary from August 22 to the day immediately after the Solemnity of the Sacred Heart in order to highlight the connection between the two feasts. Yesterday with Catholics across the world, we prayed with devotion, “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make our hearts like unto thine.” If we wish to have such a heart, we can learn so much from Mary, who shows us how to respond to the love of Jesus’ heart and be transformed by it. Mary’s heart was the one that Jesus heard from the first moment his human ears began to function. Hers is the heart that most received and best reflects her Son’s love and today is a day on which we seek not only to admire her, not only to imitate her, but to enter into her loving relationship with her Son. Today we say, with St. Louis Marie Grignion de Montfort and St. John Paul II who used to pray this every morning, “Praebe mihi cor tuum, O Maria!,” “Give me your heart, O Mary!”

* In 1917, when Mary appeared to the three shepherd children in Fatima, she said to them, “God wishes to establish in the world devotion to my Immaculate Heart.” She invited all of us to consecrate ourselves to her heart as an antidote to the sin that leads to what she showed the children in three visions: to hell, to the destruction of atheistic communism, and to the persecution of the Church and even assassination attempts against the Holy Father. In order to live out well our consecration to Jesus’ Sacred Heart we do so through consecration to her Immaculate Heart. United with her, we enter into the consecration of her Son to the Father for our sanctification (Jn 17). Today we contemplate her heart, a heart that was full of grace because it was full of God. It was a heart full of thanksgiving, one that “rejoiced heartily,” as we see prophesied in Isaiah, because her joy was in God who clothed her with the robe of salvation, wrapped her in a mantle of justice, adorned her like a bride bedecked with jewels. Her heart constantly exulted in the Lord, as we see in her Magnificat, which fulfills what we heard in Hannah’s praise in 2 Samuel. It was a contemplative heart that, as we heard at the end of today’s Gospel, “kept all these things, pondering them in her heart.” She held on to God’s words and deeds as a treasure that kept paying out dividends within her, pondering God’s word so much that that word could take on her flesh.

* One of the best ways to ponder Mary’s heart and to learn from it is with the help of the eight adjectives found in the Preface of the Votive Mass of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary taken from the most beautiful liturgical book in the Latin Rite: the Collection of Masses of the Blessed Virgin Mary. The Preface reads: “You gave the Blessed Virgin Mary a wise and obedient heart, that she might perfectly carry out your will, a new and gentle heart, in which you were well pleased and on which you inscribed the law of the New Covenant. You gave her an undivided and pure heart that she might be worthy to be the Virgin Mother of your Son and to rejoice to see you forever. You gave her a steadfast and watchful heart, so that she could endure without fear the sword of sorrow and await in faith the resurrection of her Son.” We can ponder each of the attributes:

* Wise — Her heart was like the young Solomon’s, because pondering and treasuring everything as pieces of a mosaic within. It was wise because it was filled with God’s wisdom.

* Obedient — Her heart hears the word of God and keeps it,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Solemnity of the Sacred Heart of Jesus

June 19, 2020

Deut 7:6-11, Ps 103, 1 John 4:7-16, Mt 11:25-30

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Pope Benedict in a 2008 Sunday Angelus greeting said that devotion to the Sacred Heart is the “center of the faith.” That might seem a little overstated, if we understand devotion to the Sacred Heart as something that basically began in the 1670s with St. Margaret Mary Alacoque. Pope Benedict, however, understood it far more broadly: The Heart of Christ, he stated, “expresses in a simple and authentic way the ‘glad tidings’ of love, summarizing the mystery of the Incarnation and the Redemption in itself. … God desired to enter into the limits of history and the human condition. He took on a body and a heart; thus we can contemplate and meet the infinite in the finite.” Benedict called every person to find his “center” in Jesus’ Sacred Heart, which he poetically says constitutes a “source of truth and goodness to draw from in the flux of the different situations of everyday life and its toil. Everyone of us, when he pauses for a moment of silence, needs to feel not only the beating of his own heart, but more deeply, the beating of a trustworthy presence, perceptible to the senses of faith and yet more real: the presence of Christ, the heart of the world.”

* Today’s readings emphasize the love at the heart of the mystery of the Incarnation and Redemption. In the Book of Deuteronomy, Moses tells us, “The Lord set his heart on you and chose you. … It was because the Lord loved you.” In the Psalm we see how his love is merciful, how he “pardons all your iniquities, heals all your ills, redeems your life from destruction, crowns you with kindness and compassion,” because “Merciful and gracious is the Lord, slow to anger and abounding in kindness.” We see the depth of that merciful love in which God set his heart on us and chose us in St. John’s first letter, where he tells us. “God is love. In this way the love of God was revealed to us: God sent his only Son into the world so that we might have life through him. In this is love: not that we have loved God, but that he loved us and sent his Son as expiation for our sins.” The whole incarnation and redemption is summed up by that love by which God set his heart on us. And in the Gospel, we see how that heart is “meek and humble,” how he wants us to accept it with childlike faith, to learn from it and to yoke ourselves to it. The great devotional prayer of the Church to the Sacred Heart of Jesus is, “O Jesus, meek and humble of heart, make my heart like unto thine,” and that’s ultimately Jesus’ great wish, to give us a heart like his. That’s why at the end of the second reading, St. John stresses, “Beloved, if God so loved us, we must also love one another. … If we love one another, God remains in us and his love is brought to perfection within us.” The love of the Sacred Heart is meant to be transformative and we beg for that transformation.

* It’s always struck me as noteworthy that we don’t have a feast of Jesus’ sacred brain, even though Jesus is the eternal logos. We don’t honor his hallowed hands, which, in spite of calluses from hard work in a hidden Nazarene carpentry shop, brought a tender healing touch to so many. There’s no commemoration of the Lord’s consecrated feet, which traversed the ancient holy land as he announced the Good News from town to town. There’s no liturgical observation of Jesus’ blessed eyes, which looked on the rich young man with love and were so powerful that, with one glance, they could make Peter weep in the high priest’s courtyard.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

June 17, 2020

2 Kings 2:1.6-14, Ps 31, Mt 6:1-6.16-18

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* We’re 9/16 through Jesus’ annual three-week refresher course on the Christian life geared to helping us live by his standards. Today he takes up three traditional Jewish practices of piety that have likewise become three of the most important Christian practices not only during Lent but throughout life and speaks to us of the purity of intention with which we must do them. He focuses both on the audience for whom we’re doing them and the reward. 

* The audience in the case of fasting, prayer and almsgiving is not supposed to be others, in order vainly to gain their approval or esteem. The audience needs to be God who sees in secret. We fast for God, in order to hunger for him more and to share his hunger for the care of all his hungry and needy sons and daughters. We pray for him, in our “inner room” where we store our valuables, and seek to conform ourselves with his will, his glory, his kingdom, his name. We give alms for him, as his stewards, knowing that he has placed within our reach all our material goods, our time, our life, even God himself, so that we can be the extension of God’s providence to others. So often we can be tempted to do things for the eyes of our peers, but that’s what so many of the outwardly righteous scribes and Pharisees did, what so many people in the world seek to do. Jesus is trying to help us act for God.

* And that leads directly to the subject of reward. Jesus promises, “And your Father who sees in secret will reward you.” Many Christians are uncomfortable with the whole thought of reward because it seems impure to do it for any benefit other than out of love for God. But Jesus who made us is constantly speaking to us about rewards. He mentions that if we are persecuted for the sake of his name, our reward in heaven will be great; he promises that if we’re faithful in little things, we’ll be given greater responsibilities; that if we leave all things for him and his name, we’ll be given 100-fold in this life and eternal life; that if we’re faithful, we will be with him forever. Jesus has made us to work for a goal, but the goal he wants us to strive for, as he tells us later in the Sermon on the Mount, is the “kingdom of God and his righteousness” knowing that “everything else will be given” to us besides. We seek what St. Thomas Aquinas asked for when God said to him, “Bene scripsisti de me Thoma; quam ergo mercedem accipias?” “You have written well of me Thomas; What reward would you receive?” He replied, “Non aliam, Domine, nisi te ipsum,” or “Nothing but you, Lord!” So the reward we seek is not vain, the reward we seek is not this worldly, the reward we seek is precisely the Reward God wants to give, himself.

* We see these two lessons lived out in the first reading that details the end of the Prophet Elijah’s life. He knew that the Lord was calling him across the Jordan in order to take him up, otherwise his dialogue with Elisha would make no sense. He wanted it to be something just for him and God, which is why he told Elisha to wait behind. But Elisha persisted and Elijah allowed him to accompany him into that inner room. And later we see a glimpse of the reward. When Elijah asks Elisha, “Ask for whatever I may do for you, before I am taken from you,” Elisha answered, “May I receive a double portion of your spirit.” In the original mindset, one couldn’t ask for the whole of one’s spirit and so one would ask for “two-thirds,” or a “double-portion.” In short, Elisha wanted to be like Elijah, to be filled with his purity of intention, to be filled with his courage,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

June 16, 2020

1 Kings 21:17-29, Ps 51, Mt 5:43-48

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* We are on the eighth of sixteen installments in this two-and-a-half week annual refresher course on the Christian life that Jesus gives us as we enter step-by-step into his Sermon on the Mount, the main point of which is to help us to adopt his standard of life as our own. He wants our righteousness to surpass that of the scribes and Pharisees, to have our conduct exceed that of the virtuous pagans whom he tells us today love those who love them. He wants us to learn how to become the perfect image of our Father just like he is, and the way we come to that perfection is through loving like God loves. To love like God loves we must be merciful like our Father is merciful. Today Jesus emphasizes that point and the first reading illustrates it.

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus describes for us the way God the Father loves and summons us to live according to that standard. Just like God the Father forgives and loves those who have made themselves his enemy through sin and serving other gods, so Jesus calls us to love and pardon our enemies. Jesus does everything he can to solicit the conversion of those who persecute him and calls likewise us to pray for our persecutors. He says something startling about the importance of our doing so: so that we “may be children of [our] Father in heaven, who makes his sun rise on the evil and the good, and sends rain on the righteous and on the unrighteous.” Jesus implies that we will not really become children of God until we start behaving like God, that he can be our Father without our being his children if we do not act as his children. By birth and by baptism, we are, ontologically, his children, but we still must strive to become morally his children. Jesus calls us to be good — to let our sun or life-giving rain fall — not just on those who are good to us but even on those who are not good to us, just like the Father does. We are not behaving as chips off the old divine block when we don’t love others enough to forgive them when they hurt us, to pray for them when they persecute us, to sacrifice for them when they’re in need, to avoid all vengeance against them when they strike us on our cheek or otherwise hurt or offend us. When Jesus calls us at the end of the passage to be “perfect as [our] heavenly Father is perfect,” the word in the Greek is teleios, which means “fit to achieve its end or goal.” Jesus is summoning us to order our lives to the same purpose and same goal as God the Father, to achieve the end for which we were made, which is to be fully in the image and likeness of God, to be holy as God is holy, to love like God loves, to be merciful as he is merciful, to behave truly as children of our Father.

* God shows us how to do that in today’s first reading. He sends Elijah to confront King Ahab who is seizing the field of his neighbor Naboth whom Queen Jezebel had conspired to have framed and stoned to death. Ahab explicitly confronts Elijah as his adversary, saying, “Have you found me out, my enemy?” Ahab opposed and through Jezebel even sought to kill Elijah because Elijah was calling him to convert from his worship of Ba’al. Ahab had “given [himself] up to evil in the Lord’s sight,” provoking God “by leading Israel into sin,” and becoming “completely abominable by following idols, just as the Amorites had done.” But after Elijah’s strong words, Ahab repented. He tore his garments, put on sackcloth, fasted and went about subdued. God noted his conversion, his humbling himself begging for mercy, and God told Elijah, “Since he has humbled himself before me, I will not bring the evil in his time.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

June 15, 2020

1 Kings 21:1-16, Ps 5, Mt 5:38-42

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.15.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* At first glance, today’s readings are bound to make us physically and spiritually nauseous. In the first reading, we encounter the story of Naboth, whose vineyard Ahab, the king of Samaria, coveted. Ahab told Naboth, “Give me your vineyard to be my vegetable garden, since it is close by, next to my house. I will give you a better vineyard in exchange, or, if you prefer, I will give you its value in money.” But Naboth refused, not because of selfishness, but because he believed that it was God who had given that land to him and his family to be treasured almost as a covenantal relationship: “The Lord forbid that I should give you my ancestral heritage.”  Ahab was so disturbed and angry he lay down on his bed and refused to eat. When his wife Jezebel asked why he wasn’t eating and found out the reason, she set herself on a plan of calculated evil to obtain the vineyard, writing letters in the king’s name and with his seal calling on the “elders and nobles” to secure two scoundrels to frame Naboth for the capital crime of having “cursed God and king.” The nobles went along with this abomination, Naboth was stoned to death, and Jezebel told her husband to go and acquire Naboth’s familial vineyard. The whole scene points to the revolting ugliness of wickedness and corruption, of those in positions of authority abusing their offices to trample on those, especially the worldly insignificant, who impede their insatiable will to have more power, popularity and property.

* And yet, when we read the first reading through the prism of the Gospel, it seems at first glance that Jesus is calling us not to resist this corruption and injustice but to enable it. Jesus tells us, “Offer no resistance to one who is evil. When someone strikes you on your right cheek, turn the other one to him as well. If anyone wants to go to law with you over your tunic, hand him your cloak as well. Should anyone press you into service for one mile, go with him for two miles. Give to the one who asks of you, and do not turn your back on one who wants to borrow.” It would appear that Jesus is saying, when an evil corrupt King asks you for your ancestral land, give it to him, and give him your house, and your clothes and everything else besides. That’s certainly the way some people have misinterpreted this Gospel passage, but that’s not what Jesus is affirming. Jesus’ message is highly challenging all the same — he’s calling us to live by his standards, to have our righteousness surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees as we heard last week, to go beyond a pagan sense of justice and love for those who love us, as we’ll hear tomorrow —  but he’s not telling us to become a punching bag or a defenseless victim before those who would seek to harm us or others.

* To grasp Jesus’ message, we first need to see the way he introduces it. He cites the “law of talion,” something that goes back to the Hammurabi Code of the 23rd century BC, but that was incorporated into the Mosaic law: “An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth.” This was an ancient limit on vengeance, against a tribal notion of vendetta, that would prevent the escalation of an offense. Prior to this principle becoming popular, if someone killed your ox, your whole family would have a vendetta against that person’s whole family and there was a risk that much worse would be done and for generations. It put a limit to revenge. Jesus, however,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Chapel of the Permanent Observer Mission of the Holy See, Manhattan

Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (Corpus Christi), Year A

June 14, 2020

Deut 8:2-3.14-16, Ps 147, 1 Cor 10:16-17, Jn 6:51-58

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.14.20_HSM_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* This year’s celebration of the Solemnity of the Most Holy Body and Blood of the Lord is particularly special because of the absence of Mass in many places — here in New York City still — due to coronavirus restrictions. In today’s first reading, we see what happened with the Israelites in the desert. Moses told them that God “let you be afflicted with hunger and then fed you with manna … in order to show you that not by bread alone does one live, but by every word that comes from the mouth the Lord.” One of the goods that God doubtless wants to bring out of this time of affliction is to help people hunger more  for the Holy Eucharist so that they may recognize that God the Father seeks to feed them with the “True Manna,” so that they may learn that they don’t live by bread alone or even by the words of God but by the “living Bread come down from heaven,” Jesus himself. That’s why this Corpus Christi has to be special, and ought to be lived with renewed hunger, amazement, and gratitude.

* This is a feast especially desired by the Lord, who revealed his will in two different stages in the 1200s. He desired that our faith in the Eucharist would pass from our head, to our heart to our knees, that our response to him in this gift would go from theology to devotion, that this day would help us to grow from knowledge of his real presence to passionate love. 800 years ago, people knew the truth of Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist intellectually but for many it really didn’t impact their life. Many did not prioritize the Mass. Of those who did, many came as a duty rather than a thing of love. Jesus wanted us to love him back in the Eucharist. He did this not because he’s hurting for attention, or narcissistic, but precisely because he loves us. He wants us to receive as much as we possibly can from the gift of himself in the Eucharist, not for his sake, but for ours.

* The first intervention of Jesus in asking for this Feast occurred in the early part of the century, when the Lord Jesus began to appear to a contemplative nun in Belgium, St. Juliana of Mont Cornillon (1193-1258). Beginning from the time she was 15 in 1208, a moon would appear to her throughout the day with a black band in it. She wondered what it meant and the Lord Jesus appeared to her in a dream and mentioned that the moon referred to the liturgical year and the black band to the fact that the liturgical year lacked one thing, a day in honor of His Body and Blood in the Eucharist. Up until that point, the Church had marked the institution of the Eucharist each year on Holy Thursday, when the Lord gave the Apostles His Body and Blood for the first time and instituted the priesthood so that through His priests, that Body and Blood might be multiplied to every land in every age. But on Holy Thursday, the focus of Christians is divided. Yes, we think about the Eucharist, but we also ponder the imminent betrayal that will occur after the Last Supper. Even the Gospel of the Mass of the Last Supper does not focus on the Eucharist, but rather on the Lord’s washing His Apostles’ feet and commissioning them to do the same in loving, humble service of others. Jesus was saying that missing from the liturgical calendar was a feast specifically dedicated to rejoicing in the incredible gift of the Eucharist and thanking God for it.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Corpus Christi (A), Vigil

June 13, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.13.20_Landry_ConCon_2.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* 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 tomorrow on Corpus Christi.

* If there’s ever a year in which we need the feast celebrating the Body and Blood of the Lord it’s this year.

* So many faithful have gone without the Eucharist for months. Still here in New York, faithful cannot attend either Sunday or daily Mass. We have tried to do the best we can with virtual Masses and spiritual communions, but it’s obviously not the same.

* One of the goods that have come from this pandemic has been many now are hungering more for the Eucharist, for the Mass. That hunger justifies putting up with the many inconveniences of going to Mass with masks, sitting in designated areas, constantly sanitizing hands and pews and the rest. That hunger should justify so much.

* There’s a beautiful phrase in the Sequence before the Gospel for the Solemnity of Corpus Christi in which St. Thomas Aquinas says, “Quantum potes, tantum aude.” Dare to do all you can. Go overboard with love. This is a year in which we need to. In most places we won’t be able to have Corpus Christi processions, or lengthy periods of communal adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. But perhaps we can do the same thing most of us have been doing: doing all we can to spread love of the Lord via social media, phone calls, letters. I’d like to ask you to think about posting something on your Twitter, Facebook or Instagram accounts about the Eucharist today and how grateful you are for this gift. The reason is because nothing we do could possibly be adequate to the gift.

* In the consequential conversation in the Gospel today, Jesus’ disciples as well as critics grumble after he tells them that he is the living bread that came down from heaven and whoever eats that bread, his flesh for the life of the world, will live forever. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” they ask aloud. And Jesus doubles down: Unless you gnaw on the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood you do not have life within you. … Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.”

* They would go on to say, “This teaching is hard who can endure it,” and many disciples left. They were right in that it was a very hard teaching. To them it sounded like cannibalism. Jews couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure and Jesus was telling them they needed to drink his blood. Sometimes I think the reason why some Catholics, like some of our fellow Christians, don’t find this teaching hard is because they think Jesus is talking symbolically. He’s not. He stresses his flesh is real food and his blood real drink.

* We need to approach this difficult reality with faith. After many of the disciples had left, Jesus turned to the 12 and asked if they wanted to leave. That’s when Peter said, “Lord to whom shall we go. You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the holy one of God.” Translate. Last Supper. Thomas: credo quidquid dixit…

* The teaching is hard, but that’s what’s at the origin of this feast. Peter of Prague. First Corpus Christi.

* This teaching is hard we believe whatever Jesus has said and are called to base our life o...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

June 12, 2020

1 Kings 19:9.11-16, Ps 27, Mt 5:27-32

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.12.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Today Jesus continues to sketch out for us how to live as his disciples, in communion with him who fulfills the law and seeks to help us fulfill the law by loving God with all we are and have and loving our neighbor as he loves us, by interiorizing the law of the Holy Spirit written on our hearts, so that our holiness might surpass that of the virtuous pagans and the scribes and the Pharisees and attain to the full stature of the holiness of Christ in a human being. Yesterday Jesus did so with regard to the fifth commandment. Today he will do so with regard to the sixth. But to understand what he will teach more deeply, let’s begin with the Psalm.

* In the Responsorial Psalm, we pray, “I long to see your face, O Lord,” and that points to the desire that leads to vision that then transforms a life. We see two types of longing to see God in the readings today. The first is to see the Lord in prayer, which is the journey on which God led the Prophet Elijah in the first reading. Elijah, on Mt. Horeb, didn’t find God in the various manifestations that Moses did when he was at the top of the mountain — in the howling wind, the earthquakes or the fire of a burning bush — but in the whisper of a gentle breeze. God doesn’t always respond according to our expectations in granting the desires he plants within us to see Him. He can sometimes come in the least suspecting ways. But when we long to see his face, we’ll be able to find that face speaking to us even in something small like a gentle breeze.

* In the Gospel, we see that longing and vision on display in Jesus’ words about adultery of the heart. He tells us that someone who has looked on a woman with lust has committed in his heart the sin of adultery. Lust begins with an unholy longing in the heart that passes to what St. John Paul II called a type of porno-vision, when we seek to appropriate, possess, objectify, rather than love, serve and die for the one beheld. Lust changes the entire intentionality of a human person, St. John Paul II said, from a self-giver to a taker, from someone called to lay down his life out of love for others to someone who sacrifices someone else for his own pleasures. The righteousness Jesus wants of us begins with chaste longings and chaste looking, something that views the person as a whole, rather than objectifying and abstracting the person’s values through the prism of meeting one’s desire or needs. Chastity, as John Paul II taught in his Theology of the Body, is linked to purity and to piety: purity allows us to “see God” (Mt 5:6) in others rather than make that person an idol, or idolize our own urges; piety allows us to reverence the God we see. Rather than the adulterous desiring and looking that Jesus says we should brutally root out of our life — with graphic language about plucking out eyes and chopping off hands — Jesus wants us to replace it with holy longing and vision that leads to a genuine love, which often involves forsaking human romantic love according to the other person’s or to one’s own situation in life. Adulterous desires, looks and actions are actually similarly adulterous in terms of our spousal Covenant with God, and God’s righteousness — and the help of the Holy Spirit — call us to a different way of life.

* This longing to see God in prayer, in life, and in others is the essence of the consecrated life. The motto of the consecrated life is “Faciem tuam, Domine,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Memorial of St. Barnabas

June 11, 2020

Acts 11:21-26. 13:1-3, Ps 98, Mt 5:20-26

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.11.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

Today in the Gospel, Jesus tells us something that should startle us, especially early in the morning: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” That’s a very tall order.  The Scribes were the experts of Sacred Scripture in its every detail. They consecrated their whole life to knowing the Word of God. The Pharisees were the ones who sought to live the Word of God expounded by the Scribes to the letter. Many of the Scribes were Pharisees and vice versa. They prayed three times a day. The fasted not just the one time prescribed per year but twice a week. They tithed not only the various items that God had instructed but the tithed their whole income. By worldly, even by classically religious standards, their righteousness seemed to be almost unsurpassable. But they were missing something huge. Their righteousness was fundamentally based on their own efforts, their own study, their own will-power, their own sacrifices. It also featured an extrinsic understanding of being right with God: as long as they did the right things, everything was fine with God. As the converted Pharisee St. Paul would once say back to them, they thought that they were saved by their own works of the law, by their own external adhesion to the Mosaic law, and not by God, not by a faith-filled living relationship with God.

When Jesus calls us to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees, he was not fundamentally calling us to surpass them in memorizing the New Testament along with the Old, in praying four times a day instead of three, in fasting three times a week instead of two, in giving twenty percent of all we have back to God instead of ten. He’s calling us, rather, to three things: first, to have his own relationship to the law in fulfilling the law; second, to grasp that it is all about loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as Christ has loved us (which is why we have today’s Alleluia verse, to help us remember this); and to interiorize the law so that our heart is changed, not just our outward behavior. He’s calling us to allow the Word of God, Love incarnate, to become enfleshed within. He’s summoning us to permit God to give us a new heart, to place his law within us as he pours Himself, the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. God had told us through the Prophet Jeremiah that one day he would write his law in our hearts, and that’s precisely what Jesus came to do. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to accomplish.

Today Jesus begins a series of powerful applications of what this looks like, because these are things on which everyone needs to surpass the Scribes and the Pharisees. The first is with regard to the fifth commandment. The Lord says, “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” Jesus wants to transform the way we relate to others so that we will love them as he has loved us. It’s not enough merely not to kill others. He doesn’t want us to insult them. He doesn’t want us to hate them. Jesus wants to teach us to love those whom others would be tempted even to murder, to love those who make us angry, to love those who are fools.