Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Sixteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

July 20, 2020

Mic 6:1-4.6-8, Ps 50, Mt 12:38-42

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the Gospel, the Scribes and Pharisees asked Jesus for a “sign.” A sign was a miracle that pointed to something else, namely Jesus’ authority to preach and do what he was saying and doing. We know that Jesus had been doing nothing but miracles: he had immediately before cured a man with a withered hand and cured another who was blind, mute and possessed. But the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t want to accept what those miracles signified and the authority of Jesus’ words and deeds to which they testified. So they kept asking for other ones. Perhaps they were waiting until a supposed miracle attempt failed so that they would be able to feel justified in their rejection of Jesus. Jesus cut to the core of why they were asking for such a miracle, saying, an “evil and unfaithful generation seeks a sign.” A good and faithful generation would have already taken seriously all of the miracles and words that Jesus had done and grasped that he himself was the sign for which the Jews should have been looking.

* But Jesus nevertheless says that the one sign that would be given to the evil and perverse generation that constantly seeks another sign is the Sign of Jonah. On the one hand this certainly points to his death, burial in the belly of the earth, and resurrection on the third day, the greatest of all his miracles. That sign would be given to all, but, as we know, some would refuse to believe it. The fundamental sign of Jonah, however, is a sign of conversion. Jonah was himself a convert — he had run away from the mission the Lord had given him, much as many of the Scribes and Pharisees were running away from the mission the Lord had given all the Jews in preparing for and receiving the long-awaited Messiah — and called the pagan Ninevites to conversion. And we remember how the Ninevites responded: they all repented, from the king down to the pets, and fasted in sackcloth and ashes. Jesus told them that he was greater than Jonah and a greater sign of conversion. If the pagans of Nineveh had changed their ways at the preaching of Jonah on the first day, then the supposedly “good and faithful” religious Jews of his day should have much more readily changed when they heard Jesus preaching “Repent and believe in the Gospel” and working all the signs to back up his message. Jesus added that the Queen of Sheba had traveled a great distance with many caravans in her retinue in order to hear Solomon’s wisdom — she had in fact traveled 1660 miles or, at a pace of 15 miles a day, over 110 days or nearly four months each way — but that his wisdom was greater than Solomon’s and they weren’t willing to travel any intellectual or moral distance.

* The chief problem with the Scribes and Pharisees is not that they didn’t want to convert “in general.” It’s not that they didn’t really consider themselves sinners in need of mercy. They marked Yom Kippur each year and piously recognized their need for atonement just like everyone else, but they wanted to convert on their own terms and in their own way. They didn’t want to convert in the way God wanted and to begin to do what he was asking. We see that problem laid out starkly in the reading from the Prophet Micah and in the Responsorial Psalm. God through Micah puts words on their lips about the type of repentance they were willing to do and were already doing: “With what shall I come before the Lord, and bow before God most high? Shall I come before him with burnt offerings, with calves a year old? Will the Lord be pleased with thousands of rams, with myriad streams of oil?

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Holy Family Parish, Manhattan

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

July 19, 2020

Wis 12:13.16-19, Ps 86, Rom 8:26-27, Mt 13:24-43

 

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

 

The following text guided today’s homily:

* Last week, Jesus gave us the parable of the Sower, Seed and Soil, to indicate to us how he wants us to receive his Word and his work within us. We know from our basic knowledge of farming what normally occurs once a seed has been implanted in good soil. It starts to grow and eventually produces fruit and those fruit likewise contain within many seeds that can then be planted elsewhere. Spiritually the same thing is supposed to happen. With a hat trick of different images in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus describes that transition from a fertile disciple to a fruitful apostle in which we begin to share what we ourselves have received. His words contain three very important lessons about how the kingdom of God grows. Insofar as each of us has been called and chosen by God through the Church to enter into and expand his kingdom, these three parables are deeply relevant to who we are and what God calls us to do. In one parable, Jesus tells us first that the Church, like a mustard seed, starts small but will grow to be huge. In a second, he adds that the members of the Church are meant to function in the world like yeast does in bread; we’re supposed to make everything rise. In the third, he states that the Church’s growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum: there is also “an enemy” in the field, sowing weeds, to try to wreck God’s harvest — in other words to destroy you, me and those we know and love. The three go together and are meant to guide us at every moment of the Church’s life. Let’s look at them together.

* The first parable is that the Church begins like a tiny mustard seed. From the small seed of Christ implanted by God in Mary’s womb, to the calling of just a few disciples and apostles filled with the Holy Spirit, the Church was born and grew, grew into the largest of shrubs, in which countless people throughout the ages, including whole nations, have been able to come and find shelter in her branches. That tree continues to live we’re branches on Jesus the vine (Jn 15:5). The branches of the Church extend in areas of great sunshine and of great darkness, with all of us taking our roots in that one event, that one piece of soil on Calvary, that one seed of Jesus who fell to the ground three times and died, but rose again, like a plant in springtime, giving life to all of us throughout time. This lesson of the mustard seed recurs throughout Church history. So many religious orders and apostolates that the Lord has raised up to help the Church began small, often with one saint, but over the course of sufferings and patience, they grew to be enormous. So many parishes began with just a handful of poor, committed families, but over the course of years and decades, with sacrifices, time and the help the Lord, grew to be quite large.

* Sometimes we can ask ourselves, though, whether what Jesus said about the mustard seed has an expiration date. It seems that many religious orders, many parishes, even whole dioceses, are experiencing not continued growth but shrinkage. The Archdiocese of New York is closing Churches and schools rather than building new ones. Does this parable still have meaning? Of course it does! If we’ve gotten smaller, the Lord has permitted it so that we can all experience anew the full meaning of this parable, through beginning again, beginning smaller, like the new mustard seed planted from the tall tree. The truth is that when the Church has become as big as a Middle Eastern mustard tree, we can forget many of the lessons that God teaches us in this lesson of the mustard seed. When the Church is a tree, an enormous institution,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Holy Family Parish, Manhattan

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

July 19, 2020

Wis 12:13.16-19, Ps 86, Rom 8:26-27, Mt 13:24-43

 

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

 

The following text guided today’s homily:

* Last week, Jesus gave us the parable of the Sower, Seed and Soil, to indicate to us how he wants us to receive his Word and his work within us. We know from our basic knowledge of farming what normally occurs once a seed has been implanted in good soil. It starts to grow and eventually produces fruit and those fruit likewise contain within many seeds that can then be planted elsewhere. Spiritually the same thing is supposed to happen. With a hat trick of different images in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus describes that transition from a fertile disciple to a fruitful apostle in which we begin to share what we ourselves have received. His words contain three very important lessons about how the kingdom of God grows. Insofar as each of us has been called and chosen by God through the Church to enter into and expand his kingdom, these three parables are deeply relevant to who we are and what God calls us to do. In one parable, Jesus tells us first that the Church, like a mustard seed, starts small but will grow to be huge. In a second, he adds that the members of the Church are meant to function in the world like yeast does in bread; we’re supposed to make everything rise. In the third, he states that the Church’s growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum: there is also “an enemy” in the field, sowing weeds, to try to wreck God’s harvest — in other words to destroy you, me and those we know and love. The three go together and are meant to guide us at every moment of the Church’s life. Let’s look at them together.

* The first parable is that the Church begins like a tiny mustard seed. From the small seed of Christ implanted by God in Mary’s womb, to the calling of just a few disciples and apostles filled with the Holy Spirit, the Church was born and grew, grew into the largest of shrubs, in which countless people throughout the ages, including whole nations, have been able to come and find shelter in her branches. That tree continues to live we’re branches on Jesus the vine (Jn 15:5). The branches of the Church extend in areas of great sunshine and of great darkness, with all of us taking our roots in that one event, that one piece of soil on Calvary, that one seed of Jesus who fell to the ground three times and died, but rose again, like a plant in springtime, giving life to all of us throughout time. This lesson of the mustard seed recurs throughout Church history. So many religious orders and apostolates that the Lord has raised up to help the Church began small, often with one saint, but over the course of sufferings and patience, they grew to be enormous. So many parishes began with just a handful of poor, committed families, but over the course of years and decades, with sacrifices, time and the help the Lord, grew to be quite large.

* Sometimes we can ask ourselves, though, whether what Jesus said about the mustard seed has an expiration date. It seems that many religious orders, many parishes, even whole dioceses, are experiencing not continued growth but shrinkage. The Archdiocese of New York is closing Churches and schools rather than building new ones. Does this parable still have meaning? Of course it does! If we’ve gotten smaller, the Lord has permitted it so that we can all experience anew the full meaning of this parable, through beginning again, beginning smaller, like the new mustard seed planted from the tall tree. The truth is that when the Church has become as big as a Middle Eastern mustard tree, we can forget many of the lessons that God teaches us in this lesson of the mustard seed. When the Church is a tree, an enormous institution,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form

July 19, 2020

Rom 6:19-23, Mt 7:15-21

 

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

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Yesterday the Church marked the 150th Anniversary of Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, which formally defined as divinely revealed the dogma of papal infallibility. It put into words what the Church had long believed, that when the Pope, by virtue of his authority as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, defines a doctrine about faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he does so infallibly by means the divine assistance of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised to Peter and to the Church. As I wrote in an article for the National Catholic Register celebrating this sesquicentenary, to clarify that the Pope can teach something as infallibly true is resolutely to proclaim that there is truth; that God is real; that Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God and the Truth that sets us free, taught infallibly; and that he has given his own capacity to teach the truth without error to the Church and to those he has chosen, called and commissioned to lead the Church in communion with him.

* Jesus wants us to believe the truth, to live the truth and to teach the truth. The truth about God. The truth about the human person made in God’s image and likeness. The truth about prayer and the sacraments. The truth about right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, heaven and hell. The devil, on the other hand, is the “father of lies” (Jn 8:44), who seeks to deceive and confuse and ultimately get people to reject the truth about God, ourselves and others, and believe, live and teach falsehood.

* That’s why Jesus’ words today in the Gospel are so important. He tells us, “Beware of False Prophets,” those who rather than leading others in the ways of God lead them astray. Throughout the Old Testament, the chosen prophets of the Lord were always opposed by imposters, those who claimed the title prophet but didn’t speak the word of the Lord but a false word that their listeners often found more pleasant. False prophecy remained a major problem at the time of Jesus and the early Church. St. John wrote in his first letter, “Many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 Jn 4:1). St. Peter wrote, “There were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be lying teachers among you (2 Pet 2:1). The Didache, authored in the late first century as a type of catechesis for the first Christians, said, “Let every apostle that comes to you be received as the Lord,” but cautioned them to pay attention: “If he teaches so as to increase righteousness and the knowledge of the Lord, receive him as the Lord,” but “if the teacher, … teaches another doctrine opposed to this, do not listen to him.” The Didache summarizes, “Not every one who speaks [charismatically] is a prophet, but only the one who holds the ways of the Lord. So from their ways shall the false prophet and the prophet be known.”

* This issue, this serious responsibility, of knowing how to distinguish between true and false prophets didn’t end with the apostolic age. We see it in the many heresies throughout Church history. We see it today. There’s a type of false prophet who preaches a laxist, easy way, as if the road to life is broad and to perdition is narrow. He or she doesn’t live by or repeat Jesus’ challenge to lose our life to save it, to pick up our Cross each day and follow him, to sacrifice ourselves to wash others’ feet, to love God not just a little but with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor in a self-sacrificial way as Jesus has loved us. This type of false prophet manipulates God’s unconditional love to pretend as if God never gave us the Ten Commandments to trai...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. Agnes Church, Manhattan

Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form

July 19, 2020

Rom 6:19-23, Mt 7:15-21

 

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

 

The following text guided today’s homily: 

* Yesterday the Church marked the 150th Anniversary of Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, which formally defined as divinely revealed the dogma of papal infallibility. It put into words what the Church had long believed, that when the Pope, by virtue of his authority as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, defines a doctrine about faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he does so infallibly by means the divine assistance of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised to Peter and to the Church. As I wrote in an article for the National Catholic Register celebrating this sesquicentenary, to clarify that the Pope can teach something as infallibly true is resolutely to proclaim that there is truth; that God is real; that Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God and the Truth that sets us free, taught infallibly; and that he has given his own capacity to teach the truth without error to the Church and to those he has chosen, called and commissioned to lead the Church in communion with him.

* Jesus wants us to believe the truth, to live the truth and to teach the truth. The truth about God. The truth about the human person made in God’s image and likeness. The truth about prayer and the sacraments. The truth about right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, heaven and hell. The devil, on the other hand, is the “father of lies” (Jn 8:44), who seeks to deceive and confuse and ultimately get people to reject the truth about God, ourselves and others, and believe, live and teach falsehood.

* That’s why Jesus’ words today in the Gospel are so important. He tells us, “Beware of False Prophets,” those who rather than leading others in the ways of God lead them astray. Throughout the Old Testament, the chosen prophets of the Lord were always opposed by imposters, those who claimed the title prophet but didn’t speak the word of the Lord but a false word that their listeners often found more pleasant. False prophecy remained a major problem at the time of Jesus and the early Church. St. John wrote in his first letter, “Many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 Jn 4:1). St. Peter wrote, “There were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be lying teachers among you (2 Pet 2:1). The Didache, authored in the late first century as a type of catechesis for the first Christians, said, “Let every apostle that comes to you be received as the Lord,” but cautioned them to pay attention: “If he teaches so as to increase righteousness and the knowledge of the Lord, receive him as the Lord,” but “if the teacher, … teaches another doctrine opposed to this, do not listen to him.” The Didache summarizes, “Not every one who speaks [charismatically] is a prophet, but only the one who holds the ways of the Lord. So from their ways shall the false prophet and the prophet be known.”

* This issue, this serious responsibility, of knowing how to distinguish between true and false prophets didn’t end with the apostolic age. We see it in the many heresies throughout Church history. We see it today. There’s a type of false prophet who preaches a laxist, easy way, as if the road to life is broad and to perdition is narrow. He or she doesn’t live by or repeat Jesus’ challenge to lose our life to save it, to pick up our Cross each day and follow him, to sacrifice ourselves to wash others’ feet, to love God not just a little but with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor in a self-sacrificial way as Jesus has loved us. This type of false prophet manipulates God’s unconditional love to pretend as if God never gave us the Ten Commandments to trai...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) (Vigil)

July 18, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.18.20_Landry_ConCon.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 this Sunday.

* Last week, Jesus gave us the parable of the Sower, Seed and Soil, to indicate to us how he wants us to receive his Word and his work within us. We know from our basic knowledge of farming what normally occurs once a seed has been implanted in good soil. It starts to grow and eventually produces fruit and those fruit likewise contain within many seeds that can then be planted elsewhere. Spiritually the same thing is supposed to happen. With a hat-trick of different images in this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus describes that transition from a fertile disciple to a fruitful apostle in which we begin to share what we ourselves have received. His words contain three very important lessons about how the kingdom of God grows. Insofar as each of us has been called and chosen by God through the Church to enter into and expand his kingdom, these three parables are deeply relevant to who we are and what God calls us to do. In one parable, Jesus tells us first that the Church, like a mustard seed, starts small but will grow to be huge. In a second, he adds that the members of the Church are meant to function in the world like yeast does in bread; we’re supposed to make everything rise. In the third, he states that the Church’s growth doesn’t happen in a vacuum: there is also “an enemy” in the field, sowing weeds, to try to wreck God’s harvest — in other words to destroy you, me and those we know and love. The three go together and are meant to guide us at every moment of the Church’s life.

* The first parable is that the Church begins like a tiny mustard seed. From the small seed of Christ implanted by God in Mary’s womb, to the calling of just a few disciples and apostles filled with the Holy Spirit, the Church was born and grew, grew into the largest of shrubs, in which countless people throughout the ages, including whole nations, have been able to come and find shelter in her branches. That tree continues to live we’re branches on Jesus the vine (Jn 15:5). The branches of the Church extend in areas of great sunshine and of great darkness, with all of us taking our roots in that one event, that one piece of soil on Calvary, that one seed of Jesus who fell to the ground three times and died, but rose again, like a plant in springtime, giving life to all of us throughout time. This lesson of the mustard seed recurs throughout Church history. So many religious orders and apostolates that the Lord has raised up to help the Church began small, often with one saint, but over the course of sufferings and patience, they grew to be enormous. So many parishes began with just a handful of poor, committed families, but over the course of years and decades, with sacrifices, time and the help the Lord, grew to be quite large. Even if some of us are living in an area in which the Church is shrinking, the Lord has permitted it so that we can all experience anew the full and exhilarating meaning of this parable, through beginning again, beginning smaller, like the new mustard seed planted from the tall tree.

* The second image Jesus gives us today to describe the growth of his kingdom in the Church is that of yeast in bread. The bread is the whole world and we Christians are called to be the leaven. One Christian in a neighborhood, or one truly Catholic family on a street,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Camillus de Lellis

July 18, 2020

Micah 2:1-5, Ps 10, Mt 12:14-21

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* It is quite an opening sentence to today’s Gospel. “The Pharisees went out and took counsel against Jesus to put him to death.” The Pharisees, as we know, had the reputation for being the most religious of Jews. Whereas the typical Jew fasted once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week. Whereas the typical Jew prayed once a day, the Pharisees prayed three times a day. Whereas the normal Jew tithed only those things that were explicitly prescribed, the Pharisees tithed everything. They were the ones who tried to practice to the letter all of the Scribes’ prescriptions. But as much as they had a reputation for religious zeal, many of them were “whitewashed sepulchers,” as Jesus would call them later. They looked great on the outside, but on the inside they were full of dead men’s bones. They seemed to be living by the law of God but on the inside they were hateful, unloving and even murderous. In the first reading, the Prophet Micah (whom we have today for the first of three daily Masses) says, “Woe to those who plan iniquity, and work out evil on their couches,” who “mark out boundaries [of poor persons’  property they want to seize] by lot in the assembly of the Lord.” The Pharisees were those who would come in and out of the Synagogues and Temple areas, who would practice the faith, but who would then conspire to have someone killed. They were the ones, to quote today’s Psalm, whose “mouth is full of cursing, guile and deceit” and “under his tongue are mischief and iniquity,” the one who “lurks in ambush near the villages; in hiding he murders the innocent; his eyes spy upon the unfortunate.” It’s a practical hypocrisy that remains stunning 2,000 years later. It is a prelude to every religious scandal and an illustration of the ancient aphorism corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is worst of all.

* Why did they want to put Jesus to death? Because of Jesus’ whole approach to the Sabbath and to the law in general, which went against their rigid interpretation. In yesterday’s Gospel, they criticized Jesus for allowing his disciples to eat pick the heads of grain and eat them — even though that was totally permitted in the Mosaic law — because they were “working” on the sabbath, picking grain and threshing it in their hands. The Pharisees would rather have the disciples starve than to do that simple, unstrenuous work because they thought that that work was a violation of God’s command to keep holy the Sabbath day. Then, when Jesus entered the Synagogue to teach, he saw a man with a withered hand and he cured him, and the Pharisees were outraged that he did the work of healing on the Sabbath, as if what pleased God more was to have someone suffer than to be healed. Jesus gave the example that they would all rescue their animal on the Sabbath if it fell in a ditch, but they didn’t want this handicapped man to receive God’s healing. Both scenes show just how ignorant they were to God’s will and how resistant they were to anyone’s indicating to them what that will really was. God’s whole plan was to have men and women share his very life, to receive and live in his love, and to grow in his likeness by loving others in the same way. They thought in practice that God wanted people to starve and continue to live handicapped and burdened — which they considered part of sabbath worship! — and they were totally resistant to anything Jesus might say otherwise. Their real hypocrisy with regard to God’s law was exposed in all its ugliness ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of St. Camillus de Lellis

July 18, 2020

Micah 2:1-5, Ps 10, Mt 12:14-21

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* It is quite an opening sentence to today’s Gospel. “The Pharisees went out and took counsel against Jesus to put him to death.” The Pharisees, as we know, had the reputation for being the most religious of Jews. Whereas the typical Jew fasted once a year on the Day of Atonement, the Pharisees fasted twice a week. Whereas the typical Jew prayed once a day, the Pharisees prayed three times a day. Whereas the normal Jew tithed only those things that were explicitly prescribed, the Pharisees tithed everything. They were the ones who tried to practice to the letter all of the Scribes’ prescriptions. But as much as they had a reputation for religious zeal, many of them were “whitewashed sepulchers,” as Jesus would call them later. They looked great on the outside, but on the inside they were full of dead men’s bones. They seemed to be living by the law of God but on the inside they were hateful, unloving and even murderous. In the first reading, the Prophet Micah (whom we have today for the first of three daily Masses) says, “Woe to those who plan iniquity, and work out evil on their couches,” who “mark out boundaries [of poor persons’  property they want to seize] by lot in the assembly of the Lord.” The Pharisees were those who would come in and out of the Synagogues and Temple areas, who would practice the faith, but who would then conspire to have someone killed. They were the ones, to quote today’s Psalm, whose “mouth is full of cursing, guile and deceit” and “under his tongue are mischief and iniquity,” the one who “lurks in ambush near the villages; in hiding he murders the innocent; his eyes spy upon the unfortunate.” It’s a practical hypocrisy that remains stunning 2,000 years later. It is a prelude to every religious scandal and an illustration of the ancient aphorism corruptio optimi pessima, the corruption of the best is worst of all.

* Why did they want to put Jesus to death? Because of Jesus’ whole approach to the Sabbath and to the law in general, which went against their rigid interpretation. In yesterday’s Gospel, they criticized Jesus for allowing his disciples to eat pick the heads of grain and eat them — even though that was totally permitted in the Mosaic law — because they were “working” on the sabbath, picking grain and threshing it in their hands. The Pharisees would rather have the disciples starve than to do that simple, unstrenuous work because they thought that that work was a violation of God’s command to keep holy the Sabbath day. Then, when Jesus entered the Synagogue to teach, he saw a man with a withered hand and he cured him, and the Pharisees were outraged that he did the work of healing on the Sabbath, as if what pleased God more was to have someone suffer than to be healed. Jesus gave the example that they would all rescue their animal on the Sabbath if it fell in a ditch, but they didn’t want this handicapped man to receive God’s healing. Both scenes show just how ignorant they were to God’s will and how resistant they were to anyone’s indicating to them what that will really was. God’s whole plan was to have men and women share his very life, to receive and live in his love, and to grow in his likeness by loving others in the same way. They thought in practice that God wanted people to starve and continue to live handicapped and burdened — which they considered part of sabbath worship! — and they were totally resistant to anything Jesus might say otherwise. Their real hypocrisy with regard to God’s law was exposed in all its ugliness ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart

July 17, 2020

Is 38:1-8.21-22, Is 38, Mt 12:1-8

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* As we celebrate today a votive Mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the readings today help us to ponder God’s great mercy that is at the essence of the revelation of the Sacred Heart and how he wants our hearts to be truly “misericors” as well, moved with loving compassion. Today Jesus says in the Gospel, “It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.” This is not the first time he’s said those words. We remember that after Jesus called St. Matthew to conversion and the former tax collector threw a party for all of his fellow sinners to encounter Jesus, the Pharisees complained that Jesus was associating with sinners. Jesus replied that he had come to call sinners, not the self-righteous, and that it is the sick who need a doctor not those who think they’re fine. Then he said, referring to the prophet Hosea, “Go and learn the meaning of the phrase, “It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.” In repeating that phrase today, Jesus shows just how central it is for what he teaches and enfleshes: everything God does in his relationship with us can be summarized as an expression of his merciful love, and he so wants to transform us that we can become merciful like he is merciful.

* The setting in the Gospel takes place because the Scribes and Pharisees had lost the center for the peripheries, the one thing necessary for so many other things. After the Babylonian Captivity the Jews realized — accurately — that the reason for their exile was because they had been unfaithful to God’s law, and in an excess of precaution began to become so obsessed about the little details of the law that they missed the forest for the trees, they missed the Legislator because of the legislation. The class of scribes, the scholars of the law, arose in order to study every word, and then, in order to prevent Jews from violating it, began, as many scholars like to analogize, draw fences around the law so that they wouldn’t possibly violate it. With regard to the Sabbath, if the point of the Sabbath was to keep it holy, to keep it as a day of freedom apart from enslaving work, then they would make all types of regulations so that they wouldn’t get anywhere close to violating it. So they determined in minutiae what would be the minimalist form of work and invented rules that many Jews began to take as seriously as the commandments. For example, they said that on the Sabbath you couldn’t lift anything that would weigh more than two dry figs, they described how far you could walk, they said that you couldn’t prepare food, and so on. They had totally missed the point of the commandment! Rather than a gift of God giving us a chance to set the reset button in our relationship with him and others, rather than a day of love and freedom, it became a day of a more intense form of slavery. That’s one of the most important things that Jesus came to fix.

* Today we begin the Twelfth Chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel which is all about Jesus’ bringing the Sabbath back to its original meaning and how that would get the Scribes and Pharisees — those who assiduously studied the Word of God and committed themselves to living it to the letter — to begin plotting to kill him. The violated the Fifth Commandment in order to fulfill, they thought, the Third! As we’ll see, his critics will go from observing and confronting him in today’s Gospel, to observing whether he’d heal — do an act of love — to plotting to kill him, to persecution. Today Jesus is walking through the fields of grain with the disciples on the Sabbath.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Votive Mass of the Sacred Heart

July 17, 2020

Is 38:1-8.21-22, Is 38, Mt 12:1-8

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in this homily: 

* As we celebrate today a votive Mass of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, the readings today help us to ponder God’s great mercy that is at the essence of the revelation of the Sacred Heart and how he wants our hearts to be truly “misericors” as well, moved with loving compassion. Today Jesus says in the Gospel, “It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.” This is not the first time he’s said those words. We remember that after Jesus called St. Matthew to conversion and the former tax collector threw a party for all of his fellow sinners to encounter Jesus, the Pharisees complained that Jesus was associating with sinners. Jesus replied that he had come to call sinners, not the self-righteous, and that it is the sick who need a doctor not those who think they’re fine. Then he said, referring to the prophet Hosea, “Go and learn the meaning of the phrase, “It is mercy I desire, not sacrifice.” In repeating that phrase today, Jesus shows just how central it is for what he teaches and enfleshes: everything God does in his relationship with us can be summarized as an expression of his merciful love, and he so wants to transform us that we can become merciful like he is merciful.

* The setting in the Gospel takes place because the Scribes and Pharisees had lost the center for the peripheries, the one thing necessary for so many other things. After the Babylonian Captivity the Jews realized — accurately — that the reason for their exile was because they had been unfaithful to God’s law, and in an excess of precaution began to become so obsessed about the little details of the law that they missed the forest for the trees, they missed the Legislator because of the legislation. The class of scribes, the scholars of the law, arose in order to study every word, and then, in order to prevent Jews from violating it, began, as many scholars like to analogize, draw fences around the law so that they wouldn’t possibly violate it. With regard to the Sabbath, if the point of the Sabbath was to keep it holy, to keep it as a day of freedom apart from enslaving work, then they would make all types of regulations so that they wouldn’t get anywhere close to violating it. So they determined in minutiae what would be the minimalist form of work and invented rules that many Jews began to take as seriously as the commandments. For example, they said that on the Sabbath you couldn’t lift anything that would weigh more than two dry figs, they described how far you could walk, they said that you couldn’t prepare food, and so on. They had totally missed the point of the commandment! Rather than a gift of God giving us a chance to set the reset button in our relationship with him and others, rather than a day of love and freedom, it became a day of a more intense form of slavery. That’s one of the most important things that Jesus came to fix.

* Today we begin the Twelfth Chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel which is all about Jesus’ bringing the Sabbath back to its original meaning and how that would get the Scribes and Pharisees — those who assiduously studied the Word of God and committed themselves to living it to the letter — to begin plotting to kill him. The violated the Fifth Commandment in order to fulfill, they thought, the Third! As we’ll see, his critics will go from observing and confronting him in today’s Gospel, to observing whether he’d heal — do an act of love — to plotting to kill him, to persecution. Today Jesus is walking through the fields of grain with the disciples on the Sabbath.