Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Second Sunday of Easter (A), Vigil

April 18, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you at the end of the Easter Octave as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us. It’s a dialogue that happened on the night Jesus triumphantly rose from the dead.

* He walked through the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles were huddling together out of fear and he first said to them, “Shalom!,” “Peace be with you!” Jesus had come down from heaven to earth and given his life to give us peace, but it was a special kind of peace, one the world can’t give or take away. “Not as the world gives peace do I give it,” Jesus had said during the Last Supper. The peace Jesus leaves and gives us is not the mere absence of war or conflict, but harmony with God through the forgiveness of sins. Without this type of peace, no other form can endure, because it is sin that destroys interior peace, the peace of the home, the peace of friendship, the peace of communities, the peace of nations. And so Jesus, wasting absolutely no time to set the next stage of his peace plan in motion, on the night of his resurrection divinely empowered the apostles as his peacemakers to bring that gift, and the joy to which it leads, to the ends of the earth.

* It’s important for us to pay close attention to the various steps Jesus took so that we can understand better the divine foundation of the Sacrament of his Mercy and better explain it to those who claim that they can confess their sins to God alone without the Sacrament. Jesus began by saying to the apostles, “Just as the Father sent me, so I send you!” We know that the Father had sent Jesus as the Lamb of God to take away the sins of the world and Jesus was sending his apostles to continue that saving mission of mercy. Since we know that only God can forgive sins against Him (see Mk 2:7), however, Jesus needed to impart to the apostles that divine power. So he breathed on them as he said, “Receive the Holy Spirit.” He gave them God the Holy Spirit so that they might forgive sins in God’s name, just as we hear every time the priest pronounces those beautiful words in the Sacrament of Penance, “God, the Father of Mercies, through the death and resurrection of his Son, has … sent the Holy Spirit among us for the forgiveness of sins.” And then Jesus did something that refers to the essential structure of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. He said, “Those whose sins you forgive, they are forgiven; those whose sins you retain, they are retained.” Since Jesus didn’t give the apostles the capacity to read hearts and souls, the only way they — and their successors and their priestly collaborators — would be able to know which sins to forgive or to retain would be if people told them. And that’s what happens in the Sacrament of Confession.

* It’s so fitting that Jesus established this Sacrament of his Mercy on Easter Sunday Evening because he wanted to link the joy of his resurrection to the joy of forgiveness. He had pointed to the connection between the two when he gave us the unforgettable Parable of the Prodigal Son. When the lost son returns to the Father to give his rehearsed speech of repentance, the Father erupts with happiness, because his son was dead and had been brought to life again. This Parable, which is about what happens in the Sacrament of Penance,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Easter Sunday (A), Vigil

April 11, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to wish you and your family a Happy Easter as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us. It’s a conversation that should be anything but routine, especially this year, as most of us need to celebrate Easter at home. Just like Jesus entered the closed doors of the Upper Room where the apostles and Mary were living during their time in Jerusalem, just like Jesus entered the home of the disciples in Emmaus where they recognized him in the Breaking of the Bread of Life, so Jesus wants to enter our homes this Easter and help us to enter into his triumph of light over darkness, joy over sadness, love over hatred and life over death.

* There are various consequential conversations that happened on that first Easter. The angel spoke to Mary Magdalene and the other Mary at the tomb saying, “Do not be afraid. You are seeking Jesus the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised, just as he said. Come and see the place where he lay. Then go quickly and tell his disciples, “He has been raised from the dead!” They receive the incredible news of Jesus’ resurrection and then are called to share that news. We have Jesus’ very intimate conversation later with Magdalene in the Garden where because of her sadness she couldn’t discern the risen Lord’s presence and mistook him for the gardener before he called her by name. The same Jesus wants to call us by name and to recognize his victorious presence with us. We have the conversation of Jesus with the two crestsfallen disciples on the Road to Emmaus whose hopes that Jesus might have been the Messiah had been crushed by his death, but Jesus helped to open their minds to the meaning of the Scriptures and made their hearts burn when they began to recognize that Jesus’ crucifixion was not a contradiction of his Messianic mission but a confirmation. The same metamorphosis Jesus worked in them he wants to effect in us, helping us to understand everything, especially our greatest sadnesses, within the light of God’s words and will, so that our hearts might burn, that we might recognize him in the Eucharist, and that we might, like the Emmaus disciples, go uphill in darkness to share that light. We have the dialogue of the Risen Jesus with the apostles in the Upper Room when he asked them, “Why are you troubled? Why do questions arise in your hearts? Look at my hands and feet, that it is I,” and then he strengthened them in their Mission to bring his triumph to the ends of the earth. Jesus wants to answer our questions and to strengthen us to complete that same Mission.

* It is a huge disappointment — for priests and faithful alike — that we are not able to celebrate Jesus’ victory together in packed Churches. But even though we are not able to celebrate Easter together liturgically, even though we are not able to receive Jesus’ risen body and blood in holy Communion, even though we are not able to welcome into the Church as scheduled the new Catholics who have been preparing through baptism to enter into Jesus’ death and resurrection, the reality of what we memorialize on Easter remains. And it should impact our lives just as it impacted Mary Magdalene in the Garden, the ten apostles cowering in the Upper Room, the confused disciples on the Road to Emmaus, doubting Thomas before Jesus’ wounds,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for Palm Sunday (A), Vigil

April 4, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry once again and it’s a privilege to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation that Jesus wants to have with us tomorrow on Palm Sunday and throughout this upcoming week that theChurch calls “holy.” It’s holy, first, because of all Jesus Christ did during these days, from the triumphal entry into his city, to his teaching in the Temple, to the Last Supper, to his prayer in Gethsemane, to his arrest, torture, crucifixion, preaching and death on Good Friday, to his rest in the tomb, and his glorious resurrection on the third day. It’s also called holy because it’s meant to make us holy, if we live this week the right way, if we enter into the mysteries we celebrate, if we internalize all Jesus won for us during these most holy of days, if we, in short, enter into a conversation with Jesus not just with thoughts or words but with our whole life. Holy Week is supposed to be our most faith-filled week of the year, but that requires our choosing to make it the most faith-filled week of the year.

* That’s obviously going to be more challenging to do in 2020 because of the various restrictions that have been placed on public worship due to the coronavirus. The liturgies of Holy Week are so powerful that, when we show up and are attentive, the palms, prayers, readings, music, homilies, smells and bells will normally bring us into the heart of the mysteries. Prioritizing the time to be there already predisposes us to receive what God wants to give. Just entering into the Church is a choice to leave the profane and enter the sacred. Such settings cannot be replicated. But this Holy Week we’re summoned to do the best we can. Such settings cannot be replicated. But this Holy Week we’re summoned to do the best we can. To live it well will require taking responsibility to give greater than normal cooperation with God’s grace, more focused prayer, and far greater interior and exterior preparation.

* The interior preparations are going to involve prayer and reading. There are some great books to help us. I would recommend Bishop Alban Goodier’s classic The Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ and Pope Benedict’s Jesus of Nazareth, Part II, Holy Week: From the Entrance into Jerusalem to the Resurrection, which could be read individually or, better, as a family. It would also be a time to watch some of the great movies about Jesus, which help us retrace the steps of Jesus’ life that led to the Upper Room, Calvary and the tomb, like Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ or the Visual Bible’s films on each of the Gospels. As most of us will have to watch the sacred ceremonies on television or on devices, learning how to use these media better to focus on Jesus through movies like these will make it easier for us to pray through them better as we watch the ceremonies.

* The exterior preparations are likewise important. They begin with trying to create, as best we can, sacred space in our home where we can block out distractions. The place should be cleaned and put in order, like a well-cleaned Church. We should dress up like we would if we were attending our parish. We should actively participate in the liturgies to the extent possible, praying aloud the responses, kneeling, standing, and sitting as we would when attending. Even though we will not be receiving Holy Communion, it would be good nevertheless to live a Eucharistic fas...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent(A), Vigil

March 28, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry once again and it’s good to be back with you at the end of the program to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with the Church tomorrow on the Fifth Sunday of Lent. In this present situation of the coronavirus pandemic, it’s a very poignant and relevant dialogue, one that can have a big impact on our faith and our hope.

* When Martha and Mary sent Jesus a message that their brother Lazarus was ill, he remained where he was for two days basically until Lazarus had died. It confused the apostles and likewise confused Martha and Mary. When Jesus finally arrived, Martha ran out to greet him and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Mary later came, she said the exact same words. They had faith in Jesus that he could have healed their brother just like he had healed so many others. But Martha’s hope was not extinguished. She said to Jesus, “But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” It was now the fourth day and Jews, based on different passages in the Old Testament, believed that a person’s soul hovered around the body for three days after death, but by the fourth day the person had passed the place of no return. Martha, however, was not intimidated. “Whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” That led to one of the most fascinating dialogues on the meaning of faith we have in the Gospel.

* Jesus said to Martha, “Your brother will rise.” And Martha replied immediately with stunning words, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” She, together with Lazarus and Mary, had probably asked Jesus during one of his visits to their house to reveal to them what would happen to us after death and had learned from Jesus how he would destroy death and restore life. She hadn’t forgotten the lesson about the general resurrection. But that’s not what she was requesting … and that’s not what Jesus himself was immediately planning to do.

* Jesus told her that ultimately told her that resurrection is not so much a concept, or state, or an event, but a relationship. “I am,” he told her, “the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. To be risen from the dead, to be fully alive, means to be in a living, loving friendship with Jesus. If one lives and died in such a friendship with Jesus, he affirms, then death is nothing other than a change of address as a person continues in relationship with him who is the life and who came to give us life to the full.

* But then Jesus looked Martha right in the eyes and asked, “Do you believe this?” Jesus asks us the same question. For us to look at the resurrection and the life not as concepts but as a personal relationship requires looking at Jesus not as an historical figure but as a living, acting, breathing, loving Savior present right now seeking to raise us to experience life to the full. Martha didn’t reply merely, “Yes, Lord!” She presented us the grounds of faith. She said, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.” Because of her living faith in Jesus, because of her trust in him, she committed herself to believing anything he would say, even if it seemed hard or even impossible to believe.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Lent(A), Vigil

March 21, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with the Church tomorrow on the Fourth Sunday of Lent. For many of us, this is a conversation that will unfortunately happen outside of Mass, since the coronavirus pandemic has led to the cancellation of Mass across many dioceses. But what Jesus communicates to us in dialogue this weekend is meant to be a sign of great hope for all of us during this time of so many changes as well as concerns for those struck by Covid-19.

* In the Gospel, Jesus cures a man blind for birth, but he does something very different than in all the other miracles in which Jesus cured those who had no sight. First, unlike in all the other cases, the blind man doesn’t cry out for help. He’s just there, along the road, and becomes the subject of a theological question from the disciples about the cause of his blindness. Jesus states that the reason that man was blind from birth was to allow God’s works to show through him; his whole life in darkness until that point was so that he could encounter the saving power of Jesus and from that moment onward to be a tremendously conspicuous example of God’s own light shining ever more brightly through him. That truth influences the way Jesus performs this miracle, because Jesus had two healings in mind — first a physical one for him and then a spiritual one for him and for us all.

* The Lord doesn’t keep his social distance, but spits on the ground, makes mud with his saliva, and then goes up unbidden to the blind man and smears his eyes with mud. The blind man in the Gospel could have easily thought that someone was making fun of him or abusing him, as probably happened often. But the Lord is not done. Jesus then tells him to go to wash in the pool of Siloam. The blind man could have reckoned, “What a stupid and pointless hassle! Make me dirty and then send me, who can’t see, to wash in a pool, where I could easily fall in and drown.” Jesus, however, must have given that command in a way that inspired trust. By his willingness to carry out this simple imperative Jesus gives him, the man embarks, without knowing it, on the great adventure of faith, on the exciting journey from darkness into light. Jesus allows this man, unlike the other blind men he cured — and this is the second difference from the other cures Jesus worked — to participate actively in his own healing, so that through the process, he might receive not just the ability to see the physical light of the world but also a much deeper light, the light of faith in Jesus, the true light of the world.

* Three-and-a-half weeks ago, Jesus did something to us similar to what he did to the man born blind in today’s Gospel. We went up to someone acting in His Name, who smudged our foreheads not with muddy saliva but moistened ashes, and gave us a two-part command, the very same directive with which Jesus began His whole public ministry, “Repent and believe in the Good News!” This was Jesus’ pathway for us to participate in our own healing during this blessed time of Lent, in our own coming from the darkness into the light of Christ, in our own exodus from sin to love, in our own Passover from death to life. We might have been tempted to consider this more or less an empty rite, something merely symbolic,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Third Sunday of Lent(A), Vigil

March 14, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us tomorrow on the Third Sunday of Lent.

* The Church has us focus on the life-changing conversation Jesus has with a Samaritan woman at a well. Jesus, the Good Shepherd, promised that he would leave all of his other sheep behind and go in search of whatever sheep of his was lost. Today we see him putting that truth into action, in his encounter with the Liz Taylor of her day, who had married five times already and was then living with a sixth man who was not her husband. Her behavior had led to her being ostracized, as was evidenced by her going alone to draw water at the well at high noon, at the height of the piercing sun, when no one else for obvious reasons would have been there. Had she gone at cooler times in the early morning or late afternoon, she would have been the butt of criticism from other women for her past and present. Jesus went to await her at the most brutal moment of the day. In his conversation with her, not only did he break two social conventions — that Jews didn’t speak to Samaritans and that men didn’t speak to women alone in public places — but most importantly he taught her and through her us about the two essential realities about our spiritual life: God’s grace, symbolized by the “living water” he describes, and our desire or “thirst” for that water.

* Upon the Cross, Jesus said “I thirst,” and his whole life was an insatiable quest to give us that spring of living water gushing up within us to eternal life. Just like our body cannot exist without water — the human body is in fact 72 percent water — neither can our soul survive without this living water. Jesus, through whom both our body and soul were created, knows both realities, and came as the divine physician to give us the soul-sustaining remedy to the woman at the well and to each of us.

* What is this “living water” exactly? It is nothing short of God’s divine life — what we call in theology the Indwelling of the Blessed Trinity. In one place in the Gospel, Jesus identifies the living water as the presence of the Holy Spirit; in the other, he identifies it as his own presence through the holy Eucharist. Jesus wants to give us this living water of the Holy Spirit, of his life-giving flesh and blood, of the indwelling of the Blessed Trinity, but his will is not enough. He placed a condition on his own omnipotence; he won’t force us to drink of that water. He wants us freely to ask for it, to desire We see this very clearly in his invitation to the woman at the well: “If you knew the gift of God, and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would ask him, and he would give you living water.” And the woman used her freedom to say, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may never be thirsty!” In the same way, as God thirsts for us, we must have a thirst for him. In Psalm 63, this thirst for God is highlighted: “O God, you are my God, for you I long, for you my soul is thirsting. My body pines for you like a dry, weary land without water” (Ps 63:1). That’s what God wants to help us say to him. “My soul pines for you!” “Give me that water!” If we really mean those words, if we thirst for God, certain behaviors would follow. If we thirst for God, we will pray as much and as well as we can. If we thirst for God,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Second Sunday of Lent(A), Vigil

March 7, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us tomorrow on the Second Sunday of Lent.

* Every year ten days into Lent the Church has us journey with Jesus to the top of an exceedingly high mountain. It does so for the same reason why God the Father conceded to Peter, James and John the experience of the Transfiguration in the first place: to give the a foretaste of Jesus Christ’s glory to sustain them when they will see Jesus transfigured in blood, pain and suffering on Good Friday. There is an intrinsic connection between Mt. Tabor and Mt. Calvary, between the glory of the Transfiguration and the glorification of Christ on the throne of the Cross.

* We see it in what the subject matter of the conversation between Jesus and the two great heroes of the Old Testament, Moses and Elijah. Moses and Elijah are both precursors of Lent. Elijah had lived a Lent of 40 days crossing the desert to the mountain of God, Horeb, being hunted by King Ahab. Moses had spent 40 days in prayer at the top of Mt. Sinai and then 40 years with the Jews in the desert. They came specifically to speak with Jesus not about the glory that was to come, not about Heaven, but about the culmination of the Lenten Season: Jesus’ suffering, Cross and death. St. Luke tells us they spoke about the “exodus” that Jesus was to accomplish in Jerusalem. This exodus meant the passage Jesus would make from the slavery of death to the Promised Land of eternal life. Jesus, however, was speaking about this exodus while he was gloriously transfigured, not cowering in fear. God the Father wanted Peter, James and John — and all of us— to see this scene, so that it would sustain our faith when the suffering comes.

* The second connection between Tabor and Calvary is what God the Father says to the three apostles. God the Father speaks only three times in the New Testament. The first time is at Jesus’ baptism, when he said, “This is my beloved Son, in whom I am well-pleased.” The last time is during the Last Supper when he stated that he had glorified his Son and would glorify him again. This time at the top of Mt. Tabor, however, when he spoke from the cloud, he went further. After reiterating that Jesus is his beloved Son, he tells the three apostles, “Listen to Him!”  At first this makes little sense. What had the apostles been doing for the past two plus years but listening to Jesus? But God the Father knew that they had only been selectively listening, and they had been tone deaf to what Jesus had been saying to them about his upcoming crucifixion and death. They didn’t want to hear it. Jesus would tell them on three separate occasions that this would occur, but they refused to take him seriously, rebuking him, or fighting for who would sit on his right and left. Even after the foretold crucifixion, which should have been a confirmation, they still really didn’t grasp what he said about being raised on the third day and were stunned when he walked through the closed doors of the upper room. They needed to keep the connection between Jesus’ glory and his suffering. They needed to have faith that Jesus’ exodus, as painful as it would be, would lead them all to the promised land. The needed truly to listen to Jesus.

* If we’re making the connection between the two mountains,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the First Sunday of Lent(A), Vigil

February 29, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us tomorrow on the First Sunday of Lent.

* Most people have no desire at all to go to the desert, certainly for no more than a brief visit. At a spiritual level, however, we should always have a great love for the desert, because the desert is what helps us to understand the 40-day pilgrimage of Lent, in which we join and imitate Jesus in the desert and ponder the fruits of what he learned and experienced there upon his return. To go into the desert, however, is increasingly difficult for people today. We’re so connected that if we are out of cell phone range we can easily feel totally lost. While the Lord is not calling us all physically to go to the Sahara, he is calling us to the state of the desert, removing ourselves from distractions, from the television, computer, radio, newspaper, and the various things that may be fine in themselves but crowd our lives with so much noise that we can’t hear God and so much clutter that we can’t see God. The first temptation we face each Lent is to refuse to go into the desert with Christ, to think that our Lent can be complete if, for example, all we do is give up chocolate and potato chips. The first big hurdle is for us to hear Christ’s voice from the desert saying, “Come away to a deserted place all by yourselves and rest a while” (Mk 6:31).

* The next lesson we need to grasp is what is supposed to be the fruit of our time in the desert, and that leads us to the Gospel of Jesus’ temptations by the devil in the desert, which St. Matthew could have known only if Jesus had told him. He prayed and fasted for an incredible forty days, which obviously would have left him physically weak and famished. It was at this moment of physical weakness that the Devil came to him to tempt him. In the temptations Jesus suffered and later described to his disciples, the devil brought out in a pristine form the types of temptation that Christ would undergo in his public ministry and that each of us undergoes in life. By focusing on how Christ responded, we, too, can learn how to receive his mercy and help so that we might be able to react as Jesus did.

* The first temptation was aimed right at Jesus’ tremendous hunger after 40 days of eating nothing: “If you are the Son of God, command that these stones become loaves of Bread.” Jesus had come to save people, to feed their most important hunger — the hunger of their souls — and Satan was trying to induce him, as Archbishop Sheen used to say, to become a baker rather than a Savior. To feed people’s physical hunger would be a great way to win a crowd and become popular. But Jesus himself was already living off a greater source of food and was preparing to train disciples to seek this same celestial nutrition: “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” This same insight he passed on to the crowds when they were following him to have their stomachs satiated: “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you” (Jn 6:27). All of us in the Church need to remember what this greatest food source of all is. Lent is the time in which we grow in our trust for God’s providing, that he loves us more than the lilies of the field and the bir...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Vigil

February 22, 2020

 

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The following text guided today’s homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday.

* Over the last few weeks, we have been focusing on what Jesus said to us in the Sermon on the Mount. Jesus has been calling us, as his disciples, to live by his standards, not by the standards of others. Last week, he told us that our relationship with God must surpass that of the scribes and the Pharisees, who were the most religiously observant Jews. This Sunday he tells us that we need to do better than the tax collectors who love those who love them, than the upright Gentiles who greet and do good to those who great and do good to them. He calls us to live by God the Father’s standards, which he personifies.

* Jesus this Sunday puts an exclamation point on this calling. “Therefore,” he tells us, “be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect.” Many times when we hear this, we’re thrown off by the word “perfect” and think that this is an unachievable standard, because after all, none of us is perfect, none of us will ever be perfect, and therefore if God is calling us never to make a mistake, then he’s calling us to something beyond human capacity. Therefore we feel somewhat justified in dismissing what Jesus says as if it’s clearly impossible. But before we ignore what Jesus is calling us to, as if he couldn’t possibly have meant it, we should focus on a couple of things:

* First, the main emphasis of what Jesus is saying is “Be like your heavenly Father.” He was specifically calling us to be like him in particular ways in the Gospel. Earlier in the passage he gave us specific exhortations 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 unless we experience the inner revolution to which Jesus is calling us and unless we seek to act as his children, to behave like Jesus who shows us how to live as a Son of God. Just as God the Father loves everyone and does good to everyone, including those who curse him, including those who make themselves his enemy through sin and an evil life, including those who try to use him whenever they need him, Jesus calls us to do the same, to love our enemies, to pray for those who persecute us, to walk the second mile, to give our cloak as well as our tunic, to give generously to all those who need to borrow. We’re called 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. This is the path to true holiness, this is the means by which we become, in action, sons and daughters of our heavenly Father, by behaving as he behaves.

* Second, to understand what Jesus means when he calls us to be “perfect” like our Father in heaven, we have to grasp the Greek word St. Matthew employs. The Greek word St. Matthew uses is “teleios,” which is the adjective that comes from the noun “telos,” which means “end” or “goal.” Teleios means fit to achieve its end or purpose. A hammer, for example, is teleios for pounding in a nail. A student is teleios when he has mastered the material,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Vigil

February 15, 2020

 

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The following text guided the homily:

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday.

* Every three years we have the chance to ponder at Sunday Mass Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We begin with the Beatitudes, which, because of the Feast of the Presentation, we did not hear this year. Then, last week, we ponder our identity as Salt of the Earth and Light of the World. This Sunday we get into the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus calls us to live by a special set of Christian standards, a higher set of principles than the norms of the good pagans who love those who love them and higher than the standards even of the most observant Jews. Unless our holiness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus stresses, we will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. So the stakes can’t be higher and what he’s going to tell us is too important to ignore.

* In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sets out seven different ways that as his disciples our holiness is supposed to surpass others’. He gives us five this Sunday and the final two next week. These marks of Christian behavior go beyond merely keeping the natural law or the Ten Commandments. They are meant to transform our heart and our whole life from the inside out. They challenge us not just to be “good” but genuinely “holy.” All are challenging, but we need to remember that by calling us to these high standards of ordinary Christian living, Jesus is showing us an exhilarating confidence that we, together with his help, can live up to them.

* The first standard Jesus teaches us this Sunday involves the whole way we treat others. He says that it’s not enough for us not to murder someone. We need to refrain also from the thoughts that set us on the path to maim and murder our brothers. He tells us, “If you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.’”  We are called, in short, to love others from our heart and head outward. We don’t love others if all we do is not kill them. If we’re envious, jealous, uncomplimentary, or vengeful within, we’re still not loving them. To enter into his kingdom, to become holy, we can’t kill without hearts or tongues either.

* The second standard to which Jesus calls us is to make the first move in reconciling ourselves with those from whom we have been alienated either by our sins or their sins. “When you are offering your gift at the altar,” he tells us, “if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” Jesus is saying to us that it’s not enough for us to be merely “good with God,” we also have to be “good with others.”  When we come to pray and ask God’s forgiveness, we must examine first others have something against us. If they do, he tells us that we need to make the first move and go to reconcile, even if we have been the one aggrieved, just like God made the first move in reconciling us when we had sinned against him.

* The third standard to which Jesus calls us is truly to be pure of heart. It is not enough for us not to commit adultery in the flesh,