Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

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

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

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

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

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

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of SS. John Fisher and Thomas More

June 22, 2020

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

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

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

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

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

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

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Monday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II

Memorial of SS. John Fisher and Thomas More

June 22, 2020

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

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

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

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

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

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

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

June 21, 2020

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

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

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

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

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

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

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

June 21, 2020

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

 

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

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

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

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

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

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

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.