Catholic Preaching

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of the Epiphany of the Lord (A), Vigil

January 4, 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, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Epiphany of the Lord, his “manifestation” to all the Gentiles in the persons of the Magi coming from afar.

* The Lord’s epiphany was also an epiphany of the men whom tradition has always called “wise,” as essential aspects of their true character was revealed. It’s key for us to ponder the response of the wise men, go on pilgrimage with them to Bethlehem, and learn from them invaluable lessons about how we’re called to relate to the coming of God into the world. This Sunday we can ponder seven lessons.

* The first thing we learn from the wise men is the importance of seeking God.

* When they saw the star at its rising, they not only interpreted that God was trying to communicate something to them in general, but that God was specifically heralding the birth of the newborn King in the east, who would be a universal king. The stars as we know were incredibly important to ancients. 2000 years ago, in the deserts of the Middle East and on the seas, people were highly dependent on the fixed stars in the sky as references for their direction. They firmly believed that God had made them this way for that reason. Whenever anything happened in the sky that was new — like the appearance of a comet, or meteor shower, or a planet’s or star’s shining more brightly — the ancients thought that it had to bear some message from God, the creator of the heavens and the earth. When they saw a star at its rising, they didn’t respond as curious astrologers but as those who hungered to find what they sought. Led by the star, and their simple faith in its meaning, the wise men went on a journey toward the Holy Land. We don’t know how long their pilgrimage took, but the Gospel gives us indications that it wasn’t brief. After Herod asked them the exact time of the appearance of the star, and then, a short time later, after they did not return to him, he proceeded to kill every boy in Bethlehem under two years of age. So the time of their preparation and the journey to get there probably took 18-24 months. Whether they walked or had the help of animals, we don’t know, but they came. The made a journey of many months each way because they believed God was speaking to them through the star.

* Do we search for God as ardently as they did? .

* The second thing the wise men show us is that the life of faith is a pilgrimage.

* The wise men were ready to move. Even though they must have had good lives where they were since they could afford a long journey and precious gifts at their arrival, they accounted being with the newborn universal king more important than staying where they were. They were willing to leave everything behind and make a long, difficult journey, following the star they had seen in the East.

* Are we ready to make the continuous journey of faith, a spiritual pilgrimage?

* Third, they show us that this pilgrimage of life is not one that we’re supposed to make alone.

* The wise men didn’t journey solo. They walked together. They knew that it order to make the destination they needed each other, but more than that,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Feast of the Holy Family (A), Vigil

December 28, 2019

 

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

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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, as the Church celebrates the Feast of the Holy Family.

* It’s highly significant that when the Son of God became man, when the Word became flesh, he chose to be conceived and born within a family of an already committed husband and wife. He didn’t choose to come as a 30-year-old adult, or a teenager, or an 80 year old. He didn’t choose to be born of a single mom, or raised by two men or two women, or some other arrangement. He chose to be born within a family … precisely in order to redeem the family. The family is always in need of redemption. We see with the first family of Adam and Eve how the devil succeeded in separating husband and wife from God and from each other, and we see the immediate consequences of the devil’s work in the next generation when Cain slew his brother Abel. Because the family is meant to be the world’s greatest image of God as a communion of persons in love, the devil never ceases to go after the family. We see how he did through Herod in this Sunday’s Gospel, terrorizing not only the Holy Family but all the families of ancient Bethlehem.

* And as surveys across the globe have shown, the devil has been rather effective in his attack on the family. Many think that marriage is simply a piece of paper and don’t even bother getting married any more. There’s the attempt to redefine marriage and make it a husband-less or wife-less institution. There’s the challenge in many parts of the world by polygamy, where men fail to make a commitment to one woman. There’s the struggle of so many single-parent families whether by accident or by abandonment but choice. There’s the widespread notion that marriage lasts for as long as two shall love, rather than for as long as they shall live, and the problems that come from the no-fault divorce culture. There’s the problem of the separation of families, like that is happening in the desperate situation at the border, but also happens voluntarily through the mobility of family members.

* We can spend many homilies focusing on the problems confronting the family today, but it’s more important to consider how to strengthen the family one by one. It’s a great blessing that we have the feast of the Holy Family, so that we can reflect together on the purpose of the family, what it means to be a husband and father, a wife and mother, a child and brother or sister. The family has a purpose in God’s plan; it’s meant to be a school of love, a domestic Church, a gift of God to help all of the members of the family grow into the realization of who God created each of them to be.

* In the Opening Prayer of Sunday’s Mass, we’ll pray, “O God, who were pleased to give us the shining example of the Holy Family, graciously grant that we may imitate them in practicing the virtues of family life and the bonds of charity.” All of us can learn so much from their virtues and love about how to make our families schools of love. Their family is called the “Holy Family” because holiness is the perfection of love. For a family to be a school of love, it needs to model itself on the loving choices and priorities we see in them.

* When we look at the Holy Family, we easily see several crucial elements about what made it holy:

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

December 21, 2019

 

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

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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.

* In human life as we know, it’s difficult to have a meaningful conversation when we don’t know the name of the person with whom we’re speaking. It’s similar with God. God doesn’t want us trying to converse with him as some type of cosmic higher power or generic force. Throughout salvation history we see him revealing his name. He reveals himself to Moses as YHWH, “I am who am,” as well as identified himself as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, showing he wants to have a personal relationship with each of us.

* In Sunday’s readings, we see revealed the names with which Jesus wants us to relate to him, so that we will be able to call upon the Son of God and have a personal bond with him. Both of these names help us to ground our relationship with him on what he seeks to do in us.

* The first name we encounter is Emmanuel. Throughout this Season we’re singing, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel,” and we need to know what we’re praying. There’s a dramatic scene in Sunday’s first reading. Isaiah the prophet goes to see King Ahaz of Judah during the time when the capital of Judah, Jerusalem, is being sieged by the kingdoms of Israel (Ephraim) and Syria. Ahaz is about to make an alliance with the brutal kingdom of Assyria so that the Assyrians will come to liberate Jerusalem. Isaiah goes to Ahaz to tell him not to seal that Alliance, but to have more trust in God than in the King of Assyria. Isaiah told him that God would give him this sign: “a virgin shall conceive and bear a son and shall name him Emmanuel.” Regardless, Ahaz rejected the sign, ignored God’s counsel through the prophet and formed the alliance with the King of Assyria, a cascade of bad choices that eventually led to the destruction of Jerusalem and the exile.

* The true and definitive fulfillment of the sign given to Ahaz, however, we see in the Gospel. Seven centuries later, in describing the miraculous events of Jesus’ conception and birth, St. Matthew wrote, “All this took place to fulfill what had been spoken by the Lord through the prophet, “Behold, the virgin shall conceive and bear a son, and they shall name him Emmanuel,” which means, “God-is-with-us.” But Jews pondering Isaiah’s words never fathomed that the fulfillment would be anything more than a sign of the God who bears all of those attributes, that God would literallyfulfill that prophecy in two ways: that a virgin would conceive a child and remain a virgin; and that “God-with-us” would actually be God with us, that God would take on our nature and come to abide with us, that he would be “descended from David according to the flesh” (today’s second reading) and the very Son of God. The fulfillment of this prophecy would not just be a sign that God was on their side but actually the signified presence of God at their side. This would make the sign announced by Isaiah a sign for all times. God has given this enduring sign that even when we’re experiencing tremendous human difficulty, like Ahaz, we’re never abandoned.

* Jesus of course is with us in many ways — through creation, through grace, through Sacred Scripture, through his image in others, through those he ordained to act in his very person, through his mystical body, the Church.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

December 14, 2019

 

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

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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.

* The followers of John the Baptist came to Jesus to ask him, “Are you the one who is to come or should we look for another?” John was imprisoned and his friends were likely wondering if Jesus were the long-awaited Messiah why he was waiting so long to do something. So John sent them to ask the question of Jesus directly. Jesus’ response was to show how he was fulfilling everything the Prophet Isaiah said the Messiah would do when at last he arrived: he has made the blind see, the lame walk, the deaf hear, the lepers have the skin of newborns, the dead live again and the poor have the good news proclaimed to them. He was doing everything Isaiah foretold. In fact, he was fulfilling everything all the prophets had foretold. But he was not meeting the expectations of those who thought that the Messiah would have a political mission, kicking out the Romans and their stooges like Herod, setting John free, and instituting an earthly kingdom. That’s why Jesus finished by saying, “Blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” Some of them clearly were taking offense that Jesus was not behaving according to their political expectations. There are some people in every age, however, who don’t like the way the God-man chooses to reign. Not only does evil remain, but those who do evil often seem to get rich, hold political office, even commit atrocities against children, the defensely, or even those who are faithful to Jesus, like John the Baptist. It’s important for us to ponder Jesus’ words, “Blessed is the one who takes no offense at me.” Jesus would ultimately be crucified himself — the greatest scandal of all to worldly ideas of a Messiah — but he rose from the dead on the third day, and he can and does similarly draw good out of evil, and, rather than take scandal, we need to grow in trust.

* Jesus went on in this conversation to say some extraordinary things about John the Baptist. He praises him, calling him the greatest man born of woman. He says he is more than a prophet, but the one about whom it was written, “I am sending my messenger ahead of you, who will prepare the way before you.” He not only foretold the Messiah’s coming but pointed him out when at last he came and helped people prepare the way to follow him. John continues that work of preparation every second and third Sundays of Advent. He sends us to Jesus so that we might find out personally how Jesus is and follow him.

* But then Jesus says something about us in the Gospel. As great as John the Baptist was, Jesus says “the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he.” John could announce the Lord’s coming. He could point him out. But the least in the kingdom of heaven, into which we enter by Jesus’ baptism of the Holy Spirit and fire, is able to literally to receive the Lamb of God within — receive his very life, his words, his being — and live and reign in communion with him.

* So if John is more than a prophet, and the least in the kingdom of heaven is greater than he, we must really ponder our vocation and mission, who are called to be even greater than John. We’re called to do more than to point out Christ when he comes, but, together with Christ dwelling within, take him to others,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

December 7, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.6.19_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

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.

* Last week, on the first Sunday of Advent, we began a new year in the Church. Advent is a time of spiritual reawakening and growth, a call to get up, get excited and get moving toward Jesus who never ceases to come to us. But to have this renewed, life-changing encounter with Jesus, we first have to confront and overcome the obstacles that might be in the way between the Lord and us. The biggest barrier of all is our sins and the way we hold on to them rather than allow the Lord Jesus to take them away.

* That’s why, on the Second Sunday of Advent each year, in order to help us make a totally fresh start, God sends us the same person he sent to get the people of Israel ready to encounter, embrace and follow his Son Jesus when Jesus finally revealed himself at the Jordan River. St. John the Baptist announces for us anew, “Prepare the way of the Lord, make straight his paths.” And he tells us what’s involved in that road repair: “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand!”

* In the ancient world, the dirt roads were a mess. Every time there was a battle, the roads would be attacked and bridges destroyed, to try to stop the advance of the enemy. The weather took its toll as well, leading to all types of serious potholes and other obstacles. Any time a dignitary would be coming, they would have either to fix the roads or build new ones so that the rolling caravan accompanying the dignitary could arrive without delay or hassle. St. John the Baptist is telling us that to get ready for the Lord who is coming this Advent, we, too, need to prepare a road for him. We, too, need to make straight the paths.

* 2000 years ago, preparing such a path meant a great deal of manual work, making crooked paths straight, rough ways smooth, and even charting paths through the forests, mountains and valleys. For us, that pathway will not be traced on the ground, but within. It will not be made in the wilderness, but in our day-to-day life. It’s not something that will make our hands dirty, but our souls clean. St. John the Baptist indicated the necessary road repair quoting the prophet Isaiah: “Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth” (Lk 3:5). He’s calling us to level the mountains of our pride and egocentrism, to fill in the valleys that come from a shallow prayer life and a minimalistic way of living our faith, and to straighten out whatever crooked, sinful paths we’ve been walking. This work won’t be accomplished principally by willpower and elbow grease, but by God’s power and amazing grace. The way we receive this help of God to cleanse the path between Jesus and us of the worst obstacles of all is the Sacrament of Confession. We need to be as attentive clearing the way for Christ through this Sacrament as highway workers are to removing dead deer from the high-speed lane.

* This Sunday, December 8, is also normally the Solemnity of the Immaculate Conception of our Lady, which this year will be transferred to Monday. Mary lived at the culmination of that first Advent, longing with her fellow Jews for the Messiah and then, after the Annunciation, welcoming that Messiah within her womb.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

November 30, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.29.19_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry. I hope that you have had a wonderful Thanksgiving. We give thanks today to have the chance to get ready together for the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* This Sunday, as you know, we will begin a new liturgical year, which is meant to give us a totally new spiritual start. The liturgical year — in which we retrace all of the events of salvation history from the long wait for a Messiah to the crowning of that crucified and risen long-awaited One as the King of the Universe — is not meant to be a liturgical cycle but a liturgical spiral, not a “same old, same old,” but something that helps us to enter into the mysteries we celebrate far more profoundly than the last time. Like re-reading a great book or watching anew a classic movie, each pass along the liturgical spiral that begins Sunday is supposed to reveal to us elements we haven’t seen before and remind us of important things that we once knew but have forgotten about the mystery of God, his love for us, and his hopes and plans for us.

* The proper attitude God wants us to have as we begin with this season of Advent the new liturgical year is given to us by St. Paul in Sunday’s second reading. “What time is it?,” we could ask. St. Paul replies: “You know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep, for salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers.”

* Advent, he tells us, is first meant to be a time of spiritual reawakening, of spiritual rebirth, as we return to what should be the proper foundation of our life — Christ himself — and build our life on him.

* Second, it’s a time of excitement. Salvation is nearer to us that when we became believers. It’s nearer to us because we’re a full-year closer to meeting Christ face-to-face. Advent is a time when we not only look to the past, to Jesus’ coming in Bethlehem; it’s not merely a time when we look toward Jesus in the present, as he comes to us to teach us by his Word, feed us with his body and blood, forgive us in the Sacrament of Penance, and guide us each day through prayer; it’s also a time when we look ahead with joy to Christ’s coming at the end of our or at the end of time, whichever comes first. And we look forward not with anti-Christian, spiritually-worldly dread, but with truly Christian hope. Salvation is nearer to us now than last first Sunday of Advent, than two years ago, than the day of our confirmation and first communion, that the day of our of our baptism, than the day when we first became believers! That’s something that should get us excited.

* Third, Advent is a time of journeying. Christ is coming — that is what the term Advent means — and we are called not to stay where we are, but to journey toward him and journey with him. In Sunday’s opening prayer, we will turn to God the Father and ask him to grant us “the resolve to run forth to meet” Christ “with righteous deeds at his coming.” Advent is the gun at the beginning of a race that gets us to begin a spiritual sprint, to go with haste, to meet Christ as he comes. Isaiah on Sunday will compare Advent to a hike: “Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord, to the house of the God of Jacob, that he may teach us his ways and we may walk in his paths.” Advent is a time for climbing up a mountain to meet the Lord,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King (C), Vigil

November 23, 2019

 

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

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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 Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, on which the Church celebrates the Solemnity of Christ the King.

* The dialogue we’ll enter is the one that took place on Calvary. The first dialogue was provocative. Soldiers, the chief priests, passers-by all cried out, “If you are the king of the Jews, save yourself!” The thief on his left reviled him saying, “Are you not the Messiah? Save yourself and us.” But Jesus didn’t respond to their derision with a direct response in words, but with silence, prayer and mercy — “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” But then there was another conversation with the thief crucified on his right. He turned to the one being crucified in the middle, and said, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.” And Jesus replied to him, “Truly I tell you today, you will be with me in paradise!”

* The latter is one of the most incredible dialogues of all time, one in which we’re called to echo the prayer of the good thief. Thousands of times a year, we Christians pray, “Thy kingdom come!” As we prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King, it’s important for us to ponder what type of kingdom we’re praying will come so that we may enter, dwell and rejoice in it.

* When Jesus inaugurated his kingdom, it had nothing to do with the expectations of almost anyone at the time. The last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a throne. He was crowned with thorns, not with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and Jews in general, Pilate had ordered that an inscription in three languages be placed above his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Rather than pay him homage, most just mocked him to put on a show and come down from the cross, as if he were a professional wrestler about to make a dramatic comeback. Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power that they could comprehend.

* For most Jews at the time, Jesus’ crucifixion was the proof that he was precisely not the long awaited Messiah-king for whom they had been waiting for centuries. The Jews anticipated that the descendent of King David would use his power to subjugate all those who made themselves his adversaries, not take their abuse and die a horrible death to save his abusers. They were totally unprepared for a king who would serve at all, not to mention to the point of death.

* The Romans were likewise unprepared for a king like Jesus. When Pontius Pilate interrogated Jesus, he asked him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “My kingship is not of this world; if my kingship were of this world, my servants would be fighting that I not be handed over to the Jews; but my kingship is not of this world.” Then Pilate retorted, “So you are a king?” Jesus replied by describing more specifically what type of king he was and what type of kingdom he was establishing. “You say that I am a king. For this I was born, and for this I have come into the world, to bear witness to the truth. Every one who is of the truth hears my voice.” The Romans thought that kingship meant having the power to crucify or pardon. They thought it was associated with force.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 33rd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

November 16, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.15.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

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 Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, … when people will ask Jesus about when the end of the world will happen and what the signs will be given before it will take place.

* They asked, presumably so that they could be prepared. Jesus didn’t answer their question directly, not only because the time of the second coming was known, he said, only to God the Father, but also, and perhaps more importantly, because he wanted them to be prepared for it always. If he had given some date weeks, decades or centuries later, the temptation would have been just to go on with life as normal. But Jesus had come to establish a totally new normal, a norm of faith, a norm of vigilant expectation, a norm of full-time Christian behavior. He wanted the day of the Lord to be a perpetual state, so that each day would be the Lord’s day, a day in which we exclaim, “This is the day the Lord has made!”

* The signs of the day of the Lord he gives us help us to maintain this awareness are in fact events we see in every age. Jesus describes how the house of God will be attacked, how there will be imposters claiming to be speaking for God and asking us to follow them, how there will be wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, persecutions, hatred, betrayals by family members and friends, and how even some of his disciples will be put to death.

* But at the same time Jesus says something seemingly contradictory. He assures us that not a hair on their head will be destroyed. He describes God’s protection at the same time he mentions martyrdom. We’re not dealing with a contradiction, but it’s a hard truth all the same, one that we must view with faith. God permits these evils in order to help us become better disciples and better apostles, more fervent followers of him and more passionate proclaimers of his salvation, so that we might come to eternity with every follicle in tact. God permits what we have to endure so to help us become more faithful and bring other people to faith. He tells us in the Gospel that all of these things “will lead to your giving testimony” — and not just any testimony. He tells us that he will give us the grace of “a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.” Such adversities are occasions for witness. Rather than distance us from the Lord, they rather impel us to abandon ourselves even more to Him.

* Jesus says at the end of the passage, “By your perseverance you will secure your lives.” Our salvation will come up not principally by surviving these frightening occurrences, but through growing our Christian character by means of them, through placing our faith, hope and love in God through all of all of them. When we’re brought to our knees by natural disasters or man-made hatred, it provides the opportunity for us to pray far more devoutly, to grow in faith, and to be proven like gold in a crucible. When we’re tested more severely in the faith, God always comes to our aid, he always sends us himself, to help us pass those tests, provided that we open ourselves up to his presence during trial and respond to him. And that type of faith is the greatest means to bring others to faith.

* We’ve seen since the early days of the Church that the blood of the martyrs is the...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 32nd Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

November 9, 2019

 

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https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.8.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

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 Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* Jesus will speak to us about the reality of heaven. His affirmation happens in conversation with a group called the Saduccees, who were mainly members of the high priestly elites, who didn’t believe in the Resurrection. They only accepted the first five books of the Bible — Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus, Deuteronomy and Numbers — and thought that there was no reference there at all to resurrection from the dead. So to try to test Jesus they brought to him the invented example of a woman who married successively seven different brothers after each previous brother had died. If she had become one flesh with seven different men until death did they part, they asked, then with whom would she be on flesh at the resurrection, if they were now all alive? Because she couldn’t be, they supposed, one flesh with all of them, there couldn’t be a resurrection.

* Jesus’ answer highlighted things.

* First, he said that it’s only the children of this age who marry and remarry. In heaven, he states, there will be no marrying or giving in marriage because there will only be one wedding, the wedding feast of the Lamb and his Bride the Church. The institution and sacrament of marriage, Jesus implies is a reality for this world. The reason for this is pretty clear: Marriage has a two-fold purpose, LOVE and LIFE, or, in more traditional terminology, the mutual sanctification of the spouses and the procreation and education of children. In heaven, there’s no purpose to marriage because men and women no longer need to be sanctified since they’re already saints; and there will be no new children because saints aren’t having babies in the afterlife! But while there will be no marriage and conjugal sexual activity in heaven, there will certainly be love! Marriage in this world is meant to prepare spouses and children to enter into that love, the perfect love of God and the love of the communion of saints. And marriage is particularly well-suited to achieve this purpose.

* The second thing he says is that, contrary to Sadducees’ idea, the Pentateuch does speak about marriage. Jesus says that God revealed this when he spoke to Moses out of the burning bush and called himself the “God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob.” He’s the God not of the dead but of the living,” and hence Abraham, Isaac and Jacob couldn’t be truly dead. Eternal life, therefore, is real.

* November is the time in which the Church always has us focus on the four last things — death, judgment, heaven and hell. At the beginning of the month, we celebrate All Saints’ Day, in which we remember and ask the intercession of all those who have arrived at the place to which we aspire. The next day we mark All Souls’ Day, and remember and pray for all the dead, especially those who are in need of our prayers and sacrifices to enter into paradise. And throughout the month, the Church keeps the four last things in front of us. First, the fact that each of us will die, some of us by surprise, much earlier than we think. Second, as soon as we die, we will be judged. Jesus gives us the criteria of that final exam of life, but we need to be ready for it, by a life of Christian faith, hope and love.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the 31st Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Vigil

November 2, 2019

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.1.19_Landry_Con_Con_1.mp3

 

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 Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday.

* Last week, you remember, Jesus presented us the parable contrasting the prayer of the Pharisee and the Publican. Both went up to the temple to pray. Both left. And only one’s prayer was heard. The one who left justified was notthe outwardly devout Pharisee who fasted twice a week, gave ten percent of his income back to God, and rejoiced that he was not a thief, rogue, adulterer or tax collector. The one who left with a right relationship toward God was a humble tax collector, who stood at the back, beat his breast and begged, “God, be merciful to me a sinner!” In today’s Gospel, we encounter those characters from the parable — self-righteous “good people” who complain that Jesus actually interacts with sinners and a notorious, humble “tax collector” — in real life. And we see how the God-man responds when such a sinner calls out to him for such mercy.

* Jesus called himself the “Good Shepherd” and said that he would leave the ninety-nine to go in search of one sheep who was lost (John 10:11; Lk 15:4). Before that Good Shepherd headed up to Jerusalem to lay down his life for his sheep (John 10:15), he first wanted to hunt down one who was lost. He went to literally the nethermost place on earth in search of perhaps the greatest public sinner of that city, to bring him back to his fold. He went to Jericho, the lowest city on the planet — 853 feet below sea level — to find Zacchaeus, who was not just one of a bunch of despised and excommunicated tax-collectors loathsome to the Jewish authorities, but the chief tax collector of the whole region. Jesus left the crowds behind and entered alone with the tax collector into his home and into his life. He called Zacchaeus, his lost sheep, by name (Is 43:1; John 10:3). The very name Zacchaeus means “God remembers,” and God had never forgotten him. Heaven rejoiced on that day more for his return than for those who had never wandered (Lk 15:7). So, too, Jesus takes the initiative of knocking at the door of our souls, asking for entry, coming to us wherever we are, no matter the depths to which we’ve sunk, no matter the fact that perhaps everyone else around us might despise us. To the extent that we repent of whatever sins we’ve committed and accept Jesus’ gracious invitation by “welcoming him with delight,” we, too, like Zacchaeus, can have salvation come to us.

* This is the first of three lessons we learn from the story of Zacchaeus and Jesus, that Jesus wants to take us apart from the crowd and bring us the salvation of his mercy. The place where Jesus ordinarily does this is where Saint Pope John Paul II used to say Jesus and the whole Church exist solely for each of us alone — the confessional. In the Sacrament of Confession, Jesus ministers to us individually, just as he interacted individually with Zacchaeus. But like Zacchaeus, we need to come down, to leave the perches of our pride and allow Jesus to go to work through his priestly ministers.

* The second thing we learn from this encounter of Zacchaeus and Jesus is about the diminutive tax collector’s hunger to see Jesus. Zacchaeus’ climbing of the sycamore tree is more than an interesting detail. The text tells us that he was trying to see Jesus,