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By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

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April 18, 2025It Is Finished!, The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025

To watch a video of this word, please click below:

To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
Jesus’ sixth word on the Cross, “It is finished!” is a great expression of hope.
To the eyes of the world, Jesus seemed like a failure. He was being executed in the most shameful way possible, treated as a criminal and mocked by most, stripped and exposed before the disdainful gaze of passersby, defeated by those who had made themselves his enemies and conspired in order to frame him for a capital crime. Beyond that, we know that Nazareth, where he had been brought up, was scandalized because of him (Mk 6:3) and twice cast him out. We know that most of those in Capernaum, which he then had made “his own city” (Mk 2:1) returned to their former way of life and “walked with Him no more” (Jn 6:66). The places where he had done his miracles, like Chorazin and Bethsaida, didn’t believe in him. Galilee in general was unsafe. Jerusalem really never received him. Members of his extended family thought he was out of his mind. By human metrics, Jesus seemed to be dying as a loser, as a failure.
When he said upon the Cross, “it is finished,” some might interpret it as throwing in the towel, as giving up, as saying essentially “it’s over, turn off the lights, you win.” But it wasn’t. It was a triumphant statement in the midst of tremendous agony, “Mission accomplished!” He was actually achieving the purpose for which he had been sent. He was at that very moment saving the human race.
At his Presentation, Simeon had prophesied that Jesus would be a sign of contradiction and we see that on full display on the Cross, which is architecturally and symbolically the greatest sign of contradiction of them all. Jesus’ apparent defeat was in fact his greatest triumph. I’ll never forget the words of Jesuit Father William O’Malley, who had played the role of Father Dyer in the 1973 film The Exorcist, and died last July. Many years ago, he came to the Diocese of Fall River to preach a day of recollection for the priests. He was blunt, earthy, eloquent and unforgettable. he stressed that we should never forget, in the midst of all that we might have to endure, that when we look at Jesus on the Cross, we have to see him and it as they are really are: the image of the happiest person who has ever lived at the moment of his greatest victory. The happiest person who ever lived at the moment of his greatest victory! For that reason, Jesus, he emphasized, did not whisper “It is finished!,” but shouted it! He did not say it as one battered to his knees and forced to wave a white flag. He shouted it like a conquering hero who has won his last and definitive engagement and brought everything to its triumphant conclusion. Jesus had prayed the previous night during the Last Supper, “Father, the hour is come. Glorify thy Son that thy Son may glorify thee. I have finished the work you have given me to do. Now glorify me, Father, with yourself, with the glory which I had before the foundation of the world.” That was what was now happening, in the supreme glorification of the love of God for us. Jesus had been born with this goal. This was what was to happen at the fullness of time. The most tremendous deed ever done upon this earth was being completed.
Jesus at that moment was completing all of the Messianic prophecies. He had said to the apostles as they were about to head to the holy city, “Behold, we are going up to Jerusalem and everything written by the prophets about the Son of Man will be fulfilled” (Lk 18:31). He was Abel betrayed by his brother, Isaac carrying the word for the Sacrifice, Jonah about to spend three days in the belly of the earth. Just as Zechariah had said, he was sold for 30 pieces of silver that would later be used to buy a field of blood. Just as Isaiah had declared, he would be sadistically treated, scourged, killed between criminals and pray for his torturers. Just as the Psalms had stated, he would be given vinegar to drink, his garments would be divided, his bones counted, his throat parched. With regard to all of these prophecies and more, Jesus was stating, we might even say with a sense of accomplishment, even joy, “They are all achieved!”
He was also finishing of course the Passover meal. As Scott Hahn has made famous in his books and talks, Scripture scholars, in looking at the Gospel narratives from the point of view of the Jewish seder, have noted with curiosity and a certain astonishment that Jesus did not finish the rite. There are supposed to be four cups of wine, consumed at different times. Jesus and his disciples only drank three before they went out toward the Garden of Gethsemane. What happened to the fourth cup? Most believe the fourth cup was the “cup of suffering” (Is 51:22) foretold by Isaiah that Christ would drink on the Cross, the chalice Jesus in the Garden asked that the Father take away from him if it be his will (Mk 14:36). But Hahn argues that finishing the ancient Passover rite was also the reason why Jesus said on the Cross, “I thirst.” St. John tells us that Jesus said “It is finished!” immediately after the soldiers put a sponge full of wine on a branch of hyssop and held it to Jesus’ mouth (Jn 19:28-30). Jesus had said during the Last Supper, “Truly I tell you, I will never again drink of the fruit of the vine until that day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God” (Mk 14:25). If Jesus had just drunk that wine, it must be that he was fully inaugurating that kingdom, which was the culmination of his work. He was finishing the Last Supper, the new and eternal Passover, on the Cross. He was putting into body language what he proclaimed in the Upper Room: “This is my body, given for you.” It was on the Cross that he himself became the fourth cup as he poured out “the blood of the new and everlasting covenant, to be shed for you and for all, for the forgiveness of sins.”
The expression translated into English, “It is finished,” is actually only one word in St. John’s original Greek: tetélestai. In ancient Greek that word was regularly used on invoices to signify “paid in full.” Jesus on Calvary was paying in full the total debt of what in justice we owe for our sins. Jesus was exclaiming that people don’t owe anything anymore. He was paying off all our bills. We were indeed bought, as St. Paul wrote to the Corinthians, “at a great price,” but Jesus was paying it all (1 Cor 6:20).
That reality fills us with hope. Jesus’ example also helps us to hope that, despite various obstacles we may endure, with his grace, we can indeed persevere. We see this hope enfleshed in some great saints of perseverance. We can think of St. Paul who through labors, imprisonments, numerous brushes with death, five scourgings, three beatings with rods, a stoning, three shipwrecks, sleepless nights, hunger and thirst, cold and exposure, in dangers from rivers and robbers, from Jews, Gentiles and “false brothers,” dangers in the city or in the wilderness, in toil and hardship, and the anxiety for all the Churches (2 Cor 11:23-33), was nevertheless able to exclaim to his spiritual son St. Timothy, “I have fought the good fight. I have finished the race. I have kept the faith!” (2 Tim 4:7).
We see this perseverance in Saint Monica who prayed for 17 years for the conversion of her husband and mother-in-law and then another 15 years for the conversion of her son Augustine, but after 32 years not only saw them brought to faith but through that persevering prayer, through finishing those duties of spousal and maternal love, became a saint herself.
We see it in Saint Polycarp, the mid-second century Bishop of Smyrna (Turkey) and martyr, to whom I’ve always had a devotion because his feast day is my birthday. As he was being brought to the place where he would be tried and killed, some of his captors tried to persuade him to save his life by saying Caesar was Lord or by offering incense to the statues of the pagan gods, but he replied, “I am resolved not to do what you counsel me.” Later, in the stadium, he was given a chance to save his life simply by cursing Jesus Christ. He replied, “For 86 years I have served him and he has done me no wrong, why would I betray him now?” He had chosen Christ as the Way, the Truth and the Life and he was going to persevere in that choice until the end. They sentenced him to be burned at the stake and as they were tying his feet to the stake and were about to nail his feet, he said, “Leave me as I am. The one who gives me strength to endure the fire will also give me strength to stay quite still on the pyre, even without the precaution of your nails.” They lit the fire, and the Christian eyewitnesses noted in their account of his martyrdom that there was a Eucharistic culmination. “When a great flame burst out,” they recalled, “those of us privileged to see it witnessed a strange and wonderful thing. … Like a ship’s sail swelling in the wind, the flame became as it were a dome encircling the martyr’s body. Surrounded by the fire, his body was like bread that is baked, or gold and silver white-hot in a furnace, not like flesh that has been burnt. So sweet a fragrance came to us that it was like that of burning incense or some other costly and sweet-smelling gum.” He persevered unto the end and his martyrdom because a Eucharistic sacrifice.
We see it in the American saint Rose Philippine Duschesne, who was a contemplative Visitation Nun in France whose monastery was closed by the French revolutionaries. She trusted in God and kept her eyes on him. She joined the Missionary Society of the Sacred Heart. Eventually she was sent to the United States, where she founded schools. Not only was the journey hard, but the word was really hard, as people didn’t appreciate French educational methods and accused them, she quipped, of doing everything except poisoning the children. But with hope in the Lord she soldiered on. Eventually she became too infirm the tough work of a teacher in the frontier, so they sent her to help Fr. Pierre de Smet in Kansas who was a missionary among the Potawatomi Indians, where she struggled to learn their language and eventually became blind. But she took on a mission of prayer. The community ended up dubbing her Quah-hak-ka-num-ad, “The woman who always prays.” She persevered in prayer until the end, often in all night vigils, which communicated to everyone the real presence of God with them.
All of them in life manifest the hope they received from Jesus’ perseverance to the end and their desire to share with others the fruits of Jesus’ victory. It’s important for us, too, to derive hope from what Jesus has won to give us confidence before the struggles and challenges we and the Church face now and will in the future. Jesus never promised that the Christian life would be easy. In fact he promised us the opposite, that it would involve a daily Cross, forgiving others without limit, turning the other cheek, going the second mile, giving our inner clothes along with our outer, being hated, calumniated, betrayed sometimes even by family members, and some of us martyred. What they did to him, he said, they would do to us. But each of us has signed up to follow that Crucified Savior. And he by this sixth word communicates to us that none of the obstacles or even all of the obstacles combined can defeat his purpose in us provided with hope in him, trust in him and persevere. He will bring good out of the evil we endure. He will turn even crosses and stakes into pulpits by which we can show preach in body language that Christ is worth living for and dying for and in him hope never disappoints. This is what has inspired the martyrs and the saints to persevere unto the end. And this is the gift Christ wants to give us and help us share with the world.
And so we finish by praying: “Hail O Cross, the culmination of divine love to the extreme, our only hope. Help us to bring that hope without end to the world!”
The post It Is Finished!, The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
13 min
April 18, 2025I Thirst!, The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025

To watch a video of this word, please click below:

To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.18.25_Fifth_Word_from_the_Cross_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Jesus on the Cross would experienced a tremendous loss of blood through the wounds in his hands and feet, through the 195 or more deep lacerations from the scouring, through the many punctures in his skull due to thick thorns in the mocking crown the soldiers have woven and press down upon his head, as well as from the exposure to air, and the tremendous amount of work it would have taken just to breathe. All of this obviously would have produced an extreme physical thirst. But Jesus hadn’t said anything about his severe dehydration, almost desiccation, until now.
Moreover, he through whom all things were made, who formed the waters on the second day of creation, who had spent 40 days and nights in the desert with little or no water, who had changed 180 gallons of water into wine, who had said to the woman at the well that he would give her a spring of living water welling up within her to eternal life, who had earlier rejected the an anaesthetic sedative of wine mixed with myrrh, now, finally, said, “I thirst!” Why now? St. John tells us, “When Jesus knew that all was now finished, he said (in order to fulfill the scripture), ‘I thirst.’” He accepted it to fulfill the Messianic prophecies. We heard one of them in the previous word from the Cross, in Psalm 22, when the Psalmist puts on the lips of the one suffering, “My mouth is dried up like a potsherd, and my tongue sticks to my jaws; you lay me in the dust of death” (22:16). It was also clearly Psalm 69, which exclaims, “I am weary with crying out; my throat is parched. My eyes have failed, looking for my God. More numerous than the hairs of my head are those who hate me without cause” (69:3). Later in Psalm 69, we see another Good Friday prophecy when it says, “I looked for compassion, but there was none, for comforters, but found none. Instead, they put gall in my food; for my thirst they gave me vinegar” (69:21-22).
In response to his cry, Mary, John, Mary Magdalen and Mary the wife of Clopas, had nothing to give. The soldiers were the only ones who remedy. They had some coarse wine, more vinegar, which they put on a hyssop branch and lifted to him. Hyssop was the same branch that God instructed to be used to take the blood of the Paschal lamb and sprinkle it on the lintels and door posts of the Jews in Egypt (Ex 12:22). It was the blood of the Passover lamb that saved the Israelites. As the Lamb of God was shedding his blood on Calvary to save the human race, the hyssop was a divine detail helping to clue people in how Jesus was fulfilling not just the prophetic words but the prophetic types or sacred actions as well.
But what was this thirst all about? Was it simply for minimal lubrication so that his tongue would cleave to his palate? Could it have also been the fulfillment of Psalm 42 in which we pray, “As a deer longs for flowing streams, so my soul longs for you, O God. My soul thirsts for God, for the living God. When shall I come and behold the face of God?” Was it a burning desire imminently to see his Father’s face? Surely that was part of it.
But it seems clear, as many saints have commented, that there was something else at work. When Jesus met the Samaritan woman at the well, he expressed a different type of thirst. In a beautiful dialogue that the Church has the elect ponder in Lent as they prepare for baptism, Jesus said to the woman, “Give me a drink” and when she sought to upbraid him for his custom-breaking temerity in asking, he said, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would have asked him and he would have given you living water,” adding, “Whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.” She responded, “Sir, give me this water, so that I may not be thirsty.” Jesus is in fact thirsty to have us exchange H20 for Living Water. He who said “Give me to drink” wants in fact to give to drink something that will hydrate the soul far more effectively than Gatorade the body. He wants to quench our souls, which have made to thirst for the living God. Like anyone who truly loves another, he desires that we allow him to love us this way and bring us to immerse ourselves in that love on the inside.
In two other places in St. John’s Gospel, he describes how he wants to quench our thirst. The first is in his self-gift in the Holy Eucharist. He told us in his Bread of Life discourse in the Capernaum synagogue, “Whoever comes to me will never be hungry, and whoever believes in me will never be thirsty.… for my flesh is true food and my blood is true drink. Those who eat my flesh and drink my blood abide in me, and I in them” (Jn 6:35; 55-56). This sacred indwelling that begins with the living and life-giving waters of baptism is intensified in the Eucharist, when we receive the source of life giving water within our bodies and souls. The second reference Jesus makes to living water quenching our thirst comes soon after, when Jesus said during the Feast of Tabernacles in the temple area in Jerusalem, “Let anyone who is thirsty come to me, and let the one who believes in me drink. As the scripture has said, ‘Out of the believer’s heart shall flow rivers of living water.’” St. John tells us: “He said this about the Spirit, which believers in him were to receive” (Jn 7:37-39). Just as Jesus wishes to give us his body and blood to satiate our hunger and thirst, so he wishes to send us his Holy Spirit so that we will experience God’s response to our thirst for him and his love. This presence of the Holy Spirit within us is what St. Paul describes in his Letter to the Romans: “God’s love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.” That is precisely why, St. Paul says, our “hope does not disappoint,” because of the Holy Spirit who has been poured into us.
So Jesus’s thirst is ultimately for us, to have us receive him, to have us order our whole life in relationship to the Trinity, to bathe us in his saving, merciful love.
St. Augustine, in his explanation of Jesus’ words, ‘I thirst’ in his commentary on Psalm 69, says that it shows far more than a desire for a physical drink, but rather the desire with which He was inflamed that those who had made themselves his enemies should believe in Him and be saved.
St. Josemaria Escriva stated in a homily, “Jesus hungers, he thirsts for souls. On the Cross he cried out Sitio!, ‘I thirst’. He thirsts for us, for our love, for our souls and for all the souls we ought to be bringing to him, along the way of the Cross that is the way to immortality and heavenly glory” (Friends of God, 202).
St. Teresa of Calcutta as a young Sister of Loreto on a train going on retreat to the mountains heard Jesus speak to her asking her to quench his thirst for souls to know how loved they are, asking her to follow him into the slums in order to poorest of the poor. That’s why in the chapels of the Missionaries of Charity, and I’m privileged to serve as a chaplain at their Convent in the Bronx, at Mother Teresa’s instruction, there are the words “I thirst” placed next to the crucifix behind the altar. The Cross shows the extent Jesus goes to give us the living water of his divine love and person. And St. Teresa wanted every Missionary of Charity, every co-worker, every priest, every visitor, to recognize that we are all called to be recipients and missionaries of that divine desire.
In a letter to her community in 1993, she said, “‘I thirst’ is something much deeper than Jesus just saying ‘I love you.” Until you know deep inside that Jesus thirsts for you, you can’t begin to know who He wants to be for you. Or who He wants you to be for Him. The heart and soul of [a Missionary of Charity] is only this: the thirst of Jesus’ Heart, hidden in the poor. … ‘I thirst’ and ‘You did it to me’ — remember always to connect the two.” Jesus thirsts for us to share his thirst for others. He wants to be able to say to us, in the person of others, “I was thirsty and you gave me to drink.”
There are many saints who have shared this thirst and like St. Teresa of Calcutta sought to quench it, not with the vinegar of wild grapes, but with the good wine united to Jesus’ precious blood. Who have become indeed missionaries of the infinite thirst of God.
This is what we see in St. John Bosco, who just kept praying, “Da mihi animas!,” “give me souls,” especially the souls of young derelict boys whom God was asking him to form as good sheep of the Good Shepherd.
We see it in St. Francis Xavier, the patron of the Church’s missionary work, who almost single-handed sought to convert three whole countries. He wrote to his former roommate, religious superior and friend St. Ignatius from India saying, “Again and again I have thought of going around the universities of Europe, especially Paris, and everywhere crying out like a madman, riveting the attention of those with more learning than charity: ‘What a tragedy: how many souls are being shut out of heaven and falling into hell, thanks to you!’ I wish they would work as hard at this as they do at their books and so settle their account with God for their learning and the talents entrusted to them. … They would forget their own desires, their human affairs, and give themselves over entirely to God’s will and his choice. They would cry out with all their heart: ‘Lord, I am here! What do you want me to do? Send me anywhere you like—even to India.’” That’s the passion of a Good Shepherd going after lost sheep, who wants 100 out of 100, or, more aptly in 2025, 8 billion out of 8 billion. He wants us to come to him, receive his living water and then, while having our deepest desires satiated, paradoxically also to share his thirst.
We see this in St. Patrick who returned to Ireland after escaping from slavery out of thirst that the Irish would come to thirst for the Living Water and receive it to overflowing.
We it in so many of the great American saints who were missionaries seeking to quench Jesus’ thirst for souls and help those souls come to thirst for God. We see it in the North American Marytrs, like St. Isaac Jogues, the first priest ever in Manhattan, remembered the door of this Cathedral, who left France in order to bring that living water to the Hurons, Iroquois and Mohawks in Canada and northern New York.
We see it in St. Frances Xavier Cabrini who left Italy to come to bring that living water to quench the thirst of the Italians, of orphans, and so many others here in New York and in 66 other missions in the new world.
We see it in St. Junipero Serra, who left Spain to bring to the indigenous in Mexico and all the way up the coast of California.
We see it in the Martyrs of Georgia, Spanish Franciscans soon to be beatified, who brought it to the native peoples from Florida up to Virginia.
We see it in St. Rose Philippine Duschesne who left France to bring that living water first to students around St. Louis and then to the Potawatomi in Kansas.
We see it in the German missionaries St. John Neumann and Blessed Francis Xavier Seelos, who brought that living water here to Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral, to upstate New York, to Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, New Orleans and so many other places.
We see it in St. Elizabeth Ann Seton who was passionate about bringing it to Catholic school children here in New York, in Baltimore, in Emmitsburg and beyond as well as in St. Mother Theodore Guerin who left France to bring it to schoolgirls and the sick in Indiana.
We see it in Blessed Stanley Rother and Blessed James Miller who sought to bring it to those in Guatemala and Nicaragua.
All of them were thirsty to quench Jesus thirst for others and to help awaken and inform the innate thirst for God that the Lord places within us. Like St. Ignatius of Loyola once asked about Saints Dominic and Francis, “Why can’t I do what they have done?,” and God gave him graces to found the Jesuits and do so much for God’s greater glory, so each of us is called to ask today: Why can’t I commit my life to quenching Jesus’ thirst, to receiving his love and helping everyone I can to receive it and share it?
God’s thirst for us is a great source of hope. If he thirsts for us this much as to enter the human race and give his human life out of love for us then what won’t he do to help us thirst to receive his love and then thirst to take our share in the Mission of the Church with regard to his thirst for others and stoking their thirst for God?
Jesus promised, “Truly I tell you, whoever gives you a cup of water to drink because you bear the name of Christ will by no means lose his reward” (Mt 10:42). If that’s the reward given just for a cup of cold water, how much more can we expect if we try to quench his thirst and others’ with living water? That’s the thirst for which Jesus was longing on Calvary. That’s what we’re called to see every time we look at him lifted up.
And so we finish this word by praying: Hail O Cross, sign of the infinite thirst of God for us and for others, our only hope! Help us to lift high that cross and satiate your thirst every day!

The post I Thirst!, The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min
April 18, 2025My God, My God, Why Have You Abandoned Me?, The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025

To watch a video of this word, please click below:

To listen to an audio recording of the homily based on this word, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.18.25_Fourth_Word_from_the_Cross_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
As we ponder together how each of Jesus’ seven words on the Cross is a message of hope that he fought through excruciating pain to enunciate, we come to what he said at the end of three hours of darkness over the whole land. The Prophet Isaiah had said, “Behold the day of the Lord shall come.… The sun shall be darkened in its rising” (Is 39) and Joel had stated, “The sun and moon are darkened, … for the day of the Lord is great and very terrible; who can stand it?” (Joel 2:10-11). There was external darkness because of eclipse of the sun. But Jesus’ fourth word give the appearance of an interior darkness. He had already been betrayed by Judas, abandoned by ten of the apostles and all but his mother and two women. He had been stripped of his clothing. He was quickly losing most of his internal fluids due to the over 200 open wounds. He was in a state of pain with nails through his nerves and limbs that few can fathom. And he cried out with words that at first glance make it seem as if he was feeling forsaken even by God the Father himself. St. Matthew records his cry in Hebrew, St. Mark in Aramaic, but in either ancient language the question, “My God, my God, who have you abandoned me?” suggests that his awareness of his Father’s presence had been occluded. Had Jesus, hope incarnate, in fact, lost hope at that moment? Was Jesus, in order to take away the sins of the world, being permitted to enter into the experience of alienation that can happen when one commits serious sin? Was he experiencing at an emotional or spiritual level the sense of desertion that the great Carmelite doctors of the Church called the dark night of the soul and spirit?
These fourth words from the Cross, when understood in context, are actually a great expression of hope. Jesus was quoting Psalm 22, which is a psalm of lament that becomes a psalm of thanksgiving. Jesus intones the first line, but a good Jew would have known the rest of the Psalm, in a way similar to if in the heat of battle an American soldier said the words, “O say can you see by the dawn’s early light?,” one would know that such words would not be an eye test as the sun was rising but in fact an expression of patriotic hope. Jesus was making his own the whole of the Psalm, which he was fulfilling upon Calvary.
The psalm begins with an expression of forsakenness, the cry of someone who feels alone, with God seemingly not helping. Then it turns to the various sufferings he was enduring as the words written centuries before were being on display. “I am a worm, hardly human, scorned by everyone, despised by the people. All who see me mock me; they curl their lips and jeer; they shake their heads at me: ‘You relied on the Lord — let him deliver you; if he loves you, let him rescue you.’ … Trouble is near, and there is no one to help. Like water my life drains away. … As dry as a potsherd is my throat; my tongue sticks to my palate. … So wasted are my hands and feet that I can count all my bones. They stare at me and gloat; they divide my garments among them; for my clothing they cast lots.” It was an expression of the type of human desolation that puts into relief the hope, the trust, the praise, and the thanksgiving that comes immediately after.
In a dramatic shift, the Psalm then prays: “But you, Lord, do not stay far off; my strength, come quickly to help me. Deliver me. … Save me from the lion’s mouth. … Then I will proclaim your name to the assembly; in the community I will praise you: ‘You who fear the Lord, give praise! All descendants of Jacob, give honor; show reverence, all descendants of Israel! For God has not spurned or disdained the misery of this poor wretch, did not turn away from me, but heard me when I cried out. I will offer praise in the great assembly; my vows I will fulfill before those who fear him.’ All the ends of the earth will worship and turn to the Lord; All the families of nations will bow low before you. For kingship belongs to the Lord, the ruler over the nations. All who sleep in the earth will bow low before God; All who have gone down into the dust will kneel in homage. And I will live for the Lord. … The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance you have brought.”
Far from being a Psalm expressing a sense of abandonment by God the Father, it is a song of abandonment to Despite the sense of human isolation he was enduring, in the midst of so much physical pain, Jesus was utterly certain intellectually of the Father’s closeness. He who had said, “The Father and I are one” and who had prayed the night before, “May they be one, Father, as you are in me and I in you,” still very much knew of that communion, regardless of what he was experiencing emotionally. And he was teaching us all to trust in the love of God our Father even and especially when we feel totally abandoned. This fourth word was an expression of great hope not just in the Lord’s power to save but in his will to save. It is a lesson for all men and women, especially those who are suffering from oppression by evildoers human or diabolical, not to give up their confidence that God is nevertheless there and will definitively rescue. Jesus was entering into what many go through in prison, or in hospitals, or in war torn areas, or who endure calumny or persecution, or who are oppressed by the weight of daily life.
That’s why this word is so important for us to grasp in the Jubilee of Hope. Hope is, as we’ve mentioned, living with God in the world. No matter what we have to endure, if we know God is truly there with us, whispering to us, “Do not be afraid!,” and “I’ve got this” and “We’ll face this together,” and “Nothing is impossible for God,” we know that the problems won’t seem so intimidating. This is one of the reasons why a Jubilee of Hope is so needed, because many do feel abandoned and alone. We see it in the high rates of despair from so many. We see in the movements of those pushing for what is euphemistically dubbed Medical Assistance in Dying, Physician Assisted Suicide, and other forms of euthanasia. We see it in the Fetanyl epidemic, and how many are seeking regular escapes from the difficulties of life through getting high on pot, now legalized and poisonously incensing our streets. We’ve seen it in the loss of the desire to transmit life, with collapsing birthrates in the West; having children is an act of hope in the future, and many make the decision not to bring children into the world because of fear for the future and despair over what they would be born into. We’ve seen it in the results of a ten year survey of high school students by the Centers for Disease Control between 2011-2021, which showed that 42 percent of U.S. high school teens in 2021 said they felt persistently sad or hopeless, 22 percent seriously considered attempting suicide in the previous year, 18 percent had come up with a concrete plan on how they would end their life, and ten percent actually tried to carry out that plan (and thankfully failed), rates that have skyrocked by 60 percent in just ten years, with results much worse for our girls. There’s a crisis of hope and ultimately faith underneath the persistent sadness and the consideration of ending one’s life. That’s why the Jubilee of Hope is so needed. That’s why we Christians need to be strengthened in hope by Christ on the Cross so that we can give the explanation for the reason of our hope to others.
Many saints have shown us how to have receive this gift of hope and live by it to the end, even in the midst of great difficulties.
Next week the Church will canonize St. Carlo Acutis. I’ll have the privilege to help broadcast the Mass in Rome for EWTN. When he, at 15, got the diagnosis of acute promyelocytic leukemia and grasped that he would have only a few days to live, he responded, “The Lord has given me a wake-up call” and resolved, “I offer all the sufferings I have to suffer to the Lord for the Pope and for the Church.” When the doctors asked him if he were in pain, he said, “There are people who are suffering much more than I.” He wasn’t afraid to die, because, he said, “with the incarnation of Jesus, death becomes life. In eternal life, something extraordinary awaits us.”
We see it in St. Damian of Molokai giving hope to the lepers through the way he himself stayed close to the Lord when he caught the infectious disease.
We see it in St. Pio of Pietrelcina who knew of the Lord’s presence not just in the midst of his suffering the sacred stigmata but also misunderstanding, calumny and persecution within the Church.
We see it in Blessed Chiara Luce Badano, who died at 18 of cancer in 1990. When she was losing her hair as a result of intensive chemo and radiation, just said, “Jesus, if you want this, then I want it as well.” Every time she lost another lock, she said, “Another gift to you, Jesus.” She would go around the oncology ward visiting other patients and trying to encourage them with hope. She chose to refuse painkillers, because she said, “All I have left is my suffering. If that’s taken away, what will I offer Jesus?” When her mother was at her deathbed full of grief, she told her, “Mama, be happy because I’m happy.” She had hope until the end.
We see in it St. Paul le Bao Tinh, a 19th century Vietnamese priest martyr, who in the midst of cruel shackles, iron chains, manacles, hatred, vengeance, calumnies, blaphemies, and various forms of anguish and grief in prison, wrote to his fellow Christians: “The prison here is a true image of everlasting Hell. … But the God who once freed the three children from the fiery furnace is with me always; he has delivered me from these tribulations and made them sweet, for his mercy is for ever. In the midst of these torments, which usually terrify others, I am, by the grace of God, full of joy and gladness, because I am not alone —Christ is with me. … In the midst of this storm I cast my anchor towards the throne of God, the anchor that is the lively hope in my heart.”
There are lots of other examples we can point to. St. Anna Schafer and Blessed Alexandrina da Costa both who are icons of hope in the midst of paralysis. Or St. Benedict Joseph Labre, an image of hope in the midst of mental illness. Or Blessed Benedetta Bianchi Porro, a brilliant medical student who had a degenerative condition that would ultimate rob her of all five of her senses. But despite the pain, she never despaired. Before dying in 1964 at age 27, she wrote, “I do not lack hope. I know that at the end of the road, Jesus is waiting for me … I have discovered that God exists, that He is love, faithfulness, joy, certitude, to the end of the ages. My days are not easy. They are hard. But they are sweet because Jesus is with me.”
In his fourth word on the Cross, Jesus teaches us all how to have hope even and especially in the circumstances that humanly seem most forlorn. And he seeks to lead us on the interior pilgrimage for which Psalm 22 is the itinerary, from a sense of abandonment to proclaiming God’s praise in the midst of the great assembly for never in fact leaving us but in fact being with us in the midst of all and ultimately delivering us just like he did his beloved Son.
And so we pray, “Hail, O Cross, shrouded in darkness, yet where God sustains us. You are are only hope. Help us to lift high that cross every day!”

The post My God, My God, Why Have You Abandoned Me?, The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
14 min
April 18, 2025Mother Behold Your Son; Behold Your Mother: The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025

To watch a video of this word, please click below:

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The following text guided the homily:
When Jesus looked down from the Cross, he gazed upon those who were faithful to him to the end. Together with Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene, he saw his Mother and his Beloved Disciple, St. John. The author of the fourth Gospel said Mary was there not swooning, not sobbing, but standing. She was able to stand because, despite her sorrow at seeing the blessed Fruit of her womb treated with such cruelty by his own creatures, she was nevertheless filled with hope. That hope was buttressed by her Son’s cry for mercy in his first word and his bestowing mercy in his second. But it went back much further.
On the Cross we have the third annunciation, this time with Christ giving the words, “Woman, beyond your Son” and, saying to St. John and to all of us, “Behold your mother.” But Mary was able to be hopeful because she remembered the two prior annunciations. In the first, the Archangel Gabriel told her that the Son to be conceived by the power of the Holy Spirit would be great, would be Son of the Most High, called Yeshua or “God saves,” would be given the throne of David his ancestor, and his kingdom would have no end. She believed not just that the Lord’s words to her about her conception would be fulfilled but all the rest, that nothing would be impossible for God, not a virginal conception, not a resurrection from the dead, and that even to other eyes it might seem the crucified Jesus was far from greatness, far from reigning, far from inaugurating an everlasting kingdom, that’s in fact what was taking place as the child she once bathed was now bathed in blood.
Likewise the second annunciation strengthened the hope that made her stand tall and first on Golgotha. That took place in the Temple in Jerusalem, 40 days after Jesus’ birth, when the elderly Simeon, moved by the Holy Spirit, took the baby Jesus in his arms and prophesied. He began with very consoling words, calling the infant Jesus his salvation, a light to the nations and the glory of Israel. But then he turned to Mary and said, “Behold, this child is set for the fall and rise of many in Israel.” The words he uses goes far beyond just “ups and downs” or “good days and bad days.” The literal translation is the “ruin and resurrection” of many in Israel. He’d be a “sign to be contradicted,” one spoken against and cursed. If that wasn’t enough to jolt the heart of a mother who loved a Son, what Simeon said next was probably even more jarring: “And a sword will pierce through your own soul as well, so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” That would help her to understand the contradictions that would come later, when the wise men from afar would bring not only gold and incense, but strangely myrrh, a preparation for burial; when Herod’s assassins sought to murder Jesus and together with Joseph they would have to flee in haste through the desert to Egypt; when she lost for three days when he was 12, and she prepared for his three-day absence in the tomb two decades later; when she witnessed her fellow Nazarenes try to kill her Son by throwing him off a Nazareth promontory; when several of her relatives believed that Jesus was out of his mind; when the crowds hours earlier called for him to be crucified and chose Barabbas over him; when Jesus’ closest followers would all betray him and only one of them, moved by love, would return to be with her before him. Mary was hopeful because she, who wanted her whole life to develop according to the Lord’s word, was seeing that difficult word materialize before her.
Similarly, besides Jesus, she was probably the only one who grasped how so many of the prophecies of the Old Testament were likewise being fulfilled on that limestone hill: that the Messiah would be a suffering servant, that he would be despised and rejected, a man of sorrows, betrayed by a close friend, falsely accused, taunted by his enemies, sold for 30 pieces of silver, led like a lamb to the slaughter, give his back to those who beat him and his cheeks to those who would pull out his beard, that his tongue would stick parched to the roof of his mouth, his hands and feet pierced, his clothes divided for a game of dice, ultimately wounded for our transgressions and crushed for our sins, so that we might be healed by his stripes. He was the fulfillment of the just man beset by evil doers, of Abel murdered by his brother, of Isaac who carried the wood for the sacrifice, of the Passover Lamb whose bones would not be broken, whose flesh would be eaten and whose blood would be wiped not on lintels but poured out on the whole world.
And she was the one who understood and believed in her son’s words, given three times, that he would be betrayed, mocked, tortured, crucified and die, and on the third day rise again.
That’s why she was there full of hope, embodying what should have been the hope of all Israelites, as well as all Jesus’ disciples. She, with her contemplative heart, put all of these words together like the pieces of a mosaic and grasped to it, knowing everything that was happening were tesserae in a masterpiece. She was there sharing in her Son’s sufferings full of hope that despite his being nailed to a perpendicular sign of contradiction, his crucifixion was in fact not a contradiction of the messianic prophecies at all, but a confirmation. As John Paul II said, on Calvary, she was not just a “witness to her Son’s Passion by her presence, [but was] a sharer in it by hercompassion,” making up what was lacking in her son’s afflictions for the sake of his body the Church. In response to his giving all, she gave all.
Jesus wanted everyone to have a similar hope. That’s why he gave her to the beloved disciple to be his mother and in him the mother of all the living. Tradition has called her the Mater Spei, the mother of hope. We call her in the Salve Regina, “spes nostra,” and pray “Hail, Holy Queen, mother of mercy, our life, our sweetness and our hope. And she wants to enroll us in the school of hope that is the school of the cross. This is the way she seeks to mother us. Jesus had come in fact from heaven to earth to found a new family. He described what constituted that family when someone said that his mother and relatives were standing outside where Jesus was. Jesus responded, “My mother and my brothers are those who hear the word of God and do it.” Mary heard the Word of God and kept and treasured it so much that the Word literally took her flesh and dwelled in her among us. Just as she, by her yes in Nazareth three and a half decades earlier, had become the mother of God by giving the Lord his human body, so she at the foot of the Cross would now become the mother of that Son’s mystical body. And her mission was to help them trust in all the Messianic prophecies, all of what her Son had taught, all that he was doing for the human race at that very instant.
Like Saint John, we’re called to receive her into our life like St. John, as beloved sons and daughters. As St. Josemaria Escriva said, “At the Cross, we find a mother with two sons, face to face. Christ and you.” St. John Paul II said that after hearing the words, “Behold your Mother” and receiving Jesus’ last testament of love, “John opened his house to Mary; … he welcomed her into his life, sharing with her a completely new spiritual closeness. The intimate bond with the mother of the Lord will lead the ‘beloved disciple’ to become the apostle of that Love that he sensed in the heart of Christ toward the immaculate heart of Mary. ‘Behold your mother!’ Jesus directs these words to each one of you. He asks you to take Mary into ‘your home,’ to welcome her among all you have, so that she who, by fulfilling her maternal ministry, may teach you and model for you what it means for ‘Christ to be fully formed in you.’ Mary will do this if you respond generously to the call of the Lord and persevere with faithfulness and joy to the Christian mission.” Christ our Hope wants to be fully formed in us and that happens through taking Mary into our home.
So many have been buttressed by hope by drawing close to Mary on Calvary and taking her, there, into their life fully. St. Alphonus Ligouri, St. Bridget of Sweden, St. Gabriel of Our Lady of Sorrows, the seven Holy Servite founders all were devote to Mary under the title of Our Lady of Sorrows and were strengthened to stand with her before the Son of Man when he entered into his kingdom.
Blessed Pauline Jaricot, the foundress of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, drew hope from Mary on Calvary and founded two years later the Living Rosary Association so that everyone could draw similar hope through the meditation on Mary, not just in the joyful and glorious mysteries but also the sorrow.
John Paul II shows us that Marian hope, totally entrusting himself to her maternal care. Even when he was shot on her feast day in 1981, he confessed later that her maternal hand guided the bullet, which was a point blank kill shot by a trained assassin, so that it would not be fatal and so that he could help the entire church later cross the threshold of hope of the new millennium.
We see that Marian maternal hope in Pope Francis. How touching it is his concrete devotion to Our Lady, that as soon as he was released from the Gemelli Hospital, he went directly to St. Mary Major to pray to Our Lady. He has plenty of Marian images where he lives at the Domus, especially the image of Our Lady Undoer of Knots, but he makes the extra effort out of love, because Mary fills him with hope.
So we turn to her asking her to help us in the same way. In the words of the Stabat Mater, a few verses of which we are about to sing, the Church prays to her, “By the Cross with thee to stay, there with thee to weep and pray, is all I ask of thee to give.” Then we turn to Jesus and beg, “Christ, when Thou shalt call me hence, be Thy Mother my defense, by Thy Cross my victory.”
Mary wants to help us remain with her up close to her Son, to recognize that his Cross is our victory. She stands next to us faithfully in our own crosses. We have confidence that Mary is interceding for us like she intervened for the couple in Cana, like she helped the early Church before Pentecost. She wants to help us become childlike grown-ups, like St. John, capable of remaining with her and Jesus through it all, faithful, beloved and loving, and hopeful to the end.
And so we receive her as her Son’s last will and testament, his great and final bequeathal. We ask her to help us become full of hope as we turn to the Cross of her Son and pray, “Hail O Cross, beneath which we stand with Mary, our only Hope. Help us to lift high that Cross every day!”

The post Mother Behold Your Son; Behold Your Mother: The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
13 min
April 18, 2025Truly I Tell You Today, You Will Be With Me in Paradise: The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025

To watch a video of this word, please click below:

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The following text guided the homily:
As Jesus continued to bleed from his hands and feet, back and head on Calvery, he puts into practice his divine mission for the forgiveness of sins through the new and eternal covenant in that blood. Whereas in his first word from the Cross, he cried out in mercy for everyone except his mother stretching from the foundation of the world until the end of time. In his second merciful word, he showed his love for individual sinners in particular. And that special love is a reason for hope for all of us.
The context of the dialogue with the thief on Jesus’ right, called by tradition the Good Thief or since the fourth century in apocryphal texts St. Dismas, is incredible. Hanging on the Cross, Jesus had been mocked by Pilate in writing with the title plate over his head, and then live by the leaders of the people, the soldiers, the passers-by and even, according to St. Matthew, both of the thieves. The latter must have been most difficult. Jesus had risked his reputation to become labeled a “friend of tax collectors and sinners” and had promised that tax collectors and sinners would enter the kingdom before the self-righteous, but now, as he was numbered among the malefactors, even they were verbally abusing him. But something happened in the bandit on Jesus’ right. Maybe it was watching Jesus suffer well in contrast to the way he was dealing with his own terrible pain. Maybe it was hearing Jesus’ first words from the Cross, which were indeed strange words to come from a condemned, crucified criminal, even if Pilate in three languages derisively said he was a king. It may have just been that he saw his whole life flash before him at the moment of his death and wanted to go out right. But something happened in him. He was filled with some fear of God, the beginning of wisdom. St. Luke tells us that because of that change, only one of the two continued to taunt Jesus. Dismas went from deriding to defending Jesus. Even though it would have been excruciatingly difficult for him, too, to talk, he rebuked the other thief and said, “Do you not fear God, since you are under the same sentence of condemnation? And we indeed have been condemned justly, for we are getting what we deserve for our deeds, but this man has done nothing wrong.” He stuck up for someone who was innocent. He was thinking about someone else, rather than himself. And he turned to Jesus with a prayer that betrayed a glimmer of hope.
His prayer started out simply enough. He called the Lord by name, Jesus, “God saves,” and asked, “Remember me.” Everybody hopes that someone will remember him after he dies, that he would have made some difference in someone’s life such that somebody might miss him. But what was odd was that Jesus would die even before Dismas. How would Jesus possibly remember him, … unless, … unless the Good Thief someone intuited, doubtless helped by grace, that Jesus would have some life that would extend beyond Calvary? The concrete request showed even more. He asked to be remembered when the naked, despised, crucified man beside him would enter his That he wasn’t just a carpenter but a king and somehow would have the capacity to remember.
Jesus turned his aching head toward his companion in suffering. Even word cost him enormously to pronounce, he added the words of a Jewish oath, “Amen, I say to you.” Then he promised him that he would do far more than remember. “I say to you today, you shall be with me in … paradise.” As the great Jesuit missionary Archbishop of Bombay, India, Alban Goodier, once commented, “It was language worthy of a conqueror, spoken on a field where a battle had been won; it was a reward worthy of Jesus Christ, the King of Israel, the Son of God. From a criminal, in an instant, to a saint, the first of the New Dispensation; with this unique distinction granted to no other, that he was canonized before his death.” Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen famously quipped: “A dying man asked a dying man for eternal life; a man without possessions asked a poor man for a Kingdom; a thief at the door of death asked to die like a thief and steal Paradise.”
The response of Jesus to the good thief’s appeal is a source of hope to everyone. He shows that God meant the inspiring words he said to sinners through his Prophets Isaiah and Ezekiel, that even “though your sins be like scarlet, they may become white as snow” (Is 1:18) and “when a wicked man turns away from wickedness and does what is right and just, because of this he shall live” (Ezek 33:19). Conversion is possible, even at the last minute. The last can indeed become first. Converted sinners and tax collectors will enter the kingdom of God before the rest. The dead was brought to life. The lost was found. A sinner asked and received. He knocked and the door to paradise was opened. And heaven rejoiced more for that one repentant sinner than for 99 who didn’t need to repent.
The story of the Good Thief has given hope to so many.
We see it in one of the most famous scenes in the life of Blessed Michael McGivney, the founder of the Knights of Columbus, who reached out to a young man, James “Chip” Smith after he, drunk, killed a New Haven police officer. Despite Smith’s initial defiance, the persevering kindness of Father McGivney eventually got him to hope that the way that people despised him on earth, he was in fact loved by Jesus, and even though he was sentenced to death, he might nevertheless enter into eternal life. Chip Smith died in the graces of the Lord.
We see similar hope in the work of St. Joseph Cafasso, the mentor of St. John Bosco, according to St. John Paul II one of the four extraordinary apostles of the confessional, and greatest prison chaplain of all time. He would go into prisons that even prison guards wouldn’t enter to confess the inmates within, help them humbly to renounce the sins and crimes they had committed, resolve to do good with the time they had and focus with hope on the mercy of God. With those on death row, he would patiently persuade them to make their peace with God and seize an eternal treasure. He would call them his “saints of the gallows,” the heirs of the paradise Christ gave to Dismas.
We see this form of hope in the work of St. Camillus de Lellis, the patron saint of all those who work in hospitals, who with his fellow Camillians would care for those abandoned in hospitals and help all of them, especially those whose conditions were terminal, seek, trust in and receive God’s mercy. They took a fourth vow to care for the sick even at the risk of their life, something they routinely did in caring for those with the bubonic plague and other infectious diseases. When he couldn’t walk to see the sick, he would crawl on the floor. So great was his focus on Christ in the sick that he would literally treat them as if he were handling Christ, sometimes expressing sorrow to him for all his past sins and begging mercy. It moved so many to imitate his trust in God’s mercy and his hope in eternal life.
We see it in the venerable Father Emil Kapaun, U.S. military chaplain in World War II and again in Korea, who repeatedly risked his life to bring the last rites to injured soldiers on the battlefield so that they would be ready to meet the King of Kings, and who when he was imprisoned with them in Korea awaiting execution, helped them never to lose hope in Christ’s promise of eternal life.
We see similar work in St. Maximilan Mary Kolbe, who, when he offered himself to take the place of a married man, accompanied the other nine selected to be starved to death out of punishment for a prisoner who had escaped Auschwitz. Despite their sufferings he helped them keep a vivid hope of eternal life.
And of course we cannot forget St. Therese, who prayed for Henri Pranzini as he was preparing to suffer the death penalty, that he would go the way of the Good Thief. Despite all odds and predictions, before Pranzini died, he asked for a crucifix and kissed the corpus, finding in Christ on the Cross a source of hope for mercy at the end.
Hope, the Catechism tells us, “is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit” (1817). The great hope that is meant to inspire us in life is heaven. Jesus wants us to desire it and learn how to seek the things that are above. Not to wait for the last minute, but to hunger for it now.
Heaven, paradise, cannot be taken for granted. Just as we see in the two thieves, one can turn to Jesus asking for mercy, and another can turn away in anger and self-alienation. Jesus said that at the end of time, when he comes to judge the living and the dead, he will separate us into two groups, like sheep and goats, based on whether we care for or stiff him in the hungry, thirst, naked, stranger, ill, imprisoned or otherwise in need. “Two will be in the field” or “grinding meal together” or in bed, he said: “one will be taken and one will be left.” In this case, two were on the Cross and it appears that only one was taken. But there is hope. And we’re called to act on that now. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his famous Eucharistic hymn, Adoro Te Devote, Peto quod petivit latro poenitens!, “I ask for what the Good Thief asked.” And we make that ask here and now, full of hope, that the Lord Jesus, who responded to the good thief’s plea to be remembered with the largesse befitting the King of Kings, will do far more than remember us, too, but give us the help he knows we need to be with him who has gone to prepare a place for us and promised to return to take us with him, so that where he is, we, too, may be. And so we pray in response to this second word, “Hail O Cross, key that opens paradise, our only hope. Help us to lift high that saving cross every day!”

The post Truly I Tell You Today, You Will Be With Me in Paradise: The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min
April 18, 2025Father Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do: The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025

To watch a video of this word, please click below:
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“Father, forgive them, they know not what they do.” Jesus said these first words as his executioners, sadistic Roman soldiers, began to hammer him to the Cross. They stretched out Jesus’ arms, which so often would have been extended in prayer or in eager gesticulations during his sermons, and drove nails through his wrists. They then took his feet — the feet that had been washed and kissed by the woman in Simon the Pharisee’s, the feet that Mary of Bethany had anointed with a full year’s salary of aromatic nard, the feet that had taken the greatest news ever up and down Judea, Samaria and Galilee — and drove a 5- to 7-inch nail through them into the tree. The likely 195 or more lacerations on his back would have been reopened as the soldiers stripped Jesus of his tunic and then would have been irritated beyond belief as those wounds rubbed up and down against the grating, uneven wood of the vertical stipe.
In the midst of all of this agony, Jesus didn’t cry out in pain, as likely the two thieves on his sides were doing at that instant. He didn’t cry out like men normally do when they’re sentenced to death. As my predecessor as national director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen, once said from this pulpit, the last words of men who are being executed by capital punishment either insist on their innocence, condemn those who brought them to justice and sentenced them, or ask for forgiveness for their sins. But Jesus, condemned to a shameful death, cried out for mercy, asking God the Father to pardon those who were doing him wrong.
They, of course, didn’t deserve it. Like the Pharisees and scribes who were conspiring to have him executed once admitted when Jesus gave them a parable about tenants who beat, stoned and killed the emissaries of the landowner and killed the landowner’s son in order to try to seize his inheritance, those who sought to kill the prophets and the Son of God deserved to be put to a “wretched death” (Mt 21:33-45). But Jesus didn’t cry out for justice. He had come not to judge the world, but to save it. He who had told us to “love your enemies,” and “pray for those who persecute you” and “do good to those who hate you;” who said that if they strike us on one cheek to offer the other as well; who pronounced that God’s mercy is everlasting and that God forgives us 70×7 times; who had given us the parable of the lost sheep, lost coin and lost sons; who called us to be merciful like our heavenly Father is merciful, showed he was indeed mercy incarnate. Rather than thinking of his torments, he looked with love on his tormentors. He who was criticized during his public ministry for being a “friend of tax collectors and sinners,” who had forgiven the paralytic at Capernaum, the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house, the adulteress in Jerusalem, proved himself to be a friend of sinners to the very end.
True love, of course, shows itself in mercy. It’s easy to love others when they love us, when they’re lovable. As Jesus himself said during the Sermon on the Mount, “If all you do is love those who love you, what reward do you have? Do not even the tax collectors do the same?” But it’s difficult, sometimes heroically difficult, when others are not easy to love, when others really hurt us. But the Lord in his first word on the Cross preaches to us the necessity of this mercy. “Father, forgive them!” Jesus, in the midst of enormous pain, provides his Father with an excuse for why they should be forgiven: they didn’t know what they are doing. Even though the executioners technically knew very well what they were doing as they were crucifying him, and may have been doing so with relish, even though the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, chief priests and members of the Sanhedrin, were very intentional at every step, no sinner really ever knows the full consequences of sin, which bring about an eternal death penalty. If they did, if we did, how could anyone possibly choose it? How could any of us ever consciously choose Barabbas over God and ask for God’s holy one to be crucified? St. Paul alluded to this partial ignorance in his first letter to the Christians in Corinth (1 Cor 2:8): “None of the rulers of this age understood this; for if they had, they would not have crucified the Lord of glory.” Jesus was praying for them and he was praying for us. And he wanted us to know he was praying for us.
That’s why this first word is such an incredible source of hope. Jesus was praying for us and others to be forgiven for every sin we’ve ever committed. He was begging God the Father to give us a second chance, a third chance, a seventy times seventh chance. That’s why St. Paul would write to the first Christians in Rome, “If God is for us, who can be against us? … Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who acquits us. Who will condemn? It is Christ [Jesus] who died, rather, was raised, who also is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. What will separate us from the love of Christ? … Neither death, nor l(ife, … nor anything in all of creation will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:31-39). The only thing that can separate us from God’s mercy is our choice. This is what Jesus warned against elsewhere in the Gospel when he referred to the “unforgivable” or “everlasting sin” or “blasphemy against the Holy Spirit” (Mt 12:31; Mk 3:28-29). The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1864) describes that this refers to cutting ourselves off from mercy, either by not thinking we need God’s mercy, or not trusting he will give it, or refusing humbly to come to receive it. God will always give it but we have to open ourselves to it and come to receive what he freely gives. As Pope Francis famously said in his homily and Angelus reflection his first Sunday as pope, God never tires of forgiving but we can tire of asking for it, praying that we might never tire of asking for what God never tires to give. God wants us to grasp that even though our sins may be like scarlet, God desires with mercy to make them white. He can and indeed wills to bring good even out of the evil we’ve done or received, even, as St. Ambrose said, making us better than even if we had never sinned because we now know him far more profoundly in his mercy.
Having received God’s mercy, Jesus wants us to pay that mercy forward. He has called us to follow him and to love others as he has loved us first. He calls us to live by the standard of his merciful love, making his words, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do” our own. He taught us, after all, to pray to God the Father, “Forgive us our trespasses, just as we have forgiven those who have trespassed against us.” He gave us the Parable of the Two Debtors to remind us that God has forgiven us 10,000 talents, the equivalent of 6 billion dollars in today’s money for those who would make $12.50 an hour, and whatever sins people have committed against us are the equivalent of a mere $10,000 at the same pay scale. This forgiveness is a source of hope for the world, a hope that resentment and revenge will not have the last word.
We’re all called to live by that hope that, having received God’s mercy, we can indeed be transformed by it to be like Christ versus others. We see that in St. Stephen who prayed for those stoning him to death, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them” (Acts 7:60) and his prayers led to the conversion of St. Paul.
We saw it in St. Maria Goretti who forgave Alessandro Serenelli who tried to rape her and stabbed her 14 times with a ten-inch awl. Her forgiveness not only helped make Alessandro a new man but transformed her mother when Alessandro visited her after being released from prison. Assunta said that if her daughter could forgive him, then she could, too.
We saw it in St. Rita of Cascia who forgave her abusive and unfaithful husband, which helped finally convert him. She likewise forgave and reconciled with those who later murdered her husband and tried to persuade her sons not to carry out a vengeful vendetta.
We saw it with St. John Gualbert, who as a young man sought revenge against the man who murdered his older brother, but when he found him, the man dropped to his knees with arms outstretched in the form of a cross, begging for mercy. Since it was Good Friday, inspired by Christ’s forgiveness on the Cross, he granted the man’s plea. Entering a church afterward, the figure of Christ on a crucifix bowed to him. He later became a monk and founded his own religious order.
We saw it in St. Josephine Bakhita said that if she ever were to meet again the six slave masters who owned and abused her, including one who lacerated her flesh with razor blades, pouring salt in the wounds so that they would never heal, she would not only forgive them but kiss their feet because it was ultimately through slavery that she would come to meet Christ and be set free not just from physical bondage but from all resentment.
We saw it in the Venerable Cardinal Francis Xavier Nguyen van Thuan, imprisoned for 13 years by the communists in Vietnam, including nine years in solitary confinement, who forgave his guards and sought to befriend them, teaching them French and English and other languages, and transforming so many waves of guards by mercy that the authorities stopped changing them.
And in one of the most famous examples of all time, we saw it in St. John Paul II, who forgave his assassin, Mehmet Ali Agca, visiting him in prison and seeking to do good to someone who sought harm.
They did it. We can do it, too. There’s not only hope in Christ’s mercy, but there’s also a hope that we, with God’s help, can share the divine mercy we receive and become merciful like our Father, merciful like Christ on the Cross, merciful like Saints Stephen, Maria Goretti, Rita, John Gualbert, Josephine, John Paul II, Cardinal van Thuan, and so many others.
I had the great joy nine years ago, during the extraordinary Jubilee of Mercy, to be appointed by Pope Francis a Missionary of Mercy, with special papal faculties to remove the censure and absolve sins restricted to the apostolic see. But each of us, like St. Paul, is meant to be an ambassador of mercy, God as it were appealing through us to be reconciled to God and to others.
Christ on Calvary showed us that in his divine plan, mercy wins. Evil does not have the last word. This is a word of hope and we are all called to be recipients and ambassadors of that hope that flows from divine mercy, that hope that still flows into and out of the Sacraments of Baptism and Confession, including this afternoon, the hope that awaits us and others.
Christ’s first word from the Cross reminds us that he was thinking of us as he was agonizingly hammered to the wood and lifted. He was thinking of us with mercy. And so we are filled with hope. And that’s why we’re able to cry out with gratitude, “Hail, O Cross, instrument of divine mercy, our only hope. Help us to lift high that Cross every day!”

The post Father Forgive Them For They Know Not What They Do: The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
14 min
April 18, 2025Introduction on The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Meditations for the Seven Last Words of Jesus
Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, New York City
Good Friday 2025
April 18, 2025

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The following text guided the homily:
An ecclesiastical holy year is meant to influence everything the Church does during that year. The Jubilee of Hope that we are now four months into — the first in Church history — is meant to make this Sacred Triduum, this Good Friday, these meditations on the seven last words of Christ from the Cross different from every Triduum, every Good Friday, every Tre Ore or “three hours” that has ever taken place.
I’m therefore so grateful to Cardinal Dolan for his invitation to enter with you into the mystery of the Cross as our only hope. It’s not only one of the great and most humbling honors of my priestly life, but is particularly special because of Cardinal Dolan’s presence. During my years as a seminarian under him at the North American College in the Vatican, I was routinely lit on fire by his extraordinary charism for preaching, which he put on display not just in homilies but in 45 minute masterpieces of rectors conferences that regularly changed me for the better and filled me with a desire to be able to do for others what he in his preaching was doing for God in me. And so I hope today, here, to be able to give at least a little of the interest accrued over the last three decades from the treasure with which he enriched us as young men. I likewise heartily Fr. Enrique Salvo, the rector of this awesome Cathedral, for his welcoming us all here for prayer in America’s parish Church.
There is a special connection between the virtue of hope we celebrate in this Jubilee and Good Friday.
If you go to the Basilica of St. Paul’s Outside the Walls in Rome, built over the remains of the former Saul of Tarsus, you’ll see an incredibly beautiful façade made out of mosaic. At the very top of the façade reaching into the heavens is a bejeweled Cross underneath which are the words Spes Unica, our only hope. It’s meant to summarize Saint Paul’s faith and preaching, which found their exclamation point in St. Paul’s martyrdom in Rome. St. Paul resolve to know and preach nothing except Christ and Christ crucified. He wanted to boast in nothing but the Cross of Christ, by which the world was crucified to him and him to the world. He told the Galatians that he had been crucified with Christ and the life he now lived in the flesh he lived by faith in the Son of God who loved him personally and gave his life for him on the Cross. And he told the Corinthians that even though Christ’s death on the Cross was a scandal to Jews and folly to Gentiles, Christians grasp that the Cross is not just the sign but the means of the power and the wisdom of God.
Those words, Spes Unica, come from one of the most famous Lenten hymns of all time, the Vexilla Regis Prodeunt, written by Saint Venantius Fortunatus, the sixth century Bishop of Poitiers, France. It was originally sung before the procession of a relic of the true Cross of Christ on pilgrimage to Poitiers in the year 569. The hymn is now sung in the liturgy of the hours every night at Vespers from the vigil of Palm Sunday through Holy Thursday, on Good Friday, and on the Feast of the Exaltation of the Cross. It likewise is sung every day in the Basilica of the Holy Sepulcher, enshrining Calvary, in Jerusalem. The fifth verse of the hymn goes, Ave, O Crux, Spes Unica. “Hail, O Cross, Our Only Hope.” It proclaims the Church’s faith, something that’s crucial for us to ponder during this Jubilee, that the Cross is our only hope.
Taken at face value, calling the Cross our spes unica seems ridiculous. If we view the Cross only or principally as an instrument or torture, public humiliation, and ignominious execution, such an expression is contrary to all common sense. We would never sing, “Hail O Electric Chair!” or
“Hail, O guillotine,” or “Hail, O Firing Squad!,” or call a noose or a lethal injection “our only hope.” But for Christians, as St. Paul saw, the Cross is not fundamentally a sign and instrument of suffering and death but of the love that makes even that much suffering bearable. The Cross is a reminder ultimately of the Lover who loves even to death, death on a Cross.
That’s the first reason why the Cross is a sign of hope, indeed our only hope, because it was on the Cross that we see just how much God loved the world that he sent his only Son so that we might not perish but have eternal life. It is on the Cross that we behold that God did not even spare his own Son but handed him over for us all and, if he would do that, then, as St. Paul reflected, wouldn’t he give us everything else besides? That’s why Pope Francis, in his introductory letter for this Jubilee entitled it Spes non confundit, hope does not disappoint, because, as St. Paul tells us in his Letter to the Romans, “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” and poured that love “into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” The Cross is our only hope because, as Jesus said, when he is lifted up on the Cross, he promised to draw all things to himself. Like the bronze serpent in the desert that cured the snake-bitten Israelites of the lethal serpentine venom, so Christ, lifted up, would become the antidote to all of the ways the ancient serpent of Eden would seek to poison us through sin. That’s the first way the Cross is our only hope.
The second way is by helping us to die to ourselves so that we can unite ourselves fully to Christ. Several times in the Gospel Jesus told us that to be his disciple we have to deny ourselves, pick up our cross each day and follow him. The Cross is the means by which we liberate ourselves from our egocentrism, from our softness, from our worldliness so that, like Simon of Cyrene, we can unite ourselves fully to Jesus. We need the Cross to experience to experience the newness of life Jesus came into the world to give us so that we might have life to the full. We embrace this truth every time we come into Church, except during the Sacred Triduum, to highlight this reality even more. We dip our finger into the Holy Water stoup, which is a reminder of our baptism, when we were baptized into his death and resurrection. We then take the holy water and make a sign of the Cross over us, a recognition that we recognize that we are called by Christ to pick up our Cross every day, and by means of the Cross die to everything that keeps us from Jesus so that we might be free to experience the Resurrection and Life he gives. We can’t do it on our own. We need God’s help. And that help is the Cross. That’s the second reason why the Cross is our only hope, because it liberates us to cling to Jesus with all our mind, heart, soul and strength.
We’re living in a day, however, surrounded by so many creature comforts in a consumerist and materialistic culture, in which many are tempted, just like Jesus’ first followers, to reject the Cross and run away from it. We don’t want to confront his suffering or ours. Like Simon Peter, moments after he confessed Jesus to be the Messiah and Son of the Living God and Christ changed his name to “rock,” when Jesus spoke to the apostles about his upcoming betrayal and crucifixion, want to cry out, “God forbid, Lord! No such thing should ever happen to you!” Similarly like all of Jesus’ first disciples, when Jesus describes that we take up our Cross each day too and embrace with love whatever sufferings the Lord may ask us to endure, we want to change the subject. But the greatest witness of hope in the world is the trust in God that is shown in suffering. That even if we walk in the valley of darkness, we fear no evil, because we believe that Christ is with us with his rod and staff, ultimately with his Cross, to give us comfort.
If St. Paul told the first Christians in Ephesus that before the Gospel was brought to them, they were living without hope because they were living without God in the world, that means that hope, essentially, is living with God in the world. Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us has entered human existence to be with us — and he’s still with us. No matter what we may endure, he wants to help us to unite everything to him. Just as his betrayal, torture and death were all preludes to the resurrection, he wants to convert even the most difficult of human experiences into occasions of love leading to eternal life. St. Paul would tell his spiritual son, St. Timothy, that Christ is our hope. Today we grasp that Christ crucified is our hope, which is why, even when he rises from the dead, he still bears the scars of his crucifixion. The eternal life for which we long will likewise have us bear the marks of our own crucifixion and death in Christ.
Someone who grasped this was the patron of this famous Cathedral and of this Archdiocese. St. Patrick suffered so much as a slave for six years in Ireland as a boy and young man. He suffered much from the opposition he endured when he returned as a priest and bishop to bring the Gospel to the people who had enslaved him. But he was able to bring the Irish hope because he was helping them to unite all aspects of life, including its sufferings, to God. He began every day with a prayer he had written and eventually had put on a breastplate he would wear under his garments, “Christ with me, Christ before me, Christ behind me, Christ in me, Christ beneath me, Christ above me, Christ on my right, Christ on my left, Christ when I lie down, Christ when I sit, Christ in the heart of every man who thinks of me, Christ in the mouth of every man who speaks of me, Christ in the eye that sees me, Christ in the ear that hears me.” That Christ crucified and risen wants to envelop us, too, and St. Patrick, looking at us on the column opposite this pulpit, is praying for us to cooperate fully with that metamorphosis.
In these meditations on Christ’s seven last words, given to us through literally excruciating pain from the pulpit of Golgotha, I would like, with the crucifix behind me, to ponder how each of these seven expressions is a message of great hope to us, a hope that Jesus wants each of us to receive, be thoroughly transformed by, and herald to others. For each of the words, I would like to highlight how certain saints have been so changed by the hope contained in each word, and in Jesus’ silent body language, that they have become missionaries bringing that Christian hope to others. St. Peter called all of us always to be ready to give an explanation of the reason of our hope to anyone who asks. Today Jesus wants us to recognize what that ultimate reason is. It’s the cruciform love he shows us on Calvary. That’s why, together with Christians over the last 1455 years, we exclaim, Ave, O Crux, Spes Unica, and draw near in veneration.

The post Introduction on The Jubilee of Hope and Jesus’ Seven Last Words from the Cross, St. Patrick’s Cathedral, New York, April 18, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min
April 08, 2025Liberated Missionaries of Freedom Through the Truth, Fifth Wednesday of Lent, April 9, 2025
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Xuan Loc Major Seminary, Xuan Loc, Vietnam
Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent
April 9, 2025
Dan 3:14-20.91-92.95, Dan 3:52-26, Jn 8:31-42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following points were attempted in the homily:
Lent, and the whole of Christian life, is about liberation. Throughout this holy season we retrace — at a much deeper spiritual level — the liberation of the Israelites from slavery as Jesus, the new Moses, seeks to lead us by means of the new and eternal Passover on a journey with him through the desert of life, through even death, into the eternal promised land. Lent is about being set free from the domination of the temptations of the evil one by spending 40 days with Jesus in a spiritual desert. The three practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving all point to this liberation: liberation from egocentric self-dependence through putting God in his proper place in prayer, from giving into our lower appetites by the self-mastery that comes via fasting, from obsessing about our needs wants and needs by sacrificially giving of ourselves, time and possessions for those whose needs are greater.
Today in the Gospel, in the immediate aftermath of freeing the woman caught in adultery from the death sentence of those who were trying to get Jesus to pronounce she should be stoned, Jesus speaks about liberation and slavery and describes three great interconnected means by which he wants to help us in Lent and beyond experience the freedom he came into the world to give us. We are all called to receive this gift of freedom for which Christ has set us free and then become missionaries of this gift to the world.
The first great means is faith. There are many who believe our faith enslaves, that it binds us by commandments and limits our choices, that it leads us to depend on something or someone other than what we can empirically verify, but faith helps us to recognize that what we can perceive through our senses is not all that there is. We see the liberating power of faith in the three young men in the fiery furnace in today’s first reading from the Book of Daniel. Even though they were bound and thrown into the white hot oven, they were interiorly free through faith, which liberated them from the fear of Nebuchadnezzar, from the fear of pain and suffering, from the fear even of death, and, as we see in the reading, from presumption. With faith, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar, “If our God, whom we serve, can save us from the white-hot furnace and from your hands, O king, may he save us! But even if he will not, know, O king, that we will not serve your god or worship the golden statue that you set up.” The courage came from their fidelity. And their fidelity coupled to God’s fidelity led to a great conversion of the King and many others as they were rescued by what seems to have been an angel of God. Nebuchadnezzar would exclaim at the end, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted [had faith] in him; they disobeyed the royal command and yielded their bodies rather than serve or worship any god except their own God.” Lent is meant to help us grow in that type of faith — that faith that is meant to be characteristic of our baptism, in which we renounce Satan and all his evil and empty works and proclaim our faith in our Triune God — so that no matter what white hot furnaces of suffering we may need to endure, we may remain interiorly free because of our relationship to the Lord, whom we know came into the world to save us forever from the fiery furnace of Hell.
The second great means is his word of truth. It’s important for us to grasp that weak faith is not enough. Jesus addressed his words in today’s Gospel to those who “believed in him,” but who nevertheless would seek to have him killed. Faith alone, understood as assenting that something be true, is not enough. The act of faith essentially involves believing something on the basis of our trust in someone, and for us that means a trust in God, who sent his Son. Jesus tells us that we need to go from the “word” to the One who speaks, from the truth as an idea to the Truth as a person. Jesus tells us, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The truth sets us free from the ignorance and lies that enslave us. But it’s not enough to be familiar with the truth as “facts.” We need to abide in the truth. Jesus indicates a four-step process: remaining in his word, becoming in truth his disciples, knowing the truth, and being liberated through the truth.
First we must remain in his word, dwelling in it, resting in it, familiarizing ourselves with it, reading it, meditating upon it. It’s an action verb. We can’t remain in the word of God unless we’re seeking to immerse ourselves in it.
If we do this, Jesus says, we will really be his disciples, because we’re only his disciples if we’re putting what he teaches us into practice, and the only way we can do that is to know more and more deeply what he teaches. The way we follow Jesus concretely is by remaining and living his word.
Following him along the way of his holy wisdom will help us to know the truth, not in the way we know Wikipedia articles but the way we know a friend or the way Adam knew Eve. For those who know other languages, it’s connaitre not savoir, conhecer not saber, conoscere not sapere. We become one with the truth not just at the level of our minds but in our hearts and actions.
And once this happens, the truth sets us free, because we’re no longer walking in darkness without the light of faith, we’re no longer in ignorance about the most important things, we’re no longer enslaved to our egos, appetites, others’ opinions, or the devil’s machinations.
Lent is a time in which we are called to grow in remaining, following, knowing and living the Word of God. The readings throughout Lent at daily Mass are a great help in this liberation but we must go beyond them with the help of the Holy Spirit in personal prayer and study. Jesus pointed out to his interlocutors in today’s passage that even though on one level they said they believed in him, at the same time he added, “You are trying to kill me because my word has no room among you.” We need to live in his word in order that our faith grow and not lead us to turn on God by trying to live our faith by halves.
But liberation through this process of entrustment to the God who speaks to us his word is itself not enough. God wants more than a relationship of mere trust. He wants a particular type of trust, the confidence of a child in a loving parent. He wants to us to live our divine filiation, to remember we are the beloved sons and daughters of the Father described in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This is the third great means. Those opposing Jesus in the Gospel today proudly announced they were children of Abraham, but they were really only descendants according to the flesh not according to faith. In fact by their lack of faith and love, they were slaves rather than sons in God’s household. After they said to Jesus, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone,” Jesus replied, “Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.” Sadly they didn’t want to be set free by the Son to be sons in the Son. Jesus continued, “I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me … I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence; then do what you have heard from the Father.” They insisted that they were children of Abraham, but Jesus replied, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!” They insisted anew that they are not illegitimate children but have “one Father, God,” a curious admission because they were trying to kill Jesus because he insisted he was the Father’s Son. But Jesus told them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here.” Jesus would go to say immediately after today’s Gospel passage stops who their real father is: “You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies.” They had exchanged their divine filiation for a diabolical one by their failure to believe as Abraham believed in God, by their choice to live a lie rather than “stand in truth,” which would set them free, by their choice for sin rather than true sanctity, despite their show. Lent is an occasion for all of us to work anew on becoming like the Father, to be as merciful as the Father is merciful, holy as he is holy, perfect as he is perfect, to love as he loves. In prayer we’re supposed to pray in the intimacy of communion with the Father in our inner treasure room, to fast for what he hungers, to give generously and sacrificially of what he has providentially deposited into our hands so that we might share in his care for all his sons and daughters. Lent is the time during which we overcome the blindness of the older son in the parable of the Prodigal Son who, even though he was in the house, related to the Father as a slave would, obeying the Father’s orders rather than living in and sharing the Father’s love.
The great gift God gives us every day to help us in this liberation through faith, truth and divine filiation occurs here at Mass. Mass is a mini-Lent and Easter celebration all in one. We begin with the rite of conversion in which we publicly confess that we are great sinners who have sinned through our own grievous fault, faithfully begging God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit respectively for mercy. God gives us the ability to remain in his word so that we may be strengthened in our discipleship to become one with that Word of Truth and liberated. And we become one with that truth as we receive the Truth incarnate in Holy Communion, entering into the interior life of the Blessed Trinity through him by the power of the Holy Spirit so that together with the Son and with each other we might cry out, “Abba, Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name!” This is what strengthens us in confidence in God’s liberating power in every circumstance. This is what makes us capable of bringing hope to others, as we introduce them to the great Liberator, the Redeemer, the Savior, who comes to set us free to love.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
DN 3:14-20, 91-92, 95
King Nebuchadnezzar said:
“Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,
that you will not serve my god,
or worship the golden statue that I set up?
Be ready now to fall down and worship the statue I had made,
whenever you hear the sound of the trumpet,
flute, lyre, harp, psaltery, bagpipe,
and all the other musical instruments;
otherwise, you shall be instantly cast into the white-hot furnace;
and who is the God who can deliver you out of my hands?”
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar,
“There is no need for us to defend ourselves before you in this matter.
If our God, whom we serve,
can save us from the white-hot furnace
and from your hands, O king, may he save us!
But even if he will not, know, O king,
that we will not serve your god
or worship the golden statue that you set up.”
King Nebuchadnezzar’s face became livid with utter rage
against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
He ordered the furnace to be heated seven times more than usual
and had some of the strongest men in his army
bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
and cast them into the white-hot furnace.
Nebuchadnezzar rose in haste and asked his nobles,
“Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?”
“Assuredly, O king,” they answered.
“But,” he replied, “I see four men unfettered and unhurt,
walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.”
Nebuchadnezzar exclaimed,
“Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,
who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted in him;
they disobeyed the royal command and yielded their bodies
rather than serve or worship any god
except their own God.”
Responsorial Psalm
DN 3:52, 53, 54, 55, 56
R. (52b) Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you, O Lord, the God of our fathers,
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever;
And blessed is your holy and glorious name,
praiseworthy and exalted above all for all ages.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you in the temple of your holy glory,
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever.
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you on the throne of your kingdom,
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you who look into the depths
from your throne upon the cherubim;
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you in the firmament of heaven,
praiseworthy and glorious forever.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
Gospel
JN 8:31-42
Jesus said to those Jews who believed in him,
“If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples,
and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham
and have never been enslaved to anyone.
How can you say, ‘You will become free’?”
Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.
A slave does not remain in a household forever,
but a son always remains.
So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.
I know that you are descendants of Abraham.
But you are trying to kill me,
because my word has no room among you.
I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence;
then do what you have heard from the Father.”
They answered and said to him, “Our father is Abraham.”
Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children,
you would be doing the works of Abraham.
But now you are trying to kill me,
a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God;
Abraham did not do this.
You are doing the works of your father!”
So they said to him, “We were not born of fornication.
We have one Father, God.”
Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me,
for I came from God and am here;
I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”

The post Liberated Missionaries of Freedom Through the Truth, Fifth Wednesday of Lent, April 9, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
16 min
April 03, 2025 The Prayer and Witnesses That Accompany Our Mission, Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent, April 3, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The Pontifical Mission Societies Southeast Regional Meeting
Franciscan Center, Tampa, Florida
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent
April 3, 2025
Ex 32:7-14, Ps 106, Jn 5:31-47

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.3.25_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today the Word of God helps us with two different and crucial aspects of our life as missionary disciples in communion and catalysts supporting the global mission that is the Church. It’s fitting during this regional meeting for us to take full advantage of the richness of what God gives us to strengthen us in our apostolic vocations.
The most important thing we do in our missionary life and work is to pray. Everything begins with God. Just like Jesus prayed all night before he called his first twelve missionaries, so we, at his instruction, pray to the Harvest Master for laborers for the harvest. Just as Jesus during the first Eucharist prayed not just for those harvesters but for all those who would come to the Gospel through their missionary labors, so we pray for all those whom Jesus wants to draw to himself through our work and the work of our fellow missionaries throughout the globe.
In today’s first reading, we see one of history’s most powerful witnesses to intercessory prayer. The Israelites in the desert had given in to idolatry and worshipped a golden calf and Moses begged God to forgive their sin. Like with Abraham’s prayer to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten just people were found there, so Moses’ intercession has always been considered a model of prayer.
In 2011, Pope Benedict, in his great catechetical series on Christian prayer, spoke about the importance of Moses’ prayer of intercession. He stated, “Moses’ supplication was wholly based on the Lord’s fidelity and grace. He referred first to the history of redemption which God began by bringing Israel out of Egypt and then recalled the ancient promise made to the Fathers. The Lord brought about salvation by freeing his people from slavery in Egypt; so ‘why,’ Moses asked, ‘should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’’ (Ex 32:12). Once the work of salvation has been begun it must be brought to completion. … God … is the good Lord who saves, the guarantor of life, he is the God of mercy and forgiveness, of deliverance from sin that kills. Hence Moses appealed to God, to the interior life of God against the exterior judgement. But Moses then argued with the Lord, were his Chosen People to perish, even though guilty, God might appear incapable of overcoming sin. And this he could not accept. … The intercessor wanted the People of Israel to be saved because this people was the flock that had been entrusted to him, but also because it was in this salvation that the true reality of God was manifest. The prayer of intercession is permeated by love of the brethren and love of God, they are inseparable. Moses, the intercessor, … did not ask for his people to be excused of their sin, he did not list any presumed merits, either the people’s or his own, but appealed to God’s bounty: a free God, total love, who does not cease to seek out those who have fallen away, who is always faithful to himself. … Moses asked God to show himself more powerful than sin and death, and with his prayer elicited this divine revelation of himself. … With prayer, wanting what God wanted, the intercessor entered more and more deeply into knowledge of the Lord and of his mercy, and became capable of a love that extended even to the total gift of himself.”
Pope Benedict then applied these lessons to Jesus and to us. First to Jesus: “In Moses, on the summit of the mountain, face to face with God, who made himself an intercessor for his people and offered himself, … the Fathers of the Church saw a prefiguration of Christ who from the very top of the Cross was truly before God, not only as a friend but as Son. And not only did he offer himself, … but with his pierced heart … he took upon himself our sins to ensure our salvation. His intercession was not only solidarity but identification with us: he bears all of us in his Body. And thus his whole life as a man and as Son is a cry to God’s heart, it is forgiveness, but forgiveness that transforms and renews.” Then to us: “We should meditate upon this reality. Christ stands before God and is praying for me. His prayer on the Cross is contemporary with all human beings, contemporary with me. He prays for me, he suffered and suffers for me, he identified himself with me, taking our body and the human soul. And he asks us to enter this identity of his, making ourselves one body, one spirit with him because from the summit of the Cross he brought not new laws, tablets of stone, but himself, his Body and his Blood, as the New Covenant. Thus, he brings us kinship with him, he makes us one body with him, identifies us with him. He invites us to enter into this identification, to be united with him in our wish to be one body, one spirit with him. Let us pray the Lord that this identification may transform and renew us.”
Jesus wants us to identify with his intercessory prayer from the Cross for the salvation of the human race, so that no one might perish but everyone might have eternal life, and eternal life is that they come to know God the Father and Jesus Christ whom he has sent through the powerful work of the Holy Spirit. The first and most important thing we do in the Pontifical Mission Societies is pray to God like Moses for all those throughout the world who do not yet know him and his saving, merciful love, who may have wandered away from him, who may be keeping him just as a part of their life rather than loving him with all of their mind, heart, soul and strength, and we pray for missionaries that as they sow the seed of the Gospel with perseverance they might find good and fruitful soil. That’s why even though it gets the least attention, the Pontifical Union, which forms people in missionary spirituality, is perhaps the most important, insofar as it keeps up the work of our co-patroness St. Therese in praying without ceasing for the missions and missionaries.
We see the intercessory prayer at work in Christ himself in today’s Gospel. Like Moses with the stiff-necked Israelites in the desert, Jesus was trying to bring the hard-hearted Scribes and Pharisees to conversion so that they might be able to receive the mercy God wanted to bestow. It wasn’t easy. Today’s scene continues Jesus’ response to the Scribes and Pharisees who were opposing him as evil because he healed on the Sabbath day the man crippled for 38 years. They had imputed their own false ideas of the holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath day to God and then, because Jesus violated those false ideas, condemned him for the violation. They thought that the holiness God wanted was to avoid any work at all, including works of charity; what God had forbidden was in fact slavish work so that, instead of enslaving ourselves to work and what work produces on the Sabbath, we would allow him to restore us to true freedom, a freedom that is meant to make it possible for us to love. The holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath was most of all that of loving Him and loving neighbor. God doesn’t take a weekly day off from loving us — as if a loving father or mother could take a hiatus from caring for their children — and never intended us to do the same. The Christian sabbath, for us, is meant to be a special day of prayer, including intercessory prayer for the missions. The Pharisees’ and Scribes’ misunderstanding of the Sabbath was at the root of their deep confusion of what God was asking of them in general, something of which Jesus wanted to cure them, if only their hearts were open.
That brings us to the second great lesson God gives us in the Liturgy of the Word today, which is about the various witnesses to the authority by which Jesus worked the healing of the cripple and his various other miracles. Since the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t believe Jesus could possibly be working miracles on the Sabbath by God’s power — because God in their imagination went on vacation each Sabbath — he had to be doing so by some other authority. Elsewhere they explicitly accused him of working miracles on the Sabbath by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, basically in order to destroy the Jewish religion! So Jesus necessarily takes up the question of authority and five different witnesses that point to it. It’s key for us to understand these five witnesses, so that we can grow in our knowledge of Jesus through these five different means of testimony. It’s key so that in our missionary work we can turn others, like Jesus did, to the testimony of these witnesses. But it’s also crucial so that in turn we can become a “sixth witness,” like the members of the early Church were and as saints always are.
The first witness Jesus cites is John the Baptist, who had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God. Jesus said, “You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth. I do not accept human testimony, but I say this so that you may be saved.” John had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus would ask them explicitly, when they peppered him with questions to test him, whether they accepted the testimony of John, and they refused to say either way. The point is that, though they were fascinated by John, they didn’t accept John’s testimony and the offer of salvation that would be brought by the Lamb he indicated through the forgiveness of their sins. We are called in our missionary work to accept the testimony of John the Baptist and all of the prophets and we are similarly called, as the Church remembers at the beginning of every liturgical year, that we need to make straight the paths, clear away the debris of sin, that prevents Christ from entering our life. Every missionary is a precursor of the Lord, like John the Baptist.
The second witness Jesus cites involved the works he was doing. Jesus declares, “But I have testimony greater than John’s” and then immediately describes that greater witness: “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.” He could only do what he was doing — healing the sick, casting out demons, raising the dead, multiplying loaves and fish, calming storms — by the power of God. But they didn’t want to accept the testimony of the works, works that the Messiah had been prophesied to accomplish and many more. Their hearts were hardened and there was just no way they were prepared to receive Jesus, no matter what he did. Even after he rose from the dead, they didn’t want to accept the deed of the resurrection, but instead paid off the guards to say, absurdly, that the disciples had stolen his body while they were asleep (when no one asleep could possibly have known anything). Because they were going to reject Jesus no matter what, they rejected the divine provenance of all of his works. For us as missionaries, we need to point to Jesus’ works, their credibility and the way they changed persons and history. We particularly need to point to the resurrection and the way his risen life has changed us. This is what gave the apostles’ credibility. They were willing to travel the whole world, be tortured and martyred because they knew that not even crucifixion could keep them in the grave, and as St. Thomas Aquinas once perceptively stated, if this small group of relative nobodies could persuade a down-to-earth skeptical age that a crucified carpenter had risen from the dead if he hadn’t risen from the dead, that would have been a greater miracle than the resurrection itself.
The third witness is Sacred Scripture. Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures, because you think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf. But you do not want to come to me to have life.” There are over 1,000 prophecies about the coming Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus by that point had been fulfilling almost everything on the Messianic job description except of course for the prophecies of his upcoming suffering, death and resurrection. But as much as the scribes, Pharisees and chief priests affirmed themselves as experts in the Scriptures, they obstinately resisted the conclusion that any of them pointed to Jesus, despite the fact that he was fulfilling each of them. As missionaries, we, accepting divine revelation, must become fluent in the Word of God, not necessarily by memorizing all of its details like the scribes did, but by enfleshing it like our Lady did, letting her whole life develop according to God’s word. St. Gregory the Great once said, vita bonorum viva lectio, that the life of the saints is a living reading of the Word of God. We’re all called to show what it means to live off every word that comes from the mouth of God, how we believe that God’s word is a lamp for our steps and a light for our path, how Jesus has the words of eternal life.
The fourth witness Jesus mentions is Moses. Jesus says, “Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, because he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” Everything Moses accomplished was together one long prophecy about Jesus. Moses’ interceding for the Israelites before God on the mountain in today’s first reading was a prophecy of Jesus’ praying on the hill of Calvary for God the Father to forgive us because we didn’t know what we were doing. His ascending Mt. Sinai and returning with the Ten Commandments pointed to how Jesus ascended the Mount of the Beatitudes and gave us the New Law. His leading the Jews in the Passover was a prophecy about what Jesus himself would do through his new and eternal Passover, leading us through the desert of death into the eternal Promised Land. Moses had told the Jews, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him” (Deut 18:15). That prophecy was still very much awaiting fulfillment at the time of St. John the Baptist, who was asked by the crowds, “Are you the prophet?” (Jn 1:21). John wasn’t, but Jesus is. But the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t want to accept Moses’ testimony. They didn’t want to listen to him. As Pope Benedict taught us earlier, Jesus was also the fulfillment of Moses’ action in today’s first reading, asking God to eliminate him rather than the people. That request would be, in essence, fulfilled in the Passion, when Jesus, the new Moses, would actually be killed as an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of the people. But they didn’t want to accept any of that fulfillment of Moses’ life either. As missionaries, we need to accept the testimony of Moses. As my predecessor, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, used to emphasize, Jesus is the new Moses, the fulfillment of everything to which Moses testified. The more we know and accept that testimony, the more powerful will be the conviction with which we live and testify.
The fifth witness is the most important. It’s God the Father. Jesus said, “The Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.” He added, “But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.” This witness was implicit in the other four. It’s God the Father who called John the Baptist to prepare the way for his Son. It’s God the Father who was speaking and working through each of Jesus’ miracles. It’s God the Father who inspired Sacred Scripture by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s God the Father who called Moses at the burning bush, sent him to Pharaoh, worked the ten plagues, separated the Red Sea, fed the Israelites with Manna and quail, quenched their thirst with water from the Rock, gave the Ten Commandments, accompanied them in a pillar of fire and so much more. But all of that testimony was, in a certain sense, indirect. God the Father gave direct testimony of Jesus at his baptism, saying from heaven, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.” God the Father gave direct testimony at the Transfiguration, witnessed by Peter, James and John, in which he said, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!” God the Father would later give witness to Jesus, not only speaking during the Last Supper that he had glorified Jesus’ name and would glorify it again, but most spectacularly by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. But they weren’t prepared to receive the testimony of God either. As missionaries, we not only heed God the Father’s witness of his Son but seek to become living continuations of it. The best way we do is entering into the love the Father has for the Son, so that we become witnesses in the world of what St. John wrote in his first letter: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God, yet that is what we are.”
Today, four weeks into the Lenten conversion God wants to work in us, as we reflection our the missionary nature of our Christian life, it’s good to ask ourselves how docile we are to everything God has given us to strengthen our faith, grow in relationship with him and make us more effective apostles. Have we accepted the testimony of John the Baptist pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world by coming to that Lamb to have him take away our sins in the Sacrament of God’s mercy and get at them at the real roots? Have we accepted the witness of so many miracles — the miracles in the causes of saints, the daily miracles on the altar and the confessional, and so many others — to help increase our faith in the power of prayer by praying with perseverance for the miracles we and others need? Have we embraced the witness of Sacred Scripture by studying the Bible, all it reveals about Christ and about us, and putting its words into practice? Have we accepted the witness of Moses pointing to Christ and begun to follow the New Moses, Jesus, up close? And have we heard the witness of God the Father and really begun to listen to Jesus and recognize through him that God wants us not only to be but behave always as his beloved and much-pleasing sons and daughters? It’s also a time to look at the power of intercessory prayer and to recognize that throughout the Lenten season, each of us individually, and the whole Church, turns to the Father and begs him, on account of the work of his Son, to have mercy on us and on the whole world and to bring of the sons and daughters he has created home to his house, where Jesus was incarnated, born, died, rose and ascended to prepare for us.
The Eucharist is what all five of the witnesses Jesus describes point to. This is the fulfillment of the Manna given to Moses in the desert. This is the Lamb of God pointed out with the very words of John the Baptist at every Mass. This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Sacred Scripture contained in Isaiah that God will prepare for us a banquet of the choicest food and drink (Is 25). This is the greatest of all of Jesus’ signs of love, transforming simple bread and wine into his body and blood, soul and divinity, so that we can enter into a holy communion with him. And this is the greatest gift of all from God the Father, who witnesses just how dear we are to him that he will give us the One who is most precious to Him so that we can by this reception of his body and blood enter into the inner life and love of the Trinity. Let us accept this witness at the depth at which God desires and in turn become the “sixth” witnesses whose whole lives attest, not just on the Sabbath but even every day, to the truth of Jesus’ continuing saving presence and redemptive work. The Eucharist is in fact the great prayer of intercession made for the world, in which we enter live into Christ’s eternal prayer of intercession from the Upper Room and Calvary — and into God’s response on Easter Sunday! Of this we are witnesses, together with the Holy Spirit, to the ends of the earth.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
EX 32:7-14
The LORD said to Moses,
“Go down at once to your people
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt,
for they have become depraved.
They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them,
making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it,
sacrificing to it and crying out,
‘This is your God, O Israel,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’
The Lord said to Moses,
“I see how stiff-necked this people is.
Let me alone, then,
that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.
Then I will make of you a great nation.”
But Moses implored the Lord, his God, saying,
“Why, O Lord, should your wrath blaze up against your own people,
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt
with such great power and with so strong a hand?
Why should the Egyptians say,
‘With evil intent he brought them out,
that he might kill them in the mountains
and exterminate them from the face of the earth’?
Let your blazing wrath die down;
relent in punishing your people.
Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel,
and how you swore to them by your own self, saying,
‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky;
and all this land that I promised,
I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage.’“
So the Lord relented in the punishment
he had threatened to inflict on his people.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 106:19-20, 21-22, 23
R. (4a) Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
Our fathers made a calf in Horeb
and adored a molten image;
They exchanged their glory
for the image of a grass-eating bullock.
R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
They forgot the God who had saved them,
who had done great deeds in Egypt,
Wondrous deeds in the land of Ham,
terrible things at the Red Sea.
R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
Then he spoke of exterminating them,
but Moses, his chosen one,
Withstood him in the breach
to turn back his destructive wrath.
R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
Gospel
JN 5:31-47
Jesus said to the Jews:
“If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true.
But there is another who testifies on my behalf,
and I know that the testimony he gives on my behalf is true.
You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth.
I do not accept human testimony,
but I say this so that you may be saved.
He was a burning and shining lamp,
and for a while you were content to rejoice in his light.
But I have testimony greater than John’s.
The works that the Father gave me to accomplish,
these works that I perform testify on my behalf
that the Father has sent me.
Moreover, the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.
But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form,
and you do not have his word remaining in you,
because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.
You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.
“I do not accept human praise;
moreover, I know that you do not have the love of God in you.
I came in the name of my Father,
but you do not accept me;
yet if another comes in his own name,
you will accept him.
How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another
and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?
Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father:
the one who will accuse you is Moses,
in whom you have placed your hope.
For if you had believed Moses,
you would have believed me,
because he wrote about me.
But if you do not believe his writings,
how will you believe my words?”
The post The Prayer and Witnesses That Accompany Our Mission, Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent, April 3, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
27 min
March 31, 2025 Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and the Preaching of the Missions, Pontifical North American College, March 31, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The Pontifical North American College, Vatican City
March 31, 2025

To listen to an audio recording of today’s talk, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.31.25_Sheen_and_Preaching_of_the_Missions_1.mp3

To download a copy of the slides of the presentation, please click below:
Sheen and Preaching the Gospel to All Nations

The post Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen and the Preaching of the Missions, Pontifical North American College, March 31, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
36 min

About Catholic Preaching

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Father Roger J. Landry is a priest of the Diocese of Fall River, Massachusetts, who works for the Holy See’s Permanent Observer Mission to the United Nations in New York.

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