Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

March 31, 2025 Missionaries of Mercy and Hope, Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent, March 31, 2025
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome, Italy
Mass of the Missionaries of Mercy from the USA
March 31, 2025
Is 65:17-21, Ps 30, Jn 4:43-54

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
What a joy it is for us, as part of the Jubilee of Hope Pilgrimage of the Missionaries of Mercy, to pass through the Holy Door and celebrate Mass here at the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, where the remains of the great Doctor of the Gentiles and enshrined under the main altar. St. Paul was the great Missionary of Mercy among the first generation of apostles, who, we heard on Ash Wednesday and again yesterday at Mass, saw himself as an Ambassador of Christ appealing to the first Christians to “be reconciled to God.” He was likewise a great man and missionary of hope, who reminded the first Christians that hope is ultimately living with God in the world and whose words to the first Christians here in Rome were taken as the title of Pope Francis’ Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee: spes non confundit, “Hope does not disappoint” and then he tells us why: “because while we were still sinners Christ died for us,” that “where sin increased, grace overflowed all the more” — the grace of God’s mercy — so that “grace might reign through justification for eternal life.” If those facts are not enough, he tells us that the love of Christ shown on Calvary “has been poured into our hearts by the Holy Spirit that has been given us.” That’s why St. Paul never ceased to preach the hope that came from God’s mercy. He had himself experienced it after terrorizing and presiding over the executions of the first Christians. And so he resolved to know, preach and boast in nothing but Christ and Christ Crucified as the power and the wisdom of God. To preach Christ crucified for him was not fundamentally to focus on Christ’s sufferings, but to proclaim the merciful love that made even crucifixion bearable. It’s also why he announced the power of Christ’s resurrection, without which our faith would be vain, as the definitive triumph of God’s mercy, of life over death, of light over darkness, of sanctity over sin. And so we come here today on pilgrimage, asking St. Paul’s intercession that we, too, might live up to our vocation to be “chosen vessels” to help people come to know “God, who is rich in mercy” (Eph 2:4) and help all nations “glorify God for his mercy” (Rom 15:9). We ask him likewise to pray for us to put on the “helmet that is hope for salvation” (1 Thess 5:8), “abound in hope” (Rom 15:12), and “rejoice in hope” (Rom 12:12), as we and the people we serve “await the blessed hope, the appearance of the glory of the great God and of our Savior Jesus Christ” (Tit 2:13), who is “our hope” (1 Tim 1:1).
Today’s readings are fittingly about mercy and hope. They likewise underline the how we are all called to be “pilgrims of hope” during this Jubilee and beyond.
In today’s first reading, we encounter the prelude to yesterday’s Laetare Sunday. The Church on the Fourth Sunday of Lent begins the Liturgy with God’s message, “Laetare, Ierusalem!,” found in the 66th chapter of the Prophet Isaiah. Today we read from what immediately preceded that holy imperative in the 65th chapter, God’s promise to the Jews in Babylonian exile, the hope, indeed the merciful promise, that would make them rejoice: that he was not only going to bring them back from captivity, but that he was going to do something far greater: he was going to make a new heaven and a new earth that would be full of joy. By God’s mercy, received in baptism and confession, God wants to recreate us, renew us, and give us a totally new start. The prayers of today’s Mass are all about this hope of renewal by God’s mercy. We started Mass praying in the Collect, “O God, who renew the world through mysteries beyond all telling.” In the Prayer over the Gifts, we’ll ask the Lord to grant us the grace to “be cleansed from old earthly ways and renewed by growth in heavenly life.” After Communion, we’ll pray that the gift of this Mass will “give us life by making us new, and by sanctifying us, lead us to things eternal.” The whole purpose of the Lenten season from God’s perspective, the purpose of the Jubilee of Hope, the effect of God’s mercy profoundly received, is to make us new. Today we pray to cooperate in that renewal and make us instruments to help all God’s people receive it.
In the Gospel, we once again see mercy and hope on full display, as well as the summons for us to journey with faith and hope in the transformative power of God’s merciful love. A royal official from Capernaum, in other words someone who likely worked for King Herod Antipas, went out to meet Jesus as soon as he heard that Jesus had returned to Cana in Galilee. The distance between Capernaum and Cana is 20 miles and this father, out of love for his son, walked it in search of Jesus. It was quite humbling what the dad did, not only journeying such a distance but desperately placing his trust in a Nazarene carpenter, something that for a royal official likely could have brought him derision and possibly might been a terrible career move. He journeyed out of desperate hope, and Jesus was going to take advantage of the situation not only to heal the man’s son but to bring him and his family to faith. This is a different miracle than Jesus’ healing of the centurion’s servant at a distance (Mt 8:5-13; Lk 7:1-10), which we get each year on the first Monday of Advent and the 24th Monday in Ordinary Time. While both the royal official and the centurion were from Capernaum, the royal official met Jesus in Cana, while the centurion met him in Capernaum. Jesus challenged the royal official’s faith; he praised the centurion’s for being greater than all the faith he had found in Israel. The royal official begged Jesus to come to his home; the centurion said he wasn’t worthy to receive Jesus under his roof. The royal official was likely Jewish; the Centurion was definitely pagan. Not only were the men different, but the lessons Jesus drew were different. In the centurion’s case, it was to reward and underline the beauty and power of his faith. In the royal official’s circumstances, it was to provoke faith in him and others. When the royal official asked him “to come down and heal his son,” to make the long journey with him and touch his son to cure him like he had heard Jesus had done to many others in Capernaum and elsewhere, Jesus responded, “Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.” Seeing would be believing for him. Sight preceded. Jesus wanted to teach him how to walk by faith, full of hope, trusting in his love. Jesus would say after the resurrection to doubting Thomas, “You have believed because you have seen me. Blessed are those who have not seen but believed.” Jesus wanted to bring this royal official to real faith, not only in Jesus as a person but in what he said. The royal official, however, wasn’t interested in the larger points about seeing and believing at that point but was full of impatient anxiety for the cure of his son. He pleaded with Jesus, “Sir, come down before my son dies!” That’s when Jesus said to him, “You may go. Your son will live.” It was a supreme test of faith, whether he would believe in Jesus enough to hope in his word. It would have been tempting to think Jesus may have been blowing him off, that he didn’t want to be bothered with the journey. But Jesus must have said it in a way that inspired confidence. St. John tells us, “The man believed what Jesus said to him and left.” And we know that along the at least seven-hour journey back, the royal official was intercepted by his servants who told him that his son had gotten better. The official could have simply rejoiced as if it were a coincidence, but he asked at what time his son was cured, to verify what his faith had told him, and he was told that it happened at the very hour when Jesus had said his son would live. St. John concludes by saying, “He and his whole household came to believe.” He helped his family grow to faith that it was precisely Jesus’ healing word that worked the miracle.
During this Jubilee Year, in fact during the entirety of our Christian life, Jesus wants us to walk by faith, filled with hope, trusting in her merciful love for us and for all those we care about. The pilgrim Church on earth is called always to “pilgrims of hope,” trusting that Jesus wants all of us to live. As St. Paul himself was being led in chains here to Rome, he was nevertheless always a pilgrim of hope because he was consciously making that journey with Christ our hope. That’s the journey we deepen at every Mass, because by Christ’s design, the trek of the pilgrim church on earth is a Eucharistic procession, as Christ Jesus seeks to accompany us from within each day as we seek, together with others, to follow him to the Father’s house where he’s gone to prepare a place for us. Today we come to Mass to meet the same Jesus who met St. Paul outside the gates of Damascus, the same Jesus whom the royal official met in Cana, and Jesus wants to do in us an even greater miracle than he did for this man’s son. We haven’t journeyed for 20 miles on foot — though taking the 23 bus, or the Roman metro to get here has its own challenges! — but nevertheless we have all journeyed on pilgrimage to get here. Jesus wants to give himself to us on the inside so that, as pilgrims of hope, as recipients and ambassadors of his mercy, we can do in our own day in the United States and beyond what the Doctor of the Gentiles did in his own day across the ancient world and here in this city, and lead people on a journey of faith and hope to the new heavens and the new earth, and to the joyful fulfillment of all God’s promises.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
IS 65:17-21
Thus says the LORD:
Lo, I am about to create new heavens
and a new earth;
The things of the past shall not be remembered
or come to mind.
Instead, there shall always be rejoicing and happiness
in what I create;
For I create Jerusalem to be a joy
and its people to be a delight;
I will rejoice in Jerusalem
and exult in my people.
No longer shall the sound of weeping be heard there,
or the sound of crying;
No longer shall there be in it
an infant who lives but a few days,
or an old man who does not round out his full lifetime;
He dies a mere youth who reaches but a hundred years,
and he who fails of a hundred shall be thought accursed.
They shall live in the houses they build,
and eat the fruit of the vineyards they plant.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 30:2 AND 4, 5-6, 11-12A AND 13B
R. (2a) I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.
I will extol you, O LORD, for you drew me clear
and did not let my enemies rejoice over me.
O LORD, you brought me up from the nether world;
you preserved me from among those going down into the pit.
R. I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.
Sing praise to the LORD, you his faithful ones,
and give thanks to his holy name.
For his anger lasts but a moment;
a lifetime, his good will.
At nightfall, weeping enters in,
but with the dawn, rejoicing.
R. I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.
“Hear, O LORD, and have pity on me;
O LORD, be my helper.”
You changed my mourning into dancing;
O LORD, my God, forever will I give you thanks.
R. I will praise you, Lord, for you have rescued me.
Gospel
JN 4:43-54
At that time Jesus left [Samaria] for Galilee.
For Jesus himself testified
that a prophet has no honor in his native place.
When he came into Galilee, the Galileans welcomed him,
since they had seen all he had done in Jerusalem at the feast;
for they themselves had gone to the feast.
Then he returned to Cana in Galilee,
where he had made the water wine.
Now there was a royal official whose son was ill in Capernaum.
When he heard that Jesus had arrived in Galilee from Judea,
he went to him and asked him to come down
and heal his son, who was near death.
Jesus said to him,
“Unless you people see signs and wonders, you will not believe.”
The royal official said to him,
“Sir, come down before my child dies.”
Jesus said to him, “You may go; your son will live.”
The man believed what Jesus said to him and left.
While the man was on his way back,
his slaves met him and told him that his boy would live.
He asked them when he began to recover.
They told him,
“The fever left him yesterday, about one in the afternoon.”
The father realized that just at that time Jesus had said to him,
“Your son will live,”
and he and his whole household came to believe.
Now this was the second sign Jesus did
when he came to Galilee from Judea.
The post Missionaries of Mercy and Hope, Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent, March 31, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min
March 25, 2025 The Jubilee of Hope and the Missions, TPMS Midwest Regional Meeting, March 24, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The Pontifical Mission Societies Midwest Regional Meeting
Saint Louis, Missouri
March 24, 2025

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3.24.25 Midwest Region Keynote
The post The Jubilee of Hope and the Missions, TPMS Midwest Regional Meeting, March 24, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
1 hr 11 min
March 25, 2025 Living with and Proclaiming the Word Made Flesh, Solemnity of the Annunciation, March 25, 2025
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Basilica of St. Louis, King of France (Old Cathedral), St. Louis, Missouri
TPMS Midwest Regional Meeting
Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord
March 25, 2025
Is 7:10-14.8:10, Ps 40, Heb 10:4-10, Lk 1:26-38

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
It is such a joy for all of us, from the Pontifical Mission Societies nationally and throughout the Midwest, to be here in this historic Basilica, the first Cathedral west of the Mississippi, the launching pad and sacred respite for some of the greatest missionaries in the Catholic history of our country, like the great Father Pierre de Smet among the native Americans. We are so grateful to Saint Louis Archbishop Mitchell Rozanski, a very active member of TPMS’ board, for welcoming us here to this Basilica and celebrating Mass for us. We thank Bishop Mark Rivituso for his solicitude and supervision of the missionary work of the Archdiocese of St. Louis for his presence today. We likewise thank Father Nick Smith, rector of this Basilica, for his tour before Mass and for rolling out the red carpet for us on this great feast. As all three of them all know, this present fourth Church on this property was built with the help of funds solicited by Bishop Joseph Rosati, a priest of the Congregation of the Mission, from the Society of the Propagation of the Faith in France, founded only 12 years earlier. The construction was likewise helped by the former prefect of the Congregation of the Propagation of the Faith in Rome, Cardinal Bartolomeo Cappellari, who became Pope Gregory XVI (1831-1846). So this Church was is deeply embedded in the history of the Society of the Propagation of the faith.
As we entered this beautiful Basilica today, we were greeted on the façade by three marble inscriptions from the Book of Revelation, one in Latin, another in French and a third in Latin. “Behold the tabernacle of God with men, and He will dwell with them” (Rev 21:3). That inscription orients our celebration today of the most important event in the history of the universe, when at the Incarnation, God entered his creation, taking on our humanity. As Saint John would write in the Prologue to his Gospel, literally, “The Word became flesh and tabernacled himself among us.” The definitive place of God with the human race is Jesus Christ, Emmanuel, God-with-us. Jesus’ humanity was the sacrament of the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity. He tabernacled himself in our human nature within the womb of the Blessed Virgin. He tabernacles himself among us still in this Church under the even humbler appearances of bread and wine. He desires to tabernacle himself among each of us in Holy Communion, as he dwells not just with us but within us. These are all mind-blowing mysteries to which human words will never do justice.
The Solemnity of the Annunciation contains great lessons for us as baptized missionary disciples in communion entrusted by the Church with fostering the zealous continuation of Jesus’ mission bringing him, his words, and his invitation to a life of communion with him and with us to the ends of the earth. These are the three great lessons contained in the prayer of the Angelus, which the Church prays each day to actualize the mystery of the Incarnation we solemnly celebrate today. We saw earlier in the Basilica’s museum the bell cast in 1772 that for centuries, among other purposes, would ring three times a day, at 6 am, noon and 6 pm — in three groups of three before a steady peal — calling us not just to pray but to remember the incarnation of the Lord and what our response to it must be. Each of the three versicles of the Angelus contains a great lesson for us in our Christian faith, life and life-long mission.
Angelus Domini annuntiavit Mariae. “The Angel of the Lord declared unto Mary.” St. Luke begins today’s Gospel saying, “The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, ‘Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.’” The Angel Gabriel was a great missionary from the Lord himself. Angelus, in Latin, means “messenger.” He brought the good news. The words he delivered were not just a greeting by and world changing message of joy, “Kaire, kecharitomene, ho Kurios meta sou.” in Greek: “Rejoice, you who have been filled with grace. The Lord is with you.” While there will obviously only ever be one immaculately conceived Blessed Virgin filled with grace from the first moment of her one-celled existence in St. Anne’s womb, the Church in every age is called to bring a similar sweet proclamation to the world, “Rejoice!,” and to tell the world why: first because every creature is called to be “filled with grace” through baptism and the sacramental and moral life; and second, because the Lord is truly with them. God has entered the world. He is not a figure from the distant past but still very much with us, desiring to walk at our side, desiring to dwell within. Every missionary is a spiritual descendant of the Arch-missionary Gabriel sent out to remind specific persons in specific places that they are not anonymous random biological happenings but willed by God, called by God, and commissioned by God, to be filled with him him and filled with his life. What a joy it is to be able to be like Gabriel to the people of our age.
Ecce Ancilla Domini. Fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. Let it be done to be according to your word.” The second versicle of the Angelus involves Mary’s response to God’s proclamation through Gabriel, something that is meant to guide every human response. As we see in today’s Gospel, Mary was at first overwhelmed by the Archangel’s words, wondering what they might mean. Gabriel explained to her that she had found great favor with God and that she would become not only the mother of the long-awaited Messiah, the son of David, but also, the mother of the eternal Son of the Most High God whose kingdom would know no end. That would have confused her even more. The question she asked about how that would take place, “How can this be since I have no relations with a man?,” is a sign not of naïve stupidity about the birds and bees but an indication of a promise of consecrated virginity, since if she were intending ever to have relations with St. Joseph, she would never have needed to ask how she’d become a mom. After the Archangel explained that it would happen through a miracle of the Holy Spirit’s overshadowing her, she believed, and said that she was placing herself at the Lord’s service to have her entire existence develop according to the Lord’s word and will.
This is the type of faith that each Christian is meant to show to our own having been chosen by God to be his follower and missionary. What happened in us at our Baptism was truly miraculous. God came to fill us, to help us to enter into Jesus’ death and resurrection, to live a truly new life, as a member of his Mystical Body, with a mission to continue his saving work. Each of us, having been filled with this grace, having been overshadowed by the Holy Spirit in baptism and confirmation and what St. Paul calls life according to the Spirit, is called humbly to say that we are the servants of the Lord and our great desire is not to do our will but his, to let our life flourish not according to our own wits but his divine word and will. And that’s likewise the response we seek when we announce God’s great plans and hopes for others. Not everyone, we know, will respond as promptly and as wholeheartedly as our Lady, but it’s amazing that some, even many, will. They will embrace their summons to a new life with Christ with incredible joy, profound conversion, and great zeal to have everyone else come to know, love and serve Christ with them. And the more we get outside of ourselves to share the treasure of our faith with others, the more we will see and share the joy of seeing lives dramatically changed by Christ for the better.
Et verbum caro factum est. Et habitavit in nobis. “And the Word became flesh and tabernacled himself among us.” The final versicle of the Angelus points to the principal mystery we mark today, the incarnation of the Lord. The Lord willed to assume our human nature, wondrously to unite it to his divine Person, to take it somehow into the mystery of the Blessed Trinity. In having created us in his image and likeness, God foresaw from all eternity, as St. Paul ponders in his Letter to the Ephesians, that he himself would manifest the fullness of that humanity, that image and likeness, through making us partakers of his divinity. The eternal Logos, the Word through whom all things were made, became one of us, he had a human face, human hands, human muscles and bones, a human heart beating with human blood, everything that it means to be human, except the privations of human nature that flow personal sin. He did this to dwell among us, literally to tabernacle himself within us. This points to the reality of Holy Communion. The summit of salvation history is not the incarnation we celebrate today. It’s not even his passion, death, resurrection and ascension. It’s actually the mystery of the Holy Eucharist, which he prepared since the Tree of Life at the beginning of the creation, by which what happened in Mary can by analogy be perpetuated in us. He wants to dwell within us, to make us his habitat us among the human race, to abide in us and have us abide in him.
This is key for us to grasp in our Mission work. It’s key for the whole Church to understand. We are sent out not just to proclaim the Gospel, understood as the saving words of God. We’re sent out to proclaim the Word made Flesh, that God-with-us is still with us, that the same God whom the angels adored in Mary’s womb, whom she brought to Elizabeth and John the Baptist, to whom the shepherds and the wise men journeyed to pay homage, is with us in our churches. He just looks different. And he wants under those humble sacramental appearances to dwell within each of us in a holy Communion, an embrace, that is meant to last forever. And so the Church’s mission work is ultimately to bring Christ to people, not just his saving message and teachings. It’s to build Churches, not understood as buildings but as missionary-disciples-in-communion, since the ultimate impact of our receiving Holy Communion, our cooperation with the Holy Spirit’s overshadowing of the altar, of the Archbishop and priests, and of us, is to make us, as we pray in Eucharistic Prayer III, “one body, one spirit in Christ.” As our Holy Father powerfully told us in his exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, the kerygma, the essential proclamation of our faith, is not a recapitulation of Jesus’ past deeds. It’s that the incarnation and paschal mystery are not past events at all, but a living, present realities we access by the Holy Spirit’s power in the Church. To use Pope Francis’ own words, our basic missionary message involves reminding people of “the personal love of God who became man, who gave himself up for us, who is living and who offers us his salvation and his friendship” (EG 128). Or to put the kerygma even more powerfully in the grammatical second person rather than the third, “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you” (EG 164). How privileged we are to share that fact with the world, especially with a people walking in darkness who long, sometimes without knowing it, to see the Light of the World.
In a minute, on this great solemnity in this most sacred place where we “behold the tabernacle of God with men,” we will pray together our Profession of Faith, rejoicing it the 1700th anniversary of the Nicene Creed. When we pray the awesome words that point to today’s feast, “For us men and for our salvation, he came down from heaven, and by the Holy Spirit was incarnate of the Virgin Mary and became man,” we will kneel together, as we do on Christmas, in prayerful, grateful, recognition of human history’s most pivotal moment. But that kneeling is linked to the way we will drop to our knees before the consecration at the altar, as Jesus himself takes on the role of Gabriel and announces to us the greatest and most joyful words human ears will ever hear, “This is my Body … given for you,” “This is the chalice of my Blood, … poured out for you,” “Take and eat,” “Take and drink.” This is the means by which he extends what happened in Nazareth within the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary to St. Louis and what he wants to happen within our bodies and souls, making us his dwelling place among the human race. As we prepare, in imitation of our Lady, helped by the Holy Spirit, to echo her fiat by our amen, we beg through her intercession, that our whole life may develop in accordance with the Word-made-flesh, the blessed Fruit of her womb, and like her may become living commentaries of the words of consecration as we give our body, our blood, our time and our whole life in memory of Jesus, as the Gabriels our age needs.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Isaiah 7:10-14; 8:10
The LORD spoke to Ahaz, saying:
Ask for a sign from the LORD, your God;
let it be deep as the nether world, or high as the sky!
But Ahaz answered,
“I will not ask! I will not tempt the LORD!”
Then Isaiah said:
Listen, O house of David!
Is it not enough for you to weary people,
must you also weary my God?
Therefore the Lord himself will give you this sign:
the virgin shall be with child, and bear a son,
and shall name him Emmanuel,
which means “God is with us!”
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 40:7-8a, 8b-9, 10, 11
R.   (8a and 9a) Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
Sacrifice or oblation you wished not,
but ears open to obedience you gave me.
Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not;
then said I, “Behold I come.”
R.   Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
“In the written scroll it is prescribed for me,
To do your will, O my God, is my delight,
and your law is within my heart!”
R.   Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
I announced your justice in the vast assembly;
I did not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know.
R.   Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
Your justice I kept not hid within my heart;
your faithfulness and your salvation I have spoken of;
I have made no secret of your kindness and your truth
in the vast assembly.
R.   Here I am, Lord; I come to do your will.
Reading 2
Hebrews 10:4-10
Brothers and sisters:
It is impossible that the blood of bulls and goats
take away sins.
For this reason, when Christ came into the world, he said:
“Sacrifice and offering you did not desire,
but a body you prepared for me;
in holocausts and sin offerings you took no delight.
Then I said, ‘As is written of me in the scroll,
behold, I come to do your will, O God.’”
First he says, “Sacrifices and offerings,
holocausts and sin offerings,
you neither desired nor delighted in.”
These are offered according to the law.
Then he says, “Behold, I come to do your will.”
He takes away the first to establish the second.
By this “will,” we have been consecrated
through the offering of the Body of Jesus Christ once for all.
Verse Before the Gospel
John 1:14ab
The Word of God became flesh and made his dwelling among us;
and we saw his glory.
Gospel
Luke 1:26-38
The angel Gabriel was sent from God
to a town of Galilee called Nazareth,
to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph,
of the house of David,
and the virgin’s name was Mary.
And coming to her, he said,
“Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.”
But she was greatly troubled at what was said
and pondered what sort of greeting this might be.
Then the angel said to her,
“Do not be afraid, Mary,
for you have found favor with God.
Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son,
and you shall name him Jesus.
He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High,
and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father,
and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever,
and of his Kingdom there will be no end.”
But Mary said to the angel,
“How can this be,
since I have no relations with a man?”
And the angel said to her in reply,
“The Holy Spirit will come upon you,
and the power of the Most High will overshadow you.
Therefore the child to be born
will be called holy, the Son of God.
And behold, Elizabeth, your relative,
has also conceived a son in her old age,
and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren;
for nothing will be impossible for God.”
Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord.
May it be done to me according to your word.”
Then the angel departed from her.
The post Living with and Proclaiming the Word Made Flesh, Solemnity of the Annunciation, March 25, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
March 23, 2025The Urgency of Bearing Fruit From Being With God In the World, Third Sunday of Lent (C), March 23, 2025
Msgr. Roger Landry
Murray Hill Conference Center, New York City
Retreat for Women on “The Reason for Our Hope”
Third Sunday of Lent, Year C
March 23, 2025
Ex 3:1-8.13-15, Ps 103, 1 Cor 10:1-6.10-12, Lk 13:1-9

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
As we conclude our retreat on the Reason for our Hope in this Jubilee of Hope, the readings the Church gives us today help us to consolidate the fruit of this retreat and begin to make some important resolutions about the conversion to hope and the fruit of hope that the Lord desires of us. Hope is, as we’ve been underlining, living with God in the world, and in the first reading from the Book of Exodus we see that living God encounter Moses on Mount Sinai and reveal himself under two names. The first is “I Am Who Am,” or Yahweh in Hebrew: he’s not only with us in the world but he is the source of all existence. The second name is “the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.” He’s a God who enters into personal relationship with us. He’s not just the Creator of the Universe but of the God of individuals, of families. He’s the God of Moses and the Prophets, the God of Mary and Joseph, of the apostles, of Mary, Martha and Lazarus, of generations of saints, of our grandparents and parents, of Father Joe and Roger, of Monica, Katie and Angie and more. This gives us great hope that he cares about us personally and that he’s meant to be known not just as the God of everyone, but my God. In the Psalm we have another reason for hope: the Lord is ever merciful, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, he pardons our iniquities, heals our ills, secures justice and the rights of the oppressed, redeems our life from destruction and crowns us with kindness and compassion. That’s the God who holds us in existence and wants to enter into personal friendship with us. St. Paul, in the second reading, reminds us of how God wants to convert everything, not just the good, but even sins, as lessons for us to learn from; we can relive what the Israelites experienced in the desert, what some got right and some got wrong, and convert both into a source of hope and humility so that we can get it right now. Finally in the Gospel Jesus gives a forceful call to repentance so that we might not perish as those who suffered as a result of a massacre by Pilate or because of the freak accident of a falling tower, so that we will be ready at every moment not to perish unawares but to ready for the Lord, awaiting him with hope and urgency. This is the prism with which at the end of our retreat we can ponder God’s word to us today. The upshot of the readings is not to defer on acting in accordance with hope but to do so right away.
Two and a half weeks ago, as Lent began, we were marked with ashes, reminded that we are dust and unto dust we shall return upon our death and instructed to repent and believe in the Gospel. We listened with fresh ears to St. Paul’s appeal as an ambassador of Christ calling us to be “reconciled to God” and enjoining us not to procrastinate, saying, “Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation.” Lent is a period in which, together with the whole Church, as we ponder how merciful and gracious God is, and resolve to allow him to fill us with his merciful love, press the reset button on our life, bring our soul back to its baptismal splendor and make all of heaven rejoice that we who were wayward and lost have been found, and we who were dead through sin have the chance to experience resurrection through reconciliation. Today’s readings are meant to shock us out of complacency — almost as defibrillator paddles for our souls — and get us to examine honestly before the Lord whether we have been responding to his kindness and mercy as he desires us to do or whether we have been taking these 40 days and perhaps our whole Christian life and calling, in vain.
In today’s Gospel, Jesus speaks to us what are in my opinion his most forceful words of conversion that we hear in the 156-week cycle of the Church’s Sunday liturgical readings. He begins with two tragedies that had captured the attention of the crowds in previous days. Someone asked his opinion about massacre of Galileans by Pontius Pilate in the Temple whose blood had been mixed with the blood of the sacrifices that day. Those pilgrims from Galilee had made the long journey from Galilee to the Temple in Jerusalem to pray, but they had gotten caught up in a crowd where some rabble-rousers were protesting Pilate’s decision to raid the Temple coffers for funds to build a new water system. When Pilate sent his troops into the temple area to put down the protestors, the soldiers met resistance, unsheathed their swords and massacred not only the protestors but the Galilean bystanders. There was a superstition at the time that if people died in such a way, it had to be a sign that God was punishing them for some serious sins they had committed, as if they somehow “deserved it.” Jesus asks, “Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way, they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?” “No way!,” he said. Then he brought up another example of people who were bathing underneath the water tower at the pool of Siloam in Jerusalem, which they believed had miraculous powers to cure them of bodily illnesses. The shoddily constructed tower collapsed one day and crushed to death some of those bathing. Jesus asked whether they thought the 18 people who died were “more guilty than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem!” “By no means!,” he said again. And he made a crucial moral point in response to both tragedies: “I tell you, if you do not repent, you will all perish as they did!” He didn’t mean that we would all die by being in the wrong place at the wrong time as a victim of some terrible accident, like a falling crane, an unusual tornado, or an inexplicable drive-by shooting in a safe neighborhood. What Jesus meant was that unless we repent, we will die as unready as the people from Galilee in the Temple or those underneath the Siloam water tower. The only way we’ll be ready to die well, to die ready to pass to life, will be if we repent and believe in the Gospel, if we recognize our need for God’s mercy, come to receive it, and then begin to live in full accordance with that gift. The only way we’ll truly be ready is when we’re living in accordance with the great hope and orienting our whole life to seeking to live with great I AM in the midst of the world.
Jesus gives the parable of the fruitless fig tree to drive home the point of the pressing need for us to respond to his offer of mercy. The fig tree represents human life. The owner represents God the Father. The gardener represents Jesus. The owner came looking for fruit on the fig tree and, finding none, said to the gardener, “For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree but have found none. So cut it down. Why should it exhaust the soil?” The point, harsh as it may initially seem to our modern ears, is clear: some people sadly are wasting their lives, not bearing any fruit whatsoever; some people receive all types of gifts from the soil but give nothing back. Those people, Jesus seems to indicate, are “squandering the soil.” Such people merit, according to the parable, to be cut down — not as a punishment, but because, to some degree, they’re already dead. If a Christian is not bearing fruit, if he’s not thinking like Christ, living like Christ, loving like Christ, forgiving like Christ, he’s spiritually dead. If a Christian is living like everyone else, compromising with sin, identifying more with the standards of the world than the standards of the Gospel and Christ’s kingdom, then she’s spiritually deceased.
But thanks be to God, that’s not the end of the story. The parable has often been called the Parable of the Second Chance and that’s what we see. The gardener in the parable, representing Jesus, makes an extraordinary intervention. Fig trees normally take three years to mature and if they’re not bearing fruit by the end of the third year, they’re likely never going to do so. And yet the gardener beseeches the orchard owner, “Sir, leave it for this year also, and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it; it may bear fruit in the future. If not you can cut it down.” He asks for an opportunity to try, essentially, to raise the fig tree from the dead, to help something that has not yet borne fruit and probably never will to be given every last chance to do so. And this is a lesson for our life. If we’re not bearing fruit in our Christian lives after the years that God has given us — if we’re not growing in hope, in faith, in love, if we’re not bearing fruit in acts of loving adoration, thanksgiving, prayer and service of others, if we’re not living our faith and passionately sharing it, if we’re not responding to God’s gift of mercy, coming to receive it, being merciful toward others and bringing others to receive it — then we’re like a barren fig tree, wasting our life, wasting God’s graces just like the fig tree was exhausting the soil. But Christ asks for more time for our life, fertilizing the soil of our hearts with his blood, offering us once again his mercy, his healing, his help, his grace. Jesus goes the extra mile so that our life, if it’s spiritually barren, may have every possible chance. That’s what he does each Lent he gives us. That’s why each Lent is such a season of hope. But we should never pretend as if we’re guaranteed another Lent.
Jesus in the Parable makes it clear that there will come a time when there will be no time left. There’s a time when after that fertilization, if no fruit is being borne, the tree will be cut down. And that time, as the pilgrims from Galilee and the bathers at the pool of Siloam found out, may come suddenly, when we least expect it. That ought to leave us with a sense of urgency. The devil’s greatest temptation, according to the brilliant 20th century British writer C.S. Lewis, is not to convince us that God doesn’t exist — because most of us have too much commonsense to realize that if our watch couldn’t put itself together on its own then there would be no way to explain the existence and order of the world or even the wonder of the human person unless there were a “divine Watchmaker,” a God who ordered us and the whole world. No, the devil’s greatest temptation, as Lewis wrote in his great work The Screwtape Letters, is to convince us that … there’s … always … time. He gets us to buy the lie that we don’t have to convert today. He hoodwinks us to believe that we’ll have plenty of time to convert when we’re 80, or 90, or on our deathbed. That we don’t have to say sorry to someone we’ve hurt today, because we’ll get to it the next time we’ll see them. That we don’t have to say to a family member that we love them, because there’s absolutely no chance that their or our life will end before we have the chance for that conversation. The father of lies is constantly trying to tempt us to put off to tomorrow the repentance, the faith, the charity, that needs to be lived today. He gets us to defer acting on the hope by which God wants us to live. Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth and the Life, wants us to grasp that now — not tomorrow, or next year, or 10, 30 or 60 years down the road — is the time. Now is the day of salvation. Now is the time of mercy. Now is the time for our response in faith. Now is the time for us to bear fruit.
St. Paul today intensifies this wake-up call if we’re being tempted to ignore or delay Jesus’ merciful and pressing appeal to repent and believe. He describes all of the blessings the Israelites received in the desert after God had called Moses from the burning bush and sent him to Pharaoh to liberate the Israelites from slavery, after God through Moses had worked ten miracles to get Pharaoh finally to let them return home, after God worked so many more miracles for them in the desert. “I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters,” St. Paul tells us, “that our ancestors were all under the cloud and all passed through the sea. … All ate the same spiritual food, and all drank the same spiritual drink, for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them.” After so many manifestations of God’s mercy and salvation, we would think that they would have all been saints. But St. Paul comments: “Yet God was not pleased with most of them, for they were struck down in the desert.” And he adds, “These things happened as examples for us…, as a warning to us,” namely, that “whoever thinks he is standing secure should take care not to fall.” If any of us thinks we’re standing secure, that we’re not being called to make this Lent the best Lent of our life, that we really don’t need this time of urgent and radical conversion, we need to beware lest we fall … and fall all the way to the netherworld. The truth is that we’ve received far greater blessings in our life than the Israelites ever did in the desert, because we’ve received the fulfillment of what all the miracles they experienced foretold. All of us have passed through the Red Sea of baptism. All of us have received the protection of the cloud via manifold interior graces. All of us have eaten of something far greater than manna, the Body of Christ, the true Bread from Heaven (cf. Jn 6:32). All of us have literally drunk Christ’s blood, the Living Water that flows up to life eternal (cf. John 4), the blood poured out for the forgiveness of sins. But all these divine gifts, like the blessings received by the Israelites, will not save us unless we correspond with them, unless we bear fruit as a result of them, unless Jesus’ giving of his body and blood for us transforms us and makes us willing to give our body and blood for him and others.
Lent 2025 is a gift of extra time from the Lord so that we might become the type of tree that will bear much fruit, not out of fear of judgment, not so that we won’t be cut down, but out of love for God who is kind and merciful, who loves us and has given us so many graces so that we will bear fruit. There are two essential things we need to do, Jesus tells us elsewhere in the Gospel. First, we need to examine our soil, to make sure it’s the “good soil” Jesus describes in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, and not the hardened stubborn soil by the way side that doesn’t allow God’s word to change them, not the rocky, superficial soil that only focuses on likes and dislikes and doesn’t allow God’s word to go deep, not the thorny soil choked by worldly anxieties and pleasures that cares too much about the things of this world and not enough about the things of God. Good soil, Jesus says, bears fruit, and not just some fruit, but 30, 60 or 100 fold fruit. To have this good soil begins with our listening so attentively to God’s word that we’ll allow it to change us in 30, 60 or 100 ways, and it often involves our recognizing and battling against all those tendencies that tempt us to receive God’s word, God’s invitation to mercy, on hardened, or rocky or thorny soil. The second condition for bearing fruit, Jesus told us during the Last Supper, is to remain attached to him, to draw our whole life from him. In the image of the Vine and the Branches, he tells us, “Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains on the vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine, you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit.” And we remain in Christ, and he remains in us, through prayer, through the Sacraments, and through the Christian moral life. This Sunday is an occasion for us to recommit ourselves to putting God first in our life and prioritizing these means so that we will never be a barren fig tree, but a branch on the vine of Christ that bears abundant fruit in every season.
As we approach Christ that Vine in the Holy Eucharist, as we draw near him who is the incarnation of the God who said to Moses in today’s first reading “I am who am,” we thank Him for all his blessings — for our baptism, for the privilege to receive his body and blood, for the availability of his life-changing forgiveness in Confession, for his great hope in us — but especially for giving us more time this Lent to bear the type of fruit that he expects and that we, deeply, in the depth of our heart want to bear. The most fruitful tree that has ever existed was the Tree of the Cross, the new Tree of Life, and it’s here in Mass that we become truly united as branches on the Vine with Christ on the Cross so that together with him we will indeed bear much fruit. In the Mass, from the Cross, Jesus is fertilizing the soil of our souls so that we will bear abundant fruit, fruit that will last, fruit that will bring us to salvation and by God’s mercy save others too. Jesus tells us that if we do not repent, we will all perish suddenly without being ready. But if we do repent, if we do respond to his mercy, if we heed his warning and the warning of St. Paul in the second reading, then we will experience what we prayed in today’s psalm, that the Lord redeems our life from destruction, crowns us with eternal kindness and compassion, and will bring us to the fulfillment of our great hope, to him and to that place, with Mary and the saints, where our soul and all our being will bless God’s holy name forever! The great I am, the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, is indeed with us, calling us to a new life and helping us to achieve it. This is our faith. This is our hope. This is what this retreat has been all about. Let’s ask Christ the Vine to help us stay ever united with him in the world, so that we might bear abundant fruit and thereby always be able to give to the world a resplendent and compelling explanation of the reason of the hope we Christians bear! Amen!

The readings for this Mass were:
Reading I
Exodus 3:1-8a, 13-15
Moses was tending the flock of his father-in-law Jethro,
the priest of Midian.
Leading the flock across the desert, he came to Horeb,
the mountain of God.
There an angel of the LORD appeared to Moses in fire
flaming out of a bush.
As he looked on, he was surprised to see that the bush,
though on fire, was not consumed.
So Moses decided,
“I must go over to look at this remarkable sight,
and see why the bush is not burned.”
When the LORD saw him coming over to look at it more closely,
God called out to him from the bush, “Moses! Moses!”
He answered, “Here I am.”
God said, “Come no nearer!
Remove the sandals from your feet,
for the place where you stand is holy ground.
I am the God of your fathers, “ he continued,
“the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob.”
Moses hid his face, for he was afraid to look at God.
But the LORD said,
“I have witnessed the affliction of my people in Egypt
and have heard their cry of complaint against their slave drivers,
so I know well what they are suffering.
Therefore I have come down to rescue them
from the hands of the Egyptians
and lead them out of that land into a good and spacious land,
a land flowing with milk and honey.”
Moses said to God, “But when I go to the Israelites
and say to them, ‘The God of your fathers has sent me to you,’
if they ask me, ‘What is his name?’ what am I to tell them?”
God replied, “I am who am.”
Then he added, “This is what you shall tell the Israelites:
I AM sent me to you.”
God spoke further to Moses, “Thus shall you say to the Israelites:
The LORD, the God of your fathers,
the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, the God of Jacob,
has sent me to you.
“This is my name forever;
thus am I to be remembered through all generations.”
Responsorial Psalm
Psalm 103: 1-2, 3-4, 6-7, 8, 11.
R. (8a) The Lord is kind and merciful.
Bless the LORD, O my soul;
and all my being, bless his holy name.
Bless the LORD, O my soul,
and forget not all his benefits.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful.
He pardons all your iniquities,
heals all your ills,
He redeems your life from destruction,
crowns you with kindness and compassion.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful.
The LORD secures justice
and the rights of all the oppressed.
He has made known his ways to Moses,
and his deeds to the children of Israel.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful.
Merciful and gracious is the LORD,
slow to anger and abounding in kindness.
For as the heavens are high above the earth,
so surpassing is his kindness toward those who fear him.
R. The Lord is kind and merciful.
Reading II
1 Corinthians 10:1-6, 10-12
I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters,
that our ancestors were all under the cloud
and all passed through the sea,
and all of them were baptized into Moses
in the cloud and in the sea.
All ate the same spiritual food,
and all drank the same spiritual drink,
for they drank from a spiritual rock that followed them,
and the rock was the Christ.
Yet God was not pleased with most of them,
for they were struck down in the desert.
These things happened as examples for us,
so that we might not desire evil things, as they did.
Do not grumble as some of them did,
and suffered death by the destroyer.
These things happened to them as an example,
and they have been written down as a warning to us,
upon whom the end of the ages has come.
Therefore, whoever thinks he is standing secure
should take care not to fall.
Verse Before the Gospel
Matthew 4:17
Repent, says the Lord;
the kingdom of heaven is at hand.
Gospel
Luke 13:1-9
Some people told Jesus about the Galileans
whose blood Pilate had mingled with the blood of their sacrifices.
Jesus said to them in reply,
“Do you think that because these Galileans suffered in this way
they were greater sinners than all other Galileans?
By no means!
But I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!
Or those eighteen people who were killed
when the tower at Siloam fell on them—
do you think they were more guilty
than everyone else who lived in Jerusalem?
By no means!
But I tell you, if you do not repent,
you will all perish as they did!”
And he told them this parable:
“There once was a person who had a fig tree planted in his orchard,
and when he came in search of fruit on it but found none,
he said to the gardener,
‘For three years now I have come in search of fruit on this fig tree
but have found none.
So cut it down.
Why should it exhaust the soil?’
He said to him in reply,
‘Sir, leave it for this year also,
and I shall cultivate the ground around it and fertilize it;
it may bear fruit in the future.
If not you can cut it down.’”
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28 min
March 23, 2025 Growing in Hope through Suffering, A Lenten Retreat for Women, March 23, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry and Fr. Joseph Keefe
Retreat for Women of the Leonine Forum
Murray Hill Conference and Retreat Center, Manhattan
March 23, 2025
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36 min
March 23, 2025 Growing in Hope Through Stoking Our Desire for the Great Hope, A Lenten Retreat for Women, March 22, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Retreat for Women of the Leonine Forum
Murray Hill Conference and Retreat Center, Manhattan
March 22, 2025

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34 min
March 22, 2025 Growing in Hope through the Essential School of Hope That Is Prayer, A Lenten Retreat for Women, March 22, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Retreat for Women of the Leonine Forum
Murray Hill Conference and Retreat Center, Manhattan
March 22, 2025
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36 min
March 22, 2025 Growing in Hope Through the Eucharist, A Lenten Retreat for Women, March 22, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Retreat for Women of the Leonine Forum
Murray Hill Conference and Retreat Center, Manhattan
March 22, 2025
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37 min
March 22, 2025 Hope As Living With God In The World, A Lenten Retreat for Women, March 21, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Retreat for Women of the Leonine Forum
Murray Hill Conference and Retreat Center, Manhattan
March 21, 2025
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38 min
March 21, 2025Rejection and the Good God Wants to Bring From It, Friday of the Second Week of Lent, March 21, 2025
Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Montserrat Jesuit Retreat Center, Lake Dallas, Texas
TPMS Southwest Regional Meeting
Friday of the Second Week of Lent
March 21, 2025
Gen 37:3-4.12-13.17-18, Ps 105, Mt 21:33-43.45-46

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The following text guided the homily:
Today, as we continue our reflections on the Mission of the Church and our Mission, we come face to face in the readings with one of the most difficult realities in the transmission of the faith, and, indeed, one of the most challenging experiences in human life: rejection. We ponder the rejection of the young patriarch Joseph by his family members and of Jesus by his creatures. It’s an occasion for us to ponder the times in our lives that we, too, in our life and missionary work, have been rejected. In response to the terrible rejections of Joseph and Jesus, however, the Responsorial Psalm surprisingly has us proclaim today, repeatedly, “Remember the marvels the Lord has done!” In the Gospel, Jesus, citing Psalm 118, says, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. By the Lord has this been done; it is wonderful in our eyes!” (Ps 118:22-23). The verse right after that is the Alleluia verse of the whole Easter octave, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad.” To prepare ourselves in Lent for Easter, we must enter more deeply into the experience of the rejection through examining its causes, especially envy, and how God not only seeks — marvelously! — to remedy those causes but to make the whole experience of rejection part of our salvation.
In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, we witness how Joseph’s brothers were envious of him because he was their father Jacob’s favorite. The fact that Jacob loved Joseph the most didn’t mean he didn’t love the other brothers, but their envy led them not only to close themselves to the love their father had for them but also to the love they should have had for their father and their brother. Their envy led them, as Genesis tells us, to “hate [Joseph] so much that they would not even greet him,” and that interior poison led them to do something much worse. When Joseph went out to help his brothers tend the flocks in Dothan, the brothers conspired to plan to murder him, toss his dead body into a cistern and then lie about it to their father by saying a wild beast had devoured him. They wanted to replicate Cain’s invidious murder of his brother Abel. To save Joseph’s life, one of the brothers, Reuben, persuaded the other siblings just to abandon Joseph into an empty cistern so that he might be able to rescue him later. And so they agreed and threw him down into an inescapable situation, with most of the brothers likely thinking that, while they themselves didn’t shed his blood, it would just be a longer dying process. But then they saw a group of Ishmaelites, basically their second cousins through their grandfather Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael, and sold him into slavery for 20 pieces of silver, not as an act of mercy but of simple profiteering from what they anticipated would be a situation tantamount to his death in Egypt. At every stage, their envy at Joseph’s good fortune led to evil. Their brotherly betrayal was a prophetic type of what would eventually happen to Jesus when he would be sold by one of his spiritual brothers, one of his closest friends, for silver, too.
Jesus describes that betrayal, and the envy that led to it, in today’s Gospel. Jesus spoke to the chief priests and the scribes in a parable about the way they had treated all the messengers God had sent them and how they were going to treat him. In the prophets Israel had often been referred to as a vineyard planted by God (Hos 10:1). God had made the Israelites stewards of that vineyard but expected a harvest when vintage time grew near. The prophets were the ones sent to remind them of that yield of good deeds, but, as Jesus said, “one they beat, another they killed and a third they stoned.” Other prophets were sent and maltreated the same way. Finally God sent his Son but, in prophetic tones that would be fulfilled in the cry of “Crucify Him!” in Pontius Pilate’s praetorium, they shouted out, “This is the heir. Come let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.” They wanted to be owners, not stewards, of what they had received and were prepared to commit murder in order to maintain their privileges. They wanted to be the ones in charge of the inheritance of faith, not God himself. The chief motivation behind the persecution of the prophets and the crucifixion of Jesus, Jesus implies in the image, was envy, envy that led to a hatred so severe that it resulted in homicide.
But we know that that’s not the end of either story. God’s mercy intervenes. God always seeks to bring good out of evil and in both cases God’s goodness triumphed over the worst of human wickedness. Joseph’s being sold for 20 pieces of silver, becoming a slave in Egypt and his ability to interpret dreams eventually brought him to the attention of Pharaoh and to the second position in the Kingdom, an office he was able to use not only to save millions of Egyptians lives during seven years of famine but also his family. Likewise, Jesus’ being sold for 30 pieces of silver, taking on the appearance of a slave in order to serve us all and enduring the worst of nightmares, led him to save not only millions of Egyptian lives and so many fellow Israelites but the entire human race, including those who had conspired to have him crucified. To use his own words, quoting the Psalms, “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” That is indeed a marvel in our eyes!
This theme of rejection and the good, even salvation, that God wants to bring from it is very important for us to understand and live the Christian life in general, and the missionary dimension of our existence in particular. Jesus, when he was sending out first the 12 and then the 72, prepared them for rejection. He said that there would be towns that would not accept them, that those who rejected them would reject him and the Father who sent him, but then he instructed them to dust the dirt of their town off the soles of their sandals and move on. He didn’t want them nursing their wounds, because that would obviously neutralize the Joy of the Gospel, but to go to the next town free of the experience, recognizing that one closed door would lead to their walking through a future opened one. Later, he told his first missionaries that for sharing the light of the world with others, they would be dragged before civil and religious leaders, betrayed even by family members, hated by all, and some put to death. But, he said, it would lead to their giving testimony, their having a particular pulpit by which to proclaim the faith in a way that would make it obvious to all that the truth was worth both living for and dying for. He gave the Parable of the Sower and the Seed to help missionaries of every age to recognize that even though the seed of the Word of God is indefectible, even when the sower sows perfectly, some soil still rejects the seed, too hardened to be penetrated, and many don’t bear fruit because of superficial subterranean rocky surfaces or through the nutrient-sucking thorns of worldly cares and anxieties. But he teaches us to sow all the same, because eventually the Word of God will reach souls with good and fruitful foil that will bear fruit 30, 60 or 100 fold. He was encouraging them that even though 29, 59 or 99 people reject, the next person can bear so much fruit from our missionary work that it makes everything worth it. These are super important realities for every missionary to remember. In our work as missionaries supporting missionaries, it’s also essential for us never to forget these realities. We will experience rejection, not just from likely sources like atheists and Satanists, but even from the good. Sometimes we’ll experience it from bishops and chancery officials, from pastors, from the Christian faithful, from potential or former benefactors, even from colleagues who have offices that are supposed to promote the Church’s mission work. We shouldn’t be too surprised when it happens, because it’s a constitutive part of the Christian life. But when it does, we should never forget the marvels the Lord has done, and with faith, and hope, and love for God and others, dust off the sandals and joyfully keep knocking at the next door, sowing the seed of the life-changing truth of the Gospel and the invitation to the friendship with the God-man who has come into the world so that we might have life and have it to the full. We should in those circumstances recall that “all things work out for the good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28) and build our life anew on Christ the Cornerstone.
As we prepare now to receive that “Stone rejected by the builders” in Holy Communion — the greatest marvel of all in our eyes and God’s — we ask him for the grace to build our entire life on Him, our most secure foundation. We beg him to draw good out of all the evil we’ve suffered, and the missionaries we support have suffered, on account of the envy of others. And we beseech him to help us never to succumb to that capital sin but rather to rejoice in all that he’s given us and given others. Rather than saying, “Come, let us kill him!,” and rejecting Jesus, instead we say now, filled with gratitude and awe, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!,” and embrace him with eternal love.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
GN 37:3-4, 12-13A, 17B-28A
Israel loved Joseph best of all his sons,
for he was the child of his old age;
and he had made him a long tunic.
When his brothers saw that their father loved him best of all his sons,
they hated him so much that they would not even greet him.
One day, when his brothers had gone
to pasture their father’s flocks at Shechem,
Israel said to Joseph,
“Your brothers, you know, are tending our flocks at Shechem.
Get ready; I will send you to them.”
So Joseph went after his brothers and caught up with them in Dothan.
They noticed him from a distance,
and before he came up to them, they plotted to kill him.
They said to one another:
“Here comes that master dreamer!
Come on, let us kill him and throw him into one of the cisterns here;
we could say that a wild beast devoured him.
We shall then see what comes of his dreams.”
When Reuben heard this,
he tried to save him from their hands, saying,
“We must not take his life.
Instead of shedding blood,” he continued,
“just throw him into that cistern there in the desert;
but do not kill him outright.”
His purpose was to rescue him from their hands
and return him to his father.
So when Joseph came up to them,
they stripped him of the long tunic he had on;
then they took him and threw him into the cistern,
which was empty and dry.They then sat down to their meal.
Looking up, they saw a caravan of Ishmaelites coming from Gilead,
their camels laden with gum, balm and resin
to be taken down to Egypt.
Judah said to his brothers:
“What is to be gained by killing our brother and concealing his blood?
Rather, let us sell him to these Ishmaelites,
instead of doing away with him ourselves.
After all, he is our brother, our own flesh.”
His brothers agreed.
They sold Joseph to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 105:16-17, 18-19, 20-21
R. (5a) Remember the marvels the Lord has done.
When the LORD called down a famine on the land
and ruined the crop that sustained them,
He sent a man before them,
Joseph, sold as a slave.
R. Remember the marvels the Lord has done.
They had weighed him down with fetters,
and he was bound with chains,
Till his prediction came to pass
and the word of the LORD proved him true.
R. Remember the marvels the Lord has done.
The king sent and released him,
the ruler of the peoples set him free.
He made him lord of his house
and ruler of all his possessions.
R. Remember the marvels the Lord has done.
Gospel
MT 21:33-43, 45-46
Jesus said to the chief priests and the elders of the people:
“Hear another parable.
There was a landowner who planted a vineyard,
put a hedge around it,
dug a wine press in it, and built a tower.
Then he leased it to tenants and went on a journey.
When vintage time drew near,
he sent his servants to the tenants to obtain his produce.
But the tenants seized the servants and one they beat,
another they killed, and a third they stoned.
Again he sent other servants, more numerous than the first ones,
but they treated them in the same way.
Finally, he sent his son to them,
thinking, ‘They will respect my son.’
But when the tenants saw the son, they said to one another,
‘This is the heir.
Come, let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.’
They seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
What will the owner of the vineyard do to those tenants when he comes?”
They answered him,
“He will put those wretched men to a wretched death
and lease his vineyard to other tenants
who will give him the produce at the proper times.”
Jesus said to them,
“Did you never read in the Scriptures:
The stone that the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone;
by the Lord has this been done,
and it is wonderful in our eyes?
Therefore, I say to you,
the Kingdom of God will be taken away from you
and given to a people that will produce its fruit.”
When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables,
they knew that he was speaking about them.
And although they were attempting to arrest him,
they feared the crowds, for they regarded him as a prophet.
The post Rejection and the Good God Wants to Bring From It, Friday of the Second Week of Lent, March 21, 2025 appeared first on 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.