Catholic Preaching

Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

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November 26, 2024 The Art of Prayer: Asking Jesus Anew, “Lord, Teach Us How To Pray,” The Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life, November 25, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life at Columbia
November 25, 2024

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11.25.24 CCM The Art of Prayer

The post The Art of Prayer: Asking Jesus Anew, “Lord, Teach Us How To Pray,” The Thomas Merton Institute for Catholic Life, November 25, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
1 hr 24 min
November 25, 2024Generously Following the King and Lamb Wherever He Goes, 34th Monday (II), November 25, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 34th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Catharine of Alexandria, Virgin and Martyr
November 25, 2024
Rev 14:1-5, Ps 24, Lk 21:1-4

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:
Today we have the privilege to be able to continue reflecting on the reality of Christ’s kingdom we celebrated yesterday and on the reality of how to enter it, remain in it, and draw others to seize it.
In the Gospel, we see how to seize the Kingdom as the pearl of great price. Jesus had said at the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, “Blessed are the poor in spirit: theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” To enter into the kingdom we must treasure God and his kingdom above all other things. In the Gospel, we see someone who did. After Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, he began to “people watch,” in order to continue to instruct his apostles about how to put what he taught into action. He and they saw the stream of people putting money in the temple treasury, which was a tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure money box. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coin would resonate as it rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Luke tells us, we’re putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury trumpet. But then a poor widow came and put in two lepta, two small coins which together were worth less than a penny and likely barely made a sound. Then Jesus gave a surprising lesson that obviously the disciples never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all them, for they “gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on.” This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. She could have easily chosen to drop into the trumpet only one of the coins and kept the other for herself. But she didn’t. She gave it all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain until the end of time. Jesus had said elsewhere that we could not be his disciple, we could not really enter his kingdom, unless we valued him and his kingdom more than family members, possessions and even our very life. That’s what characterized this poor wisdom. She believed so much in God and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God’s house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding that work of salvation. She accounted the continuance and expansion of that work even more than her own life. That’s living for the kingdom. This woman sacrificed her entire livelihood, spending herself and what she had in the service of the Lord. We should always seek to give in such a way that Christ the King would be tempted to pull the saints aside in heaven and point out the way we are spending ourselves in his service, seeking to build up his Kingdom.
In the first reading from the Book of Revelation and in the Psalm, we see other characteristics of the Kingdom and other examples of those who, like the widow, give all to the God who has given all to us. The 144,000 dressed in white, whose garments were washed in the blood of the Lamb, are a snapshot of the redeemed. The number 144,000 is a symbolic, not a literal one (as the Jehovah’s Witnesses and some fundamentalist Protestants claim). 12 is one of the magic numbers in Hebrew, flowing from the 12 tribes of Israel. 144 is a sign of the multiplication of the descendants of the 12 tribes and the spiritual progeny of the 12 apostles times 1,000, all meant to describe a vast multitude. We see about them that, first, they had the Lamb’s and the Father’s name written on their foreheads. They were thinking as God the Father and God the Son think; they were filled with God’s wisdom; and they also weren’t ashamed to live by that wisdom publicly. They were singing before the throne what seemed to St. John to be a “new hymn,” a hymn only they could sing, because doubtless that knowledge came from the experience of their life of love for the God, from their suffering for him, from their being “ransomed from the earth.” Third, they are described as those who “follow the Lamb wherever he goes,” which is a beautiful description for how every Christian is meant to behave, of what life in the kingdom consists. To live in the kingdom means to respond to Jesus’ call to follow him through day-to-day life all the way to heaven, to follow him across the road as Good Samaritans, to follow him to the Father in prayer, to follow him to reconcile with someone who has sinned against him and us. At the end of the passage, St. John says that “no deceit was found on their lips” and that they were “unblemished.” They were living and speaking the truth, which is the way to live in the Kingdom of Truth with Christ the Truth incarnate, attributes of the kingdom expanded upon in the Psalm. The answer to the question, “Who can ascend the mountain of the Lord? Or who may stand in his holy place?,” is, “He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean, who desires not what is vain. … Such is the race that seeks for him, that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.” Those who follow the Lamb wherever he goes are those who seek God, who desire to see him face-to-face. That desire leads them to keep their hands sinless of all bribes but to use their hands to pray, for generosity toward God and charity toward others, for honest work, for embracing and helping others; it leads them to keep their heart clean of all that can lead it to become hardened toward God and toward others; and it keeps them from desiring what is vain, and mammon is certainly among a vanity of vanities. For us to enter into the Lord’s kingdom here on earth and in the celestial Jerusalem we must align our desires, hearts and hands to the Kingdom, we must set our eyes on the Lord’s face and seek to follow him wherever he leaves, free of deceit, free of moral blemish.
Today we celebrate the feast of someone who lived this way, who longed to see God’s face, who sought to give God all and inspired others to the same generosity, who followed the Lamb wherever he led and tried to guided so many others to that same divine, living GPS, whose lips, hands and hearts were all consecrated to the King. St. Catharine of Alexandria is a very influential early virgin martyr. According to the legend of her martyrdom, she, trusting in God, triumphed in a contest of wits over the emperor Maxentius and 50 of the greatest philosophers he had in his court, and in the process converted members of his family and others. After that she showed by her courage in the face of threats, torture and death that nothing could get her to be terrified, nothing could get her to distrust that God would care for her. She was eventually killed by being crushed by a spiked wheel before she was beheaded, but she approached both knowing that the same Father who raised Jesus from the dead would raise her. She was generous to the end, giving her whole life to God. She was willing to follow the Lamb even to Martyrdom. She consecrated her hips, hands, hearts and her entire body to Christ and, seeking his face, saw it at the moment of her martyrdom. We prayed in the opening prayer of this Mass that God would grant us through St. Catharine’s intercession to “be strengthened in faith and constancy” so that we may “spend ourselves without reserve” for Christ and the Church. The type of faith and constancy we see in her is what we see in the widow in the Gospel and what God wants to give us.
Today we turn to God through her intercession and ask the Lord to grant us the grace to follow him, like she did, wherever He leads, to seek his face in all circumstances, and to try to use all our life to bring others to seek his face with us. We ask him to help us, like he helped he, to learn how to sing that “new song” of the kingdom here on earth with honest lips, raised hands, and lifted hearts, so that we might join her in the chorus of the “144,000” singing forever to God’s glory in Christ’s eternal kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 rv 14:1-3, 4b-5
I, John, looked and there was the Lamb standing on Mount Zion,
and with him a hundred and forty-four thousand
who had his name and his Father’s name written on their foreheads.
I heard a sound from heaven
like the sound of rushing water or a loud peal of thunder.
The sound I heard was like that of harpists playing their harps.
They were singing what seemed to be a new hymn before the throne,
before the four living creatures and the elders.
No one could learn this hymn except the hundred and forty-four thousand
who had been ransomed from the earth.
These are the ones who follow the Lamb wherever he goes.
They have been ransomed as the first fruits
of the human race for God and the Lamb.
On their lips no deceit has been found; they are unblemished.
Responsorial Psalm ps 24:1bc-2, 3-4ab, 5-6
R. (see 6) Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.
The LORD’s are the earth and its fullness;
the world and those who dwell in it.
For he founded it upon the seas
and established it upon the rivers.
R. Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.
Who can ascend the mountain of the LORD?
or who may stand in his holy place?
He whose hands are sinless, whose heart is clean,
who desires not what is vain.
R. Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.
He shall receive a blessing from the LORD,
a reward from God his savior.
Such is the race that seeks for him,
that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
R. Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.
Gospel lk 21:1-4
When Jesus looked up he saw some wealthy people
putting their offerings into the treasury
and he noticed a poor widow putting in two small coins.
He said, “I tell you truly,
this poor widow put in more than all the rest;
for those others have all made offerings from their surplus wealth,
but she, from her poverty, has offered her whole livelihood.”
The post Generously Following the King and Lamb Wherever He Goes, 34th Monday (II), November 25, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
18 min
November 24, 2024A Kingdom of Priests For His God and Father, Christ the King (B), November 24, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of Christ, King of the Universe
Official Mass of Thanksgiving for My Time as Catholic Chaplain at Columbia
November 24, 2024
Dan 7:13-14, Ps 93, Rev 1:5-8, Jn 18:33-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
For every Christian, but especially for young Christians, it is crucial for us to come to know who Jesus Christ really is and what he expects of us. Today’s Solemnity of Christ the King helps us to do both. This year’s celebration is particularly special. The Solemnity of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI on December 11, 1925 in the encyclical Quas Primas. Twenty days later, on December 31, Pope Pius celebrated it for the first time, to conclude the 1925 Jubilee. For the next 44 years it was celebrated in the traditional Latin liturgy on the last Sunday of October. Since 1970, in the new order of the Mass, it has been celebrated on the last Sunday of the liturgical year in November, as today we do for the 55th time. One doesn’t have to be a math whiz to know that 1+44+55 equals: 100. And so we rejoice to mark for the 100th time today the Solemnity of Christ the King. It is a chance to celebrate what Christ’s kingship means and, as Pius XI suggested in 1925, to commit ourselves to let Christ our King reign in our minds, wills, hearts, and bodies. His papal motto was Pax Christi in Regno Christi, that the peace of Christ comes in the Kingdom of Christ. For us to have the peace that Christ the Prince of Peace came into the world to give and to leave us, for us to have that peace for which our hearts yearn and our anxious age needs, we must enter into, we must live, the reality of his kingdom. Today we have the chance to focus on how.
It’s common when we celebrate this Solemnity to give our attention to the cosmic and eschatological dimensions of the manifestation of Christ as King, when, as Daniel saw in his vision in today’s first reading, we will see “one like a Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” to receive “dominion, glory and kingship,” whom “all peoples, nations and languages” shall serve, whose “dominion will be an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, [and whose] kingship shall not be destroyed;” the one whom the Book of Revelation today describes as the “ruler of the kings of the earth, … coming amid the clouds of heaven;” the one whom the Psalm indicates “has made the world firm, not to be moved,” whose “throne stands firm from of old,” who is “everlasting,” enrobed in majesty and splendor. These dimensions are an important part of today’s celebration and a key aspect of Christian faith and hope, as we live out the consequences of what we profess in the Creed, that Jesus “will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead and his kingdom will have no end.”
But it’s also helpful for us to remember, today and always, that, through his incarnation, that majestic King and Lord has come into the world to make it possible for us to enter into his kingdom not just later but now. The first words of Jesus’ public ministry were, “This is the time of fulfillment. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Later he said, “The Kingdom of God is among you” and sent out the apostles, and then the 72 disciples, to proclaim, “The kingdom of God is at hand for you.” The Kingdom, he said, was not a spectacle you’d point to, “Here it is!” or “There it is!,” it wasn’t meant to be a reality fundamentally in the future, but it was something that was both now and not yet. He announced the kingdom with an urgency. He showed it was near. And he wanted us to enter into it right away and help others to enter it.
In his preaching, Jesus gave many parables about the Kingdom, how to become part of it, live in it, and help grow it. It’s important on this feast of Christ the King to ponder with fresh wonder Jesus’ words. He said that the Kingdom starts small like a mustard seed but then becomes huge; that that seed of the kingdom is meant to be received on good and rich soil that bears fruit 30, 60 or 100 fold; that it grows like wheat in the midst of weeds or like beautiful fish in the midst of rotten; that it positively influences everything around it like yeast in dough, and needs to be treated like the richest pearl one has ever seen or a treasure buried in a field, readily selling everything else we have to obtain. He reminded his contemporaries that many tax collectors and prostitutes were entering the Kingdom before most of the Scribes and Pharisees, because these notorious sinners were far more willing and eager to leave behind their old lives to seize it and experience newness of life. Jesus reminded us in his other preaching that to enter the kingdom, we must seek it first above other things, convert and become like children, be poor in spirit, be born anew from above by water and spirit, long for it like wise bridesmaids awaiting the Bridegroom, work for it like laborers in a vineyard setting our hands to the plow and not looking back, keep our baptismal wedding garments clean and fit for the banquet, violently cut ourselves off from what is incompatible with it and be willing to suffer for it. On this Solemnity, therefore, it’s essential for us not just to look ahead to when Jesus will come on the clouds, but to recognize that the kingdom is already among us and to make the choices necessary to orient our whole life to it. As Catholics on Columbia’s campus, we are called to be living in Christ’s kingdom now. While we go to the same classes as everyone else, eat in the same dining halls, and climb the same stairs before Low Library, Christ the King summons to do things, in fact do everything, differently. We’re called to do them as citizens and subjects of the Kingdom. If Columbia’s motto is, In lumine tuo, vidibemus lumen, “In your light, we will see the light,” taken from Psalm 36:10, we are the ones called in particular to see, walk and radiate that light, the light of the Kingdom and of its King, the true Light of the World.
That requires a choice. Today’s Gospel, taken from Jesus’ dialogue with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday morning, helps us to focus on that choice. Pilate begins his conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been discussing, and trying to answer, for the previous three years: “Are you the King of the Jews?” They were debating whether Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Jesus didn’t reply with a “yes” or a “no” but with a question. He said to the Roman procurator, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate tried to deflect the query, saying, “I am not a Jew, am I?,” but the question cannot be ducked, and it cannot be answered by just regurgitating what others have told us. Jesus came into the world as King to establish a personal, saving relationship with every person he has created, from Pontius Pilate, to our Lady and St. Joseph, to you and me. As the Good Shepherd who would leave the 99 behind and go after the one sheep who is lost, he is interested in every one of us, every one of our friends, and each person we’ll meet. It’s not enough for Jesus to be the King of “others” or even the King of the “universe.” It’s not enough for the pope, or the bishops or the Catechism, or our parents, grandparents and godparents, to proclaim him sovereign Lord. It’s not adequate even that the whole Church in heaven and on earth acclaims him as King and dedicates Churches and religious institutes to Him under the title of Christus Rex. Jesus wants each of us personally and intimately to say with sincerity and desire, “Thy Kingdom come!,” rather than just doing so because others have told us about this reality. He wants each of us to recognize that now is the time of fulfillment, to repent and believe, and to live by the parables and instructions he gives about the life of the kingdom. Jesus died to become your king and my king and wants us to ground our existence in the reality of the life-giving relationship the King wants to have with us. The future Pope Benedict once told the catechists of the world words I’ve never been able to forget. “The kingdom of God,” he stated, “is not a thing. The Kingdom of God is God. The Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our — in my — life. God is not a faraway ‘ultimate cause,’ God is not the ‘great architect’ of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it. On the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of history.” Christ the King wants to become not just part of our life or even an important part of our life: he wants, as Cardinal Ratzinger tells us, to become the most present and decisive reality in our life, in each instant of our personal history. Therefore, the first choice we’re called to make today is not to live just by what we’re inherited from the Church and those who have passed on to us the treasure of the faith, but to make those values personal and intentional. We’re called to celebrate this feast not just because it’s what the Church has put into the Missal and missalettes for November 24, 2024. Today, rather, we mark what we strive to live each day, here on Columbia’s campus and beyond: that Jesus is the most present and decisive reality in every act of my life, that I want Jesus to be King of my time, my affections, my study, my work and leisure, my family bonds, my loves and friendships, my mind, heart, soul and strength, all I am and have. When Jesus asks, “Are you saying this about me yourself or have others told you about me?,” he wants us to say, “I am saying this about you my deepest personal conviction, by faith, and with all my mind, heart, soul and strength.”
To accept him as King of our whole life and to resolve to order everything in our life to him is conceptually straightforward, but morally hard. For us to denominate Christ as King is, in this world, not to be a fair-weather fan of Jesus, like those who root for a championship team simply because they are triumphing. That’s why today’s Gospel scene of the King of the Universe before a Roman procurator is so important. By worldly logic, the last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a conquering king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a bejeweled throne. He was crowned with thorns, not capped with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and Jews in general, Pilate would order that an inscription in three languages be placed above his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Rather than pay him homage, most in the crowd mocked him, as did the chief priests, Roman soldiers, passers-by, and even the thief on his left. They all derided him in the same way: “If you’re truly the king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, come down from that Cross and save yourself.” Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power that they could comprehend. To name him as our King is to recalibrate everything to his way of reigning. He told Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world” and “is not here,” but we often try to frame his kingdom in earthly categories. Until the resurrection, the apostles all had a false idea about the kingdom and what it meant to be in the king’s service, incessantly competing against each other for the greatest positions in the royal administration they imagined Jesus was about to inaugurate. But Jesus said to them and to us, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men make their authority over them felt. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” To proclaim Jesus’ kingdom, to enter into and share his kingship, means to be willing to give our life as a ransom for God and others, to serve rather than be served, to give rather than get. That’s why it’s not sufficient to listen to what others are saying about Jesus, because to live in his kingdom, each us of must undergo a moral revolution in which we live by the King’s values rather than by the world’s. We have to proclaim him king ourselves not just by our thoughts and words but in our actions.
Jesus’ interrogation by Pilate in today’s Gospel also points to another reality that’s essential for us to live in Christ’s kingdom here on campus and wherever our future paths take us. After Jesus stated that his kingdom was not of this world and Pilate followed up by querying, “Then you are a king?,” Jesus replied, “You say I am a king.” In other words, he said, “That’s what you call me,” but Jesus very much wanted to distinguish his kingdom from all earthly realms. He stated, “For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Jesus was stressing that his kingdom, the reason for which he had entered the world, was to witness to the truth, to help everyone enter the real, real world. Once again Pilate tried to duck the personal thrust of Jesus’ words by asking, rhetorically, “What is truth?” But we can’t escape the meaning of Jesus’ words. His whole mission was to remind us of the real, real world, the world God created and holds in existence, the world that goes far beyond what might appear in the morning newspapers, with the relatively minor details of who happens to be president, or the richest person in the world, or the latest movements on the stock market or the battlefield. The real, real world is the realm where the saints live, in the world but not of it, acknowledging Christ as King, storing up for themselves a treasure that can pass through a needle’s eye that rust can’t corrode, thieves rob, or the IRS tax. Jesus came to witness to this truth, that the real, real world is his kingdom. Earlier in the Gospel of St. John, Jesus had said, “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.” Knowing the truth, in other words, is the difference between slavery and freedom, between living a lie and living in the light. A little later Jesus would further specify that truth isn’t just a correspondence — or as the philosophers teach us an “adequation” — between what is in the mind and what is outside the mind, but ultimately is a moral correspondence, a personal relationship, with him. He said during the Last Supper, “I am … the Truth.” He came not just to teach us various truths, but to invite and urge us to ground our entire existence on our relationship with him the King. The big battle in the world, the war between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death, is between truth and falsity, between Christ the Truth and Satan, whom Jesus calls a “liar and the father of lies.” To proclaim Christ as King is not just to announce the truth but to commit ourselves to seek the truth, find the truth, know the truth, love the truth, live the truth and share the truth in a context in which “Prince of demons” tries to seduce us to live a lie. Satan’s lair is a dominion of lies, spin, slander, deception, and self-deception. Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of truth. To live in his kingdom is to stop pretending, to stop treating life as if it’s a game or a dream, and to commit ourselves to the reality of his Kingdom and to live maturely, full-time, in every aspect of our life, with the King. This is so important on college campuses today because various professors, explicitly or subtly, are relativists, proclaiming, in a self-contradictory way, the truth that there is no truth. It’s key at a time of even more pernicious moral relativism, which says that it’s wrong to believe that there is right and wrong. But now we are facing a particular cultural assault on the truth unprecedented in human history, based on sentimentalism or emotivism, in which people are trying to argue that there’s no truth even to the incontestable facts of our biology, to our having been made by God as male or female. They are claiming that male and female are just social attributions and mental states, and are trying to get everyone else in culture, at the price of being cancelled, to pretend that the naked emperor is well-dressed and living sanely in the real world. As Christians, human beings, friends and fellow citizens, we do no favors to anyone, especially to those who are suffering a profound anthropological confusion, to enable them to live in a made-up world far from the kingdom. Christ and we love them too much for that type of cowardly omission of truth and charity. Christ the King came to testify to the truth and says that those who belong to the truth listen to his voice, the voice who in the beginning said, “Let us make man in our own image,” and then “male and female he created them.” In the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people not just in this world but potentially forever, the Solemnity of Christ the King is the occasion for us to reaffirm not just the fact of his kingdom but to commit ourselves to living the truth in every way, and to help others to live the truth, too.
Today on this great Solemnity that we’re celebrating for the 100th time, we’re likewise thanking the Lord for the last two-and-a-half years that I’ve had the privilege to serve as your Catholic chaplain, and for the Lord’s 25 years of faithful help as I have sought to serve him as a priest. The work of a Catholic priest is always to try to proclaim and prosper the Kingdom of God and, by what he says and how he lives, to help people come to embrace that kingdom. That’s what I’ve sought to do here.
I remember one of the first conversations I had with members of the board of Columbia Catholic Ministry (CCM) in the summer before I arrived. Normally when people reach out to you before your arrival, it’s more than just to get to know you, but they have a hope to influence some of your priorities. Fair enough. I was talking to one student, the CCM retreat chair, who got right to the point: “Father, I’ve been praying that the new chaplain would increase opportunities for Eucharistic adoration.” I asked her, “How hard have you been praying?” She replied, “I’ve been praying every day for it for now several months.” I told her, with a smile, “God has been listening.” She said, “What?” I said, “How about adoration every weekday?” She couldn’t believe it. But that’s what we’ve done together. It’s obviously a priority for a priest to facilitate the encounter of Christ’s beloved faithful with him the King, to give them a chance to come to be with him, to listen to him, to befriend him, to love and adore him. In another pre-arrival conversation, I asked the officers what they thought about moving the daily and Sunday Masses from St. Paul’s Chapel on campus here to Notre Dame, so that we could offer more easily what I call “full-menu Catholicism,” with daily confessions, adoration, kneelers and more that wouldn’t be possible at St. Paul’s. They were very supportive, but asked me if I’d be open to keeping two things, Ash Wednesday ash distributions at St. Paul’s to make it easier for students who couldn’t come to Mass that day and to continue Eucharistic Processions on campus, both of which I was very eager to do. Everything I’ve tried to do as chaplain has been ultimately to foster life in the Kingdom. I’ve heard every semester about 140 hours of confessions, because the call to live in the Kingdom always involves repenting and believing. I’ve celebrated and prepared people to receive the Sacraments of Baptism, Confirmation, Penance, First Communion, and Marriage, and helped people discern to follow God to seminary and to religious life, because to live in the Kingdom is to encounter the King in the Sacraments and to receive his help to order our whole life to him. Together with others at the Merton Institute and with the FOCUS Missionaries, I’ve sought to provide some high-quality formation in the faith, so that you can learn the about Christ the King and about living in his kingdom at a level commensurate with your aptitude and what you’re getting in your various classes at Columbia. I’ve endeavored to catalyze the charity that is characteristic of the Kingdom, as we remember that Christ said that those who will enter into his eternal kingdom will be those who recognize him, the King, in those who are hungry, thirsty, sick, a stranger and otherwise in need. And I’ve tried to foster the common life of the Kingdom, as Christ the King came not just to save us as individuals but to form a real family, a royal family. What a great joy it was to me to be able to be present for the opening of the Merton Institute on February 11, 2023, the first fully dedicated center for Columbia Catholics in Columbia’s 270-year existence, and a place in which all of these aspects of life according to the Kingdom can happen far more effectively.
I’ve spent altogether ten percent of my 25 years as a priest here at Columbia, and I have to say that while I’m grateful to God for all of my assignments, for the work that has been entrusted to me, and for the people I’ve met, served and learned so much from, these last five semesters with you have certainly been among my happiest years. For the rest of my life, I’ll cherish the memories I’ve had here, especially the way I have seen so many of you grow not just physically and intellectually but especially spiritually. The conversions that I’ve witnessed in our OCIA program, on our retreats and recollections and in the confessional, the spiritual upgrades I’ve behind as people made commitments to daily Mass (for some before they were even Catholic), or adoration, or learning the faith, serving each other and caring for those in need, have filled me with joy and hope. I thank you for your faith in Christ the King and the way your faith has inspired and buttressed my own. I want to thank in a particular way the generosity of the founders of the Merton Institute for making all of this possible for all of us; the FOCUS Missionaries and the Merton staff for being my trusted and diligent collaborators; and the CCM officers for their love for the faith and their spiritual maturity in making the decision to serve their fellow Catholics at Columbia. It’s been so great for me to see what we’ve been able to accomplish together in such a short time.
The essence of a chaplain’s work, of a priest’s work, is summed up in today’s second reading from the Book of Revelation. St. John tells us that Jesus Christ, “ruler of the kings of the earth, … has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.” To live in the kingdom is to live as “priests” for God the Father. This is referring not to the ministerial priesthood of the New Covenant, which 407,000 men across the world with me share, but to our common priesthood by baptism that all 1.3 billion Catholics share. Three days ago, we marked the 60th anniversary of the publication of the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, referring to Jesus as the Light of the Nations. In that foundational document, the fathers of the Second Vatican Council underlined the role of the ministerial priesthood in catalyzing and facilitating the priesthood of the baptized and clarified what the baptismal priesthood means. They taught, “Christ the Lord … made the new people ‘a kingdom and priests to God the Father.’ The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, [in other words, by the Sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation,] are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, in order that through all those works that are those of the Christian they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the power of Him who has called them out of darkness into His marvelous light. Therefore, all the disciples of Christ, persevering in prayer and praising God, should present themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” Our common baptismal priesthood, which is the way we live in the kingdom, is a life of prayer and offering our lives as a loving oblation. Lumen Gentium continues, “The common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest, … acting in the person of Christ, makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the offering of the Eucharist. They likewise exercise that priesthood in receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, in the witness of a holy life, and by self-denial and active charity.” Therefore, the supreme act of the Kingdom of God that Christ came into the world to inaugurate is, for us — as “priests for our God and Father,” through our baptismal priesthood and through the ministerial priesthood that supports it — to offer the Eucharist and together with Christ offer ourselves. That’s what I’ve tried to facilitate as your priest chaplain, to help us all make Jesus in the Mass, the source, summit, root and center of our life, so that we might live each day with Christ the King, reigning humbly at Mass and in the tabernacle, who wants to set up his throne in each of us through Holy Communion.
As we today, for the hundredth time in the history of the Church, prepare to celebrate this supreme expression of our adoration of Christ the King and the apex of our life as a kingdom of priests for our God and Father, we ask Christ the King whom we are about to welcome on this altar and many of us receive in Holy Communion to help us to make him “the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of [our] life, in each and every moment of history,” especially every second of our blessed time here at Columbia. As we prepare to cry out in the Our Father, “Thy kingdom come!,” we ask God the Father and Christ the King to send the Holy Spirit to help us bring every part of our existence into the kingdom, the kingdom of truth, “of holiness and grace, … of justice, love and peace,” as we will soon pray in the Preface. We also ask him to strengthen us so that we might be his emissaries going out to the campus and indeed the whole world, joyfully and courageously proclaiming that we believe in, love and serve Christ the King not because others have told us about him, but because we have come to know him, to be changed for the better by him, and now can’t wait to help others come to know, love, serve and reign with him, too. Now is the time of fulfillment. The Kingdom of God is truly at hand. Let us make haste to enter! Long live Christ the King!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Dn 7:13-14
As the visions during the night continued, I saw
one like a Son of man coming,
on the clouds of heaven;
when he reached the Ancient One
and was presented before him,
the one like a Son of man received dominion, glory, and kingship;
all peoples, nations, and languages serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not be taken away,
his kingship shall not be destroyed.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 93:1, 1-2, 5
R. (1a) The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
The LORD is king, in splendor robed;
robed is the LORD and girt about with strength.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
And he has made the world firm,
not to be moved.
Your throne stands firm from of old;
from everlasting you are, O LORD.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
Your decrees are worthy of trust indeed;
holiness befits your house,
O LORD, for length of days.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
Reading II
Rv 1:5-8
Jesus Christ is the faithful witness,
the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood,
who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father,
to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.
Behold, he is coming amid the clouds,
and every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him.
All the peoples of the earth will lament him.
Yes. Amen.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, ” says the Lord God,
“the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty.”
Alleluia
Mk 11:9, 10
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 18:33b-37
Pilate said to Jesus,
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own
or have others told you about me?”
Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I?
Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me.
What have you done?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.
If my kingdom did belong to this world,
my attendants would be fighting
to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”
So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?”
Jesus answered, “You say I am a king.
For this I was born and for this I came into the world,
to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
The post A Kingdom of Priests For His God and Father, Christ the King (B), November 24, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
38 min
November 24, 2024Personally Celebrating, Adoring, Thanking and Service Christ the King, Solemnity of Christ, the King of the Universe (B), November 24, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Solemnity of Christ, King of the Universe
November 24, 2024
Dan 7:13-14, Ps 93, Rev 1:5-8, Jn 18:33-37
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.24.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today we celebrate, for the 100th time in the Church’s liturgical history, Christ as King of the Universe. The Solemnity of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925. He celebrated it for the first time on December 31 that year, to conclude the 1925 Jubilee. For the next 44 years it was celebrated in the traditional Latin liturgy on the last Sunday of October. For the last 55 years, since 1970, in the new order of the Mass, it has been celebrated on the last Sunday of the liturgical year in November. And so today is the 100th time this Solemnity is being marked. It is an opportunity to celebrate what Christ’s kingship means and then, as Pius XI suggested, to commit ourselves to let Christ our King reign in our minds, wills, hearts, and bodies. His papal motto was Pax Christi in Regno Christi, that the peace of Christ comes in the Kingdom of Christ. For us to have the peace Christ the Prince of Peace came into the world to give and to leave us, we must enter into, we must live, the reality of his kingdom. This Solemnity is the privileged occasion for us to focus on how.
It’s common when we celebrate this Solemnity to give our attention to the cosmic and eschatological dimensions of the manifestation of Christ as King, when, as Daniel saw in his vision in today’s first reading, we will see “one like a Son of Man coming on the clouds of heaven” to receive “dominion, glory and kingship,” whom “all peoples, nations and languages” shall serve, whose “dominion will be an everlasting dominion that shall not be taken away, [whose] kingship shall not be destroyed.” The one whom the Book of Revelation today describes as the “ruler of the kings of the earth, … coming amid the clouds of heaven.” The one whom the Psalm indicates “has made the world firm, not to be moved,” whose “throne stands firm from of old,” who is “everlasting,” robed in majesty and splendor. All of that is true, and it’s an important part of today’s celebration.
But it’s also helpful for us to remember that, through his incarnation, that majestic King and Lord came into the world to bring us into that kingdom. The first words of Jesus’ public ministry were, “This is the time of fulfillment. The Kingdom of God is at hand. Repent and believe in the Gospel.” Later he said, “The Kingdom of God is among you” and sent out the apostles, and then the 72 disciples, to proclaim, “The kingdom of God is at hand for you.” There was an urgency to the Kingdom, an exciting nearness we were called to embrace and seize, and a need to believe in it and turn away from other means by which to order our life. Jesus gave us many parables about the Kingdom, how to become part of it, live in it, and help grow it. He said that the Kingdom starts small like a mustard seed but then becomes huge; that that seed of the kingdom is meant to be received on good and rich soil that bears fruit 30, 60 or 100 fold; that it grows like wheat in the midst of weeds or like beautiful fish in the midst of rotten, influences everything around it like yeast in dough, and needs to be treated like the richest pearl one has ever seen or a treasure buried in a field. He reminded his contemporaries that many tax collectors and prostitutes were entering it before many of the Scribes and Pharisees because these notorious sinners were far more willing and eager to convert and seize it, appreciating its value and leaving behind their old lives to become new. Jesus reminded us that to enter the kingdom, we must seek it first above other things, convert and become like children, be born from above of water and spirit, keep our baptismal wedding garments clean and fit for the banquet, be poor in spirit, long for it like wise bridesmaids awaiting the Bridegroom, work for it like laborers in a vineyard setting our hands to the plow and not looking back, do violence to cut ourselves off from what is incompatible with it and be willing to suffer for it. The solemnity of Christ the King, therefore, is an opportunity for us to remember what Jesus said about the Kingdom and orient our lives to this way of life he indicates.
In the Gospel today, taken from Jesus’ dialogue with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday morning, we get a glimpse into the kingdom Christ has brought into the world and how it’s supposed to impact us. In it we learn two essential aspects of the kingdom and what our response must be. Pilate begins his conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been discussing, and trying to answer, about Jesus for the previous three years: “Are you the King of the Jews?” They were debating whether Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Jesus didn’t reply with a “yes” or a “no” but with a question. He said to the Roman procurator, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate tried to deflect the query, saying, “I am not a Jew, am I?” But the question cannot be ducked, and it cannot be answered by just what others have told us. Jesus came into the world as King to establish a personal, saving relationship with every person he has created, from Pontius Pilate to our Lady and St. Joseph. As the Good Shepherd who would leave the 99 behind and go after the one sheep who is lost, he is interested in every one of us, 100 out of 100. It’s not enough for him to be the King of “others” or even the King of the “universe.” It’s not enough for the pope, or the bishops or the Catechism to proclaim him sovereign Lord or to dedicate Churches to Him and whole religious institutes under the title of Christus Rex. It’s not adequate, in other words, even that the whole Church in heaven and on earth acclaims him as King. Jesus wants each of us personally and intimately to say with sincerity and desire, “Thy Kingdom come!,” rather than just doing so because others have told us about this reality. He wants each of us to recognize that now is the time of fulfillment, to repent and believe in the Gospel, and to live by the parables and instructions Jesus has given about the kingdom. Jesus died to become your king and my king and wants us to ground our entire life in the reality of the Kingdom, of the life-giving relationship the King wants to have with each of us. The future Pope Benedict once told the catechists of the world, “The kingdom of God … is not a thing. The Kingdom of God is God. The Kingdom of God means: God exists. God is alive. God is present and acts in the world, in our — in my — life. God is not a faraway ‘ultimate cause,’ God is not the ‘great architect’ of deism, who created the machine of the world and is no longer part of it. On the contrary: God is the most present and decisive reality in each and every act of my life, in each and every moment of history.” Christ the King wants to become the most decisive reality in our life. Therefore, the first response we’re called to have to the reality of what we celebrate today is to ask ourselves honestly if we’re acclaiming Christ the King on the basis of what others, including the Church, say about him, or because that’s what the liturgy today celebrates, or whether we are saying this on our own. And if Christ is our king, then we will obviously be striving to make him the most present and decisive reality in which and every act of our life. He will be King of our time, our affections, our work and leisure, our family bonds, loves and friendships, our mind, heart, soul and strength, all we are and have.
To accept him as King of our whole life and to resolve to order everything in our life to him is conceptually straightforward, but morally hard. For us to denominate Christ as King is, in this world, not to be a fair-weather fan of Jesus, like those who root for a championship team simply because they are triumphing. That’s why today’s Gospel scene of the King of the Universe before a Roman procurator is so important. By worldly logic, the last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a conquering king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a bejeweled throne. He was crowned with thorns, not capped with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and Jews in general, Pilate would order that an inscription in three languages be placed above his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Rather than pay him homage, most in the crowd mocked him, as did the chief priests, Roman soldiers, passers-by, and even the thief on his left. They all derided him in the same way: “If you’re truly the king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, come down from that Cross and save yourself.” Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power that they could comprehend. To name him as our King is to recalibrate everything to his way of reigning. He told Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world” and “is not here,” but we often try to frame his kingdom in earthly categories. Until the resurrection, the apostles all had a false idea about the kingdom and what it meant to be in the king’s service, incessantly competing against each for the greatest positions in the royal administration they imagined Jesus was about to inaugurate. But Jesus said to them and to us, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men make their authority over them felt. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of Man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” To proclaim Jesus’ kingdom, to enter into his kingship with him, means to be willing to give our life as a ransom for God and others, to serve rather than be served, to give rather than get. That’s why it’s not sufficient to listen to what others are saying about Jesus, because to live in his kingdom, each us of must undergo a moral revolution in which we live by the King’s values rather than by the world’s. We have to proclaim him king ourselves not just by our thoughts and words but in our actions. Each of us need to answer existentially Jesus’ question to Pilate, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?”
That leads us to the second point that Jesus emphasizes about his kingdom during his interrogation by Pilate. After Jesus stated he was king of a kingdom not of this world and Pilate followed up by querying, “Then you are a king?,” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king,” in other words, “That’s what you call me,” but he wanted to change very much the meaning of kingship. He said, “For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Jesus was stressing that his kingdom, the reason for which he had entered the world, was to witness to the truth, to help everyone enter the real, real world. Once again Pilate tried to duck the personal thrust of Jesus’ words by asking, rhetorically, “What is truth?” But we can’t escape the meaning of Jesus’ words. His whole mission was to remind us of the real, real world and help us to live in it. Earlier in the Gospel of St. John, Jesus had said, “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.” Knowing the truth, in other words, is the difference between slavery and freedom, between living a lie and living in the light. A little later Jesus would further specify that truth isn’t just a correspondence between what is in the mind and what is in the world, as the philosophers teach us, but ultimately a moral correspondence, a personal relationship, with him. He said during the Last Supper, “I am … the Truth.” He came not just to teach us various truths, but to invite us, urge us, have us ground our entire existence on our relationship with him. The big battle in the world, the war between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death, is between truth and falsity, between Christ the Truth and Satan, whom Jesus calls the “liar and the father of lies.” To proclaim Christ as King is not just to announce the truth but to commit ourselves to seek the truth, find the truth, know the truth, love the truth, live the truth and share the truth in a context in which “Prince of demons” tries to inseminate and seduce us to live a lie. Satan’s is a dominion of lies, spin, slander, deception, and self-deception. Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of truth. To live in his kingdom is to stop pretending, to stop treating life as if it’s a game or a dream, and to commit ourselves to the reality of his Kingdom and to live maturely, full-time, in every aspect of our life, with the King.
When Pope Pius XI established the Solemnity of Christ the King in 1925, he did so to counteract the virulent falsehoods being propagated by the communists and militant atheists, who in proclaiming that God didn’t exist were essentially announcing that truth doesn’t exist. Without God and the truth anchoring human existence, they were attempting to distort human anthropology made in God’s image and likeness and reorder all existence to power. Just eight years before Pius XI instituted the feast, Bolshevik communism had arisen to “free” the people from the “opium” of faith, which they propagandistically claimed was only a means to keep people subjugated. In Mexico, there had been a similar revolution against the “old order” and one of the first results was anti-clerical persecution based on a militant atheism. Religious orders were banned. Churches, monasteries, convents and other religious buildings were confiscated by the State. The Church needed to go underground and many Catholic priests, religious and lay people were martyred. Since there really was no God, the revolutionaries claimed, the churches and Christians were just seeking greater foundation for their competitive pursuit of political power. Over the course of the last century, attacks against the truth have grown, for example in the philosophical movement of relativism, which in a self-contradictory way proclaims as a truth that there is no truth, and particularly in moral relativism, which says that it’s wrong to believe that there is right and wrong. But now we are facing a particular cultural assault on the truth based on sentimentalism or emotivism. We see it particularly in gender ideology, with which many are trying to indoctrinate our culture and especially our kids. Gender ideology says that there’s no truth to the basic facts of our biology, no truth to our having been made by God as male or female, but that male and female are just social attributions and mental states. They claim that we are whoever we want to be, whoever we say we are. We should always be full of compassion and love for anyone who sincerely, but erroneously, thinks he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body or a man trapped in a woman’s, or likewise someone who believes he, she or it is pangender, or genderqueer, or one of the scores of other so-called “gender identities.” We know such people need help, Jesus died out of love for each of them, and they deserve our love, too. But we do them no service to pretend with them that they’re not male or female, that there’s no meaning to this foundational biological and human truth, that the emperor, to recall Hans Christian Anderson’s short story, is well dressed and living sanely in the real world. Gender ideology, in fact, harms individuals and all of society by facilitating those with gender confusion to believe and live a lie about themselves and to try to force all of society to become complicit in living that lie. Christ the King came to testify to the truth and says that those who belong to the truth listen to his voice, the voice who in the beginning said, “Let us make man in our own image,” and then “male and female he created them.” The Solemnity of Christ the King is the occasion for us to reaffirm not just the fact of his kingdom but to commit ourselves to living the truth in every way and helping others to live it in the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people not just in this world but beyond.
In the Book of Revelation today, we see one more truth about living in Christ’s kingdom. St. John tells us that Jesus Christ, “ruler of the kings of the earth, … has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.” To live in the kingdom is to live as “priests” for God the Father. This is referring not to the ministerial priesthood of the New Covenant, but to our common priesthood by baptism. In the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, Lumen Gentium, the 60th anniversary of which we marked on Thursday, the Church taught, “Christ the Lord … made the new people ‘a kingdom and priests to God the Father.’ The baptized, by regeneration and the anointing of the Holy Spirit, are consecrated as a spiritual house and a holy priesthood, in order that through all those works that are those of the Christian they may offer spiritual sacrifices and proclaim the power of Him who has called them out of darkness into His marvelous light. Therefore, all the disciples of Christ, persevering in prayer and praising God, should present themselves as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God.” Our common baptismal priesthood, which is the way we live in the kingdom, is a life of prayer and sacrifice. Lumen Gentium continues, “The common priesthood of the faithful and the ministerial or hierarchical priesthood are nonetheless interrelated: each of them in its own special way is a participation in the one priesthood of Christ. The ministerial priest, … acting in the person of Christ, makes present the Eucharistic sacrifice, and offers it to God in the name of all the people. But the faithful, in virtue of their royal priesthood, join in the offering of the Eucharist. They likewise exercise that priesthood in receiving the sacraments, in prayer and thanksgiving, in the witness of a holy life, and by self-denial and active charity.” Therefore, the supreme act of the Kingdom of God that Christ came into the world to inaugurate is for us, as “priests for our God and Father,” through our baptismal priesthood and through my ministerial priesthood, to offer the Eucharist and together with Christ offer ourselves. As we prepare to do so on this Solemnity for the hundredth time in the history of the Church, we cry out to Christ the King, “Thy kingdom come!,” asking him to bring every part of us that is not with him in the kingdom into it. We ask him to help us make him king of all parts of our life, to live fully in the truth of his kingdom, which, as we’ll pray in the Preface on the Solemnity, is a “kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace.” We also ask him to strengthen us so that we might be his emissaries going out to the whole world to help them recognize that now is the time of fulfillment is, the Kingdom of God is at hand, and help them seize the kingdom, remain in it and with us extend it. This is the way to the peace of Christ in the Kingdom of Christ. Long live Christ the King!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Dn 7:13-14
As the visions during the night continued, I saw
one like a Son of man coming,
on the clouds of heaven;
when he reached the Ancient One
and was presented before him,
the one like a Son of man received dominion, glory, and kingship;
all peoples, nations, and languages serve him.
His dominion is an everlasting dominion
that shall not be taken away,
his kingship shall not be destroyed.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 93:1, 1-2, 5
R. (1a) The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
The LORD is king, in splendor robed;
robed is the LORD and girt about with strength.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
And he has made the world firm,
not to be moved.
Your throne stands firm from of old;
from everlasting you are, O LORD.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
Your decrees are worthy of trust indeed;
holiness befits your house,
O LORD, for length of days.
R. The Lord is king; he is robed in majesty.
Reading II
Rv 1:5-8
Jesus Christ is the faithful witness,
the firstborn of the dead and ruler of the kings of the earth.
To him who loves us and has freed us from our sins by his blood,
who has made us into a kingdom, priests for his God and Father,
to him be glory and power forever and ever. Amen.
Behold, he is coming amid the clouds,
and every eye will see him,
even those who pierced him.
All the peoples of the earth will lament him.
Yes. Amen.
“I am the Alpha and the Omega, ” says the Lord God,
“the one who is and who was and who is to come, the almighty.”
Alleluia
Mk 11:9, 10
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 18:33b-37
Pilate said to Jesus,
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own
or have others told you about me?”
Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I?
Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me.
What have you done?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.
If my kingdom did belong to this world,
my attendants would be fighting
to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”
So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?”
Jesus answered, “You say I am a king.
For this I was born and for this I came into the world,
to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
The post Personally Celebrating, Adoring, Thanking and Service Christ the King, Solemnity of Christ, the King of the Universe (B), November 24, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
25 min
November 23, 2024Christ the King (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 23, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Solemnity of Christ the King, B, Vigil
November 23, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.23.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, as we celebrate him, for the 100th time in the Church’s liturgical history, as King of the Universe. The Solemnity of Christ the King was established by Pope Pius XI in 1925, when he celebrated it for the first time on December 31, to conclude the 1925 Jubilee Year. For the next 44 years it was celebrated in the traditional Latin liturgy on the last Sunday of October and since 1970, in the new order of the Mass, it has been celebrated in November on the last Sunday of the liturgical year. The Solemnity is an opportunity to celebrate what Christ’s kingship means and then, as Pius XI suggested, to commit ourselves to let him reign in our minds, wills, hearts, and bodies. This Sunday, as we enter into Jesus’ dialogue with Pontius Pilate on Good Friday morning, we get a glimpse into the kingdom Christ has established and how it’s supposed to impact us.
Pilate begins his conversation with Jesus by asking the question that Jews had been discussing, and trying to answer, about Jesus for the previous couple of years: “Are you the King of the Jews?” To ask that question, was to ask whether Jesus was the long-awaited Messiah. Jesus replied, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate tried to deflect the question, saying, “I am not a Jew, am I?” But the question cannot be ducked, and it cannot really be answered by what others have told us. Jesus came into the world to establish a personal, saving relationship with everyone he has created. As the Good Shepherd who would leave the 99 behind and go after the one sheep who is lost, he is interested in 100 out of 100. It’s not enough for him to be the King of “others” or even the King of the “cosmos.” It’s not enough for the pope, or the priests, or the Catechismto proclaim him sovereign Lord. It doesn’t suffice that we dedicate Churches to Him or whole religious institutes under the title of Christ the King. It’s not adequate, in other words, even that the whole Church in heaven and on earth acclaims him as the Savior and Lord. Jesus wants each of us personally and intimately to say and mean, “Thy Kingdom come!,” rather than just doing so because others have told us about this reality. Jesus died to become your king and my king and wants to have that life-giving relationship with each of us. He wants to become the most decisive reality in our life. Therefore, the first response we’re called to have is to ask ourselves honestly whether we have that relationship with him. Is he King of our time? Of our family and love life? Of our work, leisure, and money? Of our mind, heart, soul and strength? While he objectively is the one through whom all things are made, the King and Lord of all, have we subjectively, freely, wholeheartedly, lovingly chosen him to be our King, to obey him and follow him with trust, with love, with joy? If we have not established him as a King of all parts of our life, then we really do not have the relationship with him that is right and just.
This thought is conceptually simple, but morally hard. For us to name Christ as King is, in this world, not to be a fair-weather fan of Jesus, like those who root for a championship team because they’re the winners. By worldly logic, the last thing Jesus looked like as he hung upon the Cross on Good Friday was a conquering king. He was bathed in blood, not clothed with royal purple. He was hammered to a Cross, not seated on a bejeweled throne. He was crowned with thorns, not capped with gold and diadems. To ridicule him and Jews in general, Pilate would later order that an inscription in three languages be placed above his head: “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews.” Rather than pay him homage, most in the crowd mocked him. The chief priests, Roman soldiers, passers-by, even the thief on his left mocked him. They all derided him in the same way: “If you’re truly the king of the Jews, the Messiah, the Christ, come down from that Cross and save yourself.” Such visible force was the only demonstration of kingly power that they could comprehend. To name him as our King is to recalibrate everything to his way of reigning. He told Pilate, “My kingdom does not belong to this world” and “is not here,” but we often try to frame his kingdom in earthly categories. All the way until the resurrection, the apostles had a false idea about the kingdom and what it meant to be in the king’s service, incessantly competing against each for the greatest positions in the messianic administration they imagined Jesus was about to inaugurate. But Jesus said to them and to us, “You know that the rulers of the Gentiles lord it over them, and their great men make their authority over them felt. It shall not be so among you; but whoever would be great among you must be your servant, and whoever would be first among you must be your slave; even as the Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many.” To proclaim his kingship, to enter into his kingdom with him, means to be willing to give our life as a ransom for God and others, to serve rather than be served, to give rather than get. That’s why it’s not sufficient to listen to what others are saying about Jesus. We have to proclaim him king ourselves, and this is not just a notional or verbal consent, but something we live.
There’s a second point I likewise think is key. After Jesus said he was king of a kingdom not of this world and Pilate followed up by querying, “Then you are a king?,” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Once again Pilate tried to duck the personal thrust of Jesus’ words by asking, rhetorically, “What is truth?,” but we can’t escape the meaning of Jesus’ words. His whole mission was to remind us of the real, real world and help us to live in it. Earlier in the Gospel of St. John, Jesus had said, “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.” Knowing the truth, in other words, is the difference between slavery and freedom, between living a lie and living in the light. A little later Jesus would further specify that truth isn’t just a correspondence between what is in the mind and what is in the world, but a personal relationship, saying during the Last Supper, “I am the Way, the Truth and the Life.” He came not just to teach us truths, but to allow us to enter into relationship with him as the ground of our entire existence. The big battle in the world, the war between light and darkness, good and evil, life and death, is between truth and falsity, between Christ the Truth and Satan, whom Jesus calls the “liar and the father of lies.” To proclaim Christ as King is not just to announce the truth but to commit ourselves to seek the truth, find the truth, know the truth, love the truth, live the truth and share the truth in a context in which “Prince of demons” tries to inseminate and seduce us to live a lie. Satan’s is a dominion of lies, spin, slander, deception, and self-deception. Christ’s kingdom is a kingdom of truth.
When Pope Pius XI established the Solemnity of Christ the King in 1925, he did so to counteract the virulent falsehoods being propagated by the communists and militant atheists who in proclaiming that God didn’t exist were essentially announcing that truth doesn’t exist. Without God and the truth anchoring human existence in reality, they were capable of distorting human anthropology made in God’s image and likeness and reordering all existence to power. Just eight years before Pius XI instituted the feast, Bolshevik communism had arisen to “free” the people from the “opium” of faith in God, which they mendaciously claimed was only a means to keep people subjugated. In Mexico, there had been a similar revolution against the “old order” and one of the first results was anti-clerical persecution based on a militant atheism. Religious orders were banned. Churches, monasteries, convents and other religious buildings were confiscated by the State. The Church needed to go underground and many Catholic priests, religious and lay people were martyred. Since there really was no God, they claimed, the churches and Christians were just seeking greater foundation for their pursuit of political power.
Over the course of the last century, attacks against the truth have grown, for example in the philosophical movement of relativism, which in a self-contradictory way proclaims as a truth that there is no truth, and particularly in moral relativism, which says that it’s wrong to believe that there is right and wrong. But now we are facing a particular cultural assault on the truth based on sentimentalism or emotivism. We see it in particular in gender ideology, with which many are trying to indoctrinate our culture and especially our kids. Gender ideology says that there’s no truth to our biology, no truth to our having been made by God as male or female, but that male and female are just social attributions and mental states. We are whoever we want to be, whoever we say we are, they claim. This is not to say that we shouldn’t be full of compassion and love for anyone who sincerely, but erroneously, thinks he’s a woman trapped in a man’s body or a man trapped in a woman’s, or someone who is pangender, or a genderqueer, or one of scores of other so-called gender identities. We know such people need help and they deserve our love. But we do them no service to pretend with them that they’re not male or female, that there’s no meaning to that biological truth, that the emperor is well dressed and living sanely in the real world. We, in fact, facilitate their living a lie about themselves, and make all of society complicit in living that lie. Christ the King came to testify to the truth and says that those who belong to the truth listen to his voice, who in the beginning created us male and female. The Solemnity of Christ the King, which this year we mark for the 100th time, is the occasion for us to reaffirm not just the fact of his kingdom but to commit ourselves to living the truth in every way and helping others to live it in the context of powerfully ensconced untruths that will injure people in this world and beyond.
This Sunday, as we publicly celebrate Christ as King the Universe and together cry out, “Thy Kingdom Come!,” let us commit ourselves to make him king of all parts of our life, to live in the truth of his kingdom, which, as we’ll pray in the Preface on the Solemnity, is a “kingdom of holiness and grace, a kingdom of justice, love and peace,” and to help all others come to recognize, enter, remain in and extend that kingdom. Long live Christ the King!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 18:33b-37
Pilate said to Jesus,
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own
or have others told you about me?”
Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I?
Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me.
What have you done?”
Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world.
If my kingdom did belong to this world,
my attendants would be fighting
to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”
So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?”
Jesus answered, “You say I am a king.
For this I was born and for this I came into the world,
to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
The post Christ the King (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 23, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
November 22, 2024Becoming a House of Prayer by Consuming God’s Word, 33rd Friday (II), November 22, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Cecilia, Martyr
November 22, 2024
Rev 10:8-11, Ps 119, Lk 19:45-48

To listen to a recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.22.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted during the homily:
Today, as we prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King, we see in the Gospel how the King wants to get us ready. First he wants to purify us, something we see in his cleansing of the Temple. Second, he wants to fill us with everything we need so that we can become a temple, a “house of prayer,” a dwelling place for God, by helping us to hang on his word, to devour it, so that we can become living commentaries of it. In the couplet of the Our Father Jesus taught us, we pray successively “Thy kingdom come!” and “Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” To enter into the Kingdom of Christ the King, we must do God’s will, we must live his word, and that’s what the liturgy of the Word emphasizes for us today.
The Jesus we see in today’s Gospel is one with whom many, especially today, are unfamiliar. The same Jesus whom Isaiah prophesied would “not break a bruised reed nor quench a smoldering wick” (Is 42:3), the same Jesus whom the psalms would call “kind and merciful” (Ps 145:8) the same Jesus who called himself “meek and humble of heart” (Mt 11:29) started to overturn tables, tossing money on the floor, and making a whip of cords to drive the sheep and the cattle out of the temple. And there is no contradiction between the image of Jesus as the kind, merciful friend of sinners and Jesus as consumed with zeal for his Father’s house, because out of love for sinners and his Father, he really hated the sins that can kill sinners and self-alienate them from God. Jesus’ mercy does not baptize our sin and indulgence, but rather seeks to eradicate it. The word St. Luke uses to describe how Jesus “drove out” the animals is ekballein, the same verb used when he did exorcisms. Jesus wants to exorcise whatever in us is not fit for God. The Temple in Jerusalem, built in order to be the dwelling place of God on earth, constructed to be a place of encountering God in prayer, had become something very different by Jesus’ time, at least in the experience of many. It wasn’t so much the fact that animals were being sold and money exchanged in the temple precincts that bothered Jesus. It was two things associated with this selling of animals and exchanging money: The first was that the moneychangers and animal sellers were drastically overcharging the people. The temple had become a “den of thieves.” When people came to the temple, they needed to sacrifice an animal to God, the size and value of the animal being determined by their personal means and the type of sacrifice being made. Rather than carry an animal with them for the many miles’ uphill walk to the temple — which was too much of a burden — most would buy one at the temple. But because there was such a demand, especially at the time of the Passover, the merchants had the market to charge the people who needed the animals whatever they wanted. Others who would try to save money by bringing an animal of their own often had to get the animals inspected by Temple officials who needed to verify that the animals were unblemished, as the Mosaic law stipulated. These inspectors often were on the take of the animal sellers to find blemishes that weren’t there and disqualify the affected animals. The poor who had saved their money over the course of the whole year for the trip to the temple, therefore, one way or the other, had to pay these enormous prices. While they were there, they also had to pay a temple tax, which needed to be given in one of two types of acceptable Temple currencies. That meant that most everyone had to exchange money and the moneychangers could take an exorbitant commission, which again penalized the poor most of all. Jesus was outraged that people were coming into the temple to rip off the poor. That was the first thing that incensed him. The second was worse. The Jewish mentality had become so distorted over the centuries that they began to look at their relationship with God as something contractual or even magical. “As long as I sacrifice this animal to God,” they began to think to themselves, “everything will be all right. God will be pleased and satisfied.” Too many people had started to look at the temple as the place to go “pay off” God with their animal sacrifices. They had started to look at God as someone who needed to be “bribed” or “bought” by these gifts. God had said many times through the prophets, “It is a contrite heart I seek, not [animal] sacrifice,” but they hadn’t gotten the picture. So Jesus gave them all a lesson they would never forget — and we would never forget. Jesus wanted to return the temple and the people to the true worship of God. He wanted the temple to be a place of prayer, to be His Father’s House once again. He wanted it to be a place in which we learned to love God and love neighbor, rather than buy off God and rip off neighbor.
Every time we talk about the Temple, we need to remember that the Temple in Jerusalem was just a precursor of the Temple who would be Jesus’ humanity, the “true Temple,” which he said in St. John’s Gospel during the scene of the cleansing of the Temple would be destroyed and rebuilt on the third day. And Jesus’ salvific will was to incorporate us into himself as the Temple, as St. Paul would highlight in his letters calling us, individually and collectively, the Temple of God and summoning us to glorify God in our bodies. As a Temple, we are to worship God, to be “houses of prayer,” and places where the Word of God resonates. That’s what we see in the other part of today’s Gospel. St. Luke tells us, “Every day [Jesus] was teaching in the temple area.” Every day Jesus teaches us, in the Gospel at Mass, in the Liturgy of the Hours, in our prayerful lectio divina of Sacred Scripture, in the homily, in others’ words, in the encounters of the day, and in various other aspects of our life where the Holy Spirit seeks to help us remember everything Jesus taught and continues to teach. And we see in the Gospel what our response needs to be: the evangelist tells us, “All the people were hanging on his words.” As houses of prayer, we’re called to hang on everything Jesus says, to build our life on his words of eternal life, to grasp that we live on every word that comes from his mouth, and not to let any word — even the “the” — drop to the ground just like we wouldn’t even let the smallest particle of the Eucharist do so.
Ultimately we’re called to allow the Word of God to take on our flesh, just as Mary did. That’s what today’s first reading is about. It is a fulfillment of the prophetic image of Ezekiel 3, when God said to his prophet, “Son of man, eat what is before you; eat this scroll, then go, speak to the house of Israel. … Feed your belly and fill your stomach with this scroll I am giving you,” and Ezekiel said, “I ate it, and it was as sweet as honey in my mouth.” Then God sent him to proclaim that word to the House of Israel. Today St. John is told, “Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel who is standing on the sea and on the land,” and when he did, the Angel said, “Take and swallow it. It will turn your stomach sour, but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey.” And that’s what happened. “I took the small scroll from the angel’s hand and swallowed it. In my mouth it was like sweet honey, but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.” And then someone said to him, “You must prophesy again about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.” In this we see various lessons about our approach. We’re supposed to become what we eat, to become existential exegetes. Second, we’re called to recognize the sweetness of God’s words as we taste them, what led us in the Psalm to pray, “How sweet to my taste is your promise! In the way of your decrees I rejoice, as much as in all riches. Yes, your decrees are my delight; they are my counselors. The law of your mouth is to me more precious than thousands of gold and silver pieces. How sweet to my palate are your promises, sweeter than honey to my mouth! Your decrees are my inheritance forever; the joy of my heart they are. I gasp with open mouth in my yearning for your commands.” Third, when we interiorize the word, it may upset us, first because it’s calling us to conversion, and, second, it often moves us to do things that according to our humanity we might shirk from doing, like announcing it as medicine to others who might not want to take the remedy. But the word that we hear and ingest is a word to be done and proclaimed; sometimes the word and the action flowing from it won’t be pleasant — God wants us to know that ahead of time! — while at the same times it has the power to amputate sin and restore us to wholeness.
Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who shows us what it means to live as a Temple of God’s presence, to become a house of prayer, to hear and live the word of God, in life and even in death. St. Cecilia was a young girl of a noble Christian family who fasted, wore a hair shirt, and desired to give herself always as a virgin to God, but her father had plans for a good marriage to a young pagan patrician named Valerian. During their wedding, among the music and rejoicing of the guests, Cecilia stayed apart, singing to God within and praying for help. When she and Valerian retired to the place where he was prepared to consummate the marriage, Cecilia told him a secret that she has an angel watching over her and that if he touched her in the way of marriage, the angel would make his suffer, but if he respected her and got baptized, he would see the angel. Valerian received instruction, got baptized by Pope Urban I, and then saw the angel standing by Cecilia’s side who put on both of their heads a crown of roses and lilies, a sign (like we’d see much later in the life of St. Maximilian Mary Kolbe) of martyrdom and purity, respectively. The fact that Valerian could see Cecilia’s angel shows that we’re never abandoned by the presence of the Angel God sends each of us. Valerian eventually helped his brother Tiburtius to convert and the two of them began to care for the bodies of all the martyrs, seeking to bury them. That exposed them as Christians and both were brought to martyrdom with the guard, Maximus, who witnessed their supreme testimony and became a Christian on the spot and almost immediately a fellow martyr. Cecilia buried all three bodies and herself was exposed as a Christian and brought to trial before Almachius. She was unable to be threatened out of her faith and after they tried to suffocate her by fire, ended up trying to behead her, but the axe wouldn’t penetrate through her entire neck. The blow, however, turned out to be fatal after three days and she was buried close to the popes in the catacombs that would eventually be named after St. Callistus. Her relics were translated by Pope St. Paschal in the early 800s to the area that was believed to have been her house and where a Church had been built after the age of persecutions. In 1599, the Cardinal in charge of the Church of St. Cecilia (Cardinal Paulo Emilio Sfondrati), in doing various renovations, decided to re-inter Cecilia with SS. Valerian, Tiburtius and Maximus, and, as he opened her tomb, he found her incorrupt. He had the great renaissance sculptor Stefano Maderno make a sculpture identical to what was seen in the tomb. That statue is now found before her tomb as well as a copy has been placed in the catacombs closed to where her bodied had rested for nearly six centuries. Her remains looked as if she were sleeping. You could see the axe marks in her neck. But what has always struck me — and many others — is the way she seemed to be prophesying even in death. In her right hand, she had two fingers and her thumb extended. In her left, she had her index finger extended. This was a means by which she appeared to be proclaiming her faith in her Triune God, one God in three persons. This was the supreme witness she was giving that not even Roman executioners could cut her off from her attachment to God, because she was united with him even in martyrdom. What St. Ambrose said famously in his treatise on virginity for the feast of St. Agnes is certainly apropos for her: “Virginity is praiseworthy not because it is found in [the virgin] martyrs, but because it makes [the virgin] martyrs.” Her daily choice for Christ strengthened her to choose him until the end! As a Temple of God, she offered herself as a pleasing victim to God, professing her faith in him, one and three. Even as she was being killed, she was making of her life a house of prayer.
At the beginning of every Mass Jesus comes to do a temple cleaning. He seeks to drive from us whatever is unfit for worship, all our spiritual worldliness, all our manipulation of religion for purposes other than God’s glory and then to fill us with his word, help us to hang on it, ingest it, be transformed by it, and pass it on to others enfleshed. Today God doesn’t give us a scroll and tell us to twice to take it and eat it, but he gives us his body and blood and says, “Take and eat. … Take and drink.” Let us imitate Ezekiel, John, Cecilia and the Blessed Virgin Mary, in taking and tasting the Lord’s promise and fulfillment and receiving God into the Temple he mercifully redeemed us to be!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 RV 10:8-11
I, John, heard a voice from heaven speak to me.
Then the voice spoke to me and said:
“Go, take the scroll that lies open in the hand of the angel
who is standing on the sea and on the land.”
So I went up to the angel and told him to give me the small scroll.
He said to me, “Take and swallow it.
It will turn your stomach sour,
but in your mouth it will taste as sweet as honey.”
I took the small scroll from the angel’s hand and swallowed it.
In my mouth it was like sweet honey,
but when I had eaten it, my stomach turned sour.
Then someone said to me, “You must prophesy again
about many peoples, nations, tongues, and kings.”
Responsorial Psalm PS 119:14, 24, 72, 103, 111, 131
R. (103a) How sweet to my taste is your promise!
In the way of your decrees I rejoice,
as much as in all riches.
R. How sweet to my taste is your promise!
Yes, your decrees are my delight;
they are my counselors.
R. How sweet to my taste is your promise!
The law of your mouth is to me more precious
than thousands of gold and silver pieces.
R. How sweet to my taste is your promise!
How sweet to my palate are your promises,
sweeter than honey to my mouth!
R. How sweet to my taste is your promise!
Your decrees are my inheritance forever;
the joy of my heart they are.
R. How sweet to my taste is your promise!
I gasp with open mouth
in my yearning for your commands.
R. How sweet to my taste is your promise!
Alleluia JN 10:27
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
My sheep hear my voice, says the Lord;
I know them, and they follow me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 19:45-48
Jesus entered the temple area and proceeded to drive out
those who were selling things, saying to them,
“It is written, My house shall be a house of prayer,
but you have made it a den of thieves.”
And every day he was teaching in the temple area.
The chief priests, the scribes, and the leaders of the people, meanwhile,
were seeking to put him to death,
but they could find no way to accomplish their purpose
because all the people were hanging on his words.
This image of St. Cecilia with St. Peter’s in the background was painted by my friend, Sr. Mary Angelica Neenan, OP, of the Dominican Sisters of St. Cecilia in Nashville.
The post Becoming a House of Prayer by Consuming God’s Word, 33rd Friday (II), November 22, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
November 21, 2024Responding Like Our Lady to the King’s Visitation, 33rd Thursday (II), Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, November 21, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 33rd Week of Ordinary Time, Year II
Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, Pro Orantibus Day
November 21, 2024
Rev 5:1-10, Ps 149, Lk 19:41-44

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.21.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today, as we draw closer to the Solemnity of Christ the King on Sunday, we have a scene in the Gospel that seems incongruous to the proclamation of Jesus King of the Universe: Jesus, the King of King and Lord of Lords, is weeping. Understanding his tears and responding with what alone will help turn his tears into joy is the point of the Christian life and the best means by which we will not only celebrate appropriately this upcoming feast but learn to live in his kingdom so that we may celebrate the reality of his kingdom eternally. Today on the Memorial of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, we can learn from her how to do that.
We begin with Jesus’ tears. As he drew near Jerusalem, Jesus saw the city and wept over it. There’s a Church on the Mount of Olives overlooking the city called Dominus Flevit, “The Lord wept,” built on the spot traditionally where we believe this scene happened and where Christians are able to ponder the Lord’s tears. When I was there a few of years ago with a big pilgrimage group it was pouring outside, a meteorological event that movingly allowed us to ponder the immensity of the Lord’s weeping. St. Luke tells us why Jesus was weeping. “If this day you only knew what makes for peace,” Jesus lamented, “but now it is hidden from your eyes. For the days are coming upon you when your enemies will raise a palisade against you; they will encircle you and hem you in on all sides. They will smash you to the ground and your children within you, and they will not leave one stone upon another within you, because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.” Jesus was weeping because the inhabitants of Jerusalem, which in Hebrew means “City of Peace,” didn’t know what makes for peace. He was weeping because the city and its inhabitants would be destroyed. He was weeping because all of this would occur because they hadn’t recognized the time of their “visitation.” In Catholic life, there’s a difference between a visit and a visitation. Anybody can pay a visit, but a visitation is something much longer. It’s a time when a diocese, a parish, a religious order, or some charity receives a visitator, when it submits to an evaluation, where it is commended for what it is doing well and corrected for what it needs to change. It’s a time, in short, when the visitator helps the whole entity to take a good look at itself and where it’s going. In the incarnation, God did not just “visit” his people but came for a “visitation.” The Prince of Peace has come to establish the definitive peace treaty between God and man, to help people see where they are in terms of peace with God and with each other. The inhabitants of Jerusalem, however, representing the vast majority of Jews, hadn’t embraced Jesus and the path to divine peace he had come to leave us and give us, as he would say during the Last Supper. Had they embraced the life he was announcing, had they grasped the type of kingdom he was inaugurating, the political tensions that had led to Rome’s destroying Jerusalem in 70 AD, Jesus was prophesying by implication, likely wouldn’t have come about. And Jesus was weeping over all of these realities.
It’s important for us to grasp that Jesus was not weeping over ancient Rome. He wasn’t weeping over modern day Amsterdam, Las Vegas, or San Francisco. He wasn’t weeping over the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, or suffering cities in Ukraine, Gaza, Venezuela, China, or North Korea. He was weeping over Jerusalem, where the vast majority of people believed themselves to be religious, to be God-fearing, to be faithful. Jesus was weeping because the people of the holy city hadn’t recognized the time when God had come to visit them and that shortly they would run him out of it carrying a Cross. We need to ask ourselves whether Jesus would be weeping over Manhattan, over the United States, over the world for the same reason. Do we recognize the time of our visitation? Do we grasp what the ancient Jews, most of whom considered themselves religious, didn’t grasp: what makes for peace and how the Lord has come to visit us? We prayed in the Alleluia verse before the Gospel, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts,” and the reality is that many times the inner ears of our heart are closed to God’s voice calling us to conversion and holiness. Are we receptive to the Lord’s action? Do we welcome and dwell in his peace? Do we allow him to not just to visit but to “visitate” our heart and life and stay there? He longs for the time when we and others will allow him and his kingdom of peace to enter fully. The more we receive him and his word, however, the more we receive those he sends, the more we console him.
It’s also important for those of us who seek to love the Lord with all our mind, heart, soul and strength to enter into his tears and weep with him for all those who do not open up their hearts to him, who refuse or reject his peace, his presence, his grace, his sacraments, his word, and his brothers or sisters. Jesus said in the second beatitude, “Blessed are those who mourn.” The path to heaven is paradoxically a path of tears. This world is a journey, as we pray in the Salve Regina, “mourning and weeping through this valley of tears.” We Christians don’t ponder enough Jesus’ tears and don’t weep enough with him, not just for the hardened sinners far from the Lord, but also for those who believe themselves to be close to him but who out of stubbornness don’t allow Jesus to change them for the better because they don’t want to be disturbed. Today is a day in which we first confront the possibility that Jesus has been weeping for us because we haven’t yet fully responded to his call to become saints, because we have not yet really meant the words we’ve prayed thousands of times, “Thy kingdom come. Thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven.” And we weep because so many others haven’t prayed those words at all or have not fully desired God’s kingdom and for God’s will to be done over theirs.
In the first reading, we see St. John’s tears and it’s likewise important for us to understand them and enter into them, because they show us how the Lord’s tears, John’s tears and ours will be turned into joy. St. John tells us that he “shed many tears because no one was found worthy to open the scroll and examine it,” the scroll with writing on both sides, sealed with seven seals, being held by God the Father who sat on his throne. After the mighty angel had asked “Who is worthy to open the scroll and break open its seals?,” and revealed, as we heard yesterday, “what must happen afterward,” no one was able to come forward, because no one was really able to receive it, no one was really disposed to live according to what was contained within it. Multitudes were curious about what would be contained in it, but no one was docile enough to let everything develop according to the words of that scroll. And John wept. He, too, was not worthy, though he hungered for God’s will to be done. Do we share his tears over the fact that no one was found worthy to receive the plans of God and implement them? Do we weep because we haven’t responded to God’s grace to the point that he would purify us so that we could be worthy? Finally, one of the 24 elders said to John, “Do not weep!” The elder told him that someone would be coming worthy to open the seals of the scroll. He said, “The lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has triumphed, enabling him to open the scroll with its seven seals.” The lion of the tribe of Judah was the fulfillment of the prophecy Jacob gave to Judah his son calling him a “lion’s whelp,” a baby lion (Gen 49:9). Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judah, and became the grown up lion from Judah the whelp. Jesus is also the fulfillment of Isaiah’s prophecy that a “shoot will sprout from the stump of Jesse,” David’s father, and Jesus is that root and shoot. But when finally the One appeared to open the seals, he didn’t look like a Lion or a Shoot. St. John tells us, “I saw standing in the midst of the throne and the four living creatures and the elders a Lamb that seemed to have been slain.” Jesus appeared as a simple Lamb, the Lamb whom St. John the Baptist indicated had come to take away the sins of the world. He was a Lamb that seemed to have been slain: he bore all the marks of death but he was in fact very much alive! John continued, “He had seven horns and seven eyes.” The horns are signs of triumph and seven of them mean perfect triumph because seven (from God’s rest on the seventh or sabbath day) signifies perfection. They’re a sign of Jesus’ omnipotence. The eyes are an indication of his omniscience, that Jesus sees perfectly everything. “He came,” St. John went on, “and received the scroll from the right hand of the one who sat on the throne.” He was worthy to take in and open it. When he did, the four living Creatures and 24 elders “fell down before the Lamb in adoration,” just like they had adored God the Father seated on the throne. “Each of the elders held a harp and gold bowls filled with incense, which are the prayers of the holy ones.” They were playing music of praise to God and offering up our own prayers in the incense bowls. And they were singing to Christ the King words that we should often take to our adoration, “Worthy are you to receive the scroll and break open its seals, for you were slain and with your Blood you purchased for God those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation. You made them a kingdom and priests for our God, and they will reign on earth.” They were adoring the Lamb because he died in order to redeem not just the Jews but those from every people and nation in order not to make them a kingdom of diplomats or civil servants, not a kingdom of soldiers or troubadours, but a kingdom of priests for our God who will reign with the Lamb on earth.
As we prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King, we need to understand that to enter into Christ’s kingdom and reign with him, we need to become a kingdom of priests. What this means is not an exclusive caste of ministerial priests, but a kingdom of those who are living out their baptismal priesthood, the common priesthood of all the faithful, who are offering to the Father the Lamb looking as if he has been slain, and offering ourselves together with the Lamb (Rom 12:1-2). We are called, as the Lord indicated to St. Faustina, to offer ourselves together with Jesus as his Bride and Body to the Father in atonement for our sins and those of the whole world. The Catechism of the Catholic Church (1546-7) describes this reality. “Christ, high priest and unique mediator, has made of the Church ‘a kingdom, priests for his God and Father.’ The whole community of believers is, as such, priestly. The faithful exercise their baptismal priesthood through their participation, each according to his own vocation, in Christ’s mission as priest, prophet, and king. Through the sacraments of Baptism and Confirmation the faithful are ‘consecrated to be … a holy priesthood.’” The Catechism goes on to say, “The ministerial or hierarchical priesthood of bishops and priests, and the common priesthood of all the faithful participate, ‘each in its own proper way, in the one priesthood of Christ.’ While being ‘ordered one to another,’ they differ essentially. In what sense? While the common priesthood of the faithful is exercised by the unfolding of baptismal grace — a life of faith, hope, and charity, a life according to the Spirit — the ministerial priesthood is at the service of the common priesthood. It is directed at the unfolding of the baptismal grace of all Christians. The ministerial priesthood is a means by which Christ unceasingly builds up and leads his Church. For this reason it is transmitted by its own sacrament, the sacrament of Holy Orders.” Jesus has instituted the ministerial priesthood precisely in order to help all of the faithful become a kingdom of priests, offering Christ and themselves with Christ to the Father for the salvation of the world, serving others together with Christ as Good Samaritans, and announcing the Word of God as faithfully as Christ himself, the High Priest, opened up the seals and announced the fullness of God’s plans to all of us. The other point that is revealed in this passage is that it is the “kingdom of priests” who “reign on the earth.” We might think it’s otherwise, that the ones who are in charge are the heads of state of the US and China, the titans of tech and industry, the leaders of armies. But Jesus is saying that the ones who are reigning, not just later in heaven but already here on earth, are the saints, those who are living in Christ’s peace, and offering Christ and themselves with him to the Father. We could spend whole retreats on this, but it’s important for us to stop and ask whether we recognize that in humility, often in hiddenness, from chapels like this, we are reigning to the extent that we’re living out our baptismal priesthood with Christ. When all in this world passes away just like ancient Jerusalem was destroyed, the people who will be remembered will not be political, financial, or cultural leaders per se, the rich, famous and powerful who made the newspapers; the people who will be remembered will be those who were truly reigning the way Christ was reigning on earth, even when worldly powers didn’t acknowledge him. We should never forget that, like Christ, we reign by serving with him.
Someone who reigned this way, even in obscurity, as Queen of heaven and earth, and who offered herself totally together with her Son the eternal high priest, is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Today we celebrate the Memorial of her Presentation in the Temple, an event that comes prior to our first encounter with her in Sacred Scripture at the Annunciation. Most of the liturgical elements for today’s feast come from the Pseudogospel of St. James (and even later pseudogospels like the Pseudoevangelium of Matthew and the Pseudogospel of the Nativity of Mary) that attest that Mary was presented as a young girl of three in the Temple in Jerusalem where she was raised until the time she was betrothed to Joseph. We read in the Pseudogospel of St. James, written about 200 years after the events and so historically useless according to the details but useful in terms of the traditions based upon it later, “And the child became three years old, and Joachim said: ‘Call for the daughters of the Hebrews that are undefiled, and let every one of them take every a lamp, and let them be burning, that the child turn not backward and her heart be taken captive away from the temple of the Lord.’ And they did so until they were gone up into the temple of the Lord. And the priest received her and kissed her and blessed her and said: ‘The Lord has magnified your name among all generations: in you in the latter days shall the Lord make manifest his redemption unto the children of Israel.’ And he made her to sit upon the third step of the altar. And the Lord put grace upon her and she danced with her feet and all the house of Israel loved her. And her parents sat down marveling, and praising the Lord God because the child did not turn away backward. And Mary was in the temple of the Lord like a dove that is nurtured: and she received food from the hand of an angel.” The essential point of the passage was Mary’s being consecrated to the Lord from the beginning of her life, her joy in the Lord’s presence, and the fact that she spent her early years in God’s presence becoming herself eventually the Temple in whom God would dwell, the Ark of the New and Eternal Covenant. Her presence in the temple shows how she was anticipating living out her common priesthood, uniting her life and all her sacrifices to those of her Son the new Temple. It’s during these years, the early Church knew, that Mary’s heart was prepared to treasure God’s word, to piece it together as tesserae in a mosaic whole, to respond to the Lord in purity of heart, and more.
Since 1953, this feast is the occasion on which the Church marks Pro Orantibus Day, the annual observance begun by Pope Pius XII and expanded by St. John Paul II in 1997, on which the whole Church prays in a special way “For Those Praying,” for all of those in convents, cloisters, monasteries and hermitages who intercede for us without ceasing before God. It’s held purposefully on the feast of the Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, who is the model of total dedication to a life of prayer and intercession in God’s service. It’s a day on which we note how they lives as a kingdom of priests for God our Father, offering their lives in communion with Christ the Bridegroom’s saving sacrifice. It’s a day on which we thank God for the tears they shed over the sins of the world praying that we will recognize the time of our Visitation. It’s a time we thank the Lord for the contemplatives’ silent, hidden, generous and beautiful vocation. It’s also an occasion on which we recognize them, thank them, encourage them and commit to give the material support they need. It’s a day on which we ponder their example of consecration and of following Christ and prioritizing him through prayer. Contemplative life is a great and indispensable gift of God. All of us benefit spiritually from the orantes’ prayers and sacrifices, from the intense way they live out their baptismal priesthood, even if many of us are unaware of their intercession or naively think that their hidden life is being wasted. Contemplatives remind us — ensnared by the frenetic, noisy and provisional — that God is truly the “pearl of great price” and the “one thing necessary.” In a world that seeks to structure itself without God, their very existence helps us to recall that God is real, provident, and worth our all. They teach us how to adore Christ with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Today, as every day, communities of contemplatives are before God constantly praying for us, that we may — like them and our Lady — recognize the time of our Visitation, open ourselves to the Visitator, and align our whole life to his priestly passion death and resurrection. Today we pray for them, thank them and thank God for them. We’ll never know until heaven how many of the graces we’ve received — and disasters we’ve averted — have happened because of their incessant prayers.
As the contemplatives teach us, we’re never more fully a kingdom of priests as when we come to Mass, as all of us through our common baptismal priesthood participate through the ministerial priesthood in Christ’ the high-priest’s self-offering. This is where we look upon the Lamb appearing to have been slain and say, “Worthy are you!” and “Blessed are those called to the Supper of the Lamb!” This is where we take of our prayers not in golden bowls full of incense but present them deep in our hearts to the Father. This is where we sing “a new song” to the Father — as the elders and living creatures did, as we ourselves were called to do in today’s Responsorial Psalm, and as Our Lady and the saints do in heaven — not with harps but with our lungs. This is where Jesus visitates us each day to bring us his peace and make us his holy, indestructible temple and so that we might enter into his purifying tears. And this is where he begins to fulfill his promise that those who mourn like he mourns will be consoled!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 rv 5:1-10
I, John, saw a scroll in the right hand of the one who sat on the throne.
It had writing on both sides and was sealed with seven seals.
Then I saw a mighty angel who proclaimed in a loud voice,
“Who is worthy to open the scroll and break its seals?”
But no one in heaven or on earth or under the earth
was able to open the scroll or to examine it.
I shed many tears because no one was found worthy
to open the scroll or to examine it.
One of the elders said to me, “Do not weep.
The lion of the tribe of Judah, the root of David, has triumphed,
enabling him to open the scroll with its seven seals.”
Then I saw standing in the midst of the throne
and the four living creatures and the elders
a Lamb that seemed to have been slain.
He had seven horns and seven eyes;
these are the seven spirits of God sent out into the whole world.
He came and received the scroll from the right hand
of the one who sat on the throne.
When he took it,
the four living creatures and the twenty-four elders
fell down before the Lamb.
Each of the elders held a harp and gold bowls filled with incense,
which are the prayers of the holy ones.
They sang a new hymn:
“Worthy are you to receive the scroll
and break open its seals,
for you were slain and with your Blood you purchased for God
those from every tribe and tongue, people and nation.
You made them a kingdom and priests for our God,
and they will reign on earth.”
Responsorial Psalm ps 149:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6a and 9b
R. (Rev. 5:10) The Lamb has made us a kingdom of priests to serve our God.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Sing to the LORD a new song
of praise in the assembly of the faithful.
Let Israel be glad in their maker,
let the children of Zion rejoice in their king.
R. The Lamb has made us a kingdom of priests to serve our God.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Let them praise his name in the festive dance,
let them sing praise to him with timbrel and harp.
For the LORD loves his people,
and he adorns the lowly with victory.
R. The Lamb has made us a kingdom of priests to serve our God.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Let the faithful exult in glory;
let them sing for joy upon their couches;
Let the high praises of God be in their throats.
This is the glory of all his faithful. Alleluia.
R. The Lamb has made us a kingdom of priests to serve our God.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Gospel lk 19:41-44
As Jesus drew near Jerusalem,
he saw the city and wept over it, saying,
“If this day you only knew what makes for peace–
but now it is hidden from your eyes.
For the days are coming upon you
when your enemies will raise a palisade against you;
they will encircle you and hem you in on all sides.
They will smash you to the ground and your children within you,
and they will not leave one stone upon another within you
because you did not recognize the time of your visitation.”
The post Responding Like Our Lady to the King’s Visitation, 33rd Thursday (II), Presentation of the Blessed Virgin Mary, November 21, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
21 min
November 20, 2024Investing Wisely God’s Gifts, 33rd Wednesday (II), November 20, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
November 20, 2024
Rev 4:1-11, Ps 150, Lk 19:11-28

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.20.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the Gospel we have the Parable of the Coins (or Minas), which is similar to that of the more famous Parable of the Talents we read in St. Matthew’s Gospel. The main difference between the two is in this Parable, everyone gets the same investment on the part of the Lord. One servant multiplies the gold coin by 10, another by 5, seven we don’t know about, and the tenth buries it. Whereas with the Parable of the Talents, we can often focus on how many talents we have relative to others, “each according to his ability,” today’s Parable has us focus on the fact that the greatest gifts we’ve received, we have to a large degree received equally with others: the gift of our life, the gift of time, the gift of redemption, the gift of God’s word, the gift of the Sacraments, the gift of prayer, the gift of so many opportunities for charity. How are we investing these? Are we bearing great dividends from them? How are we planning to invest the gift of this day, of this Mass, for loving God and others? We all know that there are some people who really profit from these common gifts and others who place them in handkerchiefs. Most of us would probably give the Lord somewhere between numbers 1 and 10 in return of his investment. But the Lord today wants to teach each of us how to bear great dividends.
Before we move on, let’s first handle a couple of things for the setting of the Parable. The first is about life in general. Jesus told the people the Parable “because he was near Jerusalem and they thought that the Kingdom of God would appear there immediately.” The Parable of the Coins was given to help people know why the Kingdom of God wasn’t going to appear immediately, or, rather, how the Kingdom-among-them, as it awaits fulfillment, is a place in which people are advancing or growing the kingdom by investing the King’s gifts. How important this point is for us to grasp: that the time we have is a time of investing for the Kingdom! The second introductory point concerns the setting of the story, which involves history known very well to Jesus’ listeners but not to people today. Jesus was employing the well-known story of how after King Herod the Great’s death — the Herod who sought to kill him as an infant — Herod’s kingdom was divided into three parts, but each needed to go to Rome to be confirmed by the emperor in the kingship. The king of Judah, Herod Archelaus, went to Rome, but the people sent a delegation saying that they didn’t want him as king. The emperor confirmed him without the title king — he named him tetrarch — and upon the return, Archelaus executed those who didn’t want him to be king. In this month of November, in which we meditate on death and judgment and as we prepare for the Solemnity of Christ the King on Sunday, there’s a functional spiritual equivalent for those who don’t want to accept Christ as King. He doesn’t punish or slay them because in one sense he doesn’t have to: they’re already spiritually dead because they’re not drawing their life from him.
Let’s get into the heart of the Parable and what Jesus is teaching. Jesus gives each of the ten servants a treasure of a gold coin. The coin is actually a Mina, which is one-sixtieth of a Talent. Since a talent was 6,000 days wages, a Mina is 100 days wages or a third of a year’s salary. For someone making $30,000 a year about $10,000: not an enormous sum but substantial enough. Those entrusted by the King with this Mina make different yields: the first one makes ten, the second five, and the last just conceals the coin in a handkerchief. We don’t know what the other seven did. We see the incredible reward given to those who proved themselves trustworthy in these little matters. The one who made ten — about $100,000, or just over three years’ work — was entrusted with ten cities and the one who made five with five cities. But then in this parable as well as in St. Matthew’s Parable of the Talents, we encounter someone who out of fear refused to invest the coin. In the latter, the Master called the one who buried the talent a “wicked, lazy servant.” Today the king says, “With your own words I shall condemn you, you wicked servant.” (It would have been interesting if Jesus had given us the example of a servant who had tried to make a profit but had actually lost money. My hunch is that the King and Master would have treated that servant rather well, since that might have been a result of bad luck or bad training. He may have been an incompetent servant or an unfortunate one, but he wouldn’t have been lazy and wicked. The Lord is not necessarily asking us to be successful, but he certainly is asking us to make the effort). In today’s case of the wicked servant, the lazy servant, his problem was his fear. “I was afraid of you, because you are a demanding man; you take up what you did not lay down and you harvest what you did not plant” and for that reason he kept it in a handkerchief. His fear lead to his laziness and wickedness.
Jesus, on the other hand, is encouraging us not to be afraid to take risks in investing what he’s given us. He has made us in his image and we see in the Parable that God reaps where he doesn’t sow, taking the risk even of giving us freedom. He wants us to do the same. If fear cripples us, it is not of God. We need to have the courage to put all that God has given us at the service of him and others, not comparing ourselves to those who are making more or less, just doing the best we can. The reality is, from God’s perspective, that when we get to the most important talents or gold coin involved in life, it seems that it’s impossible not to “make a profit” if we actually make the effort to “trade” with it in life. The most important talent of all is God himself. We have the ability to pray to him and be guided each day, to enter into his life in the Sacraments, to enflesh his word in Sacred Scripture, to be strengthened by his Body the Church (the communion of saints in heaven, the presence of a family of faith here on earth, and the instruction of the magisterium), and to serve him in others. If we make the effort here, we will bear dividends. Jesus promised us about prayer that the one who seeks finds, the one who asks receives, and the one who knocks has the door opened. We could say that the one who invests God spiritually reaps a spiritual windfall. But we have to invest his gifts. The more we invest, the more we receive God’s guidance, the more we really allow him to transform us in sacramental encounters, the more we insert ourselves into the communion of holiness and charity, the more fruit we’ll bear.
The first reading and the Psalm help us to learn how to invest the gift of our time in the most important “market” of all. They all concern prayer, and above all the most important form of prayer which is praise, adoration and blessing. Many times when we think of prayer we think first or sometimes exclusively about prayer of petition and intercession, asking God for things for ourselves or for others. But this is just a small part of prayer. We occasionally think about prayers of contrition, such as when we cry out, “Lord, have mercy on me a sinner.” As we approach the Feast of Thanksgiving next week, we can recall the importance of prayers of gratitude. The most important part of prayer, however, is prayer of praise, because in that type of prayer we’re essentially telling God how much we love him without any direct reference to ourselves. Prayer of Praise is the most pure form of prayer because it’s focused essentially on God. In the Book of Revelation, we see what St. John witnessed in his vision when he looked through the open door of heaven and was shown what would happen. He saw God on his throne not appearing like a man but shining in complete radiance, sparkling like jasper, carnelian and an emerald halo. Around his throne were 24 elders, who could represent the 12 major prophets and 12 apostles, or 12 tribes and 12 gentiles, but who represent basically everyone in heaven. Then there was a vision of the “four living creatures” with eyes in front and back for the beatific vision, seeing God from all angles. The first resembled a lion, the second an ox, the third had the face like a man and the fourth looked like an eagle in flight. These have been seen on the one hand as the pinnacle of creation — the lion is the king of beasts, the ox the sum of sacrifices, the eagle the lord of the air, and the human person, the summit of all of creation — or, taking from St. Irenaeus’ second century reflections, the four Gospel writers, Mark (the lion, because he begins with Jesus’ royal proclamation as the Son of David and son of God), Luke (the ox because of the presence of ox and ass at Jesus’ birth), John (the eagle because of the soaring theology in his Gospel) and Matthew (the man with the face of an angel, because of his focus on Jesus as the Son of Man and all of the angels presence from the Nativity scene to the Garden of Gethsemane in his Gospel). I prefer the latter interpretation. We see that “whenever the four living creatures give glory and honor” to God, exclaiming, “Holy, Holy, Holy is the Lord God Almighty,” the 24 elders all fall down before him, worship him, throw down their crowns and say, “Worthy are you, Lord our God, to receive glory and honor and power, for you have created all things, and by your will they came to be and were made.” St. John saw the Gospel writers praising God and then all the Jews and Gentiles, all the prophets and apostles, joined in that adoration and blessing. It’s key for us to invest the gold coin of this type of praise and adoration of the Lord. The Gospels still proclaim God’s glory and honor and power. We normally respond to them saying, “Thanks be to God,” and “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ,” and “Alleluia!,” which means, “Praise the Lord.” But sometimes those words come off our lips without the wonder and enthusiasm that doubtless marks the four living creatures and the 24 elders. We sing the “Holy, Holy, Holy, Lord God of Hosts,” but without the passion and piety of the angels. Many of us don’t invest ourselves in this the way those on fire with love of God do, which is one of the reasons why our prayer, our assistance at Mass, our reception of Confession, our belonging to the Church, our reading of the Word of God, our service to God’s people do not bear as much fruit in us as they do in some others especially in the saints. In response to the first reading, the last Psalm in the Psalter not only tells us how to praise God with all the instruments we have, but helps us to do so as we say the words: “Praise the Lord in his sanctuary, praise him in the firmament of his strength, praise him for his mighty deeds, praise him for his sovereign majesty. Praise him with the blast of the trumpet, praise him with lyre and harp, praise him with timbrel and dance, praise him with strings and pipe. Praise him with sounding cymbals, praise him with clanging cymbals. Let everything that has breath praise the Lord! Alleluia.” One of the most important ways for us to invest ourselves more in the praise of God is actually to use the words of this Psalm, to use the words of the four living creatures, to use the phrases from the 24 elders. The Psalm and the words of Revelation teach us how to praise and worship God, how to enter more intimately into the very life of heaven, which is the most lasting investment of all, and prepares us for eternity.
Today at Mass we listen anew to the four living creatures who have spoken to us of Christ, who is worthy of all praise. The liturgy of the Word leads to the liturgy of the Eucharist where together with them we will pray, “Holy, Holy, Holy.” Let us fall down with all the elders and say to God, “Worthy are you to receive glory and honor and power!” Worthy are you to receive praise in your sanctuary, in the firmament of your strength, for your mighty deeds and sovereign majesty, with the blast of the trumpet, with lyre and harp, timbrel and dance, strings and pipe, and clanging cymbals! Let not only everything that has breath praise the Lord, but let us use all our breath to praise him. Let us invest this Mass in such a way that Jesus will say to us, “Well done, good servant!,” and give us not ten cities but the celestial Jerusalem!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 rv 4:1-11
I, John, had a vision of an open door to heaven,
and I heard the trumpetlike voice
that had spoken to me before, saying,
“Come up here and I will show you what must happen afterwards.”
At once I was caught up in spirit.
A throne was there in heaven, and on the throne sat one
whose appearance sparkled like jasper and carnelian.
Around the throne was a halo as brilliant as an emerald.
Surrounding the throne I saw twenty-four other thrones
on which twenty-four elders sat,
dressed in white garments and with gold crowns on their heads.
From the throne came flashes of lightning,
rumblings, and peals of thunder.
Seven flaming torches burned in front of the throne,
which are the seven spirits of God.
In front of the throne was something that resembled
a sea of glass like crystal.In the center and around the throne,
there were four living creatures
covered with eyes in front and in back.
The first creature resembled a lion, the second was like a calf,
the third had a face like that of a man,
and the fourth looked like an eagle in flight.
The four living creatures, each of them with six wings,
were covered with eyes inside and out.
Day and night they do not stop exclaiming:
“Holy, holy, holy is the Lord God almighty,
who was, and who is, and who is to come.”
Whenever the living creatures give glory and honor and thanks
to the one who sits on the throne, who lives forever and ever,
the twenty-four elders fall down
before the one who sits on the throne
and worship him, who lives forever and ever.
They throw down their crowns before the throne, exclaiming:
“Worthy are you, Lord our God,
to receive glory and honor and power,
for you created all things;
because of your will they came to be and were created.”
Responsorial Psalm ps 150:1b-2, 3-4, 5-6
R. (1b) Holy, holy, holy Lord, mighty God!
Praise the LORD in his sanctuary,
praise him in the firmament of his strength.
Praise him for his mighty deeds,
praise him for his sovereign majesty.
R. Holy, holy, holy Lord, mighty God!
Praise him with the blast of the trumpet,
praise him with lyre and harp,
Praise him with timbrel and dance,
praise him with strings and pipe.
R. Holy, holy, holy Lord, mighty God!
Praise him with sounding cymbals,
praise him with clanging cymbals.
Let everything that has breath
praise the LORD! Alleluia.
R. Holy, holy, holy Lord, mighty God!
Gospel lk 19:11-28
While people were listening to Jesus speak,
he proceeded to tell a parable because he was near Jerusalem
and they thought that the Kingdom of God
would appear there immediately.
So he said,
“A nobleman went off to a distant country
to obtain the kingship for himself and then to return.
He called ten of his servants and gave them ten gold coins
and told them, ‘Engage in trade with these until I return.’
His fellow citizens, however, despised him
and sent a delegation after him to announce,
‘We do not want this man to be our king.’
But when he returned after obtaining the kingship,
he had the servants called, to whom he had given the money,
to learn what they had gained by trading.
The first came forward and said,
‘Sir, your gold coin has earned ten additional ones.’
He replied, ‘Well done, good servant!
You have been faithful in this very small matter;
take charge of ten cities.’
Then the second came and reported,
‘Your gold coin, sir, has earned five more.’
And to this servant too he said,
‘You, take charge of five cities.’
Then the other servant came and said,
‘Sir, here is your gold coin;
I kept it stored away in a handkerchief,
for I was afraid of you, because you are a demanding man;
you take up what you did not lay down
and you harvest what you did not plant.’
He said to him,
‘With your own words I shall condemn you,
you wicked servant.
You knew I was a demanding man,
taking up what I did not lay down
and harvesting what I did not plant;
why did you not put my money in a bank?
Then on my return I would have collected it with interest.’
And to those standing by he said,
‘Take the gold coin from him
and give it to the servant who has ten.’
But they said to him,
‘Sir, he has ten gold coins.’
He replied, ‘I tell you,
to everyone who has, more will be given,
but from the one who has not,
even what he has will be taken away.
Now as for those enemies of mine who did not want me as their king,
bring them here and slay them before me.’”
After he had said this,
he proceeded on his journey up to Jerusalem.
The post Investing Wisely God’s Gifts, 33rd Wednesday (II), November 20, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
November 19, 2024Walking and Climbing With Jesus Dressed In White, 33rd Tuesday (II), November 19, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
November 19, 2024
Rev 3:1-6.14-22; Ps 15, Lk 19:1-10

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.19.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the readings, we are able to focus on the heart of Jesus’ interactions with us, the meaning of the incarnation, his public ministry, his passion, his death, resurrection and beyond. It can be summed up by two phrases at the end of the Gospel and first reading respectively: “The Son of Man has come to seek and to save what was lost” and “I stand at the door and knock.” Those words of Jesus at the end of his interaction with Zacchaeus and the crowds and after his address to the Seven Churches of the Asian diaspora help us to grasp God’s great desire to save us in his mercy. He knocks, he invites, he wants to seat us on his throne and share with us the victory of his triumph over sin and death. Let’s enter into these readings and learn the lessons God wants us to capture.
The Lord’s merciful desire to save was on full display in the Gospel with Zacchaeus. His love for sinners was so profound that he literally went to the deepest place on earth in search of perhaps the greatest public sinner of that city, to reconcile him to the Father. Jesus went to Jericho, the lowest city on the planet — 853 feet below sea level — to find Zacchaeus, who was not just one of a bunch of tax-collectors loathsome to the Jewish authorities, but the chief tax collector of the region, which was the equivalent of the don of the mafia. He conspired with the Romans to rip off his own fellow Jews through the crooked Roman tax system. Jesus had promised that he, the Good Shepherd, would leave the ninety-nine sheep in his fold to search out and save one lost sheep, and this is what he did, leaving the crowds behind and entering alone with Zacchaeus into his home and into his life. He called Zacchaeus, his lost sheep, by name and heaven rejoiced on that day more for him than for all the others. So, too, today and everyday, Jesus takes the initiative of knocking at the door of our souls, asking for entry, coming to us wherever we are, no matter the depths to which we’ve sunk, no matter the fact that perhaps everyone else around us might despise us. Jesus never abandons us. To the extent that we repent of whatever sins we’ve committed and accept Jesus’ gracious invitation by “welcoming him with delight,” we, too, like Zacchaeus, can have salvation come to us.
The diminutive Zacchaeus’ climbing of the tree, moreover, is more than merely an interesting detail. The text tells us that he was trying to see Jesus, but couldn’t because of the crowd, so he ran ahead and climbed a tree along Jesus’ route in order to be able to see him. We, too, often cannot see the Lord because other people get in the way. They block our sight in various ways. We’re often too small of stature to see over such obstacles, and, unfortunately, too often others are too selfish, distracted, sinful, judgmental or out-of-it, to do anything to help us and bring us into the presence of the Lord. Like a little child, however, Zacchaeus climbs a tree to see the Lord. Such an act could have led to great mockery for a middle-aged public figure. But Zacchaeus didn’t care. He wanted to see the Lord and no obstacle was going to stop him. His example challenges each of us to consider the extent to which we go, the trees or obstacles we’ll climb, in order to see Jesus more clearly. In our prayer, we regularly “leave the ground,” separating ourselves from the crowds, to go to Jesus, to behold him, to make sure that we are able to focus on him. But then, just like Jesus called Zacchaeus to come down and spend the rest of the day with him, so Jesus does the same for us. Our mental prayer is a time in which we can fix our eyes on Jesus so that we can keep them on him the rest of the day.
Zacchaeus’ response to Jesus’ invitation teaches us that true conversion to God also brings about a real conversion to others. The rehabilitation of our relationship with God is not meant to remain private, but is supposed to help us restore our relationship with others and inspire us to repair whatever harms we have caused. Even though Zacchaeus, like his fellow tax-collectors, would have been guilty of ripping off the people of Jericho by unregulated over-taxation, he knew that he needed to make amends and to use the gift of his office to do good rather than evil. So he told Jesus, “Look, half of my possessions, Lord, I will give to the poor; and if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I will pay back four times as much.” Strict justice would have required his giving back precisely what he had overcharged. If he had really wanted to be kind, he could have given it back with interest. But he was going to give it back with four-hundred percent interest, which was a sign of great contrition for the gravity of his previous sins of stealing and intimidation. Moreover, a strictly observant religious Jew would give ten percent of his income over to God and the poor. Zacchaeus committed himself to giving fifty percent of his income to those who were needy, which was a sign of great love and a recognition that others needed his money more than he did. From that point forward, he was going to be an honest tax collector, a Christian tax collector, and use his office for his salvation and sanctification and for that of others. Zacchaeus likely remained a rich man, but one who used his riches, used what God gave him, for building up God’s kingdom. We’re called to do the same with whatever God has given us, lavishly sharing the mercy we’ve received with others.
We can also learn so much about the meaning of Jesus’ coming to seek and save what was lost in today’s first reading from the Book of Revelation. Jesus’ words are highly relevant because what he describes of these Christians in the sixth and seventh of the seven Churches to whom the Book of Revelation was addressed are applicable in general to many Christians in the United States. In saying these strong words, Jesus was summoning them to conversion, so that they, like Zacchaeus, would recognize that they were lost and open themselves up to the salvation he was seeking to bring them. He was calling them to mercy and showing them the way to remain in his mercy. And so what I’d like to focus on is not just the Divine Physician’s diagnosis, but also his prescription.
To the Christians in Sardis, Jesus said, “I know your works, that you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.” On the outside and in name they seemed to be Christians but Jesus, who can read the heart, proclaimed that they were dead on the inside. To be alive is to be growing and they weren’t growing. When we stop growing, when our cells stop dividing, we’re dead. It’s also quite likely that many of them were in mortal sin and had voluntarily killed divine life within them. Jesus later noted that a few people in Sardis hadn’t “soiled their garments” and would “walk with me dressed in white” — which is a summary of sanctity — implying at the same time that most of them had sullied their baptismal garments with serious sin and were no longer walking with Jesus on the path of holiness. Jesus gave them five things to do in response. First he told them “Be watchful,” to look out for him, to find like Zacchaeus did. Second, “strengthen what is left,” which means to take advantage of the gifts and opportunities one still has, not to look back, to what was lost, but rather to the present and unite one’s life with God. Third, he called them to receptivity: “Remember how you accepted and heard,” to live by it again and to repent. How important is our openness to God, especially to his word, in order to grow in the spiritual life! The Lord wants us to have a heart that is totally receptive to his action, much like we see in our Lady. Fourth, he wants their to cleanse their garments of anything that has soiled them, which means to come to him for mercy, pointing to the importance of the Sacrament of Mercy. Lastly, he wants us to “walk with [him] dressed in white.” He wants us to follow him, to be unashamed of our baptism, of our purity, of our gifts. These are ways to come fully to life.
To the Christians in Laodicea, Jesus used even stronger language that pointed to their need for mercy and how to receive it and respond to it. “I know your works,” he said, and “that you are neither cold nor hot. I wish you were either cold or hot but since you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold, I will spit you out of my mouth.” Jesus ultimately wants us to be on fire with love for him and others, but he’d take our being cold because at least those who are cold shiver and recognize that they need the heat. Those who are tepid, he said, who are living in 65 degree weather, think that they can just go on that way. Jesus says that such lukewarmness makes him sick to his stomach. The reason for their lukewarmness, he said, is a material self-sufficiency that leads them to place their faith, hope and love in material things rather than in God. They think they don’t need God. “You say,” Jesus adds, “‘I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,’ and yet do not realize that you are [spiritually] wretched, pitiable, poor, blind and naked.” They don’t even grasp how sick and shameful their circumstance is because they’ve been deadened by their materialism and consumerism. Jesus, here, wasn’t insulting them in order to put them down; he was telling them the truth in order to raise them up. Like a doctor’s telling a patient directly about his cancerous condition and what drastic treatments will be needed, Jesus, who came to seek and save what was lost, was letting them know that they needed severe treatment of their heart and what it desired, of their body, and of their eyes. “I advise you to buy from me,” he said, “gold refined by fire so that you may be rich, and white garments to put on so that your shameful nakedness may not be exposed and buy ointment to smear on your eyes so that you may see.” He wanted them to “buy” it, rather than just receive it, because he desired them to grasp what he was giving as the pearl of great price worth selling what they presently had, their golden calves, to obtain. He wanted them to purchase the true spiritual wealth of fire-refined gold, the real treasure of the kingdom, through refining all they had through the fire of charity. He wanted them to purchase anew the white garments of baptism to cover themselves, as the sons of Adam and Eve who covered themselves, in the graces of baptism and walk with him in the grace of the communion begun in baptism. He wanted them to obtain the ointment of the Holy Spirit for their eyes so that they might see and value things aright. All of this was precisely an offer of salvation. Jesus said, “Those whom I love, I prove and chastise. Be earnest, therefore, and repent.” He finished the words to the seven Churches by saying, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If anyone hears my voice and opens the door, then I will enter his house and dine with him, and he with me.” Jesus is always knocking, politely asking entry into our lives, hoping that we will open the door to a life of total communion with him so that, as he promised, we can sit with him on his throne and share his victory.
Just like the Lord went to the lowest place on earth to bring Zacchaeus back to the fold, so the Lord Jesus comes continually to save us, no matter how far we’ve sunk, and no matter how many times we’ve fallen. And there’s nothing he won’t do to save us. When we and the whole human race were incapable of seeing Him on account of the great weight of sin which was reducing our humanity to smaller and smaller images of what we are called to be, and thereby when we were incapable of climbing any tree at all, he, out of his great love for us, climbed one on our behalf, so that each of us might still be able to see him, perched upon his glorious wooden throne. He invites each of us here and now in this Eucharistic participation in his death and resurrection, to be lifted up by him onto that life-giving tree, so that as victors we might sit with him on his throne and as God’s children might spend eternity in a celestial tree house built upon the Cross’ firm foundation. Today Jesus knocks on the door of our heart and says, “I must stay in your house today.” Let’s let him in totally, so that he might dine with us and us with him, in a communion that will know no end.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 rv 3:1-6, 14-22
I, John, heard the Lord saying to me:
“To the angel of the Church in Sardis, write this:
“‘The one who has the seven spirits of God
and the seven stars says this: “I know your works,
that you have the reputation of being alive, but you are dead.
Be watchful and strengthen what is left, which is going to die,
for I have not found your works complete in the sight of my God.
Remember then how you accepted and heard; keep it, and repent.
If you are not watchful, I will come like a thief,
and you will never know at what hour I will come upon you.
However, you have a few people in Sardis
who have not soiled their garments;
they will walk with me dressed in white,
because they are worthy.
“‘The victor will thus be dressed in white,
and I will never erase his name from the book of life
but will acknowledge his name in the presence of my Father
and of his angels.
“‘Whoever has ears ought to hear what the Spirit says to the churches.’”
“To the angel of the Church in Laodicea, write this:“
‘The Amen, the faithful and true witness,
the source of God’s creation, says this:
“I know your works;
I know that you are neither cold nor hot.
I wish you were either cold or hot.
So, because you are lukewarm, neither hot nor cold,
I will spit you out of my mouth.
For you say, ‘I am rich and affluent and have no need of anything,’
and yet do not realize that you are wretched,
pitiable, poor, blind, and naked.
I advise you to buy from me gold refined by fire so that you may be rich,
and white garments to put on
so that your shameful nakedness may not be exposed,
and buy ointment to smear on your eyes so that you may see.
Those whom I love, I reprove and chastise.
Be earnest, therefore, and repent.“
‘Behold, I stand at the door and knock.
If anyone hears my voice and opens the door,
then I will enter his house and dine with him,
and he with me.
I will give the victor the right to sit with me on my throne,
as I myself first won the victory
and sit with my Father on his throne.
“‘Whoever has ears ought to hear
what the Spirit says to the churches.’”
Responsorial Psalm ps 15:2-3a, 3bc-4ab, 5
R. (Rev. 3: 21) I will seat the victor beside me on my throne.
He who walks blamelessly and does justice;
who thinks the truth in his heart
and slanders not with his tongue.
R. I will seat the victor beside me on my throne.
Who harms not his fellow man,
nor takes up a reproach against his neighbor;
By whom the reprobate is despised,
while he honors those who fear the LORD.
R. I will seat the victor beside me on my throne.
Who lends not his money at usury
and accepts no bribe against the innocent.
He who does these things
shall never be disturbed.
R. I will seat the victor beside me on my throne.
Gospel lk 19:1-10
At that time Jesus came to Jericho and intended to pass through the town.
Now a man there named Zacchaeus,
who was a chief tax collector and also a wealthy man,
was seeking to see who Jesus was;
but he could not see him because of the crowd,
for he was short in stature.
So he ran ahead and climbed a sycamore tree in order to see Jesus,
who was about to pass that way.
When he reached the place, Jesus looked up and said,
“Zacchaeus, come down quickly,
for today I must stay at your house.”
And he came down quickly and received him with joy.
When they saw this, they began to grumble, saying,
“He has gone to stay at the house of a sinner.”
But Zacchaeus stood there and said to the Lord,
“Behold, half of my possessions, Lord, I shall give to the poor,
and if I have extorted anything from anyone
I shall repay it four times over.”
And Jesus said to him,
“Today salvation has come to this house
because this man too is a descendant of Abraham.
For the Son of Man has come to seek
and to save what was lost.”
The post Walking and Climbing With Jesus Dressed In White, 33rd Tuesday (II), November 19, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
21 min
November 18, 2024Seeing with Fresh Eyes of Love, 33rd Monday (II), November 18, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 33rd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Rose Philippine Duchesne
November 18, 2024
Rev 1:1-4.2:1-5, Ps 1, Lk 18:35-43

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.18.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in today’s homily:
On Saturday Jesus gave us the parable of the importune woman bothering the unjust judge in order to convey to us the necessity of “praying always without losing heart.” Immediately thereafter is the Parable of the Pharisee and the Publican — which the Church strangely doesn’t give us to ponder today, perhaps we meditate upon it on Saturday of third week of Lent each year — which shows us of the importance of humbly begging the Lord for mercy. Today we encounter the living illustration of what Jesus was teaching about persevering, faithful, humble prayer for mercy in the blind man by the side of the road whom St. Mark in his version of the same scene identifies as Bartimaeus.
As rabbis were accustomed to do on their three-times-per-year pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. Bartimaeus was sitting by the roadside begging. He heard the commotion of the crowd and asked what was happening. Upon being informed that “Jesus of Nazareth was passing by,” he immediately began to cry out, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles in Galilee to the north and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. But his cries for Jesus were annoying those who were trying to hear Jesus’ teaching. So the first people in the group rebuked him and told him to shut his trap. But that only led him to cry out all the more, “Son of David, have pity on me!” The word St. Luke uses means basically an animal cry, something coming deep from his woundedness.
Jesus stopped and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than whatever else he was teaching at that moment. Likely, it was also a “coincidental” opportunity for him put flesh on his parables by showing how God responds to persistent, faithful, humble prayer for compassion. Jesus asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?,” and Bartimaeus said, “Lord, please let me see!” To some degree, Bartimaeus was already seeing by faith but he wanted to see Jesus with physical eyes so that he would be able to do exactly what he did once cured, to “follow him, giving glory to God.” He saw something with inner eyes, but was asking to see more. Jesus replied, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.”
This cry of Bartimaeus is one of the most beautiful and frequent Christian aspirations: Domine, ut videam!, “Lord, I want to see.” It’s a beautiful response to Jesus’ perennial question to us in prayer, “What do you want me to do for you?” If Jesus were to ask many of us that question, many might waste his attention on lesser things, asking for him to return us to the shape we were in at 21, or to resolve a particular issue, or other relatively small stuff. Every day, however, we should ask the Lord for the gift to see, for the grace to see what we don’t see, to see things as they really are, the way he sees them. We should beseech the grace to see him and to see ourselves aright. We should ask for the grace to recognize him in the Holy Eucharist, in Confession, in prayer, in others, in the various events of the day, and especially in the beatific vision. He won’t allow us to see everything, because then we wouldn’t have the grace to live by faith, believing in things unseen, but he does want us to see things more and more in his light and more and more deeply. Today we ask him with Bartimaeus to give us the grace of real vision.
In the first reading today, from the beginning of the Book of Revelation which will guide us until the end of this liturgical year a week from Saturday, the Lord seeks to “un-veil” or “reveal” the way things really are behind the scenes so that we can see them. St. John tells us that in this book he was “reporting what he saw” as Jesus allowed him to glimpse various of the things of heaven and various of the ways which which Jesus was looking on the Christians of that time and every time. The book of Revelation is a response of God to the Church’s constant cry, “Lord, we want to see.” In today’s passage and tomorrow’s, we get what the Lord was seeing in the seven Churches of the diaspora for whom St. John was writing the book. Today we get the first of the seven Churches, Ephesus, the one that was in the best condition. Tomorrow, we’ll get the last two Churches, Sardis and Laodicea, the two that were in the worst condition. I would encourage you to read Jesus’ words to the other four Churches in the middle — Smyrna, Pergamum, Thyatira and Philadelphia — on your own. As we see what Jesus sees in these Churches, it would also be very good for us to ask what Jesus would see in this Archdiocese, or more specifically in Columbia Catholic Ministry, and in each of us, whether he would be praising us or reproving us for what he says to these ancient Churches during a time of persecution.
Jesus says that he sees in the Church of Ephesus much deserving of praise. “I know your works, your labor and your endurance,” he says. They were bearing fruit for the Gospel, they were striving to live the faith, and they were enduring faithfully the trials of many persecutions. He said, “You cannot tolerate the wicked.” We’re called to love even our enemies and pray for our persecutors, but we’re not asked to “tolerate the wicked” but to reject their wickedness and pray for their conversion, something that would do all of us good to remember during this time in which people proclaim “tolerance” and mean by it that we look the other way on their sinfulness, something that Jesus himself never did and we as his followers can’t do either. One wickedness they couldn’t tolerate concerned false prophets. Jesus said, “You have tested those who call themselves Apostles but are not, and discovered that they are impostors.” They knew the faith well enough that they were able to recognize and reject those who were preaching another Gospel than the one that they had received. Today that, too, is a very important skill, to be able to discriminate between those who are really announcing God’s word and those preachers who are saying what people want to hear for their own aggrandizement. Jesus finishes the praise by saying, “You have endurance and have suffered for my name and have not grown weary.” This was a Church of martyrs, full of those who were seeking to keep their eyes on Christ even in the midst of tears. But Jesus had one fraternal correction. “I hold this against you: you have lost the love you had at first.” Yes, they were enduring. Yes, they were discerning. Yes, they were working. But they were no longer doing it with the passion, with the love, with which they had begun. Their sufferings had hardened them. Now they were living by fidelity, by loyalty, by duty, but not by love to the same degree. “Realize how far you have fallen,” Jesus said. St. Paul had told the Corinthians that if they were to hand over their body to the torturers as martyrs but didn’t do so out of love, they would gain nothing. Jesus was essentially saying that despite all their works and good deeds, they had fallen very far because they were no longer living by that first love, that love at the beginning, that prior love, which had characterized and ought always to characterize the Christian faith. They were lacking that love for God and that love for others that had distinguished them. “Repent and do the works you did at first,” Jesus said, calling them to works of piety and works of charity done with passion. Jesus was saying that it’s not enough for us to be faithful. He wants faith working through love for God and neighbor. To lose that is to lose much! Jesus was calling them to conversion, to recover that first love. He was helping them to see who they really are so that they, like Bartimaeus, might cry out “Son of David, have mercy!,” and begin to see him more in the midst of their afflictions and to see him more in the needy and begin to love him with that passionate love they had at the start.
Jesus’ curing of the Ephesians’ sight is also a salve for the eyes of our own heart. It’s a chance for us to examine whether we still have the love we had at first, the love for God when we first became aware of his presence, the love we had for him at our first holy Communion, the love we had for him when we first became conscious of his call to be saints and sought to respond with all we are and have, the love we had for him on our retreats, the love we had for him in the moments in which our perception of divine love was most intense. God wants to renew us in that love, to bring us not back to the level of love we had at first, but to bring us beyond it, while making sure it remains “virginal,” pristine, through having had it intensified by the power of his mercy. He wants that love to inundate all our actions, our “works, labor, endurance,” our discernment, our suffering. He wants our love never to grow weary and even if we have fallen, to help us get up to where we were and keep climbing with him.
To help us to do that, Jesus doesn’t just pass us by but seeks to ground us in his own love. In today’s Responsorial Psalm, we see that the blessed person who does not follow the counsel of the wicked or walk in the way of sinners or sit in the company of the insolent, but who delights in and meditates upon the law of the Lord in day and night in order to see things with the light of God “is like a tree planted near running water that yields its fruit in due season and whose leaves never fade.” Jesus implants us not just “near” the water but in Him, who is the Living Water, constantly cleansing and purifying our motivations, our desires, our love, so that attached as branches to the Vine, we might bear fruit at all times. He wants to help us to see this love with the eyes of our heart and be so transformed that like the healed Bartimaeus, we may follow Jesus, giving glory to God and praising him not just here at Mass but in all our work, labors and endurance.
Today we celebrate the feast of a saint who shows us what persistent and humble prayer, and a life that sees by faith, looks like. She was one who loved to the end, whose love seemed to grow over time and whose leaves never seemed to fade. St. Rose Philippine Duchesne was born to a wealthy family in France; her father was a banker and businessman and her mother part of a family that eventually produced a French president. After having been educated by the Visitation nuns, she wanted to join them, but her father wanted her to enter into a fitting marriage. So she needed to run away. The French Revolution closed her convent and after trying to reestablish it, she joined St. Madeleine Sophie Barat in the Society of the Sacred Heart of Jesus and eventually accepted a mission to come to the United States to teach Americans how to pray and see the world by faith. At the age of 49, with five other sisters, she embarked on a grueling 20-week journey across the Atlantic and up the Mississippi River. Rose was sick the entire voyage and twice was near death, but she soldiered on until they arrived in St. Louis. The bishop established them in St. Charles and gave them a one-room log cabin, which they used to found a school for poor children, the first free school west of the Mississippi. Thus began 34 years of missionary toil in brutal conditions. The sisters needed to battle cold, hunger, sickness and deprivation, not to mention opposition to their French teaching methods, ingratitude and even calumny. “Poverty and Christian heroism are here,” she wrote succinctly back to the motherhouse, “and trials are the riches in this land.” About the calumny, she joked, “They say everything about us, except that we poison the children.” All of these crosses, however, served merely to prove and magnify her Christian virtue, and to spur her to share with children and fellow sisters the sweetness of a life in conformity with God’s word. Vocations from among her students started to come in large numbers and she was able to establish new houses, schools and orphanages in Florissant, Grand Côteau, New Orleans, St. Louis and St. Michael. As hard as she was working among the settlers in the frontier, she longed to bring the Gospel to the Indians, so that they could learn to see by faith as well. She got her wish when she was 72. By this point, she had become ill enough that she had asked to step down as superior. When a request came in from the famous Jesuit missionary Fr. Pierre-Jean De Smet to help establish a school for the Patawatomi in Sugar Creek, Kansas, she volunteered to go. Her fellow sisters wanted to prevent her from the difficult work in her frail condition, but not only did she insist on going but so did Fr. De Smet. “She must come,” the black-robed apostle demanded. “She may not be able to do much work, but she will assure success to the mission by praying for us. Her very presence will draw down all manner of heavenly favors on the work.” That’s precisely what she did and what happened. It had been hard enough for her to learn English upon coming to America at about the age of 50. It was near impossible for her to learn the Indian dialect, but she did the best she could to teach the young Indian girls about Jesus. What she couldn’t convey in words, she conveyed in action. She spent most of her days and nights on her knees in prayer before Jesus in the Eucharist, which taught the Indians more about the real presence of Christ and the love we’re supposed to have for God, at first and always, than hundreds of catechism classes. Once, young squaws placed small pieces of paper on the back of her habit to see if she’d move during the night and go to bed. They came back in the morning and the pieces of paper were exactly where they had placed them. So moved were they by her example that they gave her a precise nickname: Quah-hak-ka-num-ad, “the woman who always prays.” Her prayers led to many conversions and great fruitfulness. The Lord in prayer was asking what she wanted and she said souls. If you visit the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis (in St. Louis), which I believe is the country’s most beautiful Church, you will find in the Garden area outside the Cathedral a grotto with a statue of St. Rose Philippine sitting, listening, with two benches for people to sit and talk with her. There’s a sign encouraging such conversation. What she is saying in response might be as unintelligible as what she would try to say to the Patawatomi but doubtless she would be praying that each of us, in our own way, might become “Quah-hak-ka-num-ad,” people who pray insistently that we may have faith and understanding so that we might follow Jesus always, glorify him as he deserves, and love with the ever fresh love.
Today we ask the Lord with Bartimaeus for the grace to see, so that, looking at things with the eyes of faith, we may recognize and revere Him with that love we had at first. Christ is passing by today just like he did in Jericho. He is passing by in the Sacred Host and then in our sacred neighbor. May we prepare to receive him with pristine love, the love we would if we would receive him only this time, the love we hope to receive Him with our last time, the love we hope to give him forever!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 RV 1:1-4; 2:1-5
The revelation of Jesus Christ, which God gave to him,
to show his servants what must happen soon.
He made it known by sending his angel to his servant John,
who gives witness to the word of God
and to the testimony of Jesus Christ by reporting what he saw.
Blessed is the one who reads aloud
and blessed are those who listen to this prophetic message
and heed what is written in it, for the appointed time is near.
John, to the seven churches in Asia: grace to you and peace
from him who is and who was and who is to come,
and from the seven spirits before his throne.I heard the Lord saying to me:
“To the angel of the Church in Ephesus, write this:“
‘The one who holds the seven stars in his right hand
and walks in the midst of the seven gold lampstands says this:
“I know your works, your labor, and your endurance,
and that you cannot tolerate the wicked;
you have tested those who call themselves Apostles but are not,
and discovered that they are impostors.
Moreover, you have endurance and have suffered for my name,
and you have not grown weary.
Yet I hold this against you:
you have lost the love you had at first.
Realize how far you have fallen.
Repent, and do the works you did at first.
Otherwise, I will come to you
and remove your lampstand from its place, unless you repent.”’”
Responsorial Psalm PS 1:1-2, 3, 4 AND 6
R. (Rev. 2:17) Those who are victorious I will feed from the tree of life.
Blessed the man who follows not
the counsel of the wicked
Nor walks in the way of sinners,
nor sits in the company of the insolent,
But delights in the law of the LORD
and meditates on his law day and night.
R. Those who are victorious I will feed from the tree of life.
He is like a tree
planted near running water,
That yields its fruit in due season,
and whose leaves never fade.
Whatever he does, prospers.
R. Those who are victorious I will feed from the tree of life.
Not so the wicked, not so;
they are like chaff which the wind drives away.
For the LORD watches over the way of the just,
but the way of the wicked vanishes.
R. Those who are victorious I will feed from the tree of life.
Gospel LK 18:35-43
As Jesus approached Jericho
a blind man was sitting by the roadside begging,
and hearing a crowd going by, he inquired what was happening.
They told him,
“Jesus of Nazareth is passing by.”
He shouted, “Jesus, Son of David, have pity on me!”
The people walking in front rebuked him,
telling him to be silent,
but he kept calling out all the more,
“Son of David, have pity on me!”
Then Jesus stopped and ordered that he be brought to him;
and when he came near, Jesus asked him,
“What do you want me to do for you?”
He replied, “Lord, please let me see.”
Jesus told him, “Have sight; your faith has saved you.”
He immediately received his sight
and followed him, giving glory to God.
When they saw this, all the people gave praise to God.
The post Seeing with Fresh Eyes of Love, 33rd Monday (II), November 18, 2024 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.

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