Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

November 01, 2024Following the Saints on The Highway to Heaven, All Saints Day, November 1, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
All Saints Day 2024
November 1, 2024
Rev 7:2-4.9-14, Ps 24, 1 Jn 3:1-3, Mt 5:1-12

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.1.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today on this great solemnity, we first celebrate the saints. We celebrate the great and famous saints we know about, like the saints whose images and intercession surround us in this beautiful Church: Our Lady, St. Bernadette, St. John the Baptist, St. Louis de France, St. Matthew, St. Mark, St. Luke, St. John, St. Anne, St. Anthony of Padua, St. Therese, St. Joseph and St. Joan of Arc. We celebrate also the countless quiet saints, those whom Pope Francis calls the “saints next door,” among whom we pray are numbered those we have known who passed on to us the gift of the faith, who died in the love of the Lord and now live in His love. The saints are the multitude who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” as we heard in today’s first reading, and brought those white baptismal garments “unstained into the everlasting life of heaven,” like they were instructed to do on the day of their baptism. These are the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation,” who have not just been called “children of God” through baptism, as St. John told us in today’s second reading, but have lived as children of God throughout their lives, seeking to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as Christ loved them. They are the ones who, as we prayed in the Psalm, have longed to see God’s face, whose hands were sinless, whose heart was pure, whose desires were not for vain things but for the things of God. These are the ones who have ascended “the mountain of the Lord,” the eternal Jerusalem, and who “stand in his holy place.” These are the ones who are singing today in that holy place the beautiful endless song glimpsed in the passage from Revelation, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
But All Saints Day is not just about celebrating those who have lived truly successful lives, who have received and responded to the love of God and made the eternal Hall of Fame. It’s also meant, in having us focus on them, to spur us to imitate them so that one day November 1 will in the future be our day, too. As the ancient black spiritual intones, “O Lord, I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in.” St. John Paul II reminded us as we began the third Christian millennium that everything the Church does is meant to help us become holy, to help us respond to what the Second Vatican Council called the “universal call to holiness.” St. John Paul II wrote, “Since Baptism is a true entry into the holiness of God through incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of his Spirit, it would be a contradiction to settle for a life of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity. To ask catechumens: ‘Do you wish to receive Baptism?’ means at the same time to ask them: ‘Do you wish to become holy?’ It means to set before them the radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt 5:48).” He continued, “This ideal of perfection must not be misunderstood as if it involved some kind of extraordinary existence, possible only for a few ‘uncommon heroes’ of holiness. … The time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living: the whole life of the Christian community … must lead in this direction.” On All Saints Day each year the Church indeed reproposes wholeheartedly this high standard of the Christian life, that God calls us not to mediocrity, or minimalism, or shallowness, but to the perfection of love. All Saints Day is meant to inspire us to will the means to that end, to choose the narrow road that leads to life, and to invoke the powerful intercession of the saints so that we will indeed be among the great multitude in white garments who will ascend the Lord’s mountain and fulfill their dignity made in the image and likeness of God who is holy, holy, holy.
Jesus’ words in today’s Gospel help us to focus on the high standard of ordinary Christian life. In the beatitudes, Jesus shows us his path, he reveals to us the way to holiness in day to day existence, and wants to help us to choose it. This path that Jesus describes stands in stark contrast to the road that most of the people in the world, including most students at Columbia, believe will lead to human fulfillment. But they really are the path to happiness, holiness and heaven. Let’s ask Jesus help to listen to him with faith and help us to make the choice to live by the way of holiness he reveals.
The world tells us that to be happy, we have to be rich. Jesus says, rather, “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for they will inherit the kingdom of heaven.” Which path we will choose? The world tells us we’ll be happy when we don’t have a concern in the world. Jesus says, on the other hand, “Blessed are those” who are so concerned with others that “they mourn” over their own and others’ miseries, “for they will be comforted” by him eternally. Worldly know-it-alls say, “You have to be strong and powerful to be happy.” Jesus, in contrast, retorts, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth.” The spiritually worldly shout increasingly more each day that to be happy, we have to have all our sexual fantasies fulfilled. Jesus, however, says “Blessed are the pure of heart, for they shall see God.” The world preaches, “You’re happy when you accept yourself,” and espouses an “I’m okay, you’re okay,” brand of moral relativism. Jesus says, though, “Blessed are those who hunger and thirst for holiness for they will be filled.” The world says, “You’re happy when you don’t start a fight, but finish it,” and lives by the philosophy of might-makes-right in both interpersonal and international contexts, but Jesus says “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy” and “Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God.” And our culture increasingly declares, “You’re happy when everyone considers you nice, when you don’t have an enemy in the world,” while Jesus says, “Blessed are those who are persecuted for righteousness’ sake” and “Blessed are you when people revile you, persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely on my account,” for your reward will be the kingdom of heaven. Jesus makes plain for us the path to holiness. It’s the path he himself took. But it’s a path few people choose to take. Today Jesus is calling us to follow him on that path, and all the saints are praying for us to have the trust and courage to do so.
Today I’d like to focus on one young person who did. Next year, he will become the first millennial saint. His name is Blessed Carlo Acutis, who was born in London in 1991, grew up in Milan, lived life with great enthusiasm, had scores of friends, dressed in jeans and sneakers, played soccer and Pokémon, and loved computers and his dogs. He came from a home that didn’t practice the faith, but thanks to the prayers of a grandmother, the good example of a Polish nanny, and the good fortune of going to a Catholic school, he discovered as a young boy that, to his astonishment, Jesus Christ is truly with us in the Eucharist. From that point until his death of leukemia at 15, he sought to unite his entire life to Jesus in the Eucharist, going to daily Mass, trying to bring his friends to daily Mass, and even learning coding and web design so that he could build a website on Eucharistic miracles to help young people across the globe come to experience the treasure of the Eucharist, too. Four months ago today, Pope Francis announced that he would canonize Carlo during the Jubilee of Hope in 2025, at a date still to be announced.
There’s so much that one could say about soon-to-be-Saint Carlo, but I want to focus on the way he choose to follow Jesus on the path to holiness, even from a young age, and sought to help others to do so, too. He wrote in his diary soon after his first Communion at the age of 7, “My goal is to get to heaven.” He added, “Our goal must be the infinite, not the finite. The infinite is our homeland. Heaven has been waiting for us forever.” That impacted his prayer. He said, “The only thing we have to ask God for in prayer is the desire to be holy,” and God clearly heard that prayer. When he began to teach Catechism at the age of 11 to first graders, he made for them a “Program of Life” with eight priorities that he urged them to live. The first was: “Becoming a saint — You have to want this with all your heart, and if you don’t desire it, you have to pray for it constantly to God.” All the other practices he counseled — daily Mass and Communion, the Rosary, reading the Bible, adoration, weekly confession, sacrifices, and trust in one’s Guardian Angel — all were geared toward fulfilling this desire for holiness. He was super clear that holiness is something we shouldn’t put off until we’re much older, but should be a consuming hunger even in our youth. He counseled a friend, “To have a long life doesn’t mean this is a good thing. One can live a very long time and live badly. Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life.” That’s led to one of his most celebrated sayings. “All of us,” he stressed, “are born as originals, but most of us die as photocopies.” Pope Francis, reflecting on those words, said in his 2018 exhortation to young people, “Carlo said, ‘Everyone is born as an original, but many people end up dying as photocopies.’ Don’t let that happen to you! … Dare to be more! … You can become what God your Creator knows you are, if only you realize that you are called to something greater. Ask the help of the Holy Spirit and confidently aim for the great goal of holiness. In this way, you will not be a photocopy. You will be fully yourself.” Carlo himself stated, “God has written for each of us a unique and unrepeatable story — but he has left us free to write the end of the story.” Carlo is praying for that ending to be communion with all the saints in heaven, by choosing to follow Jesus on the road that leads to eternal life.
The greatest means we have to grow in holiness is the food of the saints, which is Jesus Christ in Holy Communion. Carlo Acutis called the Eucharist, “My highway to heaven.” When we receive Jesus well, we enter into communion with him who is holy, holy, holy, as he seeks to sanctify us from the inside out. The Eucharist is by far the most important means to become holy. Worshipping Jesus in the Holy Eucharist, inside of us after Holy Communion and outside of us in adoration, is the best means to prepare us for what the saints now eternally enjoy. Let us ask the Lord as we get ready to receive him to stir up in us a ravenous hunger and insatiable thirst for holiness, so that we might resolve with all our hearts to live by Jesus’ high standards of ordinary Christian living, and, through the Eucharist, speed along the highway to heaven to that place where Blessed Carlo and all the angels and saints are praying for us and waiting for us.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Rv 7:2-4, 9-14
I, John, saw another angel come up from the East,
holding the seal of the living God.
He cried out in a loud voice to the four angels
who were given power to damage the land and the sea,
“Do not damage the land or the sea or the trees
until we put the seal on the foreheads of the servants of our God.”
I heard the number of those who had been marked with the seal,
one hundred and forty-four thousand marked
from every tribe of the children of Israel.
After this I had a vision of a great multitude,
which no one could count,
from every nation, race, people, and tongue.
They stood before the throne and before the Lamb,
wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands.
They cried out in a loud voice:
“Salvation comes from our God, who is seated on the throne,
and from the Lamb.”
All the angels stood around the throne
and around the elders and the four living creatures.
They prostrated themselves before the throne,
worshiped God, and exclaimed:
“Amen. Blessing and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving,
honor, power, and might
be to our God forever and ever. Amen.”
Then one of the elders spoke up and said to me,
“Who are these wearing white robes, and where did they come from?”
I said to him, “My lord, you are the one who knows.”
He said to me,
“These are the ones who have survived the time of great distress;
they have washed their robes
and made them white in the Blood of the Lamb.”
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?
One 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 him,
that seeks the face of the God of Jacob.
R. Lord, this is the people that longs to see your face.
Reading 2
1 Jn 3:1-3
Beloved:
See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.
The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.
We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.
Everyone who has this hope based on him makes himself pure,
as he is pure.
Alleluia
Mt 11:28
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Come to me, all you who labor and are burdened,
And I will give you rest, says the Lord.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mt 5:1-12a
When Jesus saw the crowds, he went up the mountain,
and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him.
He began to teach them, saying:
“Blessed are the poor in spirit,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are they who mourn,
for they will be comforted.
Blessed are the meek,
for they will inherit the land.
Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness,
for they will be satisfied.
Blessed are the merciful,
for they will be shown mercy.
Blessed are the clean of heart,
for they will see God.
Blessed are the peacemakers,
for they will be called children of God.
Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you
and utter every kind of evil against you falsely because of me.
Rejoice and be glad,
for your reward will be great in heaven.”
The post Following the Saints on The Highway to Heaven, All Saints Day, November 1, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
October 31, 2024Putting On The Armor of God, 30th Thursday (II), October 31, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for Chastity
October 31, 2024
Eph 6:10-20, Ps 144, Lk 13:31-35

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.31.24_Homily_1.mp3

The text that guided today’s homily is below:
Today in the Gospel, Jesus is confronted by the fact that Herod was trying to kill him. Jesus was unafraid, however. He sent him a message, calling him a “fox,” an indication that he was sly and ferocious, and then gave this paranoid man who thought Jesus might be the risen John the Baptist whom he beheaded a mysterious thing for him to dwell on, which summarizes his whole mission: “Behold, I cast out demons and I perform healings today and tomorrow, and on the third day I accomplish my purpose. Yet I must continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day, for it is impossible that a prophet should die outside of Jerusalem.” First, he synthesizes his work as exorcizing and healing — something that would come to its fulfillment in the two days from the Last Supper to Good Friday to his being placed in the tomb — and then on the “third day,” accomplishing his purpose, a clear sign of the Resurrection. He also gave a clear indication that he knew he would die in Jerusalem, something that would have taken away any intimidation factor Herod might have thought he had, but also open Herod up to the fact that this was part of Jesus’ plan.
The sad thing, however, that got Jesus to weep over Jerusalem was that despite his work of healing and exorcizing, some would not receive it. Jesus says, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how many times I yearned to gather your children together as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,but you were unwilling!” They were unwilling. They didn’t want to allow God to gather them, to heal them, to free them from the power of Satan. They didn’t respond to the appeals of God’s loving mercy through the prophets but instead killed them, much like many of them were preparing to call for the Crucifixion of God’s own Son and image. It’s a reality that we need to face in every age, that sometimes we’re unwilling to let Jesus do his work and transform us the way he wants to do. But nevertheless, forward he goes, accomplishing his work, healing, casting out the devil, and gathering us from the evil one who wounds and possesses. Jesus’ courage is compelling as is his love.
Jesus wants to give us a similar courage so that, having gathered us, we might be his instruments to gather with him, to heal with him, to cast out with him. In the Responsorial Psalm today, we bless God because he is our “rock who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war,” because he is our “fortress,” “stronghold,” “deliverer,” and “shield.” He strengthens us. We see how in today’s first reading, which is the end of our study of the Letter to the Ephesians, dedicated to how Jesus has come into the world to reconcile and sum up all things and help us, united to him, to become holy and immaculate in his sight, to become his Bride purified by water and the word. Jesus in uniting us to himself wants us to become strong with him, as he is our fortress, stronghold, deliverer and shield. St. Paul urges us to “put on the armor of God,” which means to “put on God.” He reminds us that our struggle isn’t fundamentally “with flesh and blood” — meaning other people, for whom we’re called to give our lives to help Jesus save — but “with the principalities, with the powers, with the world rulers of this present darkness, with the evil spirits in the heavens.” We see in the Gospel how Jesus himself battled against these evil spirits. Herod’s opposition didn’t derive fundamentally from “flesh and blood,” but from his being under the sway of the “principalities, powers and evil spirits” St. Paul describes. And those powers likewise had taken over the Holy City of Jerusalem. Jesus would lament that in the city of the Temple of God, the city whose names (yarah and shalom) means “foundation of peace,” had become a city that warred against God. Rather than a place that lived by the motto, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!,” it was a place that would routinely evict and murder those who came in the Lord’s name and would eventually cry out for the crucifixion of the One who enfleshed God’s name. This diabolically-inspired rejection didn’t happen in the pagan cities of the Decapolis. It didn’t happen in the Samaritan cities of Shechem or Mt. Gerizim after centuries of animosity against the Jews and Judaism. It happened in and around the precincts of God’s sanctuary. Such facts ought to cure us of any false irenicism and help us all to become aware that there is a battle going on, a battle being waged by principalities, powers, and evil forces against the Lord Jesus, against his prophets, against holiness, against us, and against the people the Lord has entrusted to us. To defend ourselves, we must do what St. Paul tells us, “to put on God’s full armor,” to let God act as our defense.
St. Paul in his exhortation to the Christians in Ephesus tells us, “Draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power” and “put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm against the tactics of the Devil, … so that you may be able to resist on that evil day and, having done everything, to hold your ground.” As he was writing or dictating this letter under house arrest in Rome, doubtless with plenty of time to ponder the armor of the Roman soldier who was assigned to guard him, he counseled us to be just as arrayed with God as a Roman soldier is with bronze and steel. He mentioned six parts of our battle vesture:
“Stand fast with your loins girded in truth.” A belt tied a tunic, held a sword, and allowed freedom of movement. Living in the truth against the father of lies is the most important aspect of all, so that we may move freely, rather than enslaved to lies or to impulses. That fact that the belt enveloped the area of one’s groin is highly significant as well because the area in which so many are most vulnerable to the lies of the devil is with regard to human sexuality. Since we’ve been made in the image and likeness of God who is love, the devil most wants to corrupt our capacity to love, since then he will most easily distort the likeness of God in us. That’s why he’s attacked marriage from the beginning with Adam and Eve, seeking to pervert love into lust, and change us from self-givers in the image of the Divine Giver to takers and consumers of others, to degrade us from protectors of others to predators. That’s why we need to stand fast with our loins girded in the truth about God, about us, and about the self-sacrificial love that Jesus exemplified and called to us to imitate.
“Clothed with righteousness as a breastplate.” Over our heart and vital peritoneal organs St. Paul says we’re to place righteousness, holiness, being just before God and others. The devil will try to attack our heart and make it hardened. He may accuse us falsely through others of having a merciless or wicked heart because, like Jesus, we won’t bless others’ doing evil. But the most important defense is integrity of life, of true righteousness. St. Paul wants being right with God to be our true treasure, because where our treasure is our heart will be, and if our treasure is in divine justice, then our heart will be secure.
“Your feet shod in readiness for the Gospel of peace.” Sandals were the great sign of freedom in the ancient world. Slaves couldn’t wear sandals because it would make escaping easier. But for Paul this footwear wasn’t just a sign of a “freedom from,” of being able to flee the devil, but of a “freedom for,” showing that we were capable and desirous to evangelize, to go from town to town, from person to person, bringing peace to homes and people to the Prince of Peace. A genuine sign of a Christian is that we’re on pilgrimage, we’re on the move, we’re in the retinue of the One who constantly is calling us to “Come, follow me” and to “Go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” If laziness or idleness is the devil’s workshop, then one of the most important defenses against the devil is to keep moving, to put our shoes on and get ready for work, for service, for journeying and growth.
“Hold faith as a shield, to quench all the flaming arrows of the Evil One.” St. Paul uses in Greek a word for shield here (thyreos) that doesn’t refer to the small round shield that we can normally imagine, but a large oblong one full-body shield used by a heavily armed warrior, that one could, in essence, rest behind when the archers of the enemy were bombarding you with arrows dipped in pitch, set ablaze and launched. The full-body protection we need, St. Paul says, is our faith, our complete entrustment to God and to everything God has revealed to us. From the beginning, as we see with Adam and Eve, the devil is trying to tempt us with the fiery dart of distrust of God, that we really won’t die if we disobey him, that no sin is really mortal, and that God really doesn’t want us to live forever, that he doesn’t want us to become like him, but that he fears our becoming like him. As we see in Jesus’ response to the devil in the desert, faith, true trust in God and all he has revealed, is the means to withstand this diabolical bombardment.
“Take the helmet of salvation.” The devil is always trying to get us to forget what Christ has done to save us. As we discussed yesterday, he’s trying to get us to think that our salvation is cheap or automatic, and that basically everyone will come to salvation no matter what road they’re on. The great defense against this, St. Paul says, is to envelop our head, so to speak, with the salvation won for us by Christ, to think about what Christ has done, to think constantly about our salvation and the salvation of others, and to move forward in the path of sanctification that will make that salvation secure. Our mind should be filled with thoughts of salvation, of working out our salvation with holy awe and trembling (Phil 2:12), and that way the devil won’t be able to get us to forsake it.
Take “the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.” A sword is both a defense as well as a weapon of attack. The Word of God, given to us by the Holy Spirit through the inspired authors, helps us in both. It was Jesus’ defense against the devil in the desert and it will be ours, when we know it well enough that the Holy Spirit can remind us of it when we’re tempted. It’s also our offense against the sins of the world, helping us to build in ourselves and in others the virtues that can strengthen us toward victory in the battle overall.
The biggest weapon of all in our arsenal, St. Paul says afterward, is prayer, but not just any prayer but prayer that is constant (“pray at every opportunity”), pneumatological (“in the Spirit”), vigilant and enduring (“be watchful with all perseverance and supplication”), unselfish and intercessory (“for all the holy ones and also for me”) and audacious (“with boldness” and the “courage to speak”). This type of prayer is what helps us precisely to gird our loins with truth, to seek the Lord’s justice from the heart, to put on our sandals with haste, to guard our faith, to remember and seek salvation and to treasure and enflesh the Word of God.
This notion of putting on God’s armor is a daily reality lived by priests before Mass. In the vesting prayers, priests do something very much based on St. Paul’s counsel. When we put on the amice, we first cover our head and then drop it over our neck. The prayer explicitly calls to mind what St. Paul encourages in today’s first reading, “Place upon me, O Lord, the helmet of salvation, that I may overcome the assaults of the devil.” It helps us to put on the mind of Christ as we approach the altar. When we don the alb, we remember the armor of our baptism as we pray, “Make me white, O Lord, and cleanse my heart; that being made white in the Blood of the Lamb I may deserve an eternal reward.” When we wrap ourselves with the cincture, we cover our loins with truth as pray, “Gird me, O Lord, with the cincture of purity, and quench in my heart the fire of concupiscence, that the virtue of continence and chastity may abide in me.” As we put the stole over our shoulders, we pray for the Lord’s healing of everything from original and personal sin that makes us unworthy for battle: “Lord, restore to me the stole of immortality, which I lost through the collusion of our first parents, and, unworthy as I am to approach Thy sacred mysteries, may I yet gain eternal joy.” The final prayer is over the chasuble, in which we take on the full power of Christ’s cross as we pray: “O Lord, you who said, ‘My yoke is sweet and My burden light,’ grant that I may so carry this yoke that I may obtain your grace.” We seek to learn from Christ who is meek and humble of heart as he is the Stronger Man who conquers the devil and divines his spoils. One of the reasons why I like to wear the traditional Roman vestments is not just because in a Church without air conditioning they’re much better in hotter months, but because they look and feel much more like armor as I put them on and go out to battle against the principalities and powers in the person of Christ as we enter into the Last Supper, Calvary, the empty tomb and God’s glory.
The Christian life is a battle. Today St. Paul tells us to put on the whole armor of God and that’s what we ask God for the grace to do in the Mass we’re now celebrating. St. Paul would say at the end of his life on earth, writing from the same Roman incarceration, that he had “fought the good fight” and “kept the faith.” Let us ask his intercession that we might fight that same good fight so as to win, by entering into Christ, his salvation, and his eternal victory, for the one we are about to hold in our hands and receive is our rock who trains our hands for battle, and is our “fortress,” “stronghold,” “deliverer,” and “shield,” to whom be praise and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power, and might, forever and ever. Amen. (Rev 7:12).

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 eph 6:10-20
Brothers and sisters:
Draw your strength from the Lord and from his mighty power.
Put on the armor of God so that you may be able to stand firm
against the tactics of the Devil.
For our struggle is not with flesh and blood
but with the principalities, with the powers,
with the world rulers of this present darkness,
with the evil spirits in the heavens.
Therefore, put on the armor of God,
that you may be able to resist on the evil day
and, having done everything, to hold your ground.
So stand fast with your loins girded in truth,
clothed with righteousness as a breastplate,
and your feet shod in readiness for the Gospel of peace.
In all circumstances, hold faith as a shield,
to quench all the flaming arrows of the Evil One.
And take the helmet of salvation and the sword of the Spirit,
which is the word of God.With all prayer and supplication,
pray at every opportunity in the Spirit.
To that end, be watchful with all perseverance and supplication
for all the holy ones and also for me,
that speech may be given me to open my mouth,
to make known with boldness the mystery of the Gospel
for which I am an ambassador in chains,
so that I may have the courage to speak as I must.
Responsorial Psalm ps 144:1b, 2, 9-10
R. (1b) Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
Blessed be the LORD, my rock,
who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.
R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
My mercy and my fortress,
my stronghold, my deliverer,
My shield, in whom I trust,
who subdues my people under me.
R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
O God, I will sing a new song to you;
with a ten stringed lyre I will chant your praise,
You who give victory to kings,
and deliver David, your servant from the evil sword.
R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
Gospel lk 13:31-35
Some Pharisees came to Jesus and said,
“Go away, leave this area because Herod wants to kill you.”
He replied, “Go and tell that fox,
‘Behold, I cast out demons and I perform healings today and tomorrow,
and on the third day I accomplish my purpose.
Yet I must continue on my way today, tomorrow, and the following day,
for it is impossible that a prophet should die
outside of Jerusalem.’
“Jerusalem, Jerusalem,
you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you,
how many times I yearned to gather your children together
as a hen gathers her brood under her wings,
but you were unwilling!
Behold, your house will be abandoned.
But I tell you, you will not see me until the time comes when you say,
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”
The post Putting On The Armor of God, 30th Thursday (II), October 31, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
October 30, 2024Striving With Others To Enter Through the Narrow Gate to Salvation, 30th Wednesday (II), October 30, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Mary, Our Lady of Grace, St. Petersburg, Florida
Quarterly Meeting of The Pontifical Mission Societies
Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
October 30, 2024
Eph 6:1-9, Ps 145, Lk 13:22-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.30.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
“Lord, will only a few be saved?,” someone from the crowd asked Jesus today. That is a question that must involve all of us individually and personally as human beings and as Christians, but it is something that must deeply motivate our work as missionaries, just as much as it did Jesus himself, St. Paul, St. Francis Xavier, St. Therese and scores of apostles and missionaries across the century. Jesus came into the world so that the world might be saved through him. Throughout the Gospel, he makes the point that some will be saved and some won’t be, some will be the sheep on his eternal right and others will be the goats on his left, some will choose to live in the light and others to remain in darkness, some will receive him and those he sends and others will reject him.
In response to that question, a typical Jew at the time would have expected him to answer, “Yes!, only a few will be saved,” because most Jews believed that only Jews — and Jews who faithfully kept God’s covenant — would make it. The interrogator likely thought he was among the few. But Jesus didn’t reply attempting to satisfy the person’s curiosity, because he hadn’t come from heaven to earth to answer the questions of inquiring minds. He had come from heaven to earth to save us, and so he responded not by saying how many are saved by how any is saved. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate,” he said. The word translated as “strive” is from the Greek word to “agonize” and it’s used in a verb tense that means “keep on agonizing.” To enter and remain in Christ’s kingdom, and to get to Heaven ultimately, in other words, we need continuously to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to make the greatest, possibly most painful exertion of our life, to fit through a gate that is “narrow.” We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in an NFL training camp to make the cut, harder than a young gymnast works to make the Olympics and win the gold, harder than an immigrant father of large family works to ensure his family’s survival, harder than a missionary to plant the faith in a place that is resistant to the Gospel. To be a faithful Christian means to “agonize” to follow Christ always. There is no point that we can stop fighting to follow him and “live off the interest” of previous years of good discipleship. We are called to struggle, to keep fighting the good fight of faith, until the day we die. As the former National Director of the Society of the Propagation of the Faith, Archbishop Sheen, used to say, “If we’re not going uphill, we’re sliding downhill.” If we’re not swimming against the current of the world toward Jesus, we’ll be floating down stream over the falls. “Unless you pick up your cross each day and follow me,” he tells us, “you cannot be my disciple” (Lk 9:27,14:27). The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the Cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through. We need to agonize to fit through the narrow gate as if our whole life depended on it — because, in fact, Jesus says it does. In the midst of a culture that is consistently trying to water down our commitment to God, Christians who desire to be faithful need to strive ever harder to pick up the Cross God gives them each day to and unite themselves to Christ on the Cross. Christ, himself, is the “gate to the sheepfold” (Jn 10:7,9). The reason why the gate is narrow is because it is the width of the crucified Christ.
With words meant to shock us out of complacency, Jesus declares in St. Matthew’s version, “For the gate is wide and the road broad that leads to destruction, and those who enter through it are many. How narrow the gate and constricted the road that leads to life, and those who find it are few.” Few people, he implies, make the effort required to enter into life. Few agonize to enter through the narrow gate. Over the last few decades, people have gotten the notion that the Christian life is exactly the opposite of what Jesus describes today, that salvation is cheap and the Christian life smooth and easy. Most have been led to believe that they can “float” effortlessly downstream to heaven because everyone ends up there — except perhaps genocidal madmen, serial killers, those who don’t like us and public smokers. We might all need minor “course corrections” in life, but no major changes. Such an attitude is a diabolical ambush. This lie from the father of lies is the opposite of what Jesus the incarnate Truth taught us. It’s also a very dangerous heresy —universalism or apocatastasis — that carries with it potentially the most serious of eschatological consequences. The One who is the Gate to the sheepfold tells us that we need continuously to agonize to enter into him. Jesus said these words as he was on the road to Jerusalem, and we know what happened when he got to Jerusalem. He entered into his agony, the agony that led to our salvation and opened up the narrow door. We need to be willing to follow him along that path of sacrificial love — and to admit that it’s not a much-traveled path.
We have to be honest in assessing the situation of the world today, including among those who call themselves disciples of Jesus. Which is more popular today, the path of spiritual poverty announced by Jesus or the one of materialist wealth? The path of purity or pornography? The path of peace-making or score-settling? The path of mourning or partying? The path of turning the other cheek or slapping back? The path of keeping the commandments or breaking them? Jesus’ path is not an easy one and he never pretended that it was. Loving according to his standards can be crucifying. But he’s telling us today that it’s eternally worth it.
We need to ask, however: What if we don’t love the Lord that much? What if we really don’t make an heroic effort? We might not get an A-plus on our discipleship and priestly life and ministry, but we’ll still make the cut, won’t we? There has to be some type of loophole, right? Won’t we all benefit from an eternal bell curve? Jesus implies today that there’s no short-cut out of the effort he is calling us to. In today’s Gospel, there were many who thought they had an “in,” only to be profoundly mistaken. They remained on the outside, knocking, trying to get in to no avail. “We ate and drank with you!,” they cried. It wasn’t enough. “We heard you teaching in our streets.” That wasn’t sufficient either. To both, Jesus said, “I do not know where you come from.” In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives even more stunning examples. “Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many miracles in your name?” (Mt 7:22). Jesus says even to these he will declare, “I never knew you” (Mt 7:23). Jesus was saying to these people that a mere external relationship with him is not enough. It’s not enough to have heard Him speak. It’s not sufficient to have eaten and drunk with Him, even the Holy Eucharist as many of us do each day. It’s not adequate to proclaim the Gospel in His name, to do exorcisms and house blessings or even work miracles like priests do every day at the altar, or in the confessional or at bedsides. After all, Judas Iscariot did all of these things, but he never really knew Who Jesus was. He followed Jesus on the outside but, as much as Jesus wanted it, he never became his intimate friend, a real member of his family, and ultimately valuing Jesus less than 30 pieces of silver. Judas’ fall teaches us that not everyone living around Christ is really a Christian, not everyone coming to Church is a disciple, and not even everyone in a Roman collar is really an alter Christus. We have to do more than listen to Jesus — we have to put his words into action, even difficult words like we find in today’s Gospel. We have to do more than eat and drink with him — we need to become whom we eat. We need to do more than announce his name and do some good deeds — we need to live by his name (Christian) and allow Him to work through us. We need to enter into intimate friendship and communion with Him. And we need to agonize to let go of everything in our life that’s not ordered to God, that’s not compatible with the life of faith, to squeeze into deeper conformity of heart, mind, soul and strength with Jesus and live in that full-time loving union with him.
Today in the first reading St. Paul continues his moral instructions to the Christians in Ephesus. Yesterday, we remember, he focused on how Christian spouses are called to love each other as Christ and the Church love each other, to reverence and obey each other out of reverence for Christ, to seek to lay down their lives for each other to make the other holy and unblemished before God. Today St. Paul continues those instructions in the family, calling children to strive to honor and obey their parents in the Lord and for parents not to anger their children through authoritarianism but to “bring them up with the training and instruction of the Lord,” how to love each other like with the sometimes agonizing, self-giving, merciful love with which he has loved us first. St. Paul says that even situations of obvious injustice like slavery can be lived in a way that can make us holy. He called those who were slaves to become slaves of Christ, doing God’s will from the heart, serving others willingly as if they were serving the Lord, knowing that the Lord will repay. He summons slave owners to “act in the same way towards them,” to serve the Lord in the way they serve their slaves, to stop bullying and bossing, knowing that they have a Master in heaven who plays no favorites. He was calling slave owners not to take the broad highway leading to perdition but the narrow agonizing gate to life, by treating their slaves the way St. Paul elsewhere challenged Philemon to care for Onesimus. The whole passage indicates that the Christian family is meant to be a place where the family members help each other, and even the slaves and servants, to pass through the narrow gate that leads to life, so that none will be lost and all we be numbered among those who have been saved.
What motivates us as missionaries has to be this zeal to extend Jesus’ saving will and work to the ends of the earth, to make possible for people to proclaim the Gospel by their words and the witness of their life, so that people will learn how to follow Jesus Christ the Way along the narrow way that leads to life. Just as Jesus gave his life to ransom many, so Christian missionaries and apostles dedicate our lives to trying to get people off the broad highway that leads multitudes away from the Lord, to get them off the roadsides looking for meaning, and onto the path that leads to Jesus and his Body the Church, so that they might journey with us into deeper friendship, deeper union of life, with the Lord Jesus. What beautiful work this is, and everything begins with our personal integrity as we agonize to make every part of our life and our work united with our Savior.
In front of the call to agonize to enter through the narrow gate, Jesus doesn’t leave us on our own, with all our weaknesses, staring at the uphill narrow road, wondering if we will be one of those who are able to make it. He gives himself to us to strengthen us on the inside. He gives us the whole saving work of the Church. He empowers us by his word, he bolsters by the intimate friendship of prayer, and fortifies us by the awesome gift of Holy Communion so that united with him we might follow him step by step, entering into him who is the narrow gate. If we seize this opportunity, if we strive to enter through this narrow gate each day, then at the end of our earthly life, when we appear at the station before the gates of the eternal Jerusalem and, together with others we have invited and helped to join us on the journey, ask, “Lord, open to us,” we will see him smile, open the gates, call us by name and say, “I do know you! Come on in! Enter into the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of time!” (cf. Mt 25:34).

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 eph 6:1-9
Children, obey your parents in the Lord, for this is right.
Honor your father and mother.
This is the first commandment with a promise,
that it may go well with you
and that you may have a long life on earth.
Fathers, do not provoke your children to anger,
but bring them up with the training and instruction of the Lord.
Slaves, be obedient to your human masters with fear and trembling,
in sincerity of heart, as to Christ,
not only when being watched, as currying favor,
but as slaves of Christ, doing the will of God from the heart,
willingly serving the Lord and not men,
knowing that each will be requited from the Lord
for whatever good he does, whether he is slave or free.
Masters, act in the same way towards them, and stop bullying,
knowing that both they and you have a Master in heaven
and that with him there is no partiality.
Responsorial Psalm ps 145:10-11, 12-13ab, 13cd-14
R. (13c) The Lord is faithful in all his words.
Let all your works give you thanks, O LORD,
and let your faithful ones bless you.
Let them discourse of the glory of your Kingdom
and speak of your might.
R. The Lord is faithful in all his words.
Making known to men your might
and the glorious splendor of your Kingdom.
Your Kingdom is a Kingdom for all ages,
and your dominion endures through all generations.
R. The Lord is faithful in all his words.
The LORD is faithful in all his words
and holy in all his works.
The LORD lifts up all who are falling
and raises up all who are bowed down.
R. The Lord is faithful in all his words.
Gospel lk 13:22-30
Jesus passed through towns and villages,
teaching as he went and making his way to Jerusalem.
Someone asked him,
“Lord, will only a few people be saved?”
He answered them,
“Strive to enter through the narrow gate,
for many, I tell you, will attempt to enter
but will not be strong enough.
After the master of the house has arisen and locked the door,
then will you stand outside knocking and saying,
‘Lord, open the door for us.’
He will say to you in reply,
‘I do not know where you are from.’
And you will say,
‘We ate and drank in your company and you taught in our streets.’
Then he will say to you,
‘I do not know where you are from.
Depart from me, all you evildoers!’
And there will be wailing and grinding of teeth
when you see Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob
and all the prophets in the Kingdom of God
and you yourselves cast out.
And people will come from the east and the west
and from the north and the south
and will recline at table in the Kingdom of God.
For behold, some are last who will be first,
and some are first who will be last.”
The post Striving With Others To Enter Through the Narrow Gate to Salvation, 30th Wednesday (II), October 30, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
16 min
October 29, 2024The Kingdom of God and the Sacrament of Marriage, 30th Tuesday (II), October 29, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Family
October 29, 2024
Eph 5:21-33, Ps 128, Lk 13:18-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.29.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
What is the kingdom of God like? Jesus asks because he wants us to be able to understand it. But it’s something that we can understand only by simile, only by analogy. Until it’s fully flourishing, we’re only going to be able to see certain of its reflections. Today Jesus wants to stress that the kingdom of God, first, begins really small. But then it grows. And it grows in such a way that so many, like the birds of the air flying from all over the planet, are able to find rest in its branches. It grows in such a way that it gives us rest, a home, where we can make a nest. We might not be able to “see” the nest and the birds when we plant the seed in the garden, but Jesus wants us to have that confidence and hope that even the littlest of beginning can result in that end. Likewise, he describes yeast. A tiny pinch of yeast from previously leavened bread, put into a new dough, elevates the whole loaf. In a sense, we know not how: it’s from the inside, acting to lift the dough up. In a similar way the kingdom starts with just a little pinch: one Christian on a street, one student in a dorm or university, one one employee in an office, one priest in a diocese or one sister in a convent or religious order, can have an enormous impact. We see that in the life of every saint. Even if they seem to be hidden, they’re not hidden at all. One teenage girl in a place like Nazareth could change salvation history by a simple, faithful, yes. A young girl with tuberculosis in a convent in northwestern France can change the whole history of the church simply by her prayers and by her obediently writing down what God was doing in her soul. A parish priest in New Haven, Connecticut, caring for his people, could found a legacy, the Knights of Columbus, that would stretch across the globe. So we have to know this about the kingdom, that little things can be extraordinarily consequential. All we do sometimes is plant that tiny little mustard seed or try to be that pinch of yeast. And then we trust that God will do the rest.
Today in the first reading, we see one of the most important areas in which this kingdom is meant to grow, the soil in which the seed is planted, the dough in which the little pinch of yeast is given. It’s marriage and the family. We see how the kingdom can come just from that place. St. Paul’s words here in his Letter to the Ephesians have two contexts. The first context is the entirety of his letter. His Letter to the Ephesians, which we’ve been hearing for almost the two weeks, is about the kingdom and what Christ came to do. Christ came to reconcile all things in himself in the heavens and on earth. His entire mission was to bring us anew into harmony with the Father and in reconciled harmony with each other. This is the outgrowth of our being holy and immaculate in the Lord’s sight, as we heard two Thursdays ago. And it’s key for us to grasp that in the family, even just one little family, the kingdom can explode.
Probably one of the most eloquent documents in Church history is Evangelii Nuntiandi, Saint Paul VI’s 1975 Apostolic Exhortation on evangelization. In one section of it, he was describing the evangelization of Africa. The way it happened was not just by White Fathers coming as missionaries from France. The most effective way it happened, he described, is when families would be “planted.” They’d take one family from one village and send the family to another. They wouldn’t open up a church in their home. At first they would just live. Pope Paul describes that eventually people started to ask, “Why are they like this? Why do they live in this way? What or who is it that inspires them? Why are they in our midst?” Such a witness, he wrote, is “already a silent proclamation of the Good News and a very powerful and effective one. Here we have an initial act of evangelization. … Other questions will arise, deeper and more demanding ones, questions evoked by this witness which involves presence, sharing, solidarity, and which is an essential element, and generally the first one, in evangelization.” One family, in other words, can have that type of extraordinary impact. Not every family is going to be like the family of Gregory Nazianzen in which both parents and several of the children are canonized. Not every family will be like the one formed by Louis and Zelie Martin, the parents of St. Therese. But the Christian family is one setting in which the kingdom of God is meant to expand. Many of us have grown up in homes that, despite the imperfections we brought to it and others brought to it, still had this mystery of the kingdom unveiled. The home is where our faith grew so that others today are able to nest in our faith, even on secular university campuses. Not everybody’s home is like that, but at the same time there is a mystery happening, even sometimes through the failures that can teach us perseverance, that can help us to grow in the capacity for forgiveness and reconciliation. That’s the first context within St. Paul’s letter: the family is an important locus of morality in which we act on what Christ is trying to do in us.
The second context is what marriage and family were like when St. Paul was writing these words. The family was weak. Among the Jews, a husband could divorce his wife for any reason whatsoever; two lines written by the husband and it was done. It was worse for the Greeks. The Greek men had wives fundamentally just in order to bear legitimate children. There was a whole system of concubines beyond that to give them pleasure, to serve as their conversation partners, for everything else. Wives were hidden in the home and basically prevented from going out because there was a paranoia about legitimate children and husbands didn’t want their wife who was being totally emotionally neglected to look for other outlets. Among the Romans, it was worse still. The Romans made a sport out of serial divorce and remarriage. Seneca tells the story of one wife who had already been married 24 times marrying a husband who had already been married 21 times. Marriage could be started and ended almost immediately. There was often no real commitment to each other, no real love, constant breakdown, no real reconciliation or forgiveness. As soon as someone did something that bothered you, it could be over, as if we were dealing with a dating relationship. Even in the Christian context, we see what St. Paul wrote even nine years earlier, in the seventh chapter of his First Letter of the Corinthians. Christians in this context were marrying pagans. St. Paul wrote, essentially, “Marry if you must,” if you can’t control your passions, since marriage is better than sinning. He looked then at marriage as an either-or: You’re either going to be anxious about the affairs of the Lord or you’re going to be anxious about the affairs of your spouse. There’s no way essentially those two concerns could dovetail. So the choice was to prioritize the love of God or the love of a spouse. He encouraged people to love God and like him be chaste, but allowed that if they were burning up with concupiscence, they should marry, so that they could, in a sense, find a remedium concupiscentiae, a medicine for their uncontrollable desire. That was First Corinthians, in the context of Christians marrying pagans.
Nine years later, St. Paul wrote this letter to the Ephesians. In Ephesus, Christians were marrying other Christians. We find in St. Paul a totally different attitude. He was able to see how, in this marriage between a Christian man and woman, God’s kingdom could indeed come and grow. He wrote this letter with this in mind, about how to live Christian marriage in a truly Christian way. It’s one of the most important passages ever written, especially today in which so many people are confused about marriage, not just because people of the same sex are forming civil bonds and calling it marriage, not just because of the confusion of anthropology, in which there are now several dozen supposed genders, something that is obviously going to have a massive impact on what marriage mean, but fundamentally because so many today, including Christians, have given into the same type of divorce culture, the cancer of pornography, and so many other things by which the devil is slithering in their home, trying to separate what God has joined. What St. Paul describes in this passage is so important, first, for that sacrament and everything in the kingdom that flows from it, but also for us to understand the most profound way with which Jesus interacts with us, so that we can understand what the Church is, and what our vocations are, even those who are chaste celibates for the sake of the kingdom.
It begins with verse 21. “Be subordinate to each other out of reverence for Christ.” When Saint John Paul II wrote his Theology of the Body, this chapter was a hinge, which applies all the teachings of the theology of the body to the real circumstance of marriage. John Paul II says that everything flows from this mutual reverence for Christ. When husbands and wives look at each other, they’re supposed to see the image of God there. And when they do, when they see Christ in the other, so many things change. When a wife looks at her husband and sees Christ, St. Paul says, she is able to be subordinate. It is so much easier for us to be “under the order” (subordinate) or “under the mission” (submissive) of another if one see Christ in the other, if we are relating to Christ. We would not try to boss him around or tell him what to do! When we revere Christ, there’s a response that would be appropriate! And that’s what he’s calling women to do. He’s not saying that if a husband is an abusive loser, one has to pretend as if he’s Jesus Christ and just obey whatever he says, even when he’s asking one to do things that are sinful. We know in certain contexts this passage has been manipulated sociologically in this way, to keep women as second class citizens. And so many have opposed to this passage as if it’s giving a green light to abuse, but it’s totally contrary to such abuse. For the kingdom to really grow in a woman’s heart, she needs to look at marriage with truly Christian eyes, and to see marriage from within that lens. But there’s a mutual reverence. When the husband looks at the wife, St. Paul is calling him to look with the eyes of Christ and see likewise her in Christ’s image and therefore to lay down his life for his wife. “Husbands, love your wives, just as Christ loved the Church and laid down his life to make her holy by water with the word.” In other words, “Crucify yourself for your wife, don’t hold anything back, do everything you can to make her holy.” That’s why the wife needs to be reciprocally subordinate. If the wife doesn’t allow the husband to sacrifice in this way, the husband won’t achieve his vocation. There’s a complementarity here that Paul is pointing to, in which the wife is going to receive the gift of the husband — she’s going to give love by receiving it, as the husband receives love by giving it. This is the mystery of the complementarity of marriage. This call for husbands to die for their wives is something that a wife shouldn’t resist. That’s one of the most important ways to be subordinate. St. Paul likewise wants to stress in the love of a husband and a wife that the purpose is sanctification. Husbands should love their wives as they do their own bodies. In the culture of the time, this was revolutionary, to treat the wife the way that you treat yourself, not as a piece of property. This type of genuine Christian love makes the home the first locus regni, the first place of the kingdom. But all of this, St. Paul contextualizes, within the “great mystery.” He writes, “For this reason, a man shall leave his father and mother and be joined to his wife and the two shall become one flesh. This is a great mystery and I am speaking in reference to Christ and the Church.” What this basically means is Christian marriage flows from the marriage between Christ and the Church, and not the other way around: that the reality from which the analogy is taken is Christ’s bond to his church, rather than the church’s being an analogy of human marriage. What comes first in God’s plan is this mystical marriage between Christ and His Bride. That is the model for a marriage in the kingdom, for a truly Christian marriage. Just as Christ reveres us in His Church, just like he lays down his life, and just like we in love receive that gift and are blessed in that receiving, so Christian marriage is meant to recapitulate and image that great mystery. Today, we pray for the families of the world. We pray for the families in the church. We pray for all those who are preparing for marriage, for all those marriages who are struggling, that they might open themselves up through all the difficulties of day to day existence to the graces that flow from the sacrament.
I always say at the end of every marriage that I celebrate, “Why do Catholics get married in the context of the Mass?” Is it simply because it gives more solemnity? No. The reason why marriage takes place in the context of a Mass is because the marriage bed of the union between Christ and His Bride is the altar. That’s the reason why in the ancient Basilicas in Rome, they’re all covered with canopies or baldachins, which are meant to symbolize the Jewish chuppah, under which was first where the contract of marriage was made, and then a year or two later, when the couple would consummate the marriage, that chuppah would be brought over the marriage bed and they would consummate their marriage under the canopy that symbolized the overshadowing of God’s blessing. The reason why the altars were covered with canopies is because that was supposed to show everyone that the altar is a marriage bed in which the bride of Christ takes within herself the body and blood of the Bridegroom and becomes one flesh with the capacity to bear fruit acts of love. Catholic marriages take place within the context of a Mass because if couples want their marriage to be what God wants it to be, this beginning of the kingdom of God so that everything good grows, they need to come as often as possible to this marriage bed, where they will receive within the love of God for them, so that in that spousal love, they might love each other as Christ has loved them first. And that’s likewise true for even for those who are not yet married or for celibates, as brides and friends of the bridegroom. We come here to this same place to receive within Christ’s cruciform spousal love, so that we can be the happiest people on the planet. This is the great consummation of Christ’s spousal love that gives us a foretaste of the eternal wedding banquet. So today as we celebrate Mass with a heart full of reverence for the Lord, we ask him through his purifying love, to help us revere others, and revere the Sacrament of Marriage in such a way that it might become what God created to be: that mustard seed, that leaven, in a world that Christ has married.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 EPH 5:21-33
Brothers and sisters:
Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is head of his wife
just as Christ is head of the Church,
he himself the savior of the Body.
As the Church is subordinate to Christ,
so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives,
even as Christ loved the Church
and handed himself over for her to sanctify her,
cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
that he might present to himself the Church in splendor,
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing,
that she might be holy and without blemish.
So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one hates his own flesh
but rather nourishes and cherishes it,
even as Christ does the Church,
because we are members of his Body.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
This is a great mystery,
but I speak in reference to Christ and the Church.
In any case, each one of you should love his wife as himself,
and the wife should respect her husband.
Responsorial Psalm PS 128:1-2, 3, 4-5
R. (1a) Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
Blessed are you who fear the LORD,
who walk in his ways!
For you shall eat the fruit of your handiwork;
blessed shall you be, and favored.
R. Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
Your wife shall be like a fruitful vine
in the recesses of your home;
Your children like olive plants
around your table.
R. Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
Behold, thus is the man blessed
who fears the LORD.
The LORD bless you from Zion:
may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life.
R. Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
Alleluia SEE MT 11:25
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth;
you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 13:18-21
Jesus said, “What is the Kingdom of God like?
To what can I compare it?
It is like a mustard seed that a man took and planted in the garden.
When it was fully grown, it became a large bush
and the birds of the sky dwelt in its branches.”
Again he said, “To what shall I compare the Kingdom of God?
It is like yeast that a woman took
and mixed in with three measures of wheat flour
until the whole batch of dough was leavened.”
The post The Kingdom of God and the Sacrament of Marriage, 30th Tuesday (II), October 29, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
October 28, 2024Built Upon the Foundation of the Apostles Simon and Jude, Feast of SS. Simon and Jude, October 28, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Feast of SS. Simon and Jude, Apostles
October 28, 2024
Eph 2:19-22, Ps 19, Lk 6:12-16

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
St. Paul in today’s first reading tells the Ephesians and us that our Christian existence is “built upon the foundation of the Apostles.” The feast of the apostles SS. Simon and Jude gives us a chance to ponder several aspects of our Christian life and how to strengthen it by grounding it more firmly on the foundation of what the Lord has done and continues to do through these two apostles. These thoughts are all the more important for students as you look ahead to what the Lord is asking of you in your life.
The first thing we can examine is the theme of our calling. The apostles’ vocation, we see, was born from Christ’s prayer. Jesus had pulled an all-nighter praying to his Father about whom he should choose and praying for those he would choose. His prayer was not just a single invocation, but a persevering intercession. This prayer for those whom he would call continued throughout his public life and we can presume even after his Ascension. During the ordination rite of the Last Supper we see how fervently Jesus prayed to the Father. “I pray for them,” he said aloud, “I do not pray for the world but for the ones you have given me because they are yours. … Holy Father, keep them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one just as we are. … I do not ask that you take them out of the world but that you keep them from the evil one. … Consecrate them in the truth. … I consecrate myself for them, so that they also may be consecrated in truth.” And then he prayed for the apostles’ work to be fruitful, for all “those who will believe in me through their word,” and prayed for their salvation, “I wish that where I am they also may be with me, that they may see my glory that you gave me, … that the love with which you loved me may be in them and I in them.” Jesus’ ongoing prayer would take on a very specific form, as we would see in Jesus’ Holy Thursday dialogue with St. Peter, “Simon, Simon, behold Satan has demanded to sift all of you like wheat, but I have prayed that your [singular] own faith may not fail; and once you have turned back, you must strengthen your brothers.” It’s important regularly for us to take the time to recall with gratitude and wonder that our Christian vocation, likewise, has its beginning in Jesus’ prayer. Just as much as Jesus prayed all night and then called Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew, Thomas, James, Simon, Jude, and Judas Iscariot,” so he has prayed and called each of us. He has prayed for each of us, to keep us in the Father’s name, to unite us to God and to each other, to consecrate us in the truth of God’s word, in the truth of Jesus’ own consecration to the Father. Jesus has prayed for us that our faith may not fail and that we will strengthen the faith of each other and those we serve. Jesus continues to pray for us. He’s praying for us at this Mass. He’s praying for us when we have difficulties in our work. His persevering prayer for us is an example for us to persevere in prayer together with him during it as well.
The second theme is our discipleship. When Jesus came down the mountain, St. Luke tells us, he chose the twelve from among the “disciples,” from among those who were already as the Greek word disciple means Jesus’ “students,” who were zealously following him, who were living by faith, who were hearing his words and seeking to put them into practice. Together with Jesus’ prayer, their faith was the crucial job qualification. Jesus didn’t raid the rabbinical schools for the greatest young Scriptural scholars of the day who could more easily preach and teach. He didn’t turn to the ascetical Pharisees whose whole life was dedicated to trying to live the Mosaic law to its perfection, to those who were already praying, tithing, fasting far more than was explicitly required. He turned to common, ordinary folk. He raided wharves and tax offices, he found people under fig trees and those who were lousy private investigators tailing him to discover where he lived. For the most part, that’s always been Jesus’ way. St. Paul would say to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.” The saints were celebrate today are, in many ways, the least of the apostles. St. Luke put them at the very end of the list, named just before the notorious traitor Judas Iscariot. In some ways, they’re still the least. The tomb of any apostle — not to mention two apostles — would ordinarily be expected to be noteworthy, but both of their remains, brought to Rome by Crusaders lest their tombs be destroyed by Muslims, rest quietly together in the southern transept of St. Peter’s Basilica, at the altar of St. Joseph, underneath the Blessed Sacrament. Whereas St. Peter has a 70-ton bronze baldachin sculpted by Bernini and a massive dome-shamed tiara designed by Michelangelo over his relics just a few hundred feet away, SS. Simon’s and Jude’s tomb remains such that most visitors to St. Peter’s have no idea where it is. But there’s a beauty here, all the same, because as disciples called by Jesus, it was never truly about them, but about him, who remains on top of them in the Blessed Sacrament. Jesus called them because of their faith, because they knew how much they needed him and needed to learn from him. The criterion of discipleship even overcame human differences. Simon is labeled a “zealot,” from the Hebrew verb qana, which means that he was from among those most opposed to the Romans and the one whose first reaction, for example, to the calling of the tax collector Matthew, should have been fisticuffs. But as Pope Benedict said back in 2006, in Jesus’ calling the first apostles, “It was people who interested him, not social classes and labels.” He added, “This is clearly a lesson for us who are often inclined to accentuate differences and even contrasts, forgetting that in Jesus Christ we are given the strength to get the better of our continual conflicts.” It’s key for us routinely to examine the state of our discipleship, to sit at Jesus the Master’s feet as zealous students and let him form us like he formed the Twelve. Many of the issues that plague the Christian life begin when we forget that we’re called, like every one of the baptized, to holiness, to be a faithful follower, to keep all the commandments out of love for God and others, to hang on Jesus’ words, to become true Good Samaritans, to practice what the Lord has sent us to preach. Many of the issues also begin when we fail to relate to each other as fellow disciples, strengthening each other’s faith by the fire of our own, rejoicing at the other’s spiritual gifts given for the building up of the Church, and helping each other stay on the narrow way when we notice that a brother or sister is beginning to drift or is lost. Just like Jesus called the 12 not to be 12 independent students but to form a college, so he’s called each of us, at this time, in this place, to form community of one heart and mind, to be with him and with each other, conscious of the fact that we need each other just as much as our bodies need eyes, hands and feet.
The third thing we learn from today’s feast is about the apostolate. After choosing the 12, Jesus named them “apostles,” literally “those sent.” They were to become his ambassadors, his envoys, in spreading his kingdom, in heralding the Good News. In the Psalm today, we prayed, “Their message goes out through all the earth,” and we know that through 11 of these 12 men, Christ’s message did radiate throughout the ancient world. They couldn’t keep the message in. They were impelled to share Jesus, and his words, and the joy of the Christian life with others. They would walk for months to far off territories. Imagine what the Lord could do with all of us in the much smaller territory of New York! Imagine what the apostles could have done with the resources we have at our disposal, not just our education, but our cars, our planes, our phones, our media. Today’s feast is a chance for us to be renewed in the apostolic zeal with which SS. Simon and Jude crisscrossed the world.
The fourth thing to ponder today is the fact that they were martyrs. They were effective in proclaiming the faith because they were willing to die for it, they were willing to proclaim it even when it made others uncomfortable to the point of homicidal rage. They were willing to follow Jesus along the path of the grain of wheat. They were willing to lose their lives so as to save it. They were prepared to pick up their Cross each day and be crucified upon it. They recognized, as Jesus himself taught them, that they were, in the final analysis, not cursed but blessed to be persecuted, reviled and hated because of him. Their feast allows us to examine anew for what or Whom are we willing to die? Are we prepared to die to ourselves, to the old Adam in us, so that Christ may live? Are we prepared to pay the supreme sacrifice for him who paid the supreme sacrifice for us? The apostles effectively preached the Gospel because it was obvious that the words they were proclaiming, they believed, were worth living for and worth dying for. Our apostolic effectiveness is likewise dependent on this type of martyrion, this witness, this body language, which is meant to be the most eloquent message we’ll ever preach.
And the last thing today’s feast of the two apostles teaches us is about the power of intercession. St. Jude is most famous among Catholics not because of the letter ascribed to him, not because of any particular apostolic feats. It’s because of his prayer as the patron of hopeless causes. This devotion began because pilgrims to his original tomb in Syria, before it was translated to Rome, received answers to their least likely prayers. St. Bernard of Clairvaux and St. Bridget of Sweden both had experiences in prayer that led them to promote devotion to St. Jude as the patron of the impossible. We’ll never know why in God’s wisdom St. Jude, and not St. Simon or St. Mary of Bethany or someone else has been the conduit through whose intercession God has worked so many wonders in response to prayer, but the larger point is that God wants all of us to be intercessors. He wants us to pray for people, especially for those entrusted to us and those who entrust to us their prayers. St. John Paul II said that the Christian life is meant to be distinguished above all by the “art of prayer” (Novo Millennio Ineunte). Jesus instructed us to pray without ceasing, banging on the door of God like the importune widow before the judge or the neighbor seeking bread. This is one of the most beautiful, and most important aspects, of our life as Christians, and something that truly gives meaning to our faithful recitation of the liturgy of the hours.
Today as we prepare for the Liturgy of the Eucharist, we bring all of the prayers entrusted to us, and pray also with perseverance for each other, that on this great feast day the Lord will renew each of us in gratitude for his prayerfully calling us, that we will grow in holiness as his disciples, in zeal as his apostles, in courage as martyrs whether white or red, and in constant intercession for the needs of those entrusted to us and of the Church. SS. Simon and Jude were present during the Last Supper when Jesus took bread and wine into his hands and totally changed it into himself. They were present when Jesus said, “Do this in memory of me.” And that’s precisely what they did, celebrating the Mass in imitation of the reverence with which Jesus celebrated that first Eucharist. We’re called with them to enter into Jesus’ own consecration, so that, having become fully united with him, his message may go out through us through all the earth and one day we and those we serve may come to experience eternal friendship in that kingdom in which SS. Simon and Jude and all the saints now rejoice.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 eph 2:19-22
Brothers and sisters:
You are no longer strangers and sojourners,
but you are fellow citizens with the holy ones
and members of the household of God,
built upon the foundation of the Apostles and prophets,
with Christ Jesus himself as the capstone.
Through him the whole structure is held together
and grows into a temple sacred in the Lord;
in him you also are being built together
into a dwelling place of God in the Spirit.
Responsorial Psalm ps 19:2-3, 4-5
R. (5a) Their message goes out through all the earth.
The heavens declare the glory of God,
and the firmament proclaims his handiwork.
Day pours out the word to day,
and night to night imparts knowledge.
R. Their message goes out through all the earth.
Not a word nor a discourse
whose voice is not heard;
Through all the earth their voice resounds,
and to the ends of the world, their message.
R. Their message goes out through all the earth.
Gospel lk 6:12-16
Jesus went up to the mountain to pray,
and he spent the night in prayer to God.
When day came, he called his disciples to himself,
and from them he chose Twelve, whom he also named Apostles:
Simon, whom he named Peter, and his brother Andrew,
James, John, Philip, Bartholomew, Matthew,
Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus,
Simon who was called a Zealot,
and Judas the son of James,
and Judas Iscariot, who became a traitor.
The post Built Upon the Foundation of the Apostles Simon and Jude, Feast of SS. Simon and Jude, October 28, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
October 28, 2024Take Courage, Get Up, Jesus Is Calling You, 30th Sunday (B), October 27, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 27, 2024
Jer 31:7-9, Ps 126, Heb 5:1-6, Mk 10:46-52

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
One of the most important things for university students is to answer the big questions of life: Why did God make me? What is the purpose of my life? What is he calling me to do with the gift of my life and the time he has given me? In religious terms, these are called vocational questions. This week, as we prepare for All Saints Day, it’s an opportunity for us all to focus on our most fundamental calling, which is to become a saint. We either become holy and fit to dwell in God’s presence forever or we will spend eternity self-alienated from God in Hell. Within that universal call to holiness, however, there are many paths. Most Catholics are summoned to seek holiness in the Sacrament of Matrimony, as they seek to be God’s instrument to help sanctify their spouse and their children. Others will seek it through religious or consecrated life. Today’s second reading focuses on the call to the priesthood. Others will strive to become holy in some other form of self-giving love to God and to others. But it’s important for us to think about, and pray about, the question of our vocation in life and to be ready to respond freely, wholeheartedly and joyfully when God makes our life purpose clear.
Today’s readings have a clear vocational thrust to them. In the first reading, we see how God through the Prophet Jeremiah called the people of the ten tribes of northern Israel home. He called them as a loving Father. He summoned them as a family. He called them all, leaving none forgotten: not just the men and boys, the strong and sturdy, but mothers, children, even the lame and the blind, promising that he himself will console and guide them, leading them on level roads so that none will trip, directing them to brooks of water to stay hydrated for the journey. This is an image of the way God calls us all through the fulfillment of the twelve tribes of Israel and Judah, which is the Church, the family Christ himself came to form, to lead us all to the house of the Father where he has gone to prepare a place for us.
While the first reading focuses on the universal call to holiness in this life and the next, the Gospel helps us to perceive many elements of the personal call God gives us in Jesus’ dramatic encounter with the blind man in Jericho, Bartimaeus. Jericho is the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location on the planet. Jesus went there, symbolic of the lowest depths of the human experience, showing that there’s no abyss into which Jesus won’t descend for us in order to lead us on the 20-mile uphill trek to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift us up with him permanently to the heavenly Jerusalem. There he encounters Bartimaeus, a blind man, begging by the roadside. Bartimaeus had not been born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he uses later, anablepo, asking Jesus in the Greek literally to “see again.” He hadn’t just lost his sight, however; to some degree, he had lost his dignity. He was sitting by the roadside begging for help. He could not rely on himself anymore. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus would come to meet him and to call him.
When he heard that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by, he began to cry out, “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!” When others tried to silence him, he cried out all the more — the word St. Luke uses for crying out means basically an animal cry, something coming deep from his woundedness — “Son of David, have pity on me!”Bartimaeus didn’t cry out for alms, which would have been small. He didn’t cry out at that point for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy. He cried out for Jesus. He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles to the north in Galilee and was appealing in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. And his prayer would be answered.
That’s the prelude to the vocational call: our need for Jesus; Jesus’ drawing near; our calling out to him in prayer and in faith. Then that leads to the concrete vocational moment. “Jesus stopped and said, ‘Call him.’” Like rabbis were accustomed to do on all their pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. But when he heard Bartimaeus’ pleas, he stopped in his tracks and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. And so they said to Bartimaeus, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.’” What a beautiful expression, something that should be part of our vocabulary with everyone in the Church! “Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.” And Bartimaeus “threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus” It takes courage to get up and leave our comfort zone to respond to the Lord. Bartimaeus had that courage and did. When Jesus calls, he always challenges us to move. He who is always on the move, he who is always passing by waiting for an invitation, perpetually invites us to get up from where we are and follow him. That’s the fundamental moment of the vocational call. The courage needed does not just mean we leave our safe space, but that we even leave behind certain things that give us security. St. Mark tells us, Bartimaeus “threw aside his cloak.” The cloak was his outer garment that kept him warm at night. It was in a sense his security blanket. It was quite valuable to him and part of his life. But he was intentionally embracing a new life and establishing a new security. He left it behind, which is not just a fact but an important symbol of how he was thinking more about clinging to Jesus and the new life for which he was hoping than clinging to the past. There’s some clear baptismal imagery here as we leave behind our own garments and are clothed in Christ. The second element is he “sprang up.” Even though he was blind, he jumped up immediately. He raced to respond to his being called by the Lord. Unlike the excuse makers in other sections of the Gospel who said that they would follow Jesus after they had buried their father (who might die three decades later), inspected their oxen, enjoyed their honeymoon, etc., Bartimaeus responded with alacrity. That’s key to understanding the greatness of the call Christ gives to come to him. In every vocation, we need to be bold, get up, throw aside whatever might hinder us and come to Jesus. We can often be afraid. We can often want to stay immobilized by a sense of unworthiness. We can want to hold on to everything and they can hinder us from coming to Jesus. We can not have any sense of urgency or immediacy. Jesus wants to help us in each of these areas as he did the son of Timaeus.
The next stage is Jesus’ question: “What do you want me to do for you?” He wants us to examine our desires and ask for the big stuff, the most important. We’ve been made ultimately to want him. Bartimaeus didn’t ask for alms, because he wanted far more. On one level Bartimaeus and each of us should be saying to the Lord in obedience, “What do you want me to do for you, Lord?,” but it’s he who asks us, because he deeply desires our happiness. Our vocation begins with Jesus’ asking us what we want from him, and what we ultimately want is his help so that we might do what would please him most, because that is what would be us most deeply. In Bartimaeus’ case, he said, “Master, I want to see.” The Latin words for this have become a very popular Christian aspiration, popularized by St. Josemaria Escrivà: “Domine, ut videam!” Bartimaeus says, “I want to see! I want to live in the light. I want to see things as they really are. I want to see you!” The verb used here in Greek, is anablepo, “I want to see again.” He wants to live in grace again. He wants to live anew in the light. He knows what he lost and he knows where to find it. To say to Jesus, “I want to see!,” is not just to turn to a healer and ask him to restore his vision. It’s to say, “I want to live in your vision.” St. John in his Gospel would recall Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will have the light of life.” That’s the gift for which Bartimaeus was begging. Today we echo that prayer, begging Jesus to take out whatever planks are in our eyes so that we may see him clearly and have the chance to live with him in the light. That’s what we focus on here at Columbia with our motto, “In your light we will see the light!” (Ps 36:10).
After Bartimaeus asks for the miracle, Jesus replies, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.” Jesus says two very beautiful things to him upon healing him. The first is about a greater miracle than the healing of his physical sight. “Your faith has saved you!” The Lord not only gave him his wish to see but heard his initial cry to have mercy on him, and Jesus’ generosity far outdid Bartimaeus’ imagination to ask. Faith in response to God leads to salvation, and even though Bartimaeus didn’t dare request that, God nevertheless gave it. And likewise in response to our bold trust in him, in response to our leaving our stuff behind and hustling toward him, in response to our sincere telling him what we want, God responds by giving himself to us and granting us far more than we had implored. The second thing we see in this scene is that Jesus continues to engage Bartimaeus’ vocational freedom. He says, “Go your way!” In other words, he was giving him the chance to choose what to do with his sight. He wasn’t going to make him an indentured servant for the rest of his life, paying off the debt of the Jesus’ spiritual optometry. No, Jesus had given without a quid pro quo and had left Bartimaeus free to choose his path. That’s what makes how he used it so much more relevant. Mark tells us, “Immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.” Bartimaeus used his freedom to follow Jesus. He left the depth of Jericho behind and followed him up to Jerusalem, he followed him on Palm Sunday, he followed him on the Way of the Cross, he followed him, ultimately, all the way. And St. Luke comments, “He immediately received his sight and followed him, giving glory to God, and when they saw this, all the people gave praise to God” (Lk 18:43). He spent the rest of his life glorifying God in such a way that others joined him in that divine praise. The end of our vocational story is meant to be a similar glorification of God, hoping that our example will be contagious!
So we see all of these vocational elements in the encounter of Bartimaeus: Jesus’ drawing near; our prayer and crying out to Jesus to cure our inability to see what he’s asking of us; Jesus’ calling us to come to him more closely; our being helped to take courage, to get up and draw near; our asking Jesus to help us to see; his curing our blindness and trying to give us salvation by faith; our being give the free choice to go our way; and then our choosing to follow him, glorifying him.
These pertain to every vocation, to the universal call to holiness and to the various means given to fulfill that vocation, whether marriage, consecrated and religious life, self-giving love in the middle of the world and others. But because of the second reading today, I’d like to focus a little bit on the priesthood, where many today need God’s help to see Jesus more clearly. The priest is ordained to act in the person of Christ, in his preaching, in his celebration of the sacraments instituted by the Lord, and in his shepherding God’s family. But for several reasons, both due to some of the blind spots of our culture as well as to the counter-witness given by some clergy, it has become harder for many Catholics to see Christ working through his priests. The Letter to the Hebrews mentions first the Old Testament levitical priesthood and then the priesthood of Christ, the true high priest. But what it says is applicable the priests of the New Covenant, those who are ordained in the line of Melchizedek to act in the person of Christ the Eternal High Priest. Let’s ponder a little bit what’s revealed.
“Every high priest,” the Letter to the Hebrews says, “is chosen from among men and put in charge of things pertaining to God on their behalf, to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins. He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness; and because of this he must offer sacrifice for his own sins as well as for those of the people. And one does not presume to take this honor on himself, but takes it only when called by God, just as Aaron was.”
We learn various truths here. The first thing is that priests are “chosen,” taking on the priesthood “only when called by God.” Priests are not elected or appointed by the people, because even if all the eight billion men and women in the world got together and elected one person to act on their behalf, they could not give this person the power to change bread and wine into the Lord’s body and blood or to forgive your sins, which only God can do (Mk 2:7). The priest is chosen directly and sent out by Christ. We call the priesthood a vocation, because the priest is “called” by God himself. That’s the first thing the letter to the Hebrew teaches us.
The second is what the priest’s fundamental mission is. Hebrews tells us that is “put in charge of the things pertaining to God on their behalf.” His responsibility is to steward the great treasures of God for all the people. God has entrusted priests with his word; the priest is, in some respects, the voice or sound-system of Christ, proclaiming Christ’s Gospel. He’s entrusted them with his priestly work in the sacraments, investing them with the power to bring his own body and blood down to earth. He’s likewise entrusted them, whose role is to offer Christ’s own self-gift and sacrifice for sins, with the power of the Holy Spirit to forgive sins in his name (Jn 20:19-23). He’s also made them shepherds of His flock, so that they might be foster-fathers of the family Christ came from heaven to earth to establish. For the sake of God’s people — for each of us and all of us— Jesus did this, to perpetuate his saving work. And how important the priest is for this saving work! As the patron saint of priests, St. John Vianney used to say in his catecheses, if the Blessed Mother appeared here live today, she could not give you Jesus again as she was able to do to the shepherds and the Magi in Bethlehem. Even if all the angels and archangels were here, acting in unison, not even all of them together could forgive even our least venial sin. The priest is the only person in the entire universe capable of doing this, and he does this, not by his own merits and powers, but because he has been chosen by God and given these powers for the sanctification of all God’s people.
The third reality is that priests are chosen from “among men.” He’s not selected from the angels. He’s certainly not God. He’s fully human, he’s full of human weaknesses and frailties, just like any other person alive. This truth has a good side and a bad side to it. The good side we read in Hebrews: “He is able to deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward, since he himself is subject to weakness.” The priest has human emotions, desires, and struggles. God has chosen “earthly vessels” (2 Cor 4:7) to minister his sacraments, and this is one of God’s great gifts. To preach the great news of forgiveness from sins, the Lord has chosen to send out ordinary reconciled sinners, men like St. Peter, whose first words to the Lord were “Depart from me, O Lord, for I am a sinful man!” (Lk 5:8). They are meant to be un-intimidating human instruments, subject to weakness, who trust in and receive the Lord’s mercy. Priests do not stand outside of the human messiness of sin, but are in solidarity with sinners and are meant to tangible witnesses that forgiveness and liberation from sin is possible. They’re first sheep, and then shepherds; first disciples, then apostles. That’s the good side to the priest’s humanity. But there’s also a bad side: just like any other human being, the priest is capable of being tempted, giving into temptation and sinning. We know all too well that some priests have given into temptation to commit some truly heinous and scandalous sins. This does not mean that God has made a mistake. The reality is, however, that the men God chooses, invests with priestly gifts and powers, and to whom he is always faithful may be faithful in return or not. God chooses men prone to sin like any other, and sometimes like other Christians they choose to sin. We can see this lesson about the bad side of the priest’s humanity from the beginning. Before he chose his twelve apostles, Jesus spent all night in prayer to his Father (Lk 6:12). He taught, formed and loved them intimately for three years. He gave them power to preach in his name, to cast out demons, to cure the sick, even to raise the dead (Mt 10:7-8). He called them “friends” and treated them as his friends (Jn 15:15). Yet, in spite of all this, one of them betrayed him for 30 pieces of silver, another betrayed him to stay warm by a fire, and the rest betrayed him to try to save their own hides. But 11 of the 12 came back and almost all of them died to plant the seeds of the Gospel. That’s still the same pattern today. Even though some in certain circles like to focus more on priests who fail than priests who are faithful, there are so many more who remain faithful, whose names don’t appear in the newspapers, who are still offering their lives to serve Christ and to serve you out of love.
What are the faithful called to do in the face of these realities of the priesthood that the Letter to the Hebrews reveals? The first thing is to be grateful to Christ for the gift of the priesthood and for the divine gifts He gives us through the priesthood. Without the priest, there would be no Eucharist. Without the priest, we would have no way on earth of assuredly having our sins absolved. Without the priest, we would probably not even have unity among believers. We need first and always to thank God for the gift of the priesthood, for the sacraments the Lord makes possible uniquely through it, and for the priests who have said yes to the Lord’s call. The second thing is to pray for future priests who can continue to do these miracles of God’s people. Jesus commanded us to pray to the Lord of the Harvest to send more laborers into his vineyard (Mt 9:38). We’re called to do this because priests are not chosen by us or appointed by the Church, but are “chosen” and “called by God.” If we really look at the priesthood for what it is, we will pray, as well, that God call and choose young men from Columbia, our roommates, even for girls our boyfriends, to say yes to him in this way. That leads to the third response we’re supposed to have, based on the humanity of the priest. We’re called to remember that priests are not angels, but are chosen from among men, men just like the men we know. There are young men here in Church today who might think that because of all their imperfections, the Lord could not possibly be calling them to be priests. They and all of us in the Church are called to recall that the Lord might be calling them not despite their imperfections, but because of them, so that they, aware of their weakness, may be able to “deal gently with the ignorant and the wayward. Fourth and lastly, because of the “bad side” of the human reality of the priesthood, we’re called to pray for priests, that they remain faithful to the Lord, so that they can help all God’s people remain faithful. The great priest-saints of the history of the Church have said, very humbly, “But for the grace of God go I.” One of the great saints of all time, St. Philip Neri, used to wake up every morning and turn to the Lord very humbly in prayer, saying, “Lord, it’s me, Philip. Please help me so that I do not betray you today.” Priests simply are always in need of prayers that they remain faithful to this grace. If you want holier priests, I encourage you to pray more for them. We priests need your prayers. I’m so grateful to the people across the world, including here at this parish and within our diocese, who had a prayer and fast day for priests yesterday. We need your prayers!
As we prepare to move from the Word of God to the Word made Flesh, I’d like to finish with a small mention of how the Lord originally called me to the priesthood. It was when I was four, attending daily Mass with my mother. I watched elderly Fr. Jon Cantwell say the words of consecration and then, with great effort because he knees were bad, hobble down the marble steps of the sanctuary to give God to the people old enough and lucky enough to receive him. I was transfixed as I watched him hold Jesus Christ in his hands and then give him to others. I saw then that the priest had to be the luckiest person in the whole universe, capable of holding God and giving him to others. He was entrusted not just the things of God but God himself, incarnate, for their behalf. That’s when God inspired me to ask for the gift of the priesthood, which he confirmed 18 years later when I was in college. Now as I prepare to be God’s instrument in the celebration of the most important event that takes place anywhere on any day, as I get ready for something that still blows me away — to have bread and wine totally change into Jesus’ body and blood in my hands and then have the privilege to give God to you — I still believe that the priest is the luckiest person in the whole world. At this Mass that we began crying out to God, like Bartimaeus, “Kyrie, eleison! Christe, eleison, Kyrie eleison!” “Lord, Christ, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us!,” in which through the Word of God he has sought to restore our sight, may God give us all the eyes to see him in the Eucharist and how lucky we are just to be in his presence, not to mention to receive him. The Lord has indeed done great things for us and is still doing so: we are filled with joy! Let us take courage because Jesus is calling us to be his disciples, because he is calling us to be saints, because he is calling us to particular vocations within the Church. Let us remember the promises of our baptism, throw off our security blankets and attachments, spring up and come to him. And let us, like those following and listening to Jesus along the journey, be strengthened by him to go to those who are on the sides of the modern road, begging for meaning, and tell them, “Take courage. Jesus is calling” you, too!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Jer 31:7-9
Thus says the LORD:
Shout with joy for Jacob,
exult at the head of the nations;
proclaim your praise and say:
The LORD has delivered his people,
the remnant of Israel.
Behold, I will bring them back
from the land of the north;
I will gather them from the ends of the world,
with the blind and the lame in their midst,
the mothers and those with child;
they shall return as an immense throng.
They departed in tears,
but I will console them and guide them;
I will lead them to brooks of water,
on a level road, so that none shall stumble.
For I am a father to Israel,
Ephraim is my first-born.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 126:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6
R. (3) The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
When the LORD brought back the captives of Zion,
we were like men dreaming.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with rejoicing.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Then they said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us;
we are glad indeed.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like the torrents in the southern desert.
Those that sow in tears
shall reap rejoicing.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Although they go forth weeping,
carrying the seed to be sown,
They shall come back rejoicing,
carrying their sheaves.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Reading II
Heb 5:1-6
Brothers and sisters:
Every high priest is taken from among men
and made their representative before God,
to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.
He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring,
for he himself is beset by weakness
and so, for this reason, must make sin offerings for himself
as well as for the people.
No one takes this honor upon himself
but only when called by God,
just as Aaron was.
In the same way,
it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest,
but rather the one who said to him:
You are my son:
this day I have begotten you;
just as he says in another place:
You are a priest forever
according to the order of Melchizedek.
Alleluia
Cf. 2 Tm 1:10
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death
and brought life to light through the Gospel.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 10:46-52
As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd,
Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus,
sat by the roadside begging.
On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth,
he began to cry out and say,
“Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.”
And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent.
But he kept calling out all the more,
“Son of David, have pity on me.”
Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.”
So they called the blind man, saying to him,
“Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.”
He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.
Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want me to do for you?”
The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”
Jesus told him, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.”
Immediately he received his sight
and followed him on the way.
The post Take Courage, Get Up, Jesus Is Calling You, 30th Sunday (B), October 27, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
40 min
October 27, 2024Taking Courage from Jesus’ Call, 30th Sunday (B), October 27, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
30th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
October 27, 2024
Jer 31:7-9, Ps 126, Heb 5:1-6, Mk 10:46-52
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
“What do you want me to do for you?” Which one of us would not want the Lord to ask us the question he asks Bartimaeus in today’s Gospel? Bartimaeus’ response is one that has become a common aspiration of Christians through the centuries: “Lord, I want to see!” The early saints saw in this expression more than a cry from a physically blind man. They recognized in it the plea of all those in every generation who have been in any type of darkness. “Lord, I want to see!” See what? We learn from Bartimaeus the purpose of our sight. The Gospel tells us, “Having regained his sight, he followed Jesus on the way.” Just like St. Peter’s mother-in-law, as soon as she had been cured of a severe fever, used her health to serve others (Mk 1:30-31), so Bartimaeus, now that he could see, used the gift of his sight to follow the divine Giver, the Light of the World (Jn 8:2). Our eyes — both our physical eyes and the eyes of our heart — are gifts of God so that we might see Jesus and follow him. Our whole nature has been created by God so that we might say, like those Greeks in the Gospel who had not yet met the Lord but presented themselves to Philip: “We want to see Jesus!” (Jn 12:21).
We want to see Jesus in prayer. We want to see Jesus in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We want to see Jesus in others, in the faces of those we love, in the faces of those we find difficult to love or like. We want to see Jesus behind the distressing disguises of the poor, the sick, the lonely, the homeless, the abandoned, the blind. We want to behold Christ’s face in the beauties of creation. We want to see him behind each of the commandments, teaching us how to love. We want the eyes to see his will in our daily life, in the present and for the future. We want to see him in the deliberations of conscience guiding us in the choices we have to make. As the Holy Father said in his new encyclical on the Sacred Heart released on Thursday, we want to see him on fire with love for us and the human race. Ultimately, we want to see him forever face-to-face in heaven, smiling upon us. But so often we’re blinded. Sin blinds us. Worries blind us. Pain and suffering blind us. Hatred and prejudices blind us. Others, including those we love, can get in the way and obstruct our vision. Today, the Lord comes to us and asks us, as he asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?” As we enter into the scene, we behold not only how Jesus interacted with this particular beggar who was blind, but how he intervenes in each of our vocations and how he seeks to transform us to minister to others. Let’s try today, like in lectio divina, to ponder the various elements of this rich scene together, drawing lessons from Jesus’ interaction in our life.
“As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd” — Jericho is the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location. Jesus was passing through the depths of the human experience in order to ascend the 15-mile road up hill that leads to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift us up. There’s no abyss into which Jesus wouldn’t descend for us.
“Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging” — Bartimaeus was not born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he uses later, anablepo, asking Jesus in the Greek to “see again.” He hadn’t just lost his sight, however. To some degree, he had lost the dignity he would have had. He was sitting by the roadside begging. He could not rely on himself anymore. He needed help. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus would come to meet him, as many times he has likewise come to us.
“On hearing that Jesus of Nazareth was passing by” — Not coincidentally at all, so many times in our life Jesus enters right when we need him most, right when we’re at our weakest and most desperate. But he “passes by.” He doesn’t intrude. He draws near but he still wants to engage our freedom, rather than force himself and his love upon us. He wants us to move, too.
“He began to cry out, ‘Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!’” — Bartimaeus didn’t cry out for alms, which would have been small. He didn’t cry out at that point for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy. He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles to the north in Galilee and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. The word St. Luke uses for crying out means basically an animal cry, something coming deep from his woundedness. And his prayer would be answered.
“Jesus stopped and said, ‘Call him.’” — Like rabbis were accustomed to do on all their pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. But when he heard Bartimaeus’ pleas, he stopped in his tracks and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus caring for this man was more important than what he was teaching at that moment, because he was about to show the Gospel rather than just verbally describe it. He was also going to show how he responds to persistent prayer.
“They said to Bartimaeus, ‘Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.’” — What a beautiful expression, something that should be part of our vocabulary with everyone in the Church! “Take courage, get up, Jesus is calling you.” It would have been very easy for Jesus to come to meet Bartimaeus exactly where he was begging. But Jesus loved him too much and understands the human heart too well to do that. Instead, he drew near, he got close, but then, as I mentioned above, he had Bartimaeus get up to come to him, to exercise Bartimaeus’ freedom, to stoke his desire, to give him greater participation in the miracle Jesus himself was about to accomplish. It takes courage to get up and leave our comfort zone to respond to the Lord. Bartimaeus had that courage and did. Similarly, on many occasions we need a similar courage to respond to the Lord. It might be getting up and going to God rather than remaining where we are. It might be helping out with some form of charity rather than remaining isolated. But when Jesus calls, he always challenges us to move. He who is always on the move, he who is always passing by waiting for an invitation, perpetually invites us to get up from where we are and follow him. That’s the fundamental moment of the vocational call.
“He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus” — We see two crucial elements here in the response of Bartimaeus that are meant to be part of every vocation story. The first is that he “threw aside his cloak.” The cloak was his outer garment that kept him warm at night. It was in a sense his security blanket. It was quite valuable to him and part of his life. But he was intentionally embracing a new life and establishing a new security. He left it behind, which is not just a fact but an important symbol of how he was thinking more about clinging to Jesus and the new life for which he was hoping than clinging to the past. There’s some clear baptismal imagery here as we leave behind our own garments and are clothed in Christ. The second element is he “sprang up.” Even though he was blind, he got up immediately. He always raced to respond to his being called by the Lord. Unlike the excuse makers in other sections of the Gospel who said that they would follow Jesus after they had buried their father (who might die three decades later), inspected their oxen, enjoyed their honeymoon, etc., Bartimaeus responded with alacrity. That’s key to understanding the greatness of the call Christ gives to come to him, something we can be grateful for having heard and having responded to, we pray, with similar immediacy.
“What do you want me to do for you?” — Jesus asks us this question always with the love of the most generous person who has ever existed. What do you want? What do you seek? He wants us to examine our desires and ask for the big stuff, the most important. We’ve been made ultimately to want him. Bartimaeus didn’t ask for alms, because he wanted far more. Likewise, Jesus, each time we meet him, at the beginning of the day in the Morning Offering, in our Holy Hour, at the altar, on both sides of the Confessional screen, in the disguise of the poor, asks, “What do you want me to do for you?” On one level we should be saying to the Lord in obedience, “What do you want me to do for you, Lord?,” but it’s he who asks us, because he deeply desires our happiness. Our vocation begins with Jesus’ asking us what we want from him, and what we ultimately want is his help so that we might do what would please him most, because that is what would be us most deeply.
“Master, I want to see.” — The Latin words for this have become a very popular Christian aspiration, popularized by St. Josemaria Escrivà: “Domine, ut videam!” Bartimaeus says, “I want to see! I want to live in the light. I want to see things as they really are. I want to see you!” The verb used here in Greek, as I previously noted, is, “I want to see again.” He wants to live in grace again. He wants to live anew in the light. He knows what he lost and he knows where to find it. To say to Jesus, “I want to see!,” is not just to turn to a healer and ask him to restore his vision. It’s to say, “I want to live in your vision.” St. John in his Gospel would recall Jesus saying, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will have the light of life.” That’s the gift for which Bartimaeus was begging. Today we echo that prayer, begging Jesus to take out whatever planks are in our eyes so that we may see him clearly and have the chance to live with him in the light.
“Go your way; your faith has saved you.” — Jesus says two very beautiful things to him upon healing him. The first is about a greater miracle than the healing of his physical sight. “Your faith has saved you!” The Lord not only gave him his wish to see but heard his initial cry to have mercy on him, and Jesus’ generosity far outdid Bartimaeus’ imagination to ask. Faith in response to God leads to salvation, and even though Bartimaeus didn’t dare request that, God nevertheless gave it. And likewise in response to our bold trust in him, in response to our leaving our stuff behind and hustling toward him, in response to our sincere telling him what we want, God responds by giving himself to us and granting us far more than we had implored. The second thing we see in this scene is that Jesus continues to engage Bartimaeus’ vocational freedom. He says, “Go your way!” In other words, he was giving him the chance to choose what to do with his sight. He wasn’t going to make him an indentured servant for the rest of his life, paying off the debt of the Jesus’ spiritual optometry. No, Jesus had given without a quid pro quoand had left Bartimaeus free to choose his path. That’s what makes how he used it so much more relevant.
“Immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way” — Bartimaeus used his freedom to follow Jesus. He left the depth of Jericho behind and followed him up to Jerusalem, he followed him on Palm Sunday, he followed him on the Way of the Cross, he followed him, ultimately, all the way. And St. Luke comments, “He immediately received his sight and followed him, giving glory to God, and when they saw this, all the people gave praise to God” (Lk 18:43). He spent the rest of his life glorifying God in such a way that others joined him in that divine praise. The end of our vocational story is meant to be a similar glorification of God, hoping that our example will be contagious!
That brings us to an important application of this Gospel to our mission of charity in the world. In 2012, Pope Benedict used this scene of the cure of Bartimaeus to describe what we need to do to help the blind men and women of our day encounter Christ as he is passing by. He commented, “The state of blindness has great significance in the Gospels. It represents man who needs God’s light, the light of faith, if he is to know reality truly and to walk the path of life. It is essential to acknowledge one’s blindness, one’s need for this light, otherwise one could remain blind for ever. Bartimaeus, then, at that strategic point of Mark’s account, is presented as a model. He was not blind from birth, but he lost his sight. He represents man who has lost the light and knows it, but has not lost hope: he knows how to seize the opportunity to encounter Jesus and he entrusts himself to him for healing. … Bartimaeus represents man aware of his pain and crying out to the Lord, confident of being healed. His simple and sincere plea is exemplary, and indeed … it has found its way into the tradition of Christian prayer. … From this perspective, Bartimaeus could represent those who live in regions that were evangelized long ago, where the light of faith has grown dim and people have drifted away from God, no longer considering him relevant for their lives. These people have therefore lost a precious treasure, they have ‘fallen’ from a lofty dignity, … their lives have lost a secure and sound direction and they have become, often unconsciously, beggars for the meaning of existence. They are the many in need of a … new encounter with Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God (cf. Mk 1:1), who can open their eyes afresh and teach them the path.” He concludes that we, “who have had the experience of being healed by God through Jesus Christ” are called to go out to the present culture of the west, which is like ancient Jericho, where so many blind men and women are crying out for meaning and mercy, perhaps without explicitly realizing it, with the light of Christ, lived in daily life, in the hope that we may guide them to the source of that light, Jesus himself, who wants to lead them from the depths of the darkness of the modern Jericho to the radiant heights of the celestial Jerusalem.
At Mass today we, like Bartimaeus, have cried out, over and again, “Kyrie, eleison! Christe, eleison, Kyrie eleison!” “Lord, Christ, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us!” Jesus has drawn near and asked, “What do you want me to do for you?.” Through the Word of God he has sought to restore our sight. He is our high priest spoken about in today’s passage from the Letter to the Hebrews who is able to “deal patiently” with us because he took on our humanity. He is the fulfillment of Jeremiah’s prophecy in the first reading, who will gather “the blind and the lame” from the ends of the earth and lead them “so that none shall stumble.” He is the one who is about to give us a greater gift even than he gave Bartimaeus. He will give us himself, on the inside. No matter what difficulties we may be experiencing, no matter the depths to which we may have sunk, Jesus is right now passing by, hoping to pass through and within us. Let us take courage because Jesus is calling us. Let us remember the promises of our baptism, throw off our security blankets and attachments, spring up and come to him. And let us, like those following and listening to Jesus along the journey, be strengthened by him to go to those who are on the sides of the modern road, begging for meaning, and tell them, “Take courage. Jesus is calling” you, too!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Jer 31:7-9
Thus says the LORD:
Shout with joy for Jacob,
exult at the head of the nations;
proclaim your praise and say:
The LORD has delivered his people,
the remnant of Israel.
Behold, I will bring them back
from the land of the north;
I will gather them from the ends of the world,
with the blind and the lame in their midst,
the mothers and those with child;
they shall return as an immense throng.
They departed in tears,
but I will console them and guide them;
I will lead them to brooks of water,
on a level road, so that none shall stumble.
For I am a father to Israel,
Ephraim is my first-born.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 126:1-2, 2-3, 4-5, 6
R. (3) The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
When the LORD brought back the captives of Zion,
we were like men dreaming.
Then our mouth was filled with laughter,
and our tongue with rejoicing.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Then they said among the nations,
“The LORD has done great things for them.”
The LORD has done great things for us;
we are glad indeed.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Restore our fortunes, O LORD,
like the torrents in the southern desert.
Those that sow in tears
shall reap rejoicing.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Although they go forth weeping,
carrying the seed to be sown,
They shall come back rejoicing,
carrying their sheaves.
R. The Lord has done great things for us; we are filled with joy.
Reading II
Heb 5:1-6
Brothers and sisters:
Every high priest is taken from among men
and made their representative before God,
to offer gifts and sacrifices for sins.
He is able to deal patiently with the ignorant and erring,
for he himself is beset by weakness
and so, for this reason, must make sin offerings for himself
as well as for the people.
No one takes this honor upon himself
but only when called by God,
just as Aaron was.
In the same way,
it was not Christ who glorified himself in becoming high priest,
but rather the one who said to him:
You are my son:
this day I have begotten you;
just as he says in another place:
You are a priest forever
according to the order of Melchizedek.
Alleluia
Cf. 2 Tm 1:10
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Our Savior Jesus Christ destroyed death
and brought life to light through the Gospel.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 10:46-52
As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd,
Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus,
sat by the roadside begging.
On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth,
he began to cry out and say,
“Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.”
And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent.
But he kept calling out all the more,
“Son of David, have pity on me.”
Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.”
So they called the blind man, saying to him,
“Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.”
He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.
Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want me to do for you?”
The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”
Jesus told him, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.”
Immediately he received his sight
and followed him on the way.

The post Taking Courage from Jesus’ Call, 30th Sunday (B), October 27, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
24 min
October 26, 2024 The Eucharistic Procession of Earthly Life: Following the Eucharistic Jesus to the Nuptial Banquet, 12th Marian Eucharistic Congress, Diocese of Charleston, October 26, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
12th Marian Eucharistic Congress, Diocese of Charleston
Greenville Convention Center, Greenville, South Carolina
October 26, 2024

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The post The Eucharistic Procession of Earthly Life: Following the Eucharistic Jesus to the Nuptial Banquet, 12th Marian Eucharistic Congress, Diocese of Charleston, October 26, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
56 min
October 26, 2024Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 26, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
October 26, 2024

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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, when we will travel with Jesus to Jericho, the lowest place on earth, more below sea level than any other location on the planet. Jesus was passing through that place, representative of the moral pit of the world, in order to ascend from there the 15 mile road uphill that leads to Jerusalem, where he would suffer and die to lift up the human race and us.
St. Mark tells us that as Jesus was passing through the town, “Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus, sat by the roadside begging.” Bartimaeus was not born blind, but had become blind over the course of time. We see that in the verb he himself uses later — anablepo — asking Jesus in the Greek to “see again.” But he hadn’t just lost his sight. To some degree, he had lost his dignity. He was sitting by the roadside begging. He could not take care of himself. He needed basic help. He had hit rock bottom. He was in the depth of the valley of darkness in the lowest place on earth. But it was precisely in that spiritual poverty that Jesus would come to meet him. When Bartimaeus heard that Jesus was passing by, he didn’t cry out for alms, which would have been a small request. He didn’t cry out at that point even for a miracle. He cried out simply for mercy. “Jesus, son of David, have pity on me!” He had doubtless heard of Jesus’ reputation for working miracles to the north in Galilee and was responding in faith. The fact that he called him “Son of David” was a sign he believed Jesus was the Messiah. And his prayer would be answered.
Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” Like rabbis were accustomed to do on all their pilgrimages to Jerusalem for the major feasts, Jesus was teaching the crowds along the journey. When he heard Bartimaeus’ pleas, he stopped in his tracks and ordered that Bartimaeus be brought to him. For Jesus, caring for this man was more important than what he was teaching at that moment, because he was about to show the Gospel rather than just verbally describe it. He was also going to manifest how he responds to persistent prayer. They said to Bartimaeus, “Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you,” words that should encourage anyone. But the words are nevertheless surprising. If Jesus knew he were blind, why wouldn’t have he gone over to where the blind man was begging? The reason is that Jesus loved him too much and understood the human heart too well to do that. Instead, he drew near, he got close, but then he had Bartimaeus make the effort to get up and come to him, to exercise Bartimaeus’ freedom, to stoke his desire, to grow his faith, and to give him greater participation in the miracle Jesus himself was about to accomplish. It takes courage to get up and leave our comfort zone to respond to the Lord.
Bartimaeus had that courage and did. St. Mark tells us, “He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.” The cloak was his outer garment that kept him warm at night. It was in a sense his security blanket. It was quite valuable to him and part of his life. But in crying out, in taking courage and going to Jesus who was calling, he was intentionally embracing a new life and establishing a new security. He left his cloak behind, which is not just a fact but an important symbol of how he was thinking more about clinging to Jesus and the new life for which he was hoping than grasping the past. Even though he was blind, he got up immediately. He raced to respond to his being called by the Lord.
“What do you want me to do for you?,” Jesus asked him. Bartimaeus replied, “Master, I want to see.” The Latin words for this have become a very popular Christian aspiration, made especially famous by Saint Josemaria: “Domine, ut videam!” “I want to see!” Bartimaeus was saying, essentially, “I want to live in the light. I want to see things as they really are. I want to see you!” The verb used here in Greek is, as I mentioned earlier, is “I want to see again.” He wanted to live in grace again. He wanted to live anew in the light. He knew what he lost and he knew where to find it. To say to Jesus, “I want to see!,” is not just to turn to a healer and ask him to restore his vision. It’s to say, “I want to live in your vision.” Jesus would say to us in St. John’s Gospel, “I am the light of the world. Whoever follows me will have the light of life.” That’s the gift for which Bartimaeus was begging. But Jesus gave him something more. “Go your way; your faith has saved you.” The Lord not only granted his wish to see but heard his initial cry to have mercy on him. Jesus’ generosity far outdid Bartimaeus’ imagination to ask. Faith in response to God leads to salvation, and even though Bartimaeus didn’t dare ask for that, God gave it. St. Mark tells us, “Immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.” Bartimaeus used his freedom to follow Jesus. He left the depth of Jericho behind and followed Jesus up to Jerusalem. He followed him to Palm Sunday. He followed him to the Way of the Cross. He followed him all the way. St. Luke in his version of the scene comments, “He immediately received his sight and followed him, giving glory to God, and when they saw this, all the people gave praise to God” (Lk 18:43). He spent the rest of his life glorifying God in such a way that others joined him in that divine praise. The essence of the Christian life is encapsulated by that phrase. To glorify God in a contagious way that others join us in doing so is what the Christian life is all about.
The same Jesus who asked Bartimaeus, “What do you want me to do for you?,” puts the same question to us. We’re called to learn from the blind man in Jericho how to beg Jesus for the gift of sight. We want to see Jesus in prayer. We want to see Jesus in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. We want to see Jesus in others, in the faces of those we love, in the faces of those we find so difficult to love. We want to see Jesus behind the distressing masks of the poor, the sick, the lonely, the homeless, the abandoned, and the blind. We want to behold Christ’s face in the beauties of creation. We want to see him behind each of the commandments, teaching us how to love. We want the eyes to see his will in our daily life, in the present and for the future. We want to see him in the deliberations of conscience and in the choices we have to make. As the Holy Father said in his new encyclical on the Sacred Heart released on Thursday, we want to see him pouring out his love and mercy for us. Ultimately we want to see him forever face-to-face in heaven, smiling on us with love. But so often we’re blinded. Sin blinds us. Worries blind us. Pain and suffering blind us. Hatred and prejudices blind us. Others, including those we love, can sometimes get in the way and remove our line of vision. This Sunday is an occasion to ask the Lord to take out whatever planks are in our eyes so that we may see him clearly and follow him, like Bartimaeus before us.
There’s also a very important application of this Gospel to our Christian mission in the world today. Last Sunday, as you recall, we marked World Mission Sunday and pondered how we’re called not just to pray for and financially support the spread of the Gospel throughout the world but to grasp that each of us is a missionary, called by our baptism to spread the faith. Back in 2012, Pope Benedict focused on precisely this dimension, using the cure of Bartimaeus to describe what you and I need to do to help the blind men and women of our day encounter Christ as he is passing by. “The state of blindness has great significance in the Gospels,” Pope Benedict said. “It represents man who needs God’s light, the light of faith, if he is to know reality truly and to walk the path of life. It is essential to acknowledge one’s blindness, one’s need for this light, otherwise one could remain blind forever. Bartimaeus … is presented as a model. He was not blind from birth, but he lost his sight. He represents man who has lost the light and knows it, but has not lost hope: he knows how to seize the opportunity to encounter Jesus and he entrusts himself to him for healing. … Bartimaeus represents man aware of his pain and crying out to the Lord, confident of being healed. His simple and sincere plea is exemplary, and indeed … it has found its way into the tradition of Christian prayer. … From this perspective, Bartimaeus could represent those who live in regions that were evangelized long ago, where the light of faith has grown dim and people have drifted away from God, no longer considering him relevant for their lives. These people have therefore lost a precious treasure, they have ‘fallen’ from a lofty dignity, … their lives have lost a secure and sound direction and they have become, often unconsciously, beggars for the meaning of existence. They are the many in need of a … new encounter with Jesus, the Christ, the Son of God (cf. Mk 1:1), who can open their eyes afresh and teach them the path.” Of course, he’s talking about, among other places, the United States where five of six Catholics have given up the practice of the faith every Lord’s day. He’s similarly talking about Canada, many European countries and some in Latin America, where many more are now beggars of for the meaning of existence. Pope Benedict concludes that we, “who have had the experience of being healed by God through Jesus Christ” are called to go out to the present culture of the West, which is like ancient Jericho, where so many blind men and women are crying out for meaning and mercy, perhaps without explicitly realizing it, with the light of Christ, lived in daily life, in the hope that we may guide them to the source of that light, Jesus himself, who wants to lead them from the depths of the darkness of the modern Jericho to the radiant heights of the celestial Jerusalem.
At Mass this Sunday we, like Bartimaeus, will cry out, over and again, “Kyrie, eleison! Christe, eleison, Kyrie eleison!” “Lord, Christ, Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on us!” Jesus will come and ask, “What do you want me to do for you?” In response to our petition to see, dwell and live in his light, he will seek to illumine us by his word, and then he will give us a greater gift even than he gave Bartimaeus. He will give us himself, on the inside. No matter what difficulties we’re experiencing, no matter the depths to which we may have sunk, Jesus will be passing by. Let us take courage because Jesus is calling us. Let us throw off our security blankets and attachments, spring up and come to him. And let us, like those following and listening to Jesus along the journey, go to those who are on the sides of the modern road, begging for meaning, and tell them, “Take courage. Jesus is calling” you, too.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Mk 10:46-52
As Jesus was leaving Jericho with his disciples and a sizable crowd,
Bartimaeus, a blind man, the son of Timaeus,
sat by the roadside begging.
On hearing that it was Jesus of Nazareth,
he began to cry out and say,
“Jesus, son of David, have pity on me.”
And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent.
But he kept calling out all the more,
“Son of David, have pity on me.”
Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.”
So they called the blind man, saying to him,
“Take courage; get up, Jesus is calling you.”
He threw aside his cloak, sprang up, and came to Jesus.
Jesus said to him in reply, “What do you want me to do for you?”
The blind man replied to him, “Master, I want to see.”
Jesus told him, “Go your way; your faith has saved you.”
Immediately he received his sight
and followed him on the way.
The post Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 26, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
October 25, 2024Living In A Manner Worthy Of The Call We’ve Received, 29th Friday (II), October 25, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 29th Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Unity of Christians
October 25, 2024
Eph 4:1-6, Ps 24, Lk 12:54-59

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The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we shift gears in our biennial two-week liturgical meditation on St. Paul’s deepest and most eloquent Epistle. Since a week ago yesterday, St. Paul has been sketching out in the first three chapters of the Letter the theology of Christ’s whole mission, which can be summarized as his work to “sum up,” to reconcile “all things in himself, in the heavens and on earth.” In the last three chapters of his missive, he begins to draw moral consequences for how we’re supposed to participate in that reconciliation between us and God and in God with each other. God’s ultimate plan in Christ is to form us as a family, as a true communion of saints. In today’s passage, St. Paul pushes on that accelerator.
He urges us to “live in a manner worthy of the call [we] have received,” the call to be — as he said last week — “holy and immaculate in [God’s] sight” and describes the virtues we need to respond to his call for reconciliation: first, humility, because pride always separates us from God and from others; second, meekness, so that we will have the self-discipline to control our anger and choose the good; and third, patience (makrothumia) so that we can “bear with one another through love.” These are the means by which we can “preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace.” Then St. Paul sketches what I might call the theological grounds of our unity: that in Christ we have been made “one Body.” We have become temples of the “one Spirit.” We all have the “one hope of our call” to eternal communion with God and others. We are all disciples of the “one Lord.” We each have the “one faith” or trust in God and his promises. We have the “one baptism” that has made us spiritual siblings. We all recognize our divine filiation of the “one God and Father of all,” who is over all (omnipotent), through all (provident) and in all (omnipresent). God who calls us to live in a manner worthy of our calling to be in a loving communion with him and others will give us all of the means we need — and these are the means! And these means are not merely individual; as we prayed in the Psalm, we are a “people that longs to see [God’s] face.”
In today’s Gospel, Jesus talks about the signs of the times. Just as we are able to interpret meteorological indicators and adapt our clothing and associated behavior, so Jesus wants us to perceive the signs of his kingdom and make similar adjustments to live in accordance with his calling to that kingdom, a kingdom of unity, holiness, charity and peace. He gives the analogy of making peace with adversaries before the judge sentences us to prison, communicating that as we’re walking through life toward our judgment, we should reconcile now, we should love now in deeds. This is a mystery hidden to the wise and the clever of the world, as we prayed in the Alleluia versicle but revealed to the childlike, who forgive easily. God who wants to reconcile all things in Christ wants us to reconcile whenever we see to settle something with a brother or sister who shares with us the unity of the spirit through the bond of peace and the one Body, Spirit, hope, Lord, faith, baptism and God and Father of all. The pilgrimage of life is meant to be a kairos of mercy received and shared and we need to reconcile with God and others along the way.
During the Last Supper, Jesus prayed to his Father that our relationships with each other will be as united as the bond between the Father and the Son. To live in a manner worthy of our calling means to seek to live in this type of loving communion. And to strengthen us Jesus gives us himself so that we might be united to each through, with and in Him, and he sends the Holy Spirit to make us “one Body, one Spirit in Christ.” Let us, therefore, “strive to preserve the unity” that he gives us here — and grow it!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 EPH 4:1-6
Brothers and sisters:
I, a prisoner for the Lord,
urge you to live in a manner worthy of the call you have received,
with all humility and gentleness, with patience,
bearing with one another through love,
striving to preserve the unity of the spirit
through the bond of peace;
one Body and one Spirit,
as you were also called to the one hope of your call;
one Lord, one faith, one baptism;
one God and Father of all,
who is over all and through all and in all.
Responsorial Psalm PS 24:1-2, 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.
Alleluia SEE MT 11:25
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are you, Father, Lord of heaven and earth;
you have revealed to little ones the mysteries of the Kingdom.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 12:54-59
Jesus said to the crowds,
“When you see a cloud rising in the west
you say immediately that it is going to rain–and so it does;
and when you notice that the wind is blowing from the south
you say that it is going to be hot–and so it is.
You hypocrites!
You know how to interpret the appearance of the earth and the sky;
why do you not know how to interpret the present time?
“Why do you not judge for yourselves what is right?
If you are to go with your opponent before a magistrate,
make an effort to settle the matter on the way;
otherwise your opponent will turn you over to the judge,
and the judge hand you over to the constable,
and the constable throw you into prison.
I say to you, you will not be released
until you have paid the last penny.”
The post Living In A Manner Worthy Of The Call We’ve Received, 29th Friday (II), October 25, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min

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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.