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By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

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September 08, 2024Learning from and Cooperating with Jesus Who Does All Things Well, 23rd Sunday (B), September 8, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Red Mass, Invoking the Holy Spirit at the Beginning of the Academic Year
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 8, 2024
Is 35:4-7, Ps 146, James 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.8.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
At the beginning of an academic year, it’s routine to celebrate a Mass of the Holy Spirit in which we ask God the Father together with, and in the name of, Jesus, God the Son, to send us God the Holy Spirit, to guide us throughout the entire year. How much we need the Holy Spirit’s gifts of wisdom, knowledge, understanding and prudence in our academic work, so that we do not merely become smarter but enlightened by the light of God. How much we need the gift of courage in so many personal and communal aspects of campus life. How much we need the gifts of reverence and fear of the Lord in an age in which so many marginalize God and there are so many offenses against those made in his image and likeness in speech, social media and behavior. Since we are not normally able to celebrate Pentecost together because it generally falls after the end of the academic year, we start the academic year by asking the Holy Spirit to come down upon us like he did upon Mary and the first Christians in the Upper Room. We ask him to help teach us how to pray, since we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Holy Spirit intercedes for us. We ask him to help us to understand Sacred Scripture better, since he inspired each of its Sacred Authors and also helps us to interpret it aright through the Church. We ask him to help us to recognize the particular gifts, charisms and manifestations of the Spirit he’s given each of us for the common good and move us to use them as he intends. We ask him to help us to learn how to live according to the Spirit, which is a summary of the entire Christian moral life, rather than according to the flesh. We ask him to help us to experience the fruits of the Spirit — love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, and self-mastery — and live them in such a radiant way that others might want to come to know more deeply the Source of each of them. And we ask him to give us a tongue of fire so that, like the first Christians, we may proclaim the Gospel on campus with ardent love for God and others. As we begin this new year, we ask for all of these gifts as well as for the help we need to live by them.
Today the Holy Spirit, through all his gifts, wants to help us to enter into the passages of Sacred Scripture with which we have been blessed today and to apply them to our life on campus and beyond. To me there are three essential lessons.
The first is about the awe and reverence we should have for Jesus. In the Gospel, we get a glimpse of the amazement of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. Many of the Jews by this point were beginning to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah from today’s first reading of how their God would come to save them, opening the eyes of the blind, clearing the ears of the deaf, making cripples leap like deer and making mute people sing. They were beginning to hope that he was the anointed of the Lord through whom, as we prayed in the Psalm, God would secure justice for the oppressed, give food to the hungry, set captives free, give sight to the blind, raise up those who were bowed down, love the just, protect strangers, sustain orphans and windows, and thwart the way of the wicked.
Even non-Jews in the pagan terrorities, as we see in today’s Gospel, were buzzing with what Jesus could do and who he might be. That’s why when Jesus and the apostles journeyed into the terrority of the Decapolis, or ten cities, on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, several people brought their deaf and mute friend to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They had high hopes, and they were not to be let down. Jesus took the man away from the crowds to prevent him from being objectified by everyone as simply a deaf-mute or, soon, as a miracle recipient, but more importantly to establish a personal relationship with him, so that the first voice he would hear would be Jesus’ own as he spoke to him, and so that the man would not to be disproportionately influenced by the pagan crowd. Once apart, the Lord Jesus put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Ephphatha!,” “Be opened!” The man’s capacities to hear and speak were healed. Once he started speaking plainly, amazement seized everyone. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
It’s important to pause on that phrase. “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be our Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching and teaching, in his miracles, especially in his saving passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really knows what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of the saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues, in short, to do infinite good and do it amazingly well.
There would have been many people at Jesus’ time, however, who would have disagreed that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer destroying the sabbath and undermining the law of Moses. They would eventually claim that he would be a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Similarly, many of the zealots who had political ideas of who the Messiah would be and who were therefore were looking for someone to evict the Romans likewise thought Jesus was a total loser. Little could they or other groups of critics fathom what Jesus’ followers — a small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies — would do in his name throughout the globe.
Today, too, many in our culture challenge whether the Lord in fact does everything well. They criticize Jesus’ direct teachings and those of the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it,” and a modern irrelevancy. Some, like certain of the so-called new atheists, even accuse Jesus and his Church as being a force for evil in human history. One Columbia professor last year in a Contemporary Civilizations class actually compared Jesus to the genocidal madmen Hitler and Lenin and didn’t relent when challenged. Those who hold such ideas, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, some of these false ideas and their presuppositions have been invading the minds of believers, too. This is a much greater concern. It leads us to ponder: If Jesus were to ask us directly whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? I think all of us disciples would of course want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But do we actually believe that? With the light of the Holy Spirit, we can turn to a handful of concrete issues to see whether we, like the residents of the Decapolis, truly praise him for doing all things well or only some things well. How would we respond to these questions if Jesus were to ask us directly?
“Do you believe that I did all things well in creating you, with your strengths and weaknesses, or do you think I should have made you differently, more like someone else? Do you believe that I did all things well in reiterating for you the Ten Commandments, or do you think I should have made some of them optional? Do you believe that I did well in establishing the Sacrament of my Body and Blood as the source of our personal loving communion, even though, as you saw two weeks ago, so many of my first followers walked away scandalized? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing the Sacrament of Confession on Easter Sunday night even though so many don’t come to me in the way I established to forgive your sins? Do you believe that I did well in setting a high standard for discipleship, calling you to imitate me in living the beatitudes, loving others as I have loved you, being merciful to others just as I have been merciful to you seventy-times seven times? Do you believe I was right in saying you couldn’t serve both God and material possessions and calling you to deny yourself, pick up your cross every day of your life and follow me along the path of sacrificial love to Calvary? Do I believe that I was right to establish the standard that whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters, you do to me? Do you believe that I did well in making marriage the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, in calling you back to God’s plan for marriage in the beginning? Do you believe that I knew what I was doing when I ordained only men to be my apostles and priests? Finally, do you believe that I did all things well in establishing a heaven and a hell, or do you think I would have been more loving if everyone were to get to heaven no matter what he or she does in life?
Challenging questions like these are important ones to ask, because sometimes we can begin to allow the devil to sow seeds of doubt as to whether Jesus knows what he’s doing and does everything out of love in an age in which many want to call him antiquated, a misogynist, bigot, hater, or even a psychopath. To believe in Christ, however, to have faith, means to trust in Jesus’ words and actions, to believe in what he says and what he did. This isn’t always easy to do, but Jesus never promised that it would be. We can recall from the Gospel a couple of weeks ago how hard it was for the Twelve to believe in Jesus’ words that they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, a full year before Jesus made sense of these words by taking bread and wine at the Last Supper, changing them into his body and blood and giving them to his apostles to eat. When Jesus asked if they wanted to abandon him as a result this teaching, St. Peter, with real faith, said, not that he understood everything, but “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” In other words, Peter was declaring, “Jesus, you have done everything well until now and we trust that in this, too, you’re doing perfectly and precisely what we need.” Jesus calls us to trust in him in the same way.
So that’s the first lesson the Holy Spirit, I think, wants to help us to grasp. That Jesus has done everything well, that his teachings and actions are manifestations of his divine wisdom and love, and that we are so lucky to be his disciple, even if some will oppose us out of opposition to him.
The second lesson is about how Jesus wants to heal and help us to continue his good works in the world. Even though none of us will do everything well, like Jesus, the Holy Spirit wants to help us to do a lot of good. We are able to learn this lesson from the miracle. It’s good to ask why, for example, St. Mark would have included this scene in his Gospel. His fellow evangelist, St. John, said that if he were to try to describe all that Jesus had done, all the libraries in the world wouldn’t be big enough to contain the stories (Jn 21:25). Most of Jesus’ miracles were not described at all or described only in summary, such as what was sung in the Alleluia verse today, “Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom and cured every disease among the people” (Mt 4:23) or what St. Luke said on Wednesday at daily Mass: “All who had people sick with various diseases brought them to [Jesus]. He laid his hands on each of them and cured them” (Lk 4:40). So why did St. Mark choose to include this healing of this deaf-mute in the Decapolis over so many other miracles that he opted not to include? The reason, I think, is because he wanted us to grasp several lessons beyond the healing of one pagan man. The scene indicates in some way the mission of the Church. As Jesus did, the Church still goes into the “pagan territories.” At Jesus’ time, the ten cities were Gadara, Geresa, Scythopolis, Hippos, Raphana, Dion, Pella, Canatha, Damascus and what’s now Amman. But today they could easily be New York, Mexico City, Buenos Aires, Rio, Paris, London, Madrid, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi or many others we could name. We could even talk about the ten campuses, like the eight Ivies, MIT and Stamford. The fact is that there are so many places teeming with people who have never heard or are deaf to the word of God and therefore have speech impediments such that they’re hindered from speaking to God or about him. They’ve often been made spiritually deaf by the noise of their secular environments. And as a child’s speech can be helped or hurt by how and how often parents and others speak to the child, so the speech of many today is spiritually incapacitated because they’re never been formed in the grammar and vocabulary of God’s word. Nevertheless, many have a sense that they’re missing something. They want to be healed. They need to go on a journey, to be led apart from the crowds and the peer pressure, where they can begin to listen to God’s voice in prayer and in Sacred Scripture and there learn how to converse with him and speak his words to others.
This experience has already happened in your life and mine. On the day of our baptism, Jesus, through a bishop, priest or deacon, worked a miracle similar to what he did in the Gospel. He didn’t use spit, but through his sacred minister, he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the minister who baptized us said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the praise and glory of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to and about him. He worked this miracle so that we might listen to him, treasure his word, and be so transformed by it that through us he might transform the world. The fundamental purpose of our ears is to hear God’s word, and the primary purpose of our capacity to speak is to speak to God. We can use them for many other good purposes — including our studies, our work, our friendships — but we should never forget their first purpose. God has opened both our ears and our lips at the beginning of our Christian life, but we have to use these gifts. At the beginning of this academic year, the Holy Spirit wants to help us to resolve to have a relationship with Jesus like the healed deaf mute, to yearn to hear Jesus’ voice in Sacred Scripture and personal prayer, and to speak to him and, with tongues of fire, to speak about him. At the end of today’s Gospel, Jesus instructed the healed man and the crowds not to tell anyone of the miracle, lest everyone come to treat Jesus mainly as a free miracle worker and no longer listen to his word, which was calling them to repent and believe. Regardless, St. Mark tells us, “The more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it.” They couldn’t restrain themselves for speaking of what they had witnessed and heard. After his Resurrection, as he does at the end of every Mass, Jesus does not tell us not to tell anyone, but, rather, to go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to do that on campus, using the gift of speech we have to be able to share, with one person or friend at a time, the marvels the Lord continues to do, including and especially by coming to speak to us every Sunday, in fact every day, and to feed us with himself.
Let’s turn briefly to the third lesson the Holy Spirit wants us to grasp based on the readings. It’s how we’re supposed to hear the word of God through the ears God has opened. Last Sunday, you recall, St. James called us to be not idle listeners, but doers of the word of God. In today’s reading, he gives us a specific application of how to put the word of God into practice, which can be super instructive to the life of students. It’s about recognizing the worth of every person, attested to by the Word of God, and treating every person not according to human criteria but divine. St. James calls out in today’s second reading the way some of the first Christians were playing favorites. People were treating rich and poor differently, giving finely dressed men with gold jewelry front row seats while telling those who were poor and shabbily dressed to sit on the floor or stand in the corner. St. James is brutal in saying that such distinctions are done by “judges with evil designs.” How can we really listen to God’s word about the dignity of every person whom he has pronounced “very good,” how we live Jesus’ command, “Love one another as I have loved you,” how can we put into practice his parables of the Good Samaritan and the Rich Man and Lazarus, as well his reminder, “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me,” and possibly play favorites among people? And yet that’s what St. James was encountering, and sometimes what still happens in churches. In many places, we treat benefactors differently than the homeless people coming to Church on Sunday, when we’re supposed to treat both the way we would seek to treat Christ. We’re not supposed to play favorites between rich and poor, fit and fat, tall and short, beautiful and unattractive, coiffed and bald, celebrity or unknown. This can be particularly acute on campus, as certain students get VIP treatment from their peers and sometimes even from the university and others struggle to get the time of day. Since it’s so easy and natural to give attention to the rich, famous and good-looking, we need as Christians to prioritize caring for those who normally fall to the bottom of human favoritism. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to hear and keep in mind the divine wisdom proclaimed to us at the end of today’s second reading, that God has chosen “those who are poor in the world to be rich and faith and heirs of the kingdom that he promised to those who love him.” In what matters, often the poor — whether economically or the poor in spirit — can be affluent in the only wealth that can pass through the eye of the needle. As Catholics, we are concerned not just about the star athletes, or the top students, or those popular enough to be elected and selected to various elite positions and institutions on campus. The Holy Spirit wants to help us to care for each one, and to have a special concern for those whom our society often overlooks or even looks down upon, both on campus and around it. Jesus sends us out as his mystical body for 100 out of 100 people, but, considering the way sin corrupts human relationships and leads us to judge and instrumentalize others “for evil designs,” he wants to help us to prioritize the deaf mutes, those perhaps in shabby clothes, or otherwise on the peripheries, and to help them to hear and see through us the love God has for them so that they might come to know him and to be able to speak of him to others.
Jesus has done all things well, and he wants to continue doing good things well through us. His greatest ongoing work is what we do at the altar in his memory. It’s here that he speaks to our opened ears his word and then puts himself into our open mouths so that we might become one with him and go out together with him into the modern Decapolis. It’s here that the Holy Spirit comes to change bread and wine into Jesus and then to change men and women into one body, one Spirit in Christ. As we prepare to encounter Jesus now at Mass, as he takes us apart from the crowd to be with him here in the most intimate way in human life, we ask the Holy Spirit to help us to imitate those in the Decapolis in not being able to restrain ourselves from speaking about all the good he does for us poor, former deaf mutes, as he himself with his Church has welcomed us here however we’re dressed to his assembly and given us each a seat from which he seeks to make us rich in faith, heirs of the kingdom and true laborers in his vineyard here in Morningside. Jesus continues to do all things well and he has willed that each of us be here at Columbia now. The Holy Spirit is being sent to strengthen us in our mission. Let’s respond with all we’ve got.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Is 35:4-7a
Thus says the LORD:
Say to those whose hearts are frightened:
Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication;
with divine recompense
he comes to save you.
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,
the ears of the deaf be cleared;
then will the lame leap like a stag,
then the tongue of the mute will sing.
Streams will burst forth in the desert,
and rivers in the steppe.
The burning sands will become pools,
and the thirsty ground, springs of water.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10
R. (1b) Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
The God of Jacob keeps faith forever,
secures justice for the oppressed,
gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets captives free.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
The LORD gives sight to the blind;
the LORD raises up those who were bowed down.
The LORD loves the just;
the LORD protects strangers.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
The fatherless and the widow the LORD sustains,
but the way of the wicked he thwarts.
The LORD shall reign forever;
your God, O Zion, through all generations.
Alleluia.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2
Jas 2:1-5
My brothers and sisters, show no partiality
as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
For if a man with gold rings and fine clothes
comes into your assembly,
and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in,
and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes
and say, “Sit here, please, ”
while you say to the poor one, “Stand there, ” or “Sit at my feet, ”
have you not made distinctions among yourselves
and become judges with evil designs?
Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?
Alleluia
Cf. Mt 4:23
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the kingdom
and cured every disease among the people.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 7:31-37
Again Jesus left the district of Tyre
and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee,
into the district of the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment
and begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him off by himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” —
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone.
But the more he ordered them not to,
the more they proclaimed it.
They were exceedingly astonished and they said,
“He has done all things well.
He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
The post Learning from and Cooperating with Jesus Who Does All Things Well, 23rd Sunday (B), September 8, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
31 min
September 08, 2024Telling Of Him Who Does All Things Well, 23rd Sunday (B), September 8, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 8, 2024
Is 35:4-7, Ps 146, James 2:1-5, Mk 7:31-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.8.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we get a glimpse of the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. Many of the Jews by this point were beginning to believe that Jesus was the Messiah, the one who would fulfill the prophecy of Isaiah from today’s first reading of how God would come to save them, opening the eyes of the blind, clearing the ears of the deaf, making cripples leap like deer and making mute people sing. They were wondering whether he was the anointed of the Lord whom they praised in today’s Psalm as one who for God would secure justice for the oppressed, give food to the hungry, set captives free, give sight to the blind, raise up those who were bowed down, love the just, protect strangers, sustain orphans and windows, and thwart the way of the wicked.
Even in pagan terrorities, as we see in today’s Gospel, they were buzzing with what he could do and who he might be. That’s why when Jesus and the apostles journeyed into the pagan terrority of the Decapolis, or ten cities, on the eastern side of the Sea of Galilee, several people brought their deaf and mute friend to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They had high hopes and they were not to be let down. Jesus took the man away from the crowds to prevent him from being objectified by everyone as simply a deaf-mute or, soon, as someone healed, but more importantly to establish a personal relationship with him, so that the first voice he would hear would be Jesus’ own as he spoke to him, and so that the man would not to be disproportionately influenced by the pagan crowd. Once apart, the Lord Jesus put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Ephphatha!,” “Be opened!,” and the man’s capacity to hear and speak were healed. Once he started speaking plainly, amazement seized everyone. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
I would like to pause on this phrase. “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues to do infinite good and do it amazingly well.
There would be many people at Jesus’ time, however, who would disagree that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer destroying the sabbath and undermining the law of Moses. They would eventually claim that he would be a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Similarly, many of the zealots who were looking to evict the Romans or who had political ideas of who the Messiah would be likewise thought he was a failure. Little could any of these groups of critics fathom what his followers — a small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies — would do in his name throughout the globe.
Today, too, many in our culture challenge whether the Lord in fact does everything well. They criticize his teachings and the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it,” and a modern irrelevancy. They, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, more of these false ideas have been invading the minds of believers, too, and this is a much greater concern. If Jesus were to ask us whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? I think all of us disciples would want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But it’s helpful to turn to concrete issues to see whether we, like the residents of the Decapolis, truly praise him for doing some things well or all things well. How would we respond to these questions if Jesus were to ask us directly?
“Do you believe that I did all things well in reiterating for you the Ten Commandments, or do you think I should have made some of them optional? Do you believe that I did well in establishing the Sacrament of my Body and Blood as the source of our personal loving communion and stating that unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you, even though so many of my followers walked away scandalized? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing the Sacrament of Confession on Easter Sunday night and do you come to me in the way I established so that I may forgive your sins? Do you believe that I did well in setting a high standard for discipleship, calling you to imitate me in living the beatitudes, love others as I have loved you, to be merciful to others just as I have been merciful to you seventy-times seven times and more; to humble yourself to wash others’ feet; to deny yourself, pick up your cross every day and follow me along the path to Calvary? Do you believe that I knew what I was doing when I ordained only men to be my apostles and priests? Do you believe that I did well in making marriage the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, in calling you back to God’s plan for marriage in the beginning? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing a heaven and a hell, or do you think I would have been more loving if everyone were to get to heaven no matter what he or she does in life? Finally, do you think I did well in calling you to become a saint, or a priest or a religious, or did well in calling that priest, or that religious, whom you don’t care for?
Questions like these are important ones for us to ask, because sometimes we can begin to allow the devil to sow seeds of doubt as to whether Jesus knows what he’s doing. To believe in Christ means to trust his words and actions, to believe in what he said and what he did. This isn’t always easy to do and Jesus never promised that it would be. We can recall from the Gospel a couple of weeks ago how hard it was for the Twelve to believe in Jesus’ words that they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, a full year before Jesus made sense of these words by taking bread and wine at the Last Supper, changing them into his body and blood and giving them to his apostles to eat. When Jesus asked if they wanted to abandon him as a result this teaching, St. Peter, with real faith, said, not that he understood everything, but “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” In other words, Peter was declaring, “Jesus, you have done everything well until now and we trust that in this, too, you’re doing perfectly and precisely what we need.” Jesus calls us to trust in him in the same way.
Now let’s return to the miracle, which has many lessons for us. Sometimes it’s good to ask why, for example, St. Mark would have included this scene in his Gospel. His fellow evangelist, St. John, said that if he were to try to describe all that Jesus had done, all the libraries in the world wouldn’t be big enough to contain the stories. Most of Jesus’ miracles were not described at all or described in summary, such as St. Luke did on Wednesday at daily Mass: “all who had people sick with various diseases brought them to [Jesus]. He laid his hands on each of them and cured them” (Lk 4:40), or what was the Alleluia verse today, “Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the Kingdom and cured every disease among the people” (Mt 4:23). So why did St. Mark choose to include this healing of this deaf-mute in the Decapolis over so many that he chose not to include? Because, I think, there were lessons for every believer beyond the healing of one pagan man. The scene indicates in some way the mission of the Church. As Jesus did, the Church still goes into the “pagan territories.” At Jesus’ time, the ten cities were Gadara, Geresa, Scythopolis, Hippos, Raphana, Dion, Pella, Canatha, Damascus and what’s now Amman. But today they could easily be New York, Boston, Paris, Amsterdam, London, Madrid, Berlin, Beijing, Tokyo, New Delhi of many others we could name. There are so many who have never heard the word of God and therefore can’t speak to God or about God. They’ve been made spiritually deaf and incapable of speaking by the noise of their secular environments. Many nevertheless seek God but don’t know where to turn. They need to go on a journey, to be led apart from the crowds, where they can begin to listen to God’s voice in prayer and in Sacred Scripture and there learn how to converse with him and speak his words to others.
This experience has already happened in your life and mine. On the day of our baptism, Jesus, through a bishop, priest or deacon, worked a miracle similar to what he did in the Gospel. He didn’t use spit, but through his sacred minister, he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the minister said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the praise and glory of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. He worked this miracle so that we might listen to him, treasure his word, and be so transformed by it that we would transform the world. We have ears and mouths opened so that we might hear God and then speak to him and speak of him. But we cannot really speak to God unless we hear him speak to us. And we won’t really be able to speak effectively of him unless we know his word.
One of the proofs as to whether we are really hearing God’s word with faith is whether we’re acting on it. In Hebrew, the word to hear, shema, is also the word to obey. In Latin the word to obey, “ob-audire” is an intensification of the word to hear, “audire.” When we really know it’s God speaking to us, we listen with faith, attentiveness and a desire, as St. James spoke about last Sunday, to be a doer of the word. Today St. James gives us an application of that type of listening. When we really listen to God’s word about the dignity of every person whom he has pronounced very good, when we try to act on Jesus’ telling us, “Love one another as I have loved you,” his parables of the Good Samaritan and the Rich Man and Lazarus, and his reminder, “Whatever you do to the least of my brethren you do to me,” how could we possibly play favorites among people? And yet that’s what St. James was encountering in the communities of the first Christians. People were treating rich and poor differently, giving the finely dressed man with gold jewelry front row seats while telling those who were poor and shabbily dressed to sit on the floor or stand in the corner. St. James is brutal in saying that such distinctions are done by “judges with evil designs.” Yet we often still do this, treating the benefactor differently than the homeless person coming to Church on Sunday. We’re not supposed to treat the donor poorly, but to treat both the way we would seek to treat Christ. We’re not to play favorites between rich and poor, fit and fat, tall and short, beautiful and unattractive, coiffed and bald, celebrity or unknown. Since it’s so easy and natural to give attention to the rich, famous and good-looking, we need to prioritize caring for those who normally fall to the bottom of human favoritism. And that becomes easier when we remember what St. James says at the end of today’s passage, something that you, as Missionaries of Charity, are well aware of and most of the Church still needs to keep more firmly in mind: that God has chosen “those who are poor in the world to be rich and faith and heirs of the kingdom that he promised to those who love him.” In what matters, often the poor — economically or spiritually — can be affluent in the only wealth that can pass through the eye of the needle.
Today, September 8, the Church normally celebrates the Nativity of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Our Lady is one whose ears were always open to the word of God, such that, in medieval art, the Holy Spirit at the Annunciation was able to enter unobstructed into her through her ears. She was able, therefore, easily to speak with the words of God, as she shows us in her Magnificat, in which she wove together like a tapestry various verses from the Psalms and the sayings of the holy heroines of the Old Testament. She sought to live her whole live in accordance with God’s word. And hence she’s an example to us of how we are called to live out our baptism and the miracle that opened our ears and mouth so that we might live, too, in accordance with the Word of God. Our Lady plays no favorites. She loves and is attentive to every one of her children, and, as a mom, has a special love for those in greater need of her care. She’s praying for all of us now.
At the very end of the Gospel, Jesus instructed the healed man and the crowds not to tell anyone of the miracle, lest everyone treat Jesus fundamentally as a free miracle worker and no longer listen to his word, which was calling them to repent and believe. But, St. Mark tells us, “The more he ordered them not to, the more they proclaimed it.” At Mass today, Jesus will not tell us not to tell anyone, but, rather, to go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. May we act on those words and use the gift of speech he’s given us to share, one person at a time, the wonders that the Lord continues to do.
Jesus has done all things well, and he wants to continue doing things well through us. And his greatest ongoing work is what we do at the altar in his memory. As we prepare to encounter him at Mass, may we imitate those in the Decapolis in not being able to restrain ourselves from speaking about all the good he does for poor, former deaf mutes, like us, who thankfully have entered this assembly and whom Jesus and his Church have welcomed and given us each a seat from which he seeks to make us rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Is 35:4-7a
Thus says the LORD:
Say to those whose hearts are frightened:
Be strong, fear not!
Here is your God,
he comes with vindication;
with divine recompense
he comes to save you.
Then will the eyes of the blind be opened,
the ears of the deaf be cleared;
then will the lame leap like a stag,
then the tongue of the mute will sing.
Streams will burst forth in the desert,
and rivers in the steppe.
The burning sands will become pools,
and the thirsty ground, springs of water.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 146:6-7, 8-9, 9-10
R. (1b) Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
The God of Jacob keeps faith forever,
secures justice for the oppressed,
gives food to the hungry.
The LORD sets captives free.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
The LORD gives sight to the blind;
the LORD raises up those who were bowed down.
The LORD loves the just;
the LORD protects strangers.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
The fatherless and the widow the LORD sustains,
but the way of the wicked he thwarts.
The LORD shall reign forever;
your God, O Zion, through all generations.
Alleluia.
R. Praise the Lord, my soul!
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2
Jas 2:1-5
My brothers and sisters, show no partiality
as you adhere to the faith in our glorious Lord Jesus Christ.
For if a man with gold rings and fine clothes
comes into your assembly,
and a poor person in shabby clothes also comes in,
and you pay attention to the one wearing the fine clothes
and say, “Sit here, please, ”
while you say to the poor one, “Stand there, ” or “Sit at my feet, ”
have you not made distinctions among yourselves
and become judges with evil designs?
Listen, my beloved brothers and sisters.
Did not God choose those who are poor in the world
to be rich in faith and heirs of the kingdom
that he promised to those who love him?
Alleluia
Cf. Mt 4:23
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the kingdom
and cured every disease among the people.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 7:31-37
Again Jesus left the district of Tyre
and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee,
into the district of the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment
and begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him off by himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” —
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone.
But the more he ordered them not to,
the more they proclaimed it.
They were exceedingly astonished and they said,
“He has done all things well.
He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
The post Telling Of Him Who Does All Things Well, 23rd Sunday (B), September 8, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
September 07, 2024Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 7, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
September 7, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.7.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when we will get a glimpse of the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. On the force of this reputation, several true friends brought a man who was deaf and mute to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They were not to be let down. The Lord put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Be opened!,” and the man’s capacity to hear and speak were healed. Amazement seized them all. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
“He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues to do so much good and do it amazingly well.
There would be many people at Jesus’ time who would disagree that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer and would turn out to be a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Many of the zealots who were looking to evict the Romans or who had political ideas of who the Messiah would be likewise thought he was a failure. Little could any of these groups fathom what the small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies would do in Jesus name throughout the globe. Today, too, many in our culture challenge whether the Lord in fact does everything well. They criticize his teachings and the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it,” and a modern irrelevancy. They, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, more of these false ideas have been invading the minds of believers, too, and this is a much greater concern.
If Jesus were to ask us whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? In general, I think all of us disciples would want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing and does everything well; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But it’s when we turn to specific issues that we see whether we, like the residents of the Decapolis, truly praise him for doing some things well or all things well. We can consider a handful of test questions Jesus might ask us and our contemporaries to determine if we really trust him as God to do everything perfectly for us and our salvation. “Do you believe that I did all things well in reiterating for you the Ten Commandments, or do you think I should have made some of them optional? Do you believe that I did well in establishing the sacrament of my body and blood as the source of our personal loving communion and stating that unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing the Sacrament of Confession on Easter Sunday night and do you come to me in the way I established so that I may forgive your sins? Do you believe that I did well in setting a high standard for discipleship, in calling you to imitate me in living the beatitudes, love others as I have loved you, to be merciful to others just as I have been merciful to you seventy-times seven times and more; to humble yourself to wash others’ feet; to deny yourself, pick up your cross every day and follow me along the path to Calvary? Do you believe that I knew what I was doing when I ordained only men to be my apostles and priests? Do you believe that I did well in making marriage the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, in calling you back to God’s plan for marriage in the beginning? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing a heaven and a hell, or do you think I would have been more loving if everyone were to get to heaven no matter what he or she does in life?
Questions like these are important ones for us to ask, because sometimes we can begin to allow the devil to sow seeds of doubt as to whether Jesus knows what he’s doing. To believe in Christ means to trust his words and actions, to believe in what he said and what he did. This isn’t always easy to do and Jesus never promised that it would be. We can recall from the Gospel a couple of weeks ago how hard it was for the Twelve to believe in Jesus’ words that they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, a full year before Jesus made sense of these words by taking bread and wine at the Last Supper, changing them into his body and blood and giving them to his apostles to eat. When Jesus asked if they wanted to abandon him as a result this teaching, St. Peter, with real faith, said, not that he understood everything, but “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” In other words, Peter said, “Jesus, you have done everything well until now and we trust that in this, too, you’re doing perfectly and precisely what we need.” Jesus calls us to trust in him in the same way.
One area in which we need to trust Jesus is in the responsibility he has given us for the spread of the Gospel. As he ascended into heaven, he gave us the great commission to go and proclaim the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Trinity, teaching them to carry out everything he has taught us, and knowing that he’s with us always until the end of time. He trusted us enough that he put the salvation of others in our hands. Yet, 20 centuries later, only 2.5 of 8 people on the planet are Christian, and only half of those Catholic. So many people don’t yet even know Christ and his saving power. St. Therese of the Child Jesus, when once asked why so many centuries after Christ there were still so many who hadn’t heard of him, replied with great simplicity, that it was because of the laziness of Christians. While Jesus did all things well, many of us have not yet done well in responding to Jesus’ summons and cooperating with the Holy Spirit in spreading the faith. Jesus calls us to follow him in striving to do our mission well. That’s something now I’ve been tasked by the Church to help catalyze. On Thursday, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization appointed me the National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the U.S., which means, as of January, I’ll have the responsibility of strengthening Catholics in our country in our missionary identity, in our prayers for those in the missions and in our concrete support. Just as Jesus went into the Decapolis to spread the faith among non-Jews, so we’re called to bring Jesus — his teachings and his very presence — to the ends of the earth, so that they, too, may find in him their Good Shepherd, their Savior, their Lord, who through his passion, death and resurrection, did all things well to make possible for them eternal life and love. So I’d like humbly to ask your prayers as I take up this new assignment for the Church as well as to ask you to join me in praying that all Catholics in the U.S. will be renewed in apostolic zeal so that we may assist the One who does all things well reach those with need him just as much as we do.
On the day of our baptism, Jesus, through a bishop, priest or deacon, worked in your life and mine a miracle similar to what he did in the Gospel. He didn’t use spit, but through his sacred minister, he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the minister said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the praise and glory of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. He worked this miracle so that we might listen to him, treasure his word, and be transformed by it, so that through that transformation we might transform the world. That’s the way the Church’s mission works in every age. We have ears and mouths opened so that we might hear God and then speak to him and speak of him.
As we prepare for Sunday Mass, we ask the Lord to renew in us the graces of our baptism, to hear, obey and treasure the saving word he proclaims to us in the consequential conversation of the Gospel, and to pass it on with great courage and holy pride as a lifeline to the whole world. Jesus has done all things well, and he wants to continue doing things well through us. And his greatest ongoing work is what we do at the altar in his memory. As we prepare to encounter him at Mass, may we imitate those in the Decapolis in not being able to restrain ourselves from speaking about all the good he does so beautifully well! God bless you!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Mk 7:31-37
Again Jesus left the district of Tyre
and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee,
into the district of the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment
and begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him off by himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!”— that is, “Be opened!” —
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone.
But the more he ordered them not to,
the more they proclaimed it.
They were exceedingly astonished and they said,
“He has done all things well.
He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
The post Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 7, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
September 06, 2024Becoming Servants of Christ, Stewards of God’s Mysteries and Friends of the Bridal Chamber, 22nd Friday (II), September 6, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
September 6, 2024
1 Cor 4:1-5, Ps 37, Lk 5:33-39

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.6.24_Homily_1.mp3

he following points were attempted in the homily:
At the beginning of a new academic year, Jesus wants to help us grow in many ways, in wisdom, in virtue, in friendship with him. But we need to focus on how receptive we are to his action and today, with the help of the readings, we have a chance to do that. Four times a year at daily Mass — on the 2nd Monday of Ordinary Time, on the Friday after Ash Wednesday, on the 13th Saturday, and on the 22nd Friday — the Church has us focus on Jesus’ words about feasting and fasting and the parables of the patch and of the wineskins, in which Jesus teaches us about how he wishes us to relate to him. He has come to give us new life but the new life is not a minor revision to our “operating system,” to eliminate some “bugs” in the software; rather it’s a thorough revamp. He wants new skins, not old, to receive the newness he constantly gives. He doesn’t want to patch our old jeans; he wants to clothe us in himself. And he sets up those parables by a discussion on fasting. At the time of Jesus there were three purposes for fasting: reparation for one’s sins and those of others; supplication, or prayer in the body, for some petition; and the desire for authentic self-mastery through the capacity to say “no” to one’s appetite for food and “yes” to some other purpose, developing a moral muscle that can help to say no to other temptations in order faithfully to say yes to God. These purposes flowing from Old Testament times were certainly not bad or immoral. But Jesus today gives thoroughly new purpose: he says the purpose of fasting is to help us hunger for him in his absence and, when his presence is restored, ultimately to learn how to hunger for what he hungers. When he is “ripped away” — the same verb that is used for his arrest in Gethsemane — it is then that he says we will fast. We need to do more than just copy how previous generations fasted. We need more than a minor correction or “patch.” We need a new hunger. We need a new heart.
Today the readings specify three “new” ways we need to relate to Christ.
First, as “friends of the bridal chamber,” which is what is poorly translated in the Gospel as “wedding guests.” Because Jesus the Bridegroom is with us, pouring himself into our life, we must like groomsmen and bridesmaids be full of joy. That’s the first type of wine he wants to pour into us anew. A Christian must be defined by a sense of joy because of the presence of the Bridegroom. To be a Christian is, to some degree, always to be living out the joy we see on wedding days, as groomsmen and bridesmaids, or better, as Bride, as Christ the Bridegroom unites himself to us. Sometimes as Christians we do better at fasting than we do at feasting in the Lord’s presence. We behave as if the Lord is absent more than we live in his presence, pondering in depth what his presence means and making abiding in his presence ever more concrete. Today is an opportunity to receive new wineskins from Christ so that we might live out that spousal mystery of love and the joy to which it leads.
Second, St. Paul in his First Letter to the Corinthians says we’re called to be “servants of Christ.” The word servant he uses is not diakonos or doulos, the common Greek words for “servant” and “slave” respectively. It’s huperetes, which means the slave who mans the rudder in a big ship, whose doesn’t establish the direction of the boat — which the captain does — but helps steer the boat in that direction. That’s what we are called to do for Christ, trying to point our lives and those of others in the direction Jesus sets, not steering off course. This is true in this life and toward the eternal port. Jesus wishes to renew us in that direction at the beginning of the school year so that we can steer others along his narrow way.
Third, St. Paul says that we’re likewise called to be “stewards of the mysteries of God.” The word for steward in Greek is economos, which means the one who implements the law of the house, who administers. We’re entrusted with the mysteries of God, which first means all God’s graces, the new wine he seeks to pour into our fresh wineskins. It also means the sacraments, the effect of which he wants to see grow as we invest these gifts like a good business manager would money. But it also means the world and others, who are mysteries of God’s loving care. We seek to be good and faithful servants of all those gifts. And Jesus wants to pour into our new wineskins the help we need to be so.
And Jesus the Bridegroom does all of this here at Mass, where he welcomes us not merely as “sons of the wedding chamber,” but actually as bride and friend of the bridegroom, desiring to give us new wineskins to receive him who will help us to become truly joyful rudder men, faithfully caring for the gift of every one and thing God in his goodness has bestowed.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 1 COR 4:1-5
Brothers and sisters:
Thus should one regard us: as servants of Christ
and stewards of the mysteries of God.
Now it is of course required of stewards
that they be found trustworthy.
It does not concern me in the least
that I be judged by you or any human tribunal;
I do not even pass judgment on myself;
I am not conscious of anything against me,
but I do not thereby stand acquitted;
the one who judges me is the Lord.
Therefore, do not make any judgment before the appointed time,
until the Lord comes,
for he will bring to light what is hidden in darkness
and will manifest the motives of our hearts,
and then everyone will receive praise from God.
Responsorial Psalm PS 37:3-4, 5-6, 27-28, 39-40
R. (39a) The salvation of the just comes from the Lord.
Trust in the LORD and do good,
that you may dwell in the land and be fed in security.
Take delight in the LORD,
and he will grant you your heart’s requests.
R. The salvation of the just comes from the Lord.
Commit to the LORD your way;
trust in him, and he will act.
He will make justice dawn for you like the light;
bright as the noonday shall be your vindication.
R. The salvation of the just comes from the Lord.
Turn from evil and do good,
that you may abide forever;
For the LORD loves what is right,
and forsakes not his faithful ones.
Criminals are destroyed
and the posterity of the wicked is cut off.
R. The salvation of the just comes from the Lord.
The salvation of the just is from the LORD;
he is their refuge in time of distress.
And the LORD helps them and delivers them;
he delivers them from the wicked and saves them,
because they take refuge in him.
R. The salvation of the just comes from the Lord.
Alleluia JN 8:12
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I am the light of the world, says the Lord;
whoever follows me will have the light of life.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 5:33-39
The scribes and Pharisees said to Jesus,
“The disciples of John the Baptist fast often and offer prayers,
and the disciples of the Pharisees do the same;
but yours eat and drink.”
Jesus answered them, “Can you make the wedding guests fast
while the bridegroom is with them?
But the days will come, and when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
then they will fast in those days.”
And he also told them a parable.
“No one tears a piece from a new cloak to patch an old one.
Otherwise, he will tear the new
and the piece from it will not match the old cloak.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the new wine will burst the skins,
and it will be spilled, and the skins will be ruined.
Rather, new wine must be poured into fresh wineskins.
And no one who has been drinking old wine desires new,
for he says, ‘The old is good.’”
The post Becoming Servants of Christ, Stewards of God’s Mysteries and Friends of the Bridal Chamber, 22nd Friday (II), September 6, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
16 min
September 05, 2024Following God’s Wisdom to Put Into the Deep For a Wondrous Catch, 22nd Thursday (II), September 5, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Teresa of Calcutta
September 5, 2024
1 Cor 3:18-23, Ps 24, Lk 5:1-11

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.5.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
On this day on which the Church celebrates the feast of the great Missionary of Charity, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and on which it’s been announced that I have become the new National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, it’s particularly fitting that in today’s Gospel we have Jesus’ famous encounter with Peter, Andrew, James and John in which he sent them out for a miraculous catch of fish as a sign of how he wanted to make these fishermen true fishers of men. The Church has always taken inspiration for her mission of spreading the Gospel from this scene. In his apostolic exhortation to mark the beginning of the third Christian millennium, St. John Paul II adopted Jesus’ words to Peter, “Duc in Altum!,” “Put into the Deep!,” as basically the motto for the third Christian millennium. And so today, as we celebrate Mother Teresa, pray for her sisters and the work of the missions, ask God for his help for me as I prepare to dedicate myself full time to promoting and supporting the work of the missions starting this January, and focus on the missionary identity that flows from Christian Baptism and Confirmation, it’s important to delve into today’s readings, in which we learn the trust that is at the root of putting into the deep.
In today’s first reading, St. Paul tells the Corinthians and us, “If anyone among you considers himself wise in this age, let him become a fool, so as to become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God.” We see an illustration of how God’s wisdom turns human wisdom upside down in today’s Gospel. After having borrowed Peter’s boat as a floating pulpit to preach to the crowds, Jesus tells Peter to take his boat and put out into the deep water, lowering his nets for a catch. Peter had already worked all night and caught nothing. He wasn’t just exhausted but discouraged. The command of the Lord was absurd to anyone experienced in fishing on the Sea of Galilee, where people caught fish in shallow water at night time, not deep water in daylight. It would be as if a fisherman had told Jesus, a carpenter, to drive in nails by holding the head of the hammer and striking the nail with the handle. Peter, however, at the Lord’s word, put out into the deep and caught the biggest catch of his life. The wisdom of this world is indeed foolishness in the God-man’s eyes! That trust in the Lord that led Peter to put out into the deep was meant by the Lord to teach him and Andrew, James and John, about the life of faith and the work of evangelization: even when it seems that fishing-for-men “won’t work,” even when it seems like we’ve tried everything and caught nothing — much like St. Jean de Brébeuf worked for three years in his first wave among the Iroquois and had to return to France without one convert — God can bring extraordinary results.
We see this truth contrasting God’s wisdom versus worldly wisdom throughout this scene and throughout salvation history. Worldly wisdom would choose a good man rather than one whose first words were “depart from me for I am a sinner,” a rabbi rather than a fisherman, a nobleman rather than someone most considered a nobody. As St. Paul told us last Saturday, however, “God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise.” If we wish, like Peter, to be Jesus’ followers, we need to learn to trust in his wisdom far more than the world’s. We need to learn how to become a fool for and with him. The question for us is whether we’re wise according to God’s wisdom or the world’s. Many consider themselves wise in this age and judge the wisdom of God by those standards, rather than the other way around. They look at the world through the lens of politics and try to box everything in the Church into conversatives versus liberals. They are beholden to psychology and evaluate the entire spiritual life as a think of the psyche instead of the Spirit. They have a strong notion of the philosophy of history and look at everything as if it’s history repeating itself and as if God can’t do anything novel. They’re empiricists and don’t think anything in the faith is real unless it can be measured scientifically. Or they’re relativists thinking that there’s no such thing as truth and hence undermine any and all moral norms. When we start from any of these worldly perspectives, it hinders our progression in faith.
Today the Church celebrates one of the greatest missionaries of all time, someone who put out into the deep at the Lord’s command to found the Missionaries of Charity, someone who was considered crazy and criticized by the worldly wise but who became nevertheless, according to a 1999 Gallup poll, by far the most admired person of the twentieth century. The spirit with which she lived, the official “Spirit” of the Missionaries of charity, is loving trust, total surrender and cheerfulness as lived by Jesus and Mary in the Gospels. That’s the spirituality of putting into the deep. Like Peter, she had not just faith in God but loving faith, a faith that wasn’t a thing merely of her head but of her heart, which led her not just to surrender to God but to surrender herself completely so that His will, not hers, would be done, and because it was total, it was cheerful, because she knew she was giving what was pleasing to the God whom she loved. She was, in short, a fool on Christ’s account, who sought always to think as God thinks, to love as Christ loves, and to be his light in the midst of the darkness of so much suffering and indifference. Saint Teresa of Calcutta was truly crazy in the eyes of the world and was crazy even in the eyes of many in the Church for the radical way in which she let Christ be her light and his thirst become hers. She was serving God faithfully and well as a Sister of Loreto, teaching and administering schools for those in India who could afford an education. But at the call of the Lord, she left it all behind, going outside the high protective walls of the school compound to begin to care for Christ in the distressing disguise of the poorest of the poor, many of whom were dying alone in gutters with no one to love them with the love of God. With her former students and then other women who would join her, she entrusted herself, with Christian craziness, to God’s providence in everything. One famous example happened in Lebanon in 1982 when Beirut was a terrible war zone with Israelis bombing the area. There were 100 disabled and orphaned children abandoned and trapped in a building near the Sabra Palestinian camp. She asked the officer in charge on one side if she could go to rescue the children. He flatly refused, saying it was too dangerous and reminded her that a priest had just been killed. He said the only way it would be possible to cross from East to West would be if there were a ceasefire. It was August 13. Mother Teresa replied that there would be a ceasefire the following day because she had asked Our Lady to obtain one on the vigil of her feast day, the Assumption. U.S. Ambassador Philip Habib said to her that he was very happy to have a woman of prayer there with him, but that the was sure that Israeli Prime Minister Begin wouldn’t agree to something, all the more on such short notice. Mother replied that she was certain it would happen and, to humor her, Habib said that if it came, he would personally ensure that she would be able to cross Beirut to get to the kids. Habib nevertheless put in the request. To his shock, at 5 am the following day, it was granted. And Mother, together with representatives of the International Red Cross, immediately went to rescue the frightened and spastic children one-by-one. The Missionaries of Charity ever since have been marked by this type of apostolic courage, regularly going to serve the poor in places where few would have the guts to go, like in Yemen, where twice the Missionaries of Charity present have been martyred. But they live out this spirituality of putting into the deep at Jesus’ word every day, basing their whole life on his assurance that whatever we do to the least of his brethren we do to him. That’s what has led them to care for Him in the disguise of the lepers, those with AIDS and HIV, those covered with maggots drowning in gutters in their own and others’ urine, the untouchables, dying, orphaned, abandoned, unwanted and unborn children and so many others.
The most striking example of the difference between worldly wisdom and God’s wisdom is with regard to the Eucharist, and it’s from there that St. Teresa of Calcutta was strengthened each day in the loving trust and cheerful total surrender that spurred her to put out into the deep each day. To the worldly wise, it’s absolutely foolish to believe that what starts out as bread and wine, after another human being says a few words, turns into God while maintaining all its appearances; it changes into the same Jesus Christ through whom all things were made, who was incarnate of the Virgin, suffered under Pontius Pilate, was killed on the Cross, rose on the third day and now sits at the Father’s eternal right. It’s even more foolish to make this “bread” and “wine” the source and summit of our entire life, arranging entire schedules to come to receive him each day and spend time adoring him. But for those who are wise in God’s true wisdom, we recognize that there’s no more fitting place for us to be. And it’s from here that the Lord sends us out, like he would send Peter, Andrew, James and John, to be fishers of other fools. St. Teresa of Calcutta focused on how Jesus in the Eucharist helped make her so bold in charity. “If we have our Lord in the midst of us, with daily Mass and Holy Communion,” she wrote to her Archbishop soon after founding the Missionaries of Charity, “I fear nothing for the Sisters nor myself; he will look after us. But without him I cannot be. I am helpless.” She described her union with Jesus in Holy Communion and adoration as the source of her strength to care for him in the poorest of the poor. Christ’s love in the Eucharist would send her out, just like Mary brought Jesus in haste to her cousin Elizabeth. “Every Holy Communion,” she said in Los Angeles is 1977, “fills us with Jesus and we must, with Our Lady, go in haste to give him to others. For her, it was on her first Holy Communion day that Jesus came into her life, and so for all of us also. He made himself the Bread of Life so that we, too, like Mary, become full of Jesus. We too, like her, be in haste to give him to others. We too, like her, serve others.” When asked about the joy that so radiated from her and her fellow Missionaries of Charity, she said it came from the one who came into and remains in the world so that his joy might be in us and our joy made complete. “People ask, ‘Where do the sisters get the joy and the energy to do what they are doing? The Eucharist. … He says come to me.” She added, “The time you spend with Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament is the best time that you will spend on earth. Each moment that you spend with Jesus will deepen your union with Him and make your soul everlastingly more glorious and beautiful in heaven, and will help bring about an everlasting peace on earth.” When people would ask her for advice, she would often reply, “If I can give you any advice, I beg you to get closer to the Eucharist, to Jesus.” And I am confident that today, as she joyfully adores the Lamb around his celestial throne, she is interceding for us, that we will indeed draw closer to Jesus in the Eucharist and love him who thirsts for us with the same love with which she sought to quench that thirst, so that Jesus can make us, like he made her, missionaries of his divine lovto in the world, putting out into the deep, regardless of human wisdom, and lowering our nets for a catch!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 cor 3:18-23
Brothers and sisters:
Let no one deceive himself.
If anyone among you considers himself wise in this age,
let him become a fool, so as to become wise.
For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God,
for it is written:
God catches the wise in their own ruses,
and again:
The Lord knows the thoughts of the wise, that they are vain.
So let no one boast about human beings, for everything belongs to you,
Paul or Apollos or Cephas,
or the world or life or death,
or the present or the future:
all belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.
Responsorial Psalm
ps 24:1bc-2, 3-4ab, 5-6
R. (1) To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it.
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. To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it.
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. To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it.
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. To the Lord belongs the earth and all that fills it.
Gospel
lk 5:1-11
While the crowd was pressing in on Jesus and listening to the word of God,
he was standing by the Lake of Gennesaret.
He saw two boats there alongside the lake;
the fishermen had disembarked and were washing their nets.
Getting into one of the boats, the one belonging to Simon,
he asked him to put out a short distance from the shore.
Then he sat down and taught the crowds from the boat.
After he had finished speaking, he said to Simon,
“Put out into deep water and lower your nets for a catch.”
Simon said in reply,
“Master, we have worked hard all night and have caught nothing,
but at your command I will lower the nets.”
When they had done this, they caught a great number of fish
and their nets were tearing.
They signaled to their partners in the other boat
to come to help them.
They came and filled both boats
so that the boats were in danger of sinking.
When Simon Peter saw this, he fell at the knees of Jesus and said,
“Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man.”
For astonishment at the catch of fish they had made seized him
and all those with him,
and likewise James and John, the sons of Zebedee,
who were partners of Simon.
Jesus said to Simon, “Do not be afraid;
from now on you will be catching men.”
When they brought their boats to the shore,
they left everything and followed him.
The post Following God’s Wisdom to Put Into the Deep For a Wondrous Catch, 22nd Thursday (II), September 5, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
23 min
September 04, 2024The Path of Spiritual Growth and Maturity, 22nd Wednesday (II), September 4, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
September 4, 2024
1 Cor 3:1-9, Ps 33, Lk 4:38-44

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.4.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
St. Paul in today’s first reading points to the type of spiritual growth he was seeking to help catalyze among the Christians in Corinth, something that indicates the spiritual growth God would like to see in all of us. He began by saying that when he was first evangelizing them, he needed to care for them spiritually the way parents care for newborns because they were still living according to the ways of the world rather than according to the Holy Spirit. “I could not talk to you as spiritual people but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ. I fed you milk, not solid food, because you were unable to take it.” So he went slowly. We pass the faith on according to the capacity of people to understand. When we catechize young children, we don’t give them a copy of the adult Catechism of the Catholic Church. We speak to them very simply about God, about prayer, about charity, about the Bible, about the Sacraments. We “breast feed” them, digesting the truths of the faith and passing these truths on to them in ways they can assimilate. Of course we don’t want them to stay there. Just like a little child passes from milk to Gerber’s to normal food for children to more healthy food and a richer cuisine for growing children and adults, so a similar passage is meant to happen in us spiritually. And St. Paul was saying that that’s what was not happening among the Corinthians. “Indeed you are still not able [to take solid food], even now, because you are still of the flesh.” They were living according to their earthly, fleshy desires, instead of living according to the Spirit. He then says why: “There is jealousy and rivalry among you.” Such things are not manifestations of a life according to God. We’re called to look at each other as brothers and sisters, not as competition, and we’re supposed to be happy to see them grow and thrive, not jealous. When we’re living by the Spirit, we love each other rather than resent each other and we seek communion rather than harbor division.
St. Paul gets specific about the envy and contention that was dividing the community: Some were saying “I belong to Paul” and others “I belong to Apollos” and later, as we’ll see, “I belong to Cephas” (Peter). St. Paul is clear that that’s the talk and behavior of spiritual infants, siding according to their preferences with “ministers through whom [they] became believers” instead of with the Lord who sent the ministers to them and who caused the growth. They were focusing on earthly likes and dislikes rather than on God, and St. Paul wanted to provoke them by his strong language to grow up. There are many similar issues of living according to the flesh in a childish (rather than childlike) way that afflict the Christians of today. In an age of spiritual consumerism, people are led to focus more on their personal preferences rather than on God when it comes to which Church they attend, which music is their favorite, which pew they want to sit in and more. Many pick and choose among popes, or bishops, or priests, or Church councils, rather than receive with gratitude and follow all the Lord sends. People define themselves less with the Lord than with the instruments of the Lord who most meet their tastes. They define themselves too much with the adjectives they put to their “Catholicism,” normally taken from political categories, rather than with the faith that transcends any constricting label. And that’s why there is still so much “jealousy and rivalry” in certain parishes, dioceses and the Church, whereas Jesus prayed and worked that we might have a unity as profound as the unity among the Persons of the Blessed Trinity (Jn 17). Many people are still immature in their understanding and living of the faith and there’s a need for all of us to receive God’s help to grow in a healthy way so that we may live truly by the Spirit.
In the Gospel today, we see in Jesus three manifestations of spiritual maturity. Insofar as each of us is called to grow to full stature in Christ (Eph 4:13), we need to examine each of these and resolve to live them.
The first is in mature, self-sacrificial charity. Even though Jesus was doubtless tired from teaching for hours in the Capernaum synagogue, he responded readily when the disciples interceded with him to help Simon’s mother-in-law who was in the grip of a serious fever (think: 103 degrees Fahrenheit). After curing her, word spread throughout all the town and at “sunset,” when he was probably getting ready to wind down, “all who had people sick with various diseases brought them to him” and “he laid his hands on each of them and cured them.” It would have been easy, if he were living according to the flesh, to ask everyone to come back the following day. It would have been easy for him, by his power as God, simply to do a “group healing” and cure them all in a way that would have saved him hours, but the Good Shepherd knows each of us his sheep by name and he went one-by-one to cure each of them and cast out demons from those who were possessed. This is a great sign of spiritual maturity, that one puts others ahead of himself. We witness that type of spiritual maturity in Simon Peter’s mother-in-law. As soon as she was cured by Jesus, she used her health not to run the errands she couldn’t get to during her days in bed, not to divert herself in the ways many of us look to do after a convalescence, but instead to serve others. St. Luke says, “She got up immediately and waited on them.” Our health is a blessing from God that we’re not supposed to look at selfishly, but as a blessing to help us love others. When we’re very ill, when we’re bedridden, when we’re in the hospital and especially when we’re dead, we no longer can help others the way we ought. The spiritually mature don’t take their health for granted, the spiritually mature don’t waste their health in perpetually seeking to “have a good time” and to give into various degrees of hedonism, but endeavor to use it to love God and others.
The second habit of the spiritually mature is in making the time to pray, even when tired. Jesus went out “at daybreak” to a “deserted place” to pray. Those who are spiritually mature have their priorities straight. For Jesus prayer was a higher priority than “sleeping the fat morning” as the French are accustomed to say. A great sign of being a spiritual adult is when we are able to put God ahead of our human appetites, and one of the strongest appetites is to be like little children who never want to get out of bed. For the mature, getting out of bed to do the “work of God” (what St. Benedict calls prayer) is something that isn’t necessarily easy physically, but it’s a no-brainer spiritually, in a similar way to how a mature parent gets out of bed to go to work or to care for a crying child.
The third illustration of spiritual maturity is to put the mission God has given us above our likes and dislikes and to being willing to leave our comfort zones for God and his service. We notice is that when the crowds were looking for Jesus and tried to prevent him from leaving. Jesus replied, “To the other towns also I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God, because for this purpose I have been sent.” Jesus would have had it made staying there in Capernaum. He had just cured and exorcised many in the town, the people were amazed and astonished at his preaching, and he would probably have been elected mayor in a landslide! But he didn’t forget his mission. He was sent for the lost sheep of the house of Israel and he needed to go out looking for the lost sheep rather than staying with the fold that would have made him as comfortable as anyone would want. That’s something those who are led by the Spirit do. That’s something the spiritually mature do. The spiritually mature are always ready to go wherever the Lord leads, with loins girt and sandals on their feet.
When we were younger, God fed us with “milk” but now he feeds us with Himself, the food that will bring us to mature to the “full stature of Christ” (Eph 4:13) whom we are about to receive. Let us, in receiving this gift, unite ourselves fully with him, and with each other in him, ask the Holy Spirit for help to overcome any rivalry or jealousy, and with Christ pray, use our health to serve, and go forth to proclaim the good news of the Kingdom.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 cor 3:1-9
Brothers and sisters,
I could not talk to you as spiritual people,
but as fleshly people, as infants in Christ.
I fed you milk, not solid food,
because you were unable to take it.
Indeed, you are still not able, even now,
for you are still of the flesh.
While there is jealousy and rivalry among you,
are you not of the flesh, and walking
according to the manner of man?
Whenever someone says, “I belong to Paul,” and another,
“I belong to Apollos,” are you not merely men?
What is Apollos, after all, and what is Paul?
Ministers through whom you became believers,
just as the Lord assigned each one.
I planted, Apollos watered, but God caused the growth.
Therefore, neither the one who plants nor the one who waters is anything,
but only God, who causes the growth.
He who plants and he who waters are one,
and each will receive wages in proportion to his labor.
For we are God’s co-workers;
you are God’s field, God’s building.
Responsorial Psalm
ps 33:12-13, 14-15, 20-21
R. (12) Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Blessed the nation whose God is the LORD,
the people he has chosen for his own inheritance.
From heaven the LORD looks down;
he sees all mankind.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
From his fixed throne he beholds
all who dwell on the earth,
He who fashioned the heart of each,
he who knows all their works.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Our soul waits for the LORD,
who is our help and our shield,
For in him our hearts rejoice;
in his holy name we trust.
R. Blessed the people the Lord has chosen to be his own.
Gospel
lk 4:38-44
After Jesus left the synagogue, he entered the house of Simon.
Simon’s mother-in-law was afflicted with a severe fever,
and they interceded with him about her.
He stood over her, rebuked the fever, and it left her.
She got up immediately and waited on them.
At sunset, all who had people sick with various diseases
brought them to him.
He laid his hands on each of them and cured them.
And demons also came out from many, shouting,
“You are the Son of God.”
But he rebuked them and did not allow them to speak
because they knew that he was the Christ.
At daybreak, Jesus left and went to a deserted place.
The crowds went looking for him, and when they came to him,
they tried to prevent him from leaving them.
But he said to them, “To the other towns also
I must proclaim the good news of the Kingdom of God,
because for this purpose I have been sent.”
And he was preaching in the synagogues of Judea.
The post The Path of Spiritual Growth and Maturity, 22nd Wednesday (II), September 4, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
September 03, 2024Remaining Astonished by Jesus, His Words and His Works, 22nd Tuesday (II), September 3, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Pope St. Gregory the Great, Doctor of the Church
September 3, 2024
1 Cor 2:10-16, Ps 145, Lk 4:31-37

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.3.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we meet Jesus teaching in a synagogue. After he was booted and almost killed from the Synagogue in Nazareth where he grew up — which we heard yesterday — he went to Capernaum, on the Sea of Galilee, where Peter, Andrew, James and John all lived and worked. In Nazareth when he taught, St. Luke tells us all were initially “amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth,” but eventually doubts entered because they thought they knew him and those doubts quickly passed to rage and homicidal intentions. Today in Capernaum, St. Luke says that those in the Synagogue “were astonished at his teaching because he spoke with authority” and later, after he had rebuked a demon, they were “all amazed and said to one another, ‘What is there about his word? For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits and they come out!”
One of the most important aspects of our Christian response in faith is to be amazed and astonished at Jesus and at his words or works. This astonishment is an experience most of us, I hope, had when we first started living by faith, when — for those of us lucky enough to be cradle Christians — our parents read to us from the Bible or from Bible stories and told us that the Bible contains the words of God himself; when we first began to pray and we recognized that God was listening to us with love; when we first discovered that the Eucharist is God and comes down from heaven on the altar, and dwells within the tabernacle, or loves us from the monstrance; when we first started to hear about Jesus’ great miracles, his multiplication of the loaves and fish, his walking on water, his casting out the devil like he does in today’s Gospel, his healing the sick, and his rising from the dead. This is an amazement and astonishment that likewise envelops anyone at the time of our becoming aware of God’s calling us to follow him in a special way like when priests or religious become aware of their call within their baptismal call to holiness. But what can happen over time to every Christian is we can begin to lose our astonishment. The things of God can become routine. We can cease to view with amazement the fact that God has spoken to us in Sacred Scripture, that he listens to us in prayer, that he awaits us with love in the Eucharist wanting to nourish us with the only nourishment worthy of our souls, that he thirsts to forgive us in the Sacrament of his Mercy, that he is risen and alive and seeks to walk with us throughout each day, that he can continue to work great miracles if we approach him with faith and it really is in alignment with what’s best. We can begin to take things for granted, to “domesticate” Jesus, and lose our awe. It’s one of the saddest things that can happen in the life of faith. I think of those priests, religious and “professionally Catholic” lay people who have lost the basic astonishment that accompanies the life of faith, so that they begin to look at the Mass as just some dramatic ceremony, who begin to place tabernacles in “worship spaces” as if they’re placing potted plants, who begin even to use words to describe the Eucharist like “bread” and “cup,” who deconstruct the Word of God as if they’re dissecting a cadaver instead of analyzing a Living Word, who mock the Sacrament of Penance as if it’s just a historical vestige rather than a gift of God we need for salvation. Real faith always brings with it this childlike astonishment and amazement before God and what God has done and is doing. It’s important for us all to ask the Lord for the gift never to lose this holy awe and to help us grow in it each day. How can God, who never gives us stones when we ask for loaves of bread, refuse such a humble, filial prayer?
There’s a particular type of awe that we’re called to ponder in today’s Gospel. It’s astonishment at Jesus’ teaching, at the power of his word. St. Luke tells us that the people in the Capernaum synagogue were amazed because “he spoke with authority.” Most of their rabbis — as well as the Scribes, Pharisees and anyone who tried to teach the Jewish faith — would normally instruct by citing passages from the Hebrew Bible or from the oral tradition of the rabbis. They were constantly using footnotes to ground what they were saying. Jesus didn’t do that. He spoke as if he were the author — that’s what it means to speak with authority. We see this clearly in the way that he used parables. We see it even more strikingly in how he preached the Sermon on the Mount, beginning with what they knew from the Mosaic law and then taking the teaching much further by declaring, “But I say to you.” Much like with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus when Jesus started to do this and their hearts began to burn, those in the Capernaum synagogue could sense that they were hearing the truth from one who knows.
Recovering this astonishment at Jesus’ word is one of the principal works of the Holy Spirit. St. Paul tells us in today’s first reading that “no one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God,” but adds that “we have not received the spirit of the world but the Spirit who is from God, so that we may understand the things freely given us by God,” and that we are then helped by the spirit to “speak about [the things freely given us by God] … with words taught by the Spirit, describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms.” The world needs this truly spiritual perspective, of amazed hearers of the word and astonished apostolic echoes. When we’re truly amazed and astonished at Jesus’ teaching, the Holy Spirit helps us to understand it according to an inner logic and then makes us capable of passing on that understanding as words that astonish and amaze us just as much in proclaiming them as they do when we hear and read them. And that amazement and astonishment is contagious when it is met by those listening with faith.
Today we celebrate the feast of someone who was amazed and astonished by Jesus, his words and works, and gave his life to share that amazement and bring as many as possible to come to its source. Pope St. Gregory I is the greatest saints in history and in my opinion, the greatest Pope. By the power of the Holy Spirit, he not only came to know the Word of God inside out, but became a Doctor of the Church sharing with wonder that great gift. Gregory became prefect (mayor) of Rome when he was just 30 and did a tremendous job in trying to rebuild the buildings and morale of Rome after four brutal sackings within a short period of time. But in his mature discernment, he recognized that God was calling him to something different and more. With grateful astonishment at his vocation and to the astonishment of others, he left worldly power behind in order to become a monk, founding the first Benedictine monastery in Rome in his house on the Coelian Hill across from the Colosseum. There he grew in prayer, holiness and divine wisdom through his prayer and meditation on the Word of God. Eventually, however, the Pope asked him to leave the Monastery and go as his apocrisarius, his legate, to the emperor in Constantinople. It would have been easy for him to beg off returning to public life, but he grasped that God was asking him to serve him in this new way. He wisely brought along some of his monks with him to Constantinople so that he could keep up the good habits of prayer and meditation that he had established and would need even more among all the intrigues at the imperial court. Eventually he was allowed to return to Rome, where he and his monks would regularly sacrifice themselves by caring for those who were suffering from the plague and other illnesses in the city. Eventually, after the death of Pope Pelagius II, Gregory was elected his successor. He tried to refuse the office he didn’t want, but after it became clear it was God’s will, he accepted, and was ordained a priest and a bishop (he had already been ordained one of the seven deacons of Rome while still in the monastery). Over the course of his 15 years as the 64th pope, he set an example of spiritual wisdom and sought to train others in the same discipline. He was one who wrote Dialogues for common folks, Pastoral Letters for priests, a Commentary on Job for monks, and a “Pastoral Rule” for all bishops, one that is still very much consulted today. He reformed the liturgy, both with regard to its music (Gregorian Chant), to the need for mercy (by introducing the three cycles of three Kyries at the beginning of Mass), to its focus on God’s grace by inserting the “Hanc igitur” in the Eucharistic Prayer, and even to the dependence on God the Father by moving the place of the Our Father in the liturgy. Because he knew lex orandi, lex credendi, lex vivendi, that the way we pray forms the way we believe that in turn forms the way we live, he wanted the Mass to be precisely that means by which we’re filled with God. He confronted, rather than ducked, problems in society and in the Church. He had special care for the poor, orphans and widows. He prayed and intervened to help out during terrible plagues that would come from the overflowing, polluted Tiber. He sent his monks to places near and far to evangelize and assist illiterate kings in the government of their feudal empires. He became truly what he chose as his papal title, a servant of the servants of God (servus servorum Dei) modeled after Jesus himself, who came not to be served but to serve and to give his life as a ransom for the many. Everything began with his astonishment at Jesus and at the invitation Jesus gave him to spend his life with him.
Jesus’ most astonishing words of all are those that he says through the accent of his priests each day, when he takes simple bread and wine and changes them into himself. He does this by his authority as Creator over all creation, but he also does it by his love as our Redeemer. Today he comes not to the Capernaum synagogue, but here to this beautiful chapel, and even more particularly, he comes to each one of us, seeking to make us his temple and speak with authority to us from within throughout the day. Let us ask the Spirit who helps us to understand the things of God to give us greater amazement at this tremendous mystery as we prepare to greet him with the astonishment of the Roman Centurion: “Lord, I am not worthy that you should come under my roof, but only say the word and my [soul] shall be healed.”

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 cor 2:10b-16
Brothers and sisters:
The Spirit scrutinizes everything, even the depths of God.
Among men, who knows what pertains to the man
except his spirit that is within?
Similarly, no one knows what pertains to God except the Spirit of God.
We have not received the spirit of the world
but the Spirit who is from God,
so that we may understand the things freely given us by God.
And we speak about them not with words taught by human wisdom,
but with words taught by the Spirit,
describing spiritual realities in spiritual terms.
Now the natural man does not accept what pertains to the Spirit of God,
for to him it is foolishness, and he cannot understand it,
because it is judged spiritually.
The one who is spiritual, however, can judge everything
but is not subject to judgment by anyone.
For “who has known the mind of the Lord, so as to counsel him?”
But we have the mind of Christ.
Responsorial Psalm
ps 145:8-9, 10-11, 12-13ab, 13cd-14
R. (17) The Lord is just in all his ways.
The LORD is gracious and merciful,
slow to anger and of great kindness.
The LORD is good to all
and compassionate toward all his works.
R. The Lord is just in all his ways.
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 just in all his ways.
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 just in all his ways.
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 just in all his ways.
Gospel
lk 4:31-37
Jesus went down to Capernaum, a town of Galilee.
He taught them on the sabbath,
and they were astonished at his teaching
because he spoke with authority.
In the synagogue there was a man with the spirit of an unclean demon,
and he cried out in a loud voice,
“What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are–the Holy One of God!”
Jesus rebuked him and said, “Be quiet! Come out of him!”
Then the demon threw the man down in front of them
and came out of him without doing him any harm.
They were all amazed and said to one another,
“What is there about his word?
For with authority and power he commands the unclean spirits,
and they come out.”
And news of him spread everywhere in the surrounding region.

The post Remaining Astonished by Jesus, His Words and His Works, 22nd Tuesday (II), September 3, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
September 02, 2024Working with Christ Crucified, 22nd Monday (II), September 2, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Church of Notre Dame, Manhattan
Monday of the 22nd Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass for the Sanctification of Human Labor (on Labor Day)
September 2, 2024
1 Cor 2:1-5, Ps 119, Lk 4:16-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.2.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Yesterday we pondered St. James’ summons for Christians to become doers of the word, not just listeners. Moses, while reminding the Israelites in the desert of how lucky they were to have a God so close and loving as to give them his own statutes and decrees, multiply times said that that gift was given to be observed. Our life, our faith, is ultimately practical. It’s not fundamentally about information, but formation, not about what we know but how that knowledge and faith is translated into action and life in cooperation with God’s grace. These thoughts frame how we approach today’s readings from Sacred Scripture and our national observance of Labor Day with a Votive Mass for the Sanctification of Human Labor.
St. Paul tells the Corinthians that he wasn’t coming with “persuasive words of wisdom,” the worldly wisdom of the Greeks, so that their “faith might not rest on human wisdom.” Instead he was coming in “weakness and fear and much trembling” as a “demonstration of spirit and … the power of God.” He was coming not to give discourses but to show God’s power, and he would manifest God’s power through his own human weakness. He said he was fearful because he was preaching Christ crucified, which was “folly” to the hedonistic Corinthians; for those who loved pleasure and sought to minimize pain, what would be less appealing than following someone on a path of self-denial and a way of the Cross? But Paul was doing so anyway, and preaching Christ crucified not just by his lips but by his life and actions, having suffered together with Christ to such an extent that he was able to say, “I have been crucified with Christ and it is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” That was the demonstration of spirit and power. He was inviting the Corinthians, like him, to “know nothing … except Jesus Christ and him crucified,” not just to “know about” Christ crucified, but to “know” him in something analogous to the Biblical sense of union, to become one with Christ in his saving work on the Cross. The demonstration of Christ’s wisdom and power through Paul’s own self-denial and crucified life would prove far more effective in bringing people to conversion than the lofty words of wisdom he had preached before to the Greek intellectuals in the Athenian areopagus.St. Paul wanted us to experience that same wisdom, a wisdom learned not so much in books but through union with the crucified Master. In the Responsorial Psalm, we prayed first “How I love your law, O Lord! It is my meditation all the day,” but then we added, “Your command has made me wiser than my enemies. I have more understanding than all my teachers, … I have more discernment than the elders because I observe your precepts.” We become wise by living the Word of God, by obeying God’s commands and precepts, by incarnating his call to a union so intense that it lasts even in worldly pain and suffering.
This is also one of the essential lessons of today’s Gospel of Jesus’ preaching in the Synagogue of Nazareth, beginning our study of St. Luke’s Gospel that will last for the next three months. After Jesus had read the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah describing the works of the long-awaited Messiah, Jesus said, “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” He was the fulfillment of the one anointed by the Spirit who was announcing and delivering the Good News to the poor, freedom to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, release to the oppressed, and a year of Jubilee. But that was too much for many of his listeners. It’s fine for many when someone talks about theological subjects, but when someone goes further and tries to live the Word of God, it’s a challenge to everyone else to live by that reality. Many resist. Those in Nazareth recognized that he was speaking with “gracious words” but they couldn’t harmonize that with the fact that he was the supposed son of Joseph the carpenter. And their amazement soon passed to doubt and then to homicidal anger as they sought to kill him. His enfleshment of the word of God — even his working of miracles — proved scandal to them. They didn’t think that one of their own could be the Messiah. They really didn’t want one of their own, or anyone, to be the Messiah, because they didn’t want to get shaken out of their own habits to examine whether it was true and if so to follow him. Therefore they sought to reject the challenging message by killing the challenging messenger. Jesus got a foretaste of the Passion in his home town.
Both readings point to how each of us is called to enflesh God’s wisdom, to live by his commands, to unite ourselves to Christ’s crucified and his saving Messianic work. We’re called to do so in every area of our life, but one area in particularly we can ponder on this Labor Day is in our human work. Since the 1880s, Americans have marked Labor Day on the first Monday in September, in order to celebrate the hard work of Americans in making this country prosperous and strong and, according to the original Presidential proclamation, to have the time to attend speeches and events on the spiritual and education aspects of human work not only for the building up of our country, but also for building us and others up in God’s plan. So it’s important to ponder the spiritual aspect of work as we all get ready for increased work with the beginning of the semester. Our world is hedonist and looks at work not as a divine blessing but as a necessary evil, something that most are required to do in order to make money to survive and eventually allow for retirement or pleasure, but something from which we’re all trying to escape. God gave us the vocation to work in the beginning before the Fall, with his three-fold command to “increase and multiply,” to “fill the earth and subdue it” and to “have dominion” over all the animals. After the Fall, this vocation to work remained, but it would now be done with labor pains, both the pain of contractions in child birth as well as the toil on one’s brow in normal human work, but it was precisely through the “cross” of work that we would be redeemed and become cooperators in Jesus’ ceaseless work of the salvation of the world through love.
So, in non-conformity with a culture that pretends as if the path to happiness is coextensive with the path of unending vacation, we Christians are called to proclaim the Gospel of Work, a Gospel that indeed involves the “seventh day” in which we rest with God and others, but a Gospel that also involves days one through six when we work together with Jesus. When Jesus came down from heaven to save us, he didn’t spend his hidden and public life at the Mediterranean, or the Dead Sea, or the Sea of Galilee working on his tan and diverting himself with aquatic games. He spent his hidden life working as a carpenter and then spent his public ministry working even harder, spending long days preaching, healing one by one, and putting into practice all the words that Isaiah prophesied that Jesus announced in his hometown synagogue. He had so great appreciation for all human work in God’s plan that he could not stop using it as the proper analogy for his preaching. In his teaching, he favorably mentions shepherds, farmers, doctors, sowers, householders, servants, stewards, merchants, laborers, soldiers, cooks, tax collectors and scholars and many more. He compares the work of the apostolate to the manual work of harvesters and fishermen. He praised “good and faithful servants” who worked hard in their Master’s absence. He called a few to leave their fishing boats and tax-charts to proclaim the Gospel as missionaries; the vast majority he called to proclaim the Gospel by living that good news right where they were, through “increasing and multiplying,” through “subduing” and “dominion” in the kitchen or at their workbench, out in the fields or in their boats, at their desk or in the classroom. That’s where the vast majority of people are called to be saints with they do their work with “diligence” — which means “love” in Latin, love for God and love for those served by work — offering that work to God like the sacrifice of Abel and sanctifying themselves and others in the process.
This Gospel of Human Work is something that seems folly to our hedonistic culture in which it seems the vast majority would take early retirement if they’d get full benefits, where more and more are playing the system to try to collect disability when they still could work, where welfare benefits just keep getting extended and where the lines of those who have stopped looking for work grows by the millions each year, not because there are no jobs, but because our culture is enabling them not to have to work. This is contrary to our vocation as human beings and will hurt individuals and our whole society. Retirement is, in one sense, a good thing, that one no longer needs to have the pressure of working in order to survive, so that as one gets older, one can focus more and more on the meaning of life that might get lost by too much work. But retirement is meant to lead to a different type of work, where one is able to use one’s life experience to pass on to others the wisdom of life, whether that means babysitting grandchildren, serving as catechists, tutoring at risk kids, caring for those who are sick or lonely, getting more involved in important causes, helping to build up one’s parish, or, following the example of Simeon and Anna in the Gospel, praying for oneself and others. Last Saturday in a parable Jesus called “wicked” the “lazy servants” who, when their Master was away, just gave into their pleasures and rather than serving others through their work, started abusing them. He said that he hoped to find his servants “working” upon his return. This doesn’t mean that there’s no time for legitimate rest, but it does mean that he wants us in general working so that we may build up his kingdom in the world and build up ourselves in the process. That is the way we conform ourselves to Christ crucified, who, through our work, allows us to participate in the redemption, sweating, toiling, contracting out of love for others. Through that work we help him care for the poor, liberate those enslaved to want, and help people see the meaning of life. That’s the way we fulfill Scripture — the first pages of Scripture! — in others’ hearing and sight.
As we celebrate this Mass for the Sanctification of Human Labor we remember that the Mass itself is a combination between God’s work and ours, symbolized by the prayers of the offertory when we thank God for the “fruit of the earth” and “fruit of the vine” but also for the “work of human hands” that converts grain into bread and grapes into wine. That’s a symbol of the pleasing sacrifice of Abel that we’re called to bring with us each day to the altar, something that prepares us much better to allow Jesus to continue to do his divine work of salvation in us and through us. Today a diligent construction worker from Nazareth with calloused hands bids us to “Come, follow me!” to this altar, where he wishes to strengthen us so that he may send us out to proclaim his Gospel not just by words but by our work. We pray that at the end of today, as we examine our conscience before him, we might be able to echo his words in Nazareth and say honestly, “Today, this Scripture about the importance of work has been fulfilled in me.”

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 cor 2:1-5
When I came to you, brothers and sisters,
proclaiming the mystery of God,
I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.
For I resolved to know nothing while I was with you
except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
I came to you in weakness and fear and much trembling,
and my message and my proclamation
were not with persuasive words of wisdom,
but with a demonstration of spirit and power,
so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom
but on the power of God.
Responsorial Psalm
ps 119:97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 102
R. (97) Lord, I love your commands.
How I love your law, O LORD!
It is my meditation all the day.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
Your command has made me wiser than my enemies,
for it is ever with me.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
I have more understanding than all my teachers
when your decrees are my meditation.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
I have more discernment than the elders,
because I observe your precepts.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
From every evil way I withhold my feet,
that I may keep your words.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
From your ordinances I turn not away,
for you have instructed me.
R. Lord, I love your commands.
Gospel
lk 4:16-30
Jesus came to Nazareth, where he had grown up,
and went according to his custom
into the synagogue on the sabbath day.
He stood up to read and was handed a scroll of the prophet Isaiah.
He unrolled the scroll and found the passage where it was written:
The Spirit of the Lord is upon me,
because he has anointed me
to bring glad tidings to the poor.
He has sent me to proclaim liberty to captives
and recovery of sight to the blind,
to let the oppressed go free,
and to proclaim a year acceptable to the Lord.Rolling up the scroll,
he handed it back to the attendant and sat down,
and the eyes of all in the synagogue looked intently at him.
He said to them,
“Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.”
And all spoke highly of him
and were amazed at the gracious words that came from his mouth.
They also asked, “Is this not the son of Joseph?”
He said to them, “Surely you will quote me this proverb,
‘Physician, cure yourself,’ and say, ‘Do here in your native place
the things that we heard were done in Capernaum.’”
And he said,
“Amen, I say to you, no prophet is accepted in his own native place.
Indeed, I tell you,
there were many widows in Israel in the days of Elijah
when the sky was closed for three and a half years
and a severe famine spread over the entire land.
It was to none of these that Elijah was sent,
but only to a widow in Zarephath in the land of Sidon.
Again, there were many lepers in Israel
during the time of Elisha the prophet;
yet not one of them was cleansed, but only Naaman the Syrian.”
When the people in the synagogue heard this,
they were all filled with fury.
They rose up, drove him out of the town,
and led him to the brow of the hill
on which their town had been built, to hurl him down headlong.
But he passed through the midst of them and went away.
The post Working with Christ Crucified, 22nd Monday (II), September 2, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
27 min
September 01, 2024Bringing Our Hearts Closer to the Lord as Doers of the Word, 22nd Sunday (B), September 1, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 1, 2024
Deut 4:1-2.6-8, Ps 15, James 1:17-18.21-22.27, Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.1.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
It’s great to be able to say, finally, a hearty welcome to all new students and a spirited welcome back to all those returning. The beginning of a new academic year is a time of great hope and expectation, as well as an occasion sometimes for some questions and anxiety, as we begin a new adventure. God is present, here, to be with us and to accompany us with his loving care in successes and struggles, in sickness and health, throughout the months that await and beyond. The start of an academic year is a time for maturely setting some resolutions about the types of priorities and habits we’re going to establish and strive to maintain. One of the most biggest and most important decisions that has to be made is about the role God is going to play in our life: whether we’re going to make time for him; whether we’re going to seek his help or try to do things on our own; whether we’re going to live in or out of accordance with the way he’s wired us, body, soul and conscience; whether, to follow Columbia’s motto, in lumine tuo, videbimus lumen, we’re going to try to see all things in his light or whether we’re going to try to live by some artificial light, or turn off the light and live in darkness. Today’s readings are super important because they put before us two big questions at the beginning of the year: first the role the word of God, and therefore the truth, will play in our life; and, second, the importance of our heart, what it will beat for and love, and whether we will keep it far from God or close, even united, to him. These are two of the big questions that God wants to help us clarify and answer with the help of the readings at Mass this afternoon.
Let’s begin with the question of the role the Word of God will play in our life this year. In today’s second reading, St. James introduces the subject of the Word of God by describing how God has given us “every perfect gift” including our “birth by the word of truth.” He frames the Word of God as a gift and says that we owe not just physical life but our whole supernatural life beginning in baptism to the word of truth, and more specifically to the One through whom all things were made, to the source of our regeneration, Jesus himself, the Word made flesh and the One who said, “I am the Truth” (Jn 14:6). God is the one who communicates himself to us in human speech and by taking our own humanity. That’s why St. James can encourage us, “Humbly welcome the word that has taken root in you, with its power to save you.” Students come to Columbia because there’s a hunger to learn about many subjects and St. James is telling us today that we should have a ravenous hunger to learn from Jesus the Master himself. We should be humble enough to grasp we need what he teaches. We should try to receive what he plants on good soil, so that it will take deep root and bear great fruit. And we should be in awe at what the Word of God can do, because the Word has the power to save us and we need saving.
Then St. James gives us the criterion to help us to determine if we really have welcomed the Word of God: “Be doers of the word,” he says, “and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.” There obviously must have been several people in his day who liked to come just to listen to the word of God without any intention to put it into practice. To use Jesus’ image from one of his most famous parables, they received the seed of his word on hardened, rocky or thorny soil, rather than good soil, and bore little or no fruit. But why did St. James say that idle listeners were lying to themselves? I think the reason might be because if they were thinking that all God wanted was for them merely to show up on the Christian Sabbath and listen to the Scriptures, they were deceived, because God didn’t give us Sacred Scripture to win literary awards, or because he wanted to entertain us, but because he wanted to transform our life and through us change the world. And if we come to hear the word of God without desiring for it to have a radical impact on our existence, without intending to act on it, without giving full rein to its power to save us and through us others, then God tells us that we, like Christians in St. James’ day, are triply-deceived. We’re deceived about its purpose, about its power, and about our dramatic need for it. The Word of God brought to life creation out of nothing! The Word of God calmed stormy seas, made the deaf hear, dumb speak, blind see, lame walk, healed lepers, exorcised demons, and raised the dead! We’re called not just to hear but to live off every word that comes from God’s mouth.
We see how great a gift the Word of God is, and what our response to it needs to be, also in today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses conveyed to the Israelites what set the people of Israel apart from other nations: the statutes and decrees the Lord had given them to help them live in fidelity to the covenant God had made with them. God put his divine wisdom in human language and had it written down to guide them individually and as a people. But Moses stressed that this gift was not supposed to sit on a metaphorical bookshelf. He repeatedly told them, “Hear the statutes and decrees that I am teaching you to observe,” “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord your God,” and “Observe them carefully.” They were entrusted as words to be observed and obeyed, to be done and lived with gratitude. With tremendous pride, Moses asked aloud, “What great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?” They recognized that God’s word, that God’s law and commandments, were a treasure. Just like scientists spend decades in labs trying to discover the secrets of biology and biochemistry or in observatories trying to unlock the secrets of the universe, so the Creator of the World has done us the enormous favor of giving us in his Word the handbook or users’ manual containing so many of the most important things about the way we’ve been made. And if Moses and the Israelites in the desert were able to exclaim how lucky they were to have the first five books of the Bible, if their descendants later could have rejoiced to have the prophetic and wisdom books as well, what should our response be as Christians that we have not only those treasures, but also the Gospel, the Acts of the Apostles, and all the letters and works of the New Testament? How incredibly lucky we are! Moses called the Israelites to observe the commandments not as slaves just doing what they’re told, or as followers carry out a burdensome duty, but as people full of love for God and made ever more free the more faithfully they learned through the statutes and decrees to love God with their whole mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. At their best, the Israelites saw the law of the Lord not as a fence to hem them in, but as the path to true freedom, real love and lasting happiness. The truth that the Word of God contains is what is meant to set us free, not free to do whatever we please, which can often lead us to slavery and death, but free to flourish fully as God made us and experience life in abundance. But that comes from humbly welcoming God’s word, allowing it to grow within us, to save us, and to change us. It comes from being not just “hearers” of the Word, not just “knowers,” but “doers” of the word. As we prayed in the Psalm, the one who lives in the presence of the Lord is not just the one who knows what is just but one who “does justice,” concretely giving God and others the love that they are due.
But as we see in the first reading, Moses gave his people a warning with regard to God’s law. He said, “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord, your God, … you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it.” From the beginning, he was indicating that there would be a temptation to change God’s word. It’s pretty easy to see why many people have sought to subtract from it the parts of it that aren’t easy, pleasant, convenient or in conformity with what one wants to believe and do. Martin Luther tried to eliminate the Book of James from Christian education, deeming it an “epistle of straw” because he didn’t like its passage that faith without works is dead; similarly he effectively eliminated seven Old Testament Books from his translation of the inspired works of the Bible, because they didn’t align with his theological ideas. U.S. founding father and our third president Thomas Jefferson similarly sought to make his own Bible, what’s become known as the Jeffersonian Bible, excising parts of the Gospels he didn’t like, reducing Jesus from a divine person and miracle worker to a moral philosopher, excising eliminating Jesus’ resurrection. Plenty of other people today try to eliminate from the Word of God passages they don’t want to hear or follow, whether about welcoming the stranger or sacrificing for the needy, or receiving little children like we receive Christ, or about forgiving 70 times seven times, or about denying ourselves and picking up our Cross, or about particular sins that they want to treat as quasi-sacraments, or more. If we’re going to be a doer of the Word, we have to be alert to the temptation to eliminate those parts of the word we don’t really want to do.
But there’s also the temptation to change the Word of God by adding to it, by using the reverence we have for God to take his Word in a direction that in fact distorts it. This is what happened to the Pharisees and Scribes, whom Jesus confronts in today’s Gospel in the dramatic scene in which these two closely associated groups convene to criticize Jesus and his disciples for not obsessing about the ritual hand washings traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Mark describes the complicated and rigorous practice of Jewish ceremonial washings, something that God had not revealed that he wanted done but something that the Scribes in the fourth and fifth centuries BC had developed to foster what they called ritual purity. Over time, such practices, such human traditions, began to be emphasized almost as much as the Ten Commandments. In this case, the Scribes and the Pharisees taught that everyone needed to wash his or her hands in two directions with one-and-a-half egg shells of clean water, first from the fingertips down and then with the fingertips at the bottom, drying the other hand with the outside of a closed fist. This was the religious practice they obsessed about, as if such collectively neurotic, obsessive-compulsive washings of hands — and similar practices with cups, jugs, kettles and beds — were what would help them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other. Jesus responded to their accusation and to the false theology behind it with strength and clarity. He called them hypocrites — literally, in Greek, “actors” or fakers — and cited the Prophet Isaiah against them, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.” And then Jesus told them: “You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.” They had changed what God had given to them, substituting their own humanly developed systems of cleanliness for what God himself wanted, adding these to the Word of God and in the process de factosubtracting from the Word of God things far more important.
Jesus’ words that the Pharisees and the Scribes were only seeming to serve the Lord while their hearts and actions were doing otherwise would have come as a great shock to them and to all his listeners. The Scribes and Pharisees were considered as extraordinarily faithful Jews. They studied the Bible intensely down to the letter. Many had memorized it. They committed themselves to live it and go far beyond the minimum. They went to the synagogue not just every Saturday but most days. They prayed at least three times per day. They fasted twice a week, rather than just once a year like others on the Day of Atonement. They paid tithes not only on the things explicitly mentioned in the Mosaic Law but on their whole income. They used to walk to Jerusalem a few times each year to celebrate the major Jewish feasts like Passover at the Temple. They only ate kosher meat. They wore special clothes. And yet in all of this, Jesus, as God, says remarkably, “This people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me.” And he was of course right! These critics who were doing all of these religious deeds were also the ones who would end up conspiring to kill Jesus, cavorting with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and even the Romans, to have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from God despite all of their external practices! They were in fact not authentically religious at all but profound hypocrites, since, despite their washed hands, in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers. They were doers, in fact, not of God’s word but of what God had explicitly forbidden!
After responding to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about what God wants in terms of purity. He wants us to be pure, not just our palms and fingers. And so Jesus talked about purity and impurity of heart. In the Sermon on the Mount, you remember, Jesus praised the “pure of heart,” saying, “They shall see God,” and reminded us, “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be.” Jesus had come into the world not to show us how to wash our hands but to give us a heart transplant, to take out our heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, cleansing us so that we might receive within God’s love expressed in the word of God, treasure it with gratitude, and then put it into practice by loving God and love others as God had loved us first. And so Jesus said to all those assembled, “Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” He emphasized that nothing coming from outside a person, either touching a jug or a ritually impure person — like a woman at her time of the month, or a leper, or anyone who has come into contact with either — or even anything we eat, can make us impure in the sight of God. The purity that God cares about, he said, is what comes from the heart, which in the Biblical understanding is the real core of the person, pointing to what we love and desire. It’s what’s in the heart — and the actions that flow from the heart — that renders a person pure or impure, holy or sinful. A truly religious person, we prayed in the Psalm, “thinks the truth in his heart” and therefore “slanders not with his tongue,” “walks blamelessly and does justice.” A hypocrite doesn’t. Jesus emphasizes that it is from the heart, from what we desire, that sins like “evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, and folly” all come. These evil desires, Jesus says, are what make someone impure, and we see several of them, especially malice, deceit, envy, arrogance, and murderous thoughts, on evident display in the actions of the Pharisees. What Jesus wants from us is for our hearts to be as clean as the Pharisees wanted their hands to be. He wants us to honor the Lord not just with our lips, but with our hearts, hands, knees, feet, and all our mind, soul and strength; to cling not to our own man-made rules and conventions but to his teaching in all its beauty and fullness; to place our treasure in the things of God and seek the opposite of what Jesus says flows from a corrupt heart. Therefore, from your heart and mine, he wants us to commit to chastity and integrity instead of unchastity and licentiousness, generosity instead of theft and greed, self-sacrifice instead of murder, faithful love rather than adultery, goodness rather than malice, truthfulness instead of deceit, happiness over others’ gifts instead of envy, praise of God and others rather than blasphemy, humility and wisdom instead of arrogance and folly. It’s to respond to Jesus who says, “Hear me all of you and understand,” with great attention, comprehension, and action.
It’s good for us at the beginning of the academic year, for some students at the beginning of their university career, to focus in particular on Jesus’ words about the heart. If with the words he put on Isaiah’s lips, he criticized his critics for their hearts being far from him, he obviously desires that our hearts be close to him. If he said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, words and deeds, he desires out of our hearts to come holy thoughts, truthful words, and loving deeds. Are our hearts close to him? Do we want them to be close to him? We could obviously look at whether our hearts to desire truly to know his word so that we might be doers of it; if so, then we will take advantage of our time at Columbia to come to know God’s word intimately, like, for example, by participating in the FOCUS Bible studies that will start this month, or listening religiously to Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year podcast. But insofar as we are in the heart of the ongoing Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States, in which with gratitude we acknowledge, celebrate, adore and share Jesus, the Word made flesh on our altars, in our Tabernacles, and even within us in Holy Communion, I think it’s important that we ask, with humility and sincerity, whether we’re idle listeners of the Word-made-flesh, deceiving ourselves, or doers of the Word-made-flesh. The Church’s teaching on the Eucharist can’t just remain intellectual or theological; it must become practical. It’s not enough to honor the Lord with our lips, merely stating — and believing — that after the words of consecration, the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine the Precious Blood of Christ. We also need to honor this awesome mystery with our hearts and conform our lives to this reality. Are our hearts really close to the Eucharistic Jesus or are our hearts far from him? Does this show in the way we prioritize the Mass, pray the Mass, and make time to spend with Jesus in adoration? Do truly Eucharistic deeds flow from within our hearts — in which we give our own body, blood, sweat, tears, time and things to God and others, as we seek to do “this” in memory of Jesus — or, rather, do self-centered and even selfish thoughts, words and actions flow, even after we’ve received Jesus? I mentioned last week and likewise in the past that the most important decision I ever made in college was three weeks into my freshman year at Harvard, when I asked whether there was anything more important I could do on any given day that receive Jesus inside? Knowing that the answer was clearly no, I made a resolution to try to attend daily Mass and by God’s grace I’m still doing so, now 36 years later this month. The desire to keep my heart close to Jesus was what led me also to team with other Catholic students to start adoration at the Catholic Center and to attend various holy hours. It’s what led me to try to bring other students to Jesus at Mass and in prayer and to discover with wonder the incredible gift we have as Catholics, that we have a God so close to us that he hides himself miraculously under the humble appearances of bread and wine so that he can be with us always throughout our university studies and until the end of time, so that he can nourish us from within, so that he can change us from within, save and sanctify us, and little by little, person by person, through us transform the world. And so I would urge you as this year begins and you make some decisions about how you are going to order your time and what your priorities will be, to take to your prayer how you can keep your hearts close to him and to his teachings, and how you can with his help become a true doer of the Word, someone who does justice, and in all the aspects of your life live in his presence.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Dt 4:1-2, 6-8
Moses said to the people:
“Now, Israel, hear the statutes and decrees
which I am teaching you to observe,
that you may live, and may enter in and take possession of the land
which the LORD, the God of your fathers, is giving you.
In your observance of the commandments of the LORD, your God,
which I enjoin upon you,
you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it.
Observe them carefully,
for thus will you give evidence
of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations,
who will hear of all these statutes and say,
‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’
For what great nation is there
that has gods so close to it as the LORD, our God, is to us
whenever we call upon him?
Or what great nation has statutes and decrees
that are as just as this whole law
which I am setting before you today?”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 15:2-3, 3-4, 4-5
R. (1a) The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Whoever walks blamelessly and does justice;
who thinks the truth in his heart
and slanders not with his tongue.
R. The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Who harms not his fellow man,
nor takes up a reproach against his neighbor;
by whom the reprobate is despised,
while he honors those who fear the LORD.
R. The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Who lends not his money at usury
and accepts no bribe against the innocent.
Whoever does these things
shall never be disturbed.
R. The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Reading 2
Jas 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27
Dearest brothers and sisters:
All good giving and every perfect gift is from above,
coming down from the Father of lights,
with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change.
He willed to give us birth by the word of truth
that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you
and is able to save your souls.
Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:
to care for orphans and widows in their affliction
and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Alleluia
Jas 1:18
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Father willed to give us birth by the word of truth
that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
When the Pharisees with some scribes who had come from Jerusalem
gathered around Jesus,
they observed that some of his disciples ate their meals
with unclean, that is, unwashed, hands.
—For the Pharisees and, in fact, all Jews,
do not eat without carefully washing their hands,
keeping the tradition of the elders.
And on coming from the marketplace
they do not eat without purifying themselves.
And there are many other things that they have traditionally observed,
the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds. —
So the Pharisees and scribes questioned him,
“Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders
but instead eat a meal with unclean hands?”
He responded,
“Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines human precepts.
You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.”
He summoned the crowd again and said to them,
“Hear me, all of you, and understand.
Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person;
but the things that come out from within are what defile.
“From within people, from their hearts,
come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.
All these evils come from within and they defile.”
The post Bringing Our Hearts Closer to the Lord as Doers of the Word, 22nd Sunday (B), September 1, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
30 min
September 01, 2024Doers of the Word With Hearts United to the Lord, 22nd Sunday (B), September 1, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx, NY
Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
September 1, 2024
Deut 4:1-2.6-8, Ps 15, James 1:17-18.21-22.27, Mk 7:1-8.14-15.21-23

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.1.24_MC_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Saint James challenges every one of us today in the same way he challenged the readers of his letter more than 1950 years ago. After we have just listened to the word of God in Sacred Scripture, the apostle tells us: “Humbly welcome the word that has taken root in you, with its power to save you.” And then he gives us the criterion to help us to determine if we really have welcomed it: “Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.”
There obviously must have been several people in his day who liked to come just to listen to the word of God without any intention to put it into practice. To use Jesus’ image from one of his most famous parables, they received the seed of his word on hardened, rocky or thorny soil, rather than good soil, and bore little or no fruit. But why did St. James say that idle listeners were lying to themselves? I think the reason might be because if they were thinking that all God wanted was for them merely to show up on the Christian Sabbath and listen to the Scriptures, they were deceived, because God didn’t give us Sacred Scripture to win literary awards, or because he wanted to entertain us, but because he wanted to change our life and through us change the world. And if we come to hear the word of God without desiring for it to have a radical impact on our existence, without intending to act on it, without giving full rein to its power to save us and others, then God tells us that we, like Christians in St. James’ day, are triply-deceived. We’re deceived about its purpose, about its power, and about our dramatic need for it. The Word of God brought to life creation out of nothing. The Word of God calmed stormy seas, made the deaf hear, dumb speak, blind see, lame walk, healed lepers, exorcised demons, and raised the dead. We’re called not just to hear but to live off every word that comes from God’s mouth.
We see how great a gift the Word of God is, and what our response to it needs to be, also in today’s first reading from the Book of Deuteronomy. Moses conveyed to the Israelites what set Israel apart from other nations: the statutes and decrees the Lord had given them to help them live in fidelity to the covenant God had made with them. God put his divine wisdom in human language and had it written down to guide them individually and as a people. But Moses stressed that this gift was not supposed to sit on a metaphorical bookshelf. He repeatedly told them, “Hear the statutes and decrees that I am teaching you to observe,” “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord your God,” and “Observe them carefully.” They were entrusted as words to be done and lived with gratitude. With tremendous pride, Moses asks aloud, “What great nation has statutes and decrees that are as just as this whole law which I am setting before you today?” They were called to observe the commandments not as slaves just doing what they’re told, or as followers carry out a burdensome duty, but as people full of love for God and made ever more free the more faithfully they learn through the statutes and decrees to love God with their whole mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as themselves. At their best, the Israelites saw the law of the Lord not as a fence to hem them in, but as a signpost pointing the way to true freedom, real love and lasting happiness. Like we prayed in the Psalm, at their best they sought not just to know what is just but to “do justice” and so “live in the presence of the Lord.”
But Moses gave his people a warning with regard to God’s law. He said, “In your observance of the commandments of the Lord, your God, … you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it.” From the beginning, he was telling them that there would be a temptation to change God’s word. It’s pretty easy to see why many people have sought to subtract from it the parts of it that aren’t easy, pleasant, convenient or in conformity with what one wants to believe and do. Martin Luther tried to eliminate the Book of James from Christian educating, deeming it an “epistle of straw” because he didn’t like its passage that faith without works is dead; similarly he effectively eliminated seven Old Testament Books from his translation of the inspired works of the Bible, because, like with the Epistle of James, they didn’t align with his theological ideas. U.S. founding father and third president Thomas Jefferson excised parts of the Gospels he didn’t like, reducing Jesus from a divine person and miracle worker to a moral philosopher, excising even Jesus’ resurrection. Plenty of other people today try to eliminate from the Word of God passages they don’t want to hear or follow, whether about welcoming the stranger, or receiving little children like we receive Christ, or about sexual sins, or even, as we’ve seen over the last several weeks, about the real presence of Jesus in the Holy Eucharist.
But there’s also the temptation to change it by adding to it, by using the reverence we have for God to take it in another direction that in fact distorts it. This is what happened to the Pharisees and Scribes, whom Jesus confronts in today’s Gospel in the dramatic scene in which the two closely associated groups criticize Jesus and his disciples for not obsessing about the ritual hand washings traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Mark describes the complicated and rigorous practice of Jewish ceremonial washings, something that God had not revealed that he wanted done but something that the Scribes in the fourth and fifth centuries BC had developed to foster what they called ritual purity and that, over time, was treated almost as if such practices were as important as the Ten Commandments. The Scribes and the Pharisees taught that everyone needed to wash his or her hands in two directions with one-and-a-half egg shells of clean water, first from the fingertips down and then with the fingertips at the bottom, drying the other hand with the outside of a closed fist. This was the religious practice they obsessed about, as if such collectively neurotic, obsessive-compulsive hygienic washings of hands — and similar practices with cups, jugs, kettles and beds — were what would help them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other. Jesus, the truth incarnate, responded to their accusation and to the false theology behind it with force and clarity. He called them hypocrites — literally in Greek, actors or fakers — and cited the Prophet Isaiah against them, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.” And then Jesus told them: “You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.” They had changed what God had given to them, substituting their own humanly developed systems of cleanliness for what God himself wanted, adding these to the Word of God and in the process subtracting from the Word of God things far more important.
Jesus’ words that the Pharisees and the Scribes were only seeming to serve the Lord while their hearts and actions were doing otherwise would have come as a great shock to his listeners. The Scribes and Pharisees were considered as extraordinarily faithful Jews. They studied the Bible intensely down to the letter. Many had memorized it. They committed themselves to live it and go far beyond the minimum. They went to the synagogue not just every Saturday but most days. They prayed at least three times per day. They fasted twice a week, rather than just once a year like others on the Day of Atonement. They paid tithes not only on the things explicitly mentioned in the Mosaic Law but on their whole income. They used to walk to Jerusalem a few times each year to celebrate the major Jewish feasts like Passover at the Temple. They only ate kosher meat. They wore special clothes. And yet in all of this, Jesus, as God, says remarkably, “This people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me.” And he was of course right! The people who did all of these religious deeds were also the ones who would end up conspiring to kill Jesus, conspiring with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and Romans, to have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from God despite all of their external practices! They were in fact not authentically religious at all but profound hypocrites, since in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers. They were doers, in fact, not of God’s word but of what God had explicitly forbidden.
After responding to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about what God wants in terms of purity. He wants us to be pure, not just our palms and fingers. And so he talked about purity and impurity of heart. In the Sermon on the Mount, you remember, Jesus praised the “pure of heart,” saying, “They shall see God,” and reminded us, “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be.” Jesus had come into the world not to show us how to wash our hands but to give us a heart transplant, to take out our heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, cleansing us so that we might receive within God’s love expressed in the word of God, treasure it with gratitude, and then put it into practice by loving God and love others as God had loved us first. And so Jesus said to all those assembled, “Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” He emphasized that nothing coming from outside a person, either touching a jug or a ritually impure person — like a woman at her time of the month, or a leper, or anyone who has come into contact with either — or even anything we eat, can make us impure in the sight of God. The purity that God cares about, he said, is what comes from the heart, which in the Biblical understanding is the real core of the person, pointing to what we love and desire. It’s what’s in the heart — and the actions that flow from the heart — that renders a person pure or impure, holy or sinful, Jesus says, emphasizing that it is from the heart, from what we desire, that sins like “evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, and folly,” all come. These evil desires, Jesus says, are what make someone impure, and we see several of them, especially malice, deceit, envy, arrogance, and murderous thoughts, on evident display in the actions of the Pharisees.
The point of the Gospel is not to become like the Pharisees in obsessing about how others are living, but to help us examine our hearts and make a commitment to ensure our hearts are as clean as the Pharisees wanted their hands to be. It’s to honor the Lord with our lips, our hearts, our hands, our knees, our feet, and all our mind, soul and strength. It’s to cling to his teaching in all its beauty and fullness. It’s to ensure that we place our treasure in the things of God and seek the opposite of what Jesus condemns and therefore to commit to chastity, generosity, self-sacrifice, faithful love, goodness, truthfulness, integrity, happiness over others’ gifts, praise of God and others, humility and wisdom. It’s to respond to Jesus who says, “Hear me all of you and understand,” with great attention, comprehension, and action.
It’s good for us to focus in particular on Jesus’ words about the heart. If with the words he put on Isaiah’s lips, he criticized his critics for their hearts being far from him, he obviously desires that our hearts be close to him. If he said that out of the heart come evil thoughts, words and deeds, he desires out of our hearts to come holy thoughts, truthful words, and loving deeds. In the ongoing Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States, in which with gratitude we acknowledge, celebrate, adore and share Jesus, the Word made flesh on our altars, in our Tabernacles, and even within us in Holy Communion, we need to ask whether we’re idle listeners of the Word-made-flesh, deceiving ourselves, or doers of the Word-made-flesh. The Church’s teaching on the Eucharist can’t just remain intellectual or theological; it must become practical. It’s not enough to honor the Lord with our lips, stating that after the consecration the bread becomes the Body of Christ and the wine the Precious Blood of Christ, but we need to honor this mystery with our hearts and conform our lives to this reality. Are our hearts close to the Eucharistic Jesus at Mass, in adoration, in life, or far from him? Do truly Eucharistic deeds flow from within our hearts — in which we give our own body, blood, sweat, tears, time and things to God and others, as we seek to do “this” in memory of Jesus — or, rather, do self-centered and even selfish thoughts, words and actions flow, even after we’ve received Jesus?
That brings us to the great litmus test God gives us to determine whether we’re idle listeners or doers of the Word: how we respond to what God is doing at Mass. The Mass is supposed to change us, and change us big-time, even 30, 60 or 100 ways, to use the numbers Jesus gave in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed. As we listen to the Word of God in the Liturgy of the Word, we’re called humbly to welcome it, conscious that God at Mass seeks to plant it within us, because it has the power to save our souls. He wants us to nourish the Word of God within, much like the Blessed Mother whose fiat mihi secundum verbum tuum shows that she wanted her whole life to develop in accordance with God’s word. He wants us to strive to remember it, to pray it, to strive to enflesh it more and more, and to share it with others in all its saving power. He wants us to respond to it like St. Teresa of Calcutta, whose feast we will celebrate this Thursday, responded to God’s Word when he revealed his plans for her on the train to Darjeeling. He wants what he has spoken to us today through Moses, through the Psalm, through James and in the Gospel to purify and transform first our hearts, and then our thoughts, then words and actions, so that we may be missionaries of that saving word and the charity to which it leads in the midst of a world in which that word is often not heard, seen or believed. Elsewhere in the Gospel, Jesus said that his family members, his real brothers and sisters, are those who “hear the word of God and do it” (Lk 8:21). The Word of God confirms us in our divine filiation and makes us spiritual siblings if we but hear, observe and obey it. This is the path of the saints. As Pope St. Gregory the Great, whose feast we will celebrate on Tuesday, once declared: vita bonorum viva lectio, that the life of the good, the life of the saints, is a living reading of the Word of God. We are supposed to be living, breathing, commentaries of God’s word for the whole world to see. As we prepare to receive the Word-made-flesh at this Mass, we ask Jesus, who calls us to imitate him as a doer of the word, to give us the help he knows we need to accomplish it. If we respond to those graces, then we will realize, like the Blessed Mother, Teresa of Calcutta, Gregory the Great and the saints already have, the truth of today’s responsorial psalm — “The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord” — not just in this life but forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Dt 4:1-2, 6-8
Moses said to the people:
“Now, Israel, hear the statutes and decrees
which I am teaching you to observe,
that you may live, and may enter in and take possession of the land
which the LORD, the God of your fathers, is giving you.
In your observance of the commandments of the LORD, your God,
which I enjoin upon you,
you shall not add to what I command you nor subtract from it.
Observe them carefully,
for thus will you give evidence
of your wisdom and intelligence to the nations,
who will hear of all these statutes and say,
‘This great nation is truly a wise and intelligent people.’
For what great nation is there
that has gods so close to it as the LORD, our God, is to us
whenever we call upon him?
Or what great nation has statutes and decrees
that are as just as this whole law
which I am setting before you today?”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 15:2-3, 3-4, 4-5
R. (1a) The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Whoever walks blamelessly and does justice;
who thinks the truth in his heart
and slanders not with his tongue.
R. The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Who harms not his fellow man,
nor takes up a reproach against his neighbor;
by whom the reprobate is despised,
while he honors those who fear the LORD.
R. The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Who lends not his money at usury
and accepts no bribe against the innocent.
Whoever does these things
shall never be disturbed.
R. The one who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
Reading 2
Jas 1:17-18, 21b-22, 27
Dearest brothers and sisters:
All good giving and every perfect gift is from above,
coming down from the Father of lights,
with whom there is no alteration or shadow caused by change.
He willed to give us birth by the word of truth
that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
Humbly welcome the word that has been planted in you
and is able to save your souls.
Be doers of the word and not hearers only, deluding yourselves.
Religion that is pure and undefiled before God and the Father is this:
to care for orphans and widows in their affliction
and to keep oneself unstained by the world.
Alleluia
Jas 1:18
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The Father willed to give us birth by the word of truth
that we may be a kind of firstfruits of his creatures.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 7:1-8, 14-15, 21-23
When the Pharisees with some scribes who had come from Jerusalem
gathered around Jesus,
they observed that some of his disciples ate their meals
with unclean, that is, unwashed, hands.
—For the Pharisees and, in fact, all Jews,
do not eat without carefully washing their hands,
keeping the tradition of the elders.
And on coming from the marketplace
they do not eat without purifying themselves.
And there are many other things that they have traditionally observed,
the purification of cups and jugs and kettles and beds. —
So the Pharisees and scribes questioned him,
“Why do your disciples not follow the tradition of the elders
but instead eat a meal with unclean hands?”
He responded,
“Well did Isaiah prophesy about you hypocrites, as it is written:
This people honors me with their lips,
but their hearts are far from me;
in vain do they worship me,
teaching as doctrines human precepts.
You disregard God’s commandment but cling to human tradition.”
He summoned the crowd again and said to them,
“Hear me, all of you, and understand.
Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person;
but the things that come out from within are what defile.
“From within people, from their hearts,
come evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder,
adultery, greed, malice, deceit,
licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.
All these evils come from within and they defile.”
The post Doers of the Word With Hearts United to the Lord, 22nd Sunday (B), September 1, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
23 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.

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