Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

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August 31, 2024Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 31, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 31, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when, after several weeks of focusing on Jesus’ words to us in St. John’s Gospel about Jesus’ self-gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist, we return to St. Mark’s Gospel where Jesus will speak to us about the type of homage God expects of us. This applies to every interaction we have with God, but similarly, in this ongoing Eucharistic Revival, to the way we treat him in the Holy Eucharist.
This Sunday we have a dramatic scene in which Jesus and his followers are criticized by the Pharisees for not obsessing about the ritual hand washings traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Jesus, the truth incarnate, responds with force and clarity. He calls them hypocrites — literally in Greek, actors — and cites 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.” Then Jesus tells the Pharisees: “You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.”
Jesus’ words that the Pharisees 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 Pharisees were considered extraordinarily faithful Jews. They went to the synagogue every Saturday. They prayed at least three times a day. They fasted twice a week, rather than just once a year like other Jews on the Day of Atonement. They paid tithes on their whole income, rather than just on the things explicitly mentioned in the Mosaic Law. They used to walk to Jerusalem a few times each year to celebrate the major Jewish feasts like Passover at the Temple. They washed before every meal. They only ate kosher meat. They wore special clothes. And yet in all of this, Jesus, like the Triune God through Isaiah, says remarkably, “This people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me.” And Jesus was right! The people who did all of these religious deeds were also the ones who ended up conspiring to kill Jesus, working together with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and Romans to have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from him! They were in fact not authentically religious at all, because in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers.
But they and many others thought they were exemplary believers because of the way they scrupulously adhered to their human traditions above God’s clear commandments. St. Mark describes this Sunday in the Gospel 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. They needed to wash their hands in two directions with exactly one-and-a-half egg shells of clean water, first from the fingertips down and then with the fingertips at the bottom. This was the religious practice they obsessed about, as if such collectively neurotic, hygienic washings of hands, cups, jugs, kettles and beds were what would help them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other.
In response to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about the purity God himself wants. In the Sermon on the Mount, 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 the love of God, treasure it with gratitude, and then love God and love others as God had loved us first.
And so Jesus says 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 the outside, either touching a jug or a ritually impure person, 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. The heart 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. Jesus states 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, 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.
Jesus wants all of us to hear him and understand the truths he is describing. He wants this conversation with the Pharisees to be consequential in the way you and I understand our faith and live it. Especially with regard to him in the Holy Eucharist, do we honor him with our lips or with our hearts? Do we say to him and mean, as St. Peter said last week, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,” or do we pay greater attention to celebrities or presidential candidates or others vying for our attention. Do we say to Jesus in the Eucharist, like St. Thomas the Apostle, “My Lord and my God,” and treat him with awe and prioritize him, or do we relate to him as if he’s just bread and wine? Do we disregard God’s commandments in favor of human traditions, clinging to our own preferences of the ways we’d like to worship God, or do we do this, the Eucharist, in Jesus’ memory as he commanded? Do our hearts treasure his self-gift in the Eucharist or are our hearts set on worldly things? Do we really mean the words we pray at Mass, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and my soul shall be healed?,” or do we give him lip service? Do we try to receive him with love and purity of heart or do we come to communion with hearts defiled by evil thoughts, unchastity, greed, malice, deceit, envy, arrogance, or even by licentiousness, theft, blasphemy, adultery and murder? Do we truly adore him or worship him in vain?
There are important considerations because there are many today who do what Jesus warned the Pharisees about in today’s Gospel. They try to substitute human traditions for God’s commandments, like the pseudo-commandment to be nice over the Christian duty to call people to repent and believe. They substitute football stadiums for Churches on Sunday. They substitute politically correct ideas on human sexuality, gender, sex, marriage and family for what God has revealed. They supplant the commandment not to kill to permit the destruction of human life in the womb or in hospitals and nursing homes. They replace God’s command to love our neighbor as ourselves with justifications for treating migrants and refugees, or the poor and needy, or those of other races, or religions, with hardened hearts. Or to keep to things more particular to the Eucharistic Revival, they cling to liturgical preferences — about music, priests, homily length, or even parishes — more than they do to Jesus Christ in the Sacraments.
Jesus in this Sunday’s Gospel is trying to call the Pharisees — and everyone else — to conversion. The point is not to become like the Pharisees in obsessing about how others are living, rather than examining our own hearts. It’s to make a commitment to ensure our souls are as clean as the Pharisees wanted their hands to be. It’s to honor the Lord with both our lips and our hearts. It’s to cling to his teaching in all its beauty and fullness. It’s to take great advantage of the Sacrament of Confession in which God power-washes our insides. It’s to ensure that we place our treasure in the things of God and seek the opposite of what Jesus condemns: 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.
The great way to do this is at Mass, as the Eucharistic Revival has been striving to make clear. This is where we come to honor the Lord, to worship him, not in vain, but with our lips, hearts, mind, soul, strength and voices. It’s where we come to cling not to human traditions and desires but to God and his commandments. It’s where we recognize that while nothing that enters from the outside can defile a person, what enters into us in Holy Communion can sanctify a person, provided that we receive him as he deserves and desires. And it’s where Christian conspire not to put Jesus to death, but to enter into his passion, death and resurrection, and come out of Mass in allegiance to bring Jesus to the end of the earth. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was:
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 Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 31, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
9 min
August 30, 2024Folly and Wisdom with Regard to a Crucified Bridgegroom, 21st Friday (II), August 30, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of the Holy Cross
August 30, 2024
1 Cor 1:17-25, Ps 33, Mt 25:1-13

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.30.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
In today’s readings, as we prepare for the beginning of a new semester, there is a huge contrast between wisdom and foolishness. In the Gospel, Jesus focuses on the wise and foolish virgins, with the hope that we will learn to imitate the wise and learn from the mistakes of the foolish. In the first reading, St. Paul speaks about how God will destroy the “wisdom of the wise and the learning of the learned,” how he has “made the wisdom of the world foolish” and established the Cross, which is a “scandal to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles” as the “power and the wisdom of God,” establishing this “foolishness of God” as “wiser than human wisdom.” Wisdom is more and greater than intelligence or knowledge, and foolishness is worse than dullness or ignorance. Wisdom means to look at the world with God’s perspective. It means seeing and live in the “real, real world” where God is present and, despite appearances to the contrary, King and Lord. Foolishness is really a blindness to the ultimate reality of things in such a way that far less important things are prioritized and even sometimes promoted to absolutes or to divine status. It’s so important that at a university like Columbia, students, teachers and everyone learn become not just smarter about various subject matters, but truly wise. Columbia’s motto points to this wisdom: in lumine tuo, videbimus lumen (Ps 36:10), “In your light [O God,] we will see light.” The litmus test as to how this university reveals its wisdom or its foolishness is, at every time, by how serious it takes and lives that motto.
Let’s turn to what today’s readings reveal about wisdom and foolishness. To understand the wisdom and folly Jesus is describing in the Gospel, we first need to understand the ancient practice of a Jewish wedding. There were two main stages in a marriage. The first would be the exchange of vows. When this took place, the man and woman were married, but they would continue to live apart for a while, even up to a year, while the husband prepared everything to welcome his new wife into his home. It was during this time, for example, that the Archangel Gabriel appeared to Mary; she was already wedded to Joseph but they had not started to live under the same roof. The second stage was when the bridegroom, the husband, would come to the house of the bride to pick her up and take her to his home. He would be accompanied by all the guests from his side as he went to her home. There he would meet her and all the guests from her side — her bridesmaids, family members, friends and neighbors — who would be waiting for him. Both groups would process back together to his home and when they arrived, they would celebrate the nuptials for eight days with all their friends and family (something they would consider far more enjoyable than leaving all of them behind for a honeymoon!) The bridegroom could come at any time to pick up his bride and so people needed to be ready. Before he would come, he would send out a herald who would announce along the path, “Behold the Bridegroom is coming,” but the husband himself could come within hours, days, up to a week. He could come in the middle of the night. There was a law that said that if one were out at night, one had to have a lamp, which was common sense to prevent any ambushes and retard burglaries, etc. People could either wait with the bride or accompany the bridegroom — but most would prefer the former because it was less walking! As soon as the Bridegroom took his Bride into his house, the doors really would be shut, to prevent latecomers crashing their party. This wedding tradition, which was universal at Jesus’ time, is still found today in certain parts of the Holy Land and Middle East.
Jesus used that image as the background to communicate to us how we should wisely be living our life in preparation for the return of Jesus Christ, the Bridegroom, at the end of our life or at the end of the world, whichever comes first. Jesus contrasts five wise bridesmaids versus five foolish ones, wanting us to imitate the lessons we see in the five wise ones. We can focus on three lessons.
The first is vigilance for the Bridegroom’s coming. The heralds have already gone out to announce that Jesus is coming. He is already married to his Bride the Church, but he’s awaiting the time in which he will be able to celebrate with the wedding banquet that will last not just eight twenty-four hour periods, but be an eternal eighth day (the day of resurrection, the new and eternal “first day of the week”). All of us have been given invitations and are members of the wedding party. Jesus wants us there. But we have to be ready to go with him whenever he arrives. Death, for a Christian, is not meant to be a scary thing. It’s the time when Jesus the Bridegroom comes for us to take us to His home when we will celebrate with him forever. We’re called to await him with eager longing, with great expectation. He wants the lamps of our hearts burning for him, full of the oil of love. For certain, the best way for us to stay alert for the return of the Bridegroom is for us to be ready, with hearts burning with love, for the presence of the Bridegroom now. The more we long for Jesus in the Eucharist, the more we will long to share eternal communion with him. The more we attentively listen to his Word in Sacred Scripture, the more prepared we will be to hear even the softest footsteps of his advent. The more we seek to recognize him in the persons and events of each day, and love and embrace them as we would love and embrace Christ, the more ready we will be ready to embrace Christ when he appears without disguise.
The second thing Jesus teaches us about wisdom in the image of the ten bridesmaids is that there are certain things we cannot borrow. Just as the unwise virgins didn’t have enough oil for their own lamps — and oil stands for expectant love for the Lord — so we can’t borrow anyone else’s faith, hope or love. We need to have our own, otherwise we’ll be caught unready and be left outside. All ten virgins have the desire to encounter the Bridegroom, they all show up. Their fidelity is taken for granted. The wise bridesmaids have no inherent natural qualities that automatically put the foolish virgins at a disadvantage. They are all tired and fall asleep. They all have lamps. They all have some oil in the lamps. But the wise virgins have brought extra flasks. St. Augustine in his commentary on this parable said that virginity shows their abstention from sin, their lamps shows their good works, but the oil manifests their love for God in abstaining from sin and doing their good works, rather than to win the praise of others. Each one’s oil, in other words, is the gift of each one’s virginity, the first gift of one’s self, the integrity of the person, the purity of heart that longs to see the Bridegroom face to face. The person becomes the gift, the self-offering, this all-inclusive personal act of self-giving in pure love. The unwise have not committed their lives to the extreme; there is some self giving but not to overflowing.
The third lesson is that there is a time that can be too late. Certain things cannot be obtained at the last minute. The unwise virgins were caught off guard. They couldn’t borrow oil, so they had to try to obtain some on their own, but they missed the bridegroom and were locked out. They knocked on the door saying, “Lord, lord, open to us.” But then he replied with the words that I think are the saddest and most frightening in all of Sacred Scripture: “Truly I tell you, I do not know you.” The Bridegroom cannot know them because the would-be brides are offering only a borrowed facsimile of love that is not flowing from their heart. Their souls are like the empty lamps they are carrying. For the Lord to know us, for us to be on time for the wedding banquet, we have to spend our time getting to know him intimately, as a friend we love, as a savior, as the bridegroom of our souls, as God. Many of us often put off the most important thing in the life, which is to make God number one in our lives. Jesus tells us that there will be a time when there will be no time left. There will be a time when the door will be shut. Now is the time for us to get to know the Lord so that the Lord may never say, “I don’t know you.” Now is the time for us to prepare for his return. The Lord in today’s Gospel tells us that the wise among us will always be prepared. The moral he gives at the end of today’s parable is crystal clear: “Keep awake, therefore, for you know neither the day nor the hour.” To be awake means never to be asleep to God, but always to be alert, full of love, waiting for his return. It means to be living not according to the wisdom of the world but according to God’s power and glory.
St. Paul at the beginning of his first Letter to the Christians in Corinth applies all of these lessons to how we relate to Christ crucified. The Bridegroom we and the Church await has wounds, lots of them, out of love for us. Our Crucified and Risen Savior turns to us with a glorious scarred hand and bids us to come, follow him. To follow Jesus means to follow someone who was crucified, who was ignominiously murdered in a conspiracy between religious and civil leaders, and one who told us that if we should wish to be his disciples, we would need to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow him all the way, even to crucifixion should it be needed. But he does so because he knows that the Cross is not simply a symbol of torture and death but of the love for others that makes even that much suffering and death bearable. St. Paul wants us to have our lamps filled to overflowing with the oil of grateful love for our crucified Bridegroom and for all those he loved enough to give his life. It’s through the love he manifested for us on the Cross that we really come to know Jesus. The door he opens for us is the wound of his Sacred Heart, where he helps us to enter and abide. This is what St. Paul is describing in today’s first reading. He did not seek to preach “with the wisdom of human eloquence,” because then the raw power of the “cross of Christ [might be] emptied of its meaning.” He noted that the Cross — that being publicly executed out of love — is “foolishness to those who are perishing,” to the worldly, to Greeks who thought that the greatest wisdom was self-preservation. God came to “destroy the wisdom of the wise” according to the world and did so on Calvary when he crucified it. There “God made the wisdom of the world foolish.” But, he said, while Christ crucified is a scandal to the Jews and folly to Greeks and Gentiles, for Christians he is the “power and the wisdom of God”: we know the power of the Cross was to raise the dead and make salvation possible; we know the wisdom was to reveal that no one has greater love than to lay down one’s life to save theirs. Christ crucified is the incarnate wisdom and power of God, whose “foolishness … is wiser than human wisdom.” At the beginning of this new academic year, it’s a grace for us to have to confront the Cross and to ask whether we’re going to seek true wisdom or any a cheap facsimile of knowledge. If we’re going to strive to become truly wise, the Crucified Christ will be our teacher and the Cross will be our school. St. Paul is hoping that we will be able to say, as he did and wrote to the Galatians, that “I have been crucified with Christ and the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave his life up for me” and “May I boast of nothing except the Cross of Christ through which the world has been crucified to me and I to the world” (Gal 2:20, 6:14).
Today we seek to Mass to be crucified with Christ, to enter into his passion, death and resurrection. We come like wise virgins awaiting the Bridegroom. He pours himself out on the Cross in self-giving love and calls us to do this in his memory, to model our life on the mystery of the Cross, to experience its true power of redemptive love and the wisdom of God’s saving ways. Let us, like St. Paul, embrace Jesus in all his power, wisdom and glory, and, with passion, filled with mercy, let us live not for ourselves but for him who died for us, and go out to help people come to embrace the Crucified bridegroom with lamps and flasks full of the oil of love Jesus pours out here.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 COR 1:17-25
Brothers and sisters:
Christ did not send me to baptize but to preach the Gospel,
and not with the wisdom of human eloquence,
so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning.
The message of the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing,
but to us who are being saved it is the power of God.
For it is written:
I will destroy the wisdom of the wise,
and the learning of the learned I will set aside.
Where is the wise one?
Where is the scribe?
Where is the debater of this age?
Has not God made the wisdom of the world foolish?
For since in the wisdom of God
the world did not come to know God through wisdom,
it was the will of God through the foolishness of the proclamation
to save those who have faith.
For Jews demand signs and Greeks look for wisdom,
but we proclaim Christ crucified,
a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles,
but to those who are called, Jews and Greeks alike,
Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God.
For the foolishness of God is wiser than human wisdom,
and the weakness of God is stronger than human strength.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 33:1-2, 4-5, 10-11
R. (5) The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.
Exult, you just, in the LORD;
praise from the upright is fitting.
Give thanks to the LORD on the harp;
with the ten-stringed lyre chant his praises.
R. The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.
For upright is the word of the LORD,
and all his works are trustworthy.
He loves justice and right;
of the kindness of the Lord the earth is full.
R. The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.
The LORD brings to nought the plans of nations;
he foils the designs of peoples.
But the plan of the LORD stands forever;
the design of his heart, through all generations.
R. The earth is full of the goodness of the Lord.
Alleluia
LUKE 21:36
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Be vigilant at all times and pray,
that you may have the strength to stand before the Son of Man.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
MT 25:1-13
Jesus told his disciples this parable:
“The Kingdom of heaven will be like ten virgins
who took their lamps and went out to meet the bridegroom.
Five of them were foolish and five were wise.
The foolish ones, when taking their lamps,
brought no oil with them,
but the wise brought flasks of oil with their lamps.
Since the bridegroom was long delayed,
they all became drowsy and fell asleep.
At midnight, there was a cry,
‘Behold, the bridegroom! Come out to meet him!’
Then all those virgins got up and trimmed their lamps.
The foolish ones said to the wise,
‘Give us some of your oil,
for our lamps are going out.’
But the wise ones replied,
‘No, for there may not be enough for us and you.
Go instead to the merchants and buy some for yourselves.’
While they went off to buy it,
the bridegroom came
and those who were ready went into the wedding feast with him.
Then the door was locked.
Afterwards the other virgins came and said,
‘Lord, Lord, open the door for us!’
But he said in reply,
‘Amen, I say to you, I do not know you.’
Therefore, stay awake,
for you know neither the day nor the hour.”
The post Folly and Wisdom with Regard to a Crucified Bridgegroom, 21st Friday (II), August 30, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
16 min
August 29, 2024Kept Firm to the End, Passion of St. John the Baptist, August 29, 2024
Fr Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Memorial of the Passion of St. John the Baptist
Thursday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
August 29, 2024
1 Cor 1:1-9, Ps 145, Mk 6:17-29

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.29.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we celebrate the final way by which St. John the Baptist made straight the paths of the Lord. He had been his precursor in birth, making a joy-filled in utero proclamation of Christ’s presence. He was his forerunner in preaching the message of conversion, with the Word made flesh eventually echoing what the “voice of One crying out in the wilderness” was crying out: repent, change your ways, have a revolution in your conduct. He was his predecessor in the work of baptizing, showing in a non-sacramental anticipation what Christ himself would sacramentally institute, do and send his Church to continue to do to the ends of the earth and the end of time. And today we mark how he was his precursor in imprisonment, death and in a vague sense his resurrection, with Herod saying of Jesus the very words that the angels at the tomb would say, “He has been raised from the dead,” applying them to Jesus whom he, through the paranoia of a guilty conscience, viewed as John the Baptist redivivus. Tertullian said that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of future Christians, and the blood of this protomartyr was what prepared the way for Christ’s own martyrdom and the martyrdom of St. Stephen, the apostles, and so many others after Christ. Christ himself made that link after the Transfiguration, when Peter, James and John asked him about whether Elijah whom they had just seen speaking to Jesus would precede Jesus as the Messiah. Jesus replied, “I tell you that Elijah has already come, and they did not recognize him but did to him whatever they pleased. So also will the Son of Man suffer at their hands” (Mt 17:12). This feast used to be called the “Beheading of St. John the Baptist,” but in the updated Roman Missal of 2011, it was changed to “Passion,” specifically to link it to Christ’s Passion. So today we need to look at John the Baptist’s martyrdom in a Christological key and in a Christian key, because all of his actions point to Christ and insofar as our actions are meant to flow from our following and our union with Christ, John’s actions also implicate us just as much as they implicated Herod, Herodias, Salome and all Herod’s courtiers, military officials and the leading figures of Galilee.
The martyrdom of the Friend of the Bridegroom happened because he pointed out the truth about Herod and Herodias’ putative marriage: John was trying to prepare even Herod and Herodias through conversion for the real love they were seeking down a dead end: to marry the true Bridegroom. What John preached by his suffering and death was a foretelling of what Jesus himself would do out of love for the Bride. John had reminded Herod Antipas that it was not lawful for him to marry his brother Philip’s wife. The book of Leviticus had said clearly, “You shall not have intercourse with your brother’s wife, for that would be a disgrace to your brother” (Lev 18:16). Herod had gone to Rome to visit his brother and while there seduced his sister-in-law, persuaded her to leave his brother, divorced his own wife and married her. To make the incestuous matters worse, Herodias was Philip’s and Herod’s niece as well. For all these reasons it was not right for Herod to have Herodias as his wife. With a string of violent verbs, the evangelist tells us that Herod had John arrested, bound, and imprisoned. He wanted to kill him, St. Matthew tells us, but he feared the people. And Herodias absolutely wanted him dead and was constantly looking to kill him. Eventually Herod would kill him when his vindictive bride pimped her princess daughter to do a striptease before her step-father and uncle and all his drunken courtiers to seduce him into vowing to give her anything she wanted. It was an incredible promise and Salome would ask for far more than half his kingdom. She would ask for Herod’s soul. She would demand that he murder an innocent man. As Jesus himself would ask later, “What profit would there be for one to gain the whole world and forfeit his life?” (Mt 16:26), and Salome was asking Herod to surrender his conscience and bring John the Baptist’s head on a platter. Herod gave the command. He had already refused to convert upon listening to John. Though troubled, he didn’t act. He put his own desires above the law, above conscience, about God, as had Herodias. And we can imagine to the Aramaic tune of Happy Birthday to You, the soldiers brought in, instead of birthday cake, the Baptist’s severed head and presented it to this lustful, power-hungry, self-important little assassin. But while that day was a tragedy for Herod and all those participating in his Satanic liturgy where lust ruled instead of sacrificial love, where immoral oaths dominated over the truth, it was a triumph for John the Baptist, in essence, his spiritual birthday in which he was born into eternity and we believe leaped for joy again.
John the Baptist’s whole life was a witness to Christ Crucified, to the Lamb of God who takes away sins, to the love of the Bridegroom who would lay down his life to save his Bride’s. He tried to get the Bride ready to receive the love of the Bridegroom. His entire existence was directed toward Christ and toward this mission, a mission he was willing to decrease in fulfilling so that Christ would increase to become all in all. His life is a challenge for our own, for us to examine whether we’re really living in a way in which we point to Christ, whether we are living for him and dying for him, whether we seek to give voice to his Word, point him out, bring others to him, and help others receive his love. In a special way, in today’s confusion concerning the truth about marriage, family, love, sexuality and even what it means to be a man or woman, it’s key for us to ponder John’s triumphant death today, his willingness courageously to announce the truth, to speak and live seeking to please God rather than men, to give ourselves along with the message, even if suffering and death be required. In today’s first reading, from the beginning of St. Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians which we will be hearing for the next three-plus weeks at daily Mass (through Sept 20), the apostle tells us that God who calls us, like John the Baptist, “to be holy” has “enriched [us] in every way, with all discourse and knowledge … so that [we] are not lacking in any spiritual gift as [we] wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ,” and he promises, “[God] will keep you firm to the end, irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.” Just like John the Baptist, we are called to be precursors, preparing people for the revelation of the living presence of the Lamb of God in our midst, and, even though we may suffer for it, God will keep us firm to the end if we allow him, too. We, like John, will encounter many whose consciences are deadened, who may seek to do to us what was done to John and to Jesus so that they don’t hear our words and example the call to repent and believe, and we need to be ready for it, just as John and Jesus were. For as we see on this day, if we die it witness to Christ, that message will never stop echoing until Christ comes again!
The Mass, in which John the Baptist’s words resonate until the end of time indicating to us the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, is where we become one with the Word we announce. This is where we receive the Body and Blood of the Bridegroom in the one-flesh and even one-Spirit consummation of his spousal union with the Bride. This is where we decrease so that he may increase. This is where we are strengthened to become martyrs, witnesses, to Christ. This is where he enriches us in every way, where he fills us with every spiritual gift, where he makes us firm so that we may persevere irreproachable to the end. This is where we receive something far more valuable than even 100 kingdoms of Herod!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 Cor 1:1-9
Paul, called to be an Apostle of Christ Jesus by the will of God,
and Sosthenes our brother,
to the Church of God that is in Corinth,
to you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, called to be holy,
with all those everywhere who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
their Lord and ours.
Grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ.
I give thanks to my God always on your account
for the grace of God bestowed on you in Christ Jesus,
that in him you were enriched in every way,
with all discourse and all knowledge,
as the testimony to Christ was confirmed among you,
so that you are not lacking in any spiritual gift
as you wait for the revelation of our Lord Jesus Christ.
He will keep you firm to the end,
irreproachable on the day of our Lord Jesus Christ.
God is faithful,
and by him you were called to fellowship with his Son, Jesus Christ our Lord.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 145:2-3, 4-5, 6-7
R. (1) I will praise your name for ever, Lord.
Every day will I bless you,
and I will praise your name forever and ever.
Great is the LORD and highly to be praised;
his greatness is unsearchable.
R. I will praise your name for ever, Lord.
Generation after generation praises your works
and proclaims your might.
They speak of the splendor of your glorious majesty
and tell of your wondrous works.
R. I will praise your name for ever, Lord.
They discourse of the power of your terrible deeds
and declare your greatness.
They publish the fame of your abundant goodness
and joyfully sing of your justice.
R. I will praise your name for ever, Lord.
Alleluia
Mt 5:10
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Blessed are those who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness,
for theirs is the Kingdom of heaven.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 6:17-29
Herod was the one who had John the Baptist arrested and bound in prison
on account of Herodias,
the wife of his brother Philip, whom he had married.
John had said to Herod,
“It is not lawful for you to have your brother’s wife.”
Herodias harbored a grudge against him
and wanted to kill him but was unable to do so.
Herod feared John, knowing him to be a righteous and holy man,
and kept him in custody.
When he heard him speak he was very much perplexed,
yet he liked to listen to him.
She had an opportunity one day when Herod, on his birthday,
gave a banquet for his courtiers,
his military officers, and the leading men of Galilee.
Herodias’ own daughter came in
and performed a dance that delighted Herod and his guests.
The king said to the girl,
“Ask of me whatever you wish and I will grant it to you.”
He even swore many things to her,
“I will grant you whatever you ask of me,
even to half of my kingdom.”
She went out and said to her mother,
“What shall I ask for?”
She replied, “The head of John the Baptist.”
The girl hurried back to the king’s presence and made her request,
“I want you to give me at once
on a platter the head of John the Baptist.”
The king was deeply distressed,
but because of his oaths and the guests
he did not wish to break his word to her.
So he promptly dispatched an executioner with orders
to bring back his head.
He went off and beheaded him in the prison.
He brought in the head on a platter and gave it to the girl.
The girl in turn gave it to her mother.
When his disciples heard about it,
they came and took his body and laid it in a tomb.
The post Kept Firm to the End, Passion of St. John the Baptist, August 29, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
12 min
August 28, 2024The Work The Lord Asks of Us, 21st Wednesday (II), August 28, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Augustine
August 28, 2024
2 Thess 3:6-10.16-18, Ps 128, Mt 23:27-32

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.28.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
In today’s first reading, St. Paul helps us to ponder the importance of work, a subject that’s very important for us as we begin the work of a new semester and some of those present begin the transition from university studies to full-time employment. The Thessalonians thought the end of the world was coming so that they had stopped working. Paul called them to imitate him in his hard work, who, after spending all day preaching the Gospel and helping those who were coming to him, would spend his nights doing the arduous work of tent making so that he would show everyone else by his diligence the importance of the virtue of hard work in their life.
We remember that work was part of God’s plans from the beginning. At the beginning of time, even before the Fall, God had given us a three-fold vocation to work: to fill the earth and subdue it, to have dominion over all creatures, and to increase and multiply. After the Fall, this work would be toilsome, we’d do it with sweat on our brows and women would have pains in childbirth, but work itself would remain an essential element of the redemption. The reason for that is because by our work we cooperate with God in perfecting ourselves. There are always two dimension to work, something that’s distinguished in most romance languages by two different expressions “to do” or “to make”: to take the Latin terms, the first is facere (fare in Italian, faire in French, hacer in Spanish, fazer in Portuguese), which means transitively to make something like a desk or a chair; the second is agere (agire in Italian, agir in French and Portuguese, actuar in Spanish), which means intransitively to make oneself in the process of making something. When we work well, seeking to do things as well as we can, to finish on time, we build ourselves up in virtue. When we work poorly, not concerned with the final product or who will use it, when we’re lazy, we injure our character. St. Gregory of Nyssa, one of the early doctors of the Church said that we are our parents through our actions and the habits they form, and one of the most powerful means of that type of generation happens through our work. That’s why St. Paul insists upon it as he does.
“If anyone is unwilling to work,” the apostle underlines, “he shouldn’t eat.” Notice, first, what he doesn’t say. He doesn’t state that if someone can’t work because of a serious disability or because she is an infant or is 114 years old, that person shouldn’t eat. Nor does he say that if someone has been laid off and despite searching every day for a job still hasn’t found one, that that person shouldn’t eat. He says, “If anyone is unwilling to work.” That’s the big issue for St. Paul. We should all be willing to work and when we have the capacity to work, we should be striving to do so. This is true even for someone who is rich and strictly speaking doesn’t have to work in order to have food on the table. This is true also for those who are retired. It’s not a time for decades of vacation wasting time watching soap operas or obsessing about golf. Those who are retired can be grateful they no longer have to work with the intensity and pressure they once did, but they should be using their time to do another type of work, to do good, to help others, to volunteer, to care for those in need, to build up their parish or their community, to tutor and to pass on wisdom.
St. Paul’s words on not enabling and feeding someone “unwilling to work” are very important for us to hear in our culture, because in many places our culture is changing. Whereas once people looked to America as the place of the American dream, where by hard work someone who is poor can become rich and enrich the lives of others, today it is becoming increasingly in many places a culture of the handout, where people who can work try not to, in order to live off of the work of others, where people talk about a universal basic income providing money to those who want to play video games all day, where a few try to enter our country not to work but in order to get welfare, free health care, free education and everything else free, where some hope to get a minor injury on the job so that they can apply for disability and start collecting, where others who are hurt without trying to get hurt nevertheless take advantage of a leg injury to collect for the whole rest of their life while they would still be capable of lots of other types of work, where an 18-year-old kid told me in one of the parishes I led that he was hoping to get laid off so that he could collect unemployment. I saw something recently on one of the news sites that said — it’s hard for me to believe — that more people of working age are not working in the United States now than are working. And it’s changing the fiber of our country. This isn’t a rich/poor issue, it’s not a Democrat/Republican issue, it’s a moral/immoral issue. The United States was built on hard work of generations and if the present generations just want to live off of the hard work of their forbears, rather than imitate it and build upon it, then the country will weaken from within from the vice of indolence. God calls us to work and to sanctify that work, sanctifying ourselves and others through that work. These are important thoughts to ponder as we approach Labor Day on Monday.
That brings us to the second point. One of the most important forms of work that we are called to by God is to engage in our sanctification in response to his grace. The Psalm tells us today, “Blessed are you who fear the Lord, who walk in his ways! For you shall eat the fruit of your handiwork.” The Lord wants us all to eat the fruit of the hard work of reverentially walking in his ways, of following his paths, of crossing the road as he does with self-sacrificial love. Growth in the life of faith is hard work. It’s hard to be faithful to prayer. It’s hard work to get involved in charitable activity. It’s a challenge to continue studying the faith. Sometimes getting through a homily may feel like a workout! It’s hard to forgive, to turn the other cheek, to pray for those who persecute us, to conquer our fears and defend the faith when it’s attacked and to share it in season and out of season. But when we do the sometimes strenuous work of walking in the Lord’s ways, God promises us that we will eat the fruit of that handiwork, and not just experience the joy that comes from hard work here on earth, but enjoy it forever at the eternal banquet.
This is a path that the Scribes and the Pharisees did not take. Today Jesus gives his sixth and seventh and seven woes in their regard (the first three were on Monday, the middle two yesterday). He calls them hypocrites (actors) for pretending to walk in God’s ways but actually walking in their own ways and leading others into the pit with them. Today he uses two images. He compares them to the whitewashed tombs that would be on the sides of the roads every Spring. Since if one touched a tomb the person would be ritually impure for the triennial pilgrimages up to Jerusalem, the Jews would paint white all the tombs along the road side so that someone couldn’t possibly bump into them by accident. In the sunshine they could be quite beautiful, but inside, Jesus says, they still had filth, decay and dead bones. That’s what the Scribes and Pharisees were like, he suggested. They seemed to be stunningly pious on the outside, but inside they were filled with death, duplicity and evil-doing. He illustrated the point by the last of the seven woes. He said that on the outside they were claiming to want to venerate the prophets God had sent his people, lamenting that their ancestors had rejected and killed them, yet on the inside they were preparing to do the same things to Jesus, “to fill up what [their] ancestors measured out.” To return to the work analogy, the Scribes and the Pharisees on the outside seemed to work very hard in observing all of the minutiae of the law, but what they were doing was similar to the work of an employee who’s always at his desk, always typing on the keyboard, always seeming to work hard, but instead of accomplishing the company’s business, is not just wasting the company’s time by typing out personal emails, not just giving the company a bad name by some of his communications, but ultimately undermining the business by his failure to do what he should have been doing.
The saints are the ones who, in contrast to the Scribes and Pharisees and in imitation of St. Paul, really do God’s work. Today we have one of the greatest saints in history. St. Augustine initially opposed the work God was trying to do in his life and, despite all his diligent study and practice of rhetoric, discovered, as he wrote at the beginning of his famous Confessions, that God has made us for himself and our hearts are restless, without peace, until they rest in Him. After the death of his father when he was 17, he sought to work for ego, his libido, and ultimately for gods of his own making. But having discovered the true God after resisting him for long, he sought to make up for lost time. He described his dissipative form of work in Book X of his Confessions, in a passage that I think is one of the most eloquent in the history of writing. He penned, “Late have I loved you, O Beauty ever ancient, ever new, late have I loved you! You were within me, but I was outside, and it was there that I searched for you. In my unloveliness I plunged into the lovely things that you created. You were with me, but I was not with you. Created things kept me from you; yet if they had not been in you they would not have been at all. You called, you shouted, and you broke through my deafness. You flashed, you shone, and you dispelled my blindness. You breathed your fragrance on me; I drew in breath and now I pant for you. I have tasted you, now I hunger and thirst for more. You touched me, and I burned for your peace.” He describes how the work he did searching for God in creation and creatures, how he tuned out God’s voice, light, odor and food, about of his eyes, ears, smell, taste being addicted to the things of this world. God, however, eventually broke through, and when his restless heart discovered the true God so “late,” he desired to make up for lost time.
The “work” Augustine needed to do was ultimately to “believe in the One [God the Father] sent,” as Jesus described in the Bread of Life discourse we’ve been considering over the summer. He needed, in response to God’s grace, to make the leap of faith. He needed to repent, to die to his idols, and to turn to God and receive his mercy. That was not a one-time work but a lifetime one, that grew in stages. When we think about St. Augustine’s conversion, many of us can think about the dramatic circumstances that occurred in his life in Milan, after 15 years of sorrowful prayer by his mother, St. Monica. But as Pope Benedict, perhaps the most famous student of Augustine in history, said at St. Augustine’s tomb in Pavia in 2007, the work of Augustine’s conversion was continuous and can be mentioned in three phases.
The first phase is the one most known, after he had rejected the faith of his mother and sought it in worldly wisdom, in Manichean philosophy and in the art of rhetoric. One day in Milan, when he was 32, as he was weeping over his state in the back yard of his friend Alypius, he heard what sounded like kids singing from a neighboring yard saying, “Tolle et legge,” “Take and read.” He thought it was a strange game for kids to play, but finding no kids, he considered that it was a message perhaps from an angel. So he took up the Sacred Scriptures and began to read what his eyes found first. It was a passage from St. Paul’s Letter to the Romans that helped him to realize that he needed to stay awake perpetually in God’s presence. “It is the hour now for you to awake from sleep. For our salvation is nearer now than when we first believed; the night is advanced, the day is at hand. Let us then throw off the works of darkness [and] put on the armor of light; let us conduct ourselves properly as in the day, not in orgies and drunkenness, not in promiscuity and licentiousness, not in rivalry and jealousy. But put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rom 13:11-14). That passage seemed like it was written precisely for him — as it indeed it was, for him and for us! — and it gave him the courage from God finally to leave the long night of spiritual sleep and the darkness of the flesh behind and live with the Lord in the day. He received that word “not as the word of men, but as it truly is, the word of God,” and it went to work in him through faith. And his interiorization of God’s word was so great that he became one of the greatest commentators of it, in word and witness, in the history of the Church. We, too, need to do this work of conversion, turning from the works of the flesh and living according to the Holy Spirit.
But that famous conversion was only the first stage in Augustine’s lifetime work of repenting and believing. When he returned to Africa after his mother’s death, he founded a monastery for which he wrote the rule and began to write some of his great theological works. It was a perfect situation for him, it seemed, and he was cranking out works for God’s glory. One day when he had gone to visit a friend in the small city of Hippo, however, he was attending Mass and the elderly bishop asked the people to pray that the Lord would send him someone who could help him with his preaching duties in Latin, because he had become too infirm to preach. The people looked around and saw in the crowd Aurelius Augustinus, once the greatest rhetoric professors in the empire and now a monk, and proposed him. Augustine didn’t want to have anything to do with that work, which would require giving up a lot of his writing in order to care for ordinary people with very ordinary concerns. But he sensed that it was the Lord calling him to be humble and, like the Lord, begin to live and work for others. “Christ died for all,” he read in St. Paul’s second letter to the Corinthians, “so that those who live should not live for themselves, but for him who died for them” (2 Cor 5:15). And so he made the great sacrifice, being ordained a deacon and a priest and eventually, after the bishop’s death, bishop and successor. And it was from that point that he took on the work of becoming an icon of God in his love for his people. We, too, need to recognize that all of our gifts are not meant to be used for ourselves but for God and in him for others.
The third stage of his conversion, according to Pope Benedict XVI, was when he recognized, very late in life, that everything flows from God’s mercy, not from his own works. This third major conversion happened when Augustine was making his “retractions” of everything he had written, to correct what he now saw as his errors. When he looked back at his famous commentary on the Beatitudes — perhaps the most famous commentary on them of all time! — he saw that one of its major flaws was that he focused too much on our actions to become poor in spirit, meek, pure of heart, peacemaking, compassionate, hungry and thirsty for holiness, and willing to suffer for the faith. He focused too little, he recognized, on how without God we can’t live the beatitudes as they’re meant to be lived, that they’re all a grace of God’s mercy. Everything in our life is meant to be a response to God’s grace and mercy, and God gives us the help he knows we need to do what he asks and commands. That discovery of mercy is part of how St. Augustine grew to recognize the “Beauty ever ancient, ever new.” We, too, in all our work need to know that it all flows from God’s mercy, that all our capacities, talents, opportunities, virtues come ultimately from him, that we can’t do it on our own, but that God gives us those opportunities so that ultimately together with him the summit of his creation, us, whom he pronounced in the beginning “very good,” can be perfected.
Today on St. Augustine’s feast day we come to God to enter into the most important work of all time, Jesus’ life-saving passion, death and resurrection. This is the mix of what God has given — the fruit of the earth and of the vine — and the “work” of human hands, the joint offering of Christ the Head and Bridegroom and the Church the Body and Bride. This is where we eat the fruit of God’s handiwork and our own, as we unite all our sacrifices to Christ’s on the altar. This is where Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, from within raises our dead bones and brings us fully alive, so that we’re not whitewashed sepulchers but radiant temples. This is where God ultimately wants to give us the gift of continual conversion, as he calls, shouts, breaks through our deafness, flashes, shines and dispels our blindness, breathes his fragrance upon us and allows us to taste him so that we can hunger and thirst for more, touching us so that we can burn for his peace, the only peace that will ever satisfy our restless hearts!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 THES 3:6-10, 16-18
We instruct you, brothers and sisters,
in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,
to shun any brother
who walks in a disorderly way
and not according to the tradition they received from us.
For you know how one must imitate us.
For we did not act in a disorderly way among you,
nor did we eat food received free from anyone.
On the contrary, in toil and drudgery, night and day we worked,
so as not to burden any of you.
Not that we do not have the right.
Rather, we wanted to present ourselves as a model for you,
so that you might imitate us.
In fact, when we were with you, we instructed you that
if anyone was unwilling to work, neither should that one eat.
May the Lord of peace himself
give you peace at all times and in every way.
The Lord be with all of you.
This greeting is in my own hand, Paul’s.
This is the sign in every letter; this is how I write.
The grace of our Lord Jesus Christ be with all of you.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 128:1-2, 4-5
R. (1) Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
Blessed are you who fear the LORD,
who walk in his ways!
For you shall eat the fruit of your handiwork;
blessed shall you be, and favored.
R. Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
Behold, thus is the man blessed
who fears the LORD.
The LORD bless you from Zion:
may you see the prosperity of Jerusalem
all the days of your life.
R. Blessed are those who fear the Lord.
Gospel
MT 23:27-32
Jesus said,
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You are like whitewashed tombs, which appear beautiful on the outside,
but inside are full of dead men’s bones and every kind of filth.
Even so, on the outside you appear righteous,
but inside you are filled with hypocrisy and evildoing.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You build the tombs of the prophets
and adorn the memorials of the righteous,
and you say, ‘If we had lived in the days of our ancestors,
we would not have joined them in shedding the prophets’ blood.’
Thus you bear witness against yourselves
that you are the children of those who murdered the prophets;
now fill up what your ancestors measured out!”
The post The Work The Lord Asks of Us, 21st Wednesday (II), August 28, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
25 min
August 27, 2024Holding Fast to the Weightier Things, Encouraged and Strengthened by Christ, 21st Tuesday (II), August 27, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Saint Monica
August 27, 2024
2 Thes 2:1-3.14-17, Ps 96, Mt 23:23-26

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.27.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today, at the beginning of a new academic year, the readings the Church gives us and the saint we celebrate have much to teach us about how to order our life and be strengthened and encouraged by the Lord properly to prioritize and live.
In the first reading, we see that the Christians in Thessalonika were worried about the end of the world happening imminently, something that left them paralyzed and petrified. They weren’t working. Some didn’t seem to be eating. They basically thought what was the point if today was going to be the last day of their life. They were basing their life on hysteria and hype, “shaken out of [their] minds suddenly, … alarmed by a ‘spirit’ or by an oral statement or by a letter allegedly from [Paul] to the effect that the day of the Lord is at hand.” St. Paul stressed, “Let no one deceive you in any way.” Still today many are caught up in rumors, they’re able to be misled by videos on youtube, podcasts, books and websites about supposedly imminent apocalyptic events predicted by some sage or seer. Others are enslaved by rumors they pick up from secular sources, like tabloid papers and programs, by politicians, or by their neighbors. St. Paul wanted the people of his time, instead, to be basing their lives solidly on the truth that had been revealed to them. “Stand firm, brothers and sisters, and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught, either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.” This is always the antidote, to stand firm on the rock of God’s word in revelation and in the oral traditions passed down in the Church, both of which constitute what we call the “deposit of faith.” The better we know that revelation, the better we’ll be able to hold fast to it and not be swayed by the deceptions and manipulative hype of the age. In the particular question at hand, about the end of time, Jesus told us that we know not the day or the hour, that the end of the world may happen today but we will never know that it will happen today or thousands of years from now; anyone claiming to know is deceived and is deceiving others. What we do know Jesus also revealed: that we’re called to be vigilant in striving to live every day as if it is our last, not in dread, but behaving in a way that will lead us to eternity: praying, forgiving and asking for forgiveness, doing acts of charity, receiving the sacraments. At the end of the passage, St. Paul prayed that God would “encourage [their] hearts and strengthen them in every good deed and word,” the good deeds and words that we should be doing every day, so that we’ll be doing them on the day that will turn out to be our last or the world’s last.
In the Gospel, Jesus was fighting a different type of confusion and deception, one given by hypocritical lifestyle of the Scribes and Pharisees. Today we hear the fourth and the fifth of the seven woes, the ferocious denunciations, Jesus makes of the behavior of the Scribes and Pharisees in Matthew 23. Today Jesus called the Scribes and Pharisees once again “actors” (the literal translation of hypocrites) for neglecting the weightier things of the law in an obsession for the tiniest things. He says that they’re neurotic about paying tithes on garden herbs (mint, dill and cummin) that will always be in very short supply, obsessing about whether they owe perhaps two or three tiny leaves from a garden plant to the Temple, while totally overlooking justice, mercy and fidelity. There are so many examples of their injustice, mercilessness and infidelity: injustice, for example, in their refusing to care for their elderly relatives by saying all they had was given to God; mercilessness, in wanting to stone the adulterous woman or in resenting the fact that Jesus talked with sinners and ate with them; infidelity shown in their swearing oaths seemingly calling on God as the guarantor of their truthfulness while all the while intending to deceive. Jesus says that they “strain out the gnat and swallow the camel.” Both gnats and camels were unclean and would make any food they touched unclean. The Jews used to use filters over their wine to make sure no microscopic gnats were in it rendering it unfit to drink, but at the same time as doing that, Jesus was saying, they were eating huge camels. While obsessing about eliminating venial sins and imperfections, they were committing mortal sins, cleansing the “outside of the cup and dish” while inside being “full of plunder and self-indulgence.” We see how right Jesus was insofar as these people with a reputation for great holiness were those who conspired to have Jesus, an innocent man, framed by false testimony and publicly murdered by the same foreign authorities they thought had no legitimacy. Jesus was calling them out, calling them to conversion, and calling them to focus on the most important things, on cleansing their insides, on doing the weightier more important aspects of the law.
Jesus continues to call each of us to do the same. Sometimes we can be consumed about little things and miss the biggest. We can say a whole bunch of vocal prayers but mercilessly hold a grudge against a family member. We can book Masses for all types of holy intentions but then watch lustful films. We can dress with the finest clothes on Sunday but on the inside be a cesspool of judgements rather than love vis-a-vis our neighbor. If we’re not going to be actors like the Pharisees, if we’re not boing to be “blind guides,” we need humbly to receive Jesus’ help in the Sacrament of Confession to cleanse our insides and then focus on living in and extending God’s justice, mercy and fidelity.
Today the Church celebrates the feast of someone who focused on the weightier things of the law, someone who was a good guide to her husband and famous son in the ways of faith, someone who was encouraged and strengthened by the Lord to so many good deeds that remain known today, more than 1600 years later. St. Monica is one of the most endearing figures in history. Whereas many saints have inimitable qualities, she is one of the most relatable, approachable and practical of them all. As a Christian wife, her chief role was to sanctify her husband, who was a violent and dissolute pagan named Patricius. Though he was rich, he could not stand Monica’s generosity to the poor. Though she was as faithful and loving to him as she sought to be toward God, he constantly chastised her piety. If all of that was not hard enough to bear, her cantankerous mother-in-law lived with them and daily multiplied the insults. All of this could have driven Monica to divorce and despair, but instead it propelled her to even greater devotion to God and them. For 17 years, she joined her sufferings to prayers for their conversion. Eventually, the power of God’s grace and the example of her Christian virtues penetrated their hardened hearts and they both received baptism. For her husband it was just in time — Patricius would die a holy death in the hands of the Divine Thief less than a year later. But that work as a wife was just a warm-up for her labors as a mother. The oldest of her three children, Augustine, was then a brilliant teenage rhetoric student living away from home in Carthage. She hoped that he would follow the example of his father’s conversion, but, instead, especially after his father’s death, he went full-steam in the opposite direction. He joined the Manichean heretics. He invited a woman to cohabitate with him and fathered a child out-of-wedlock. When he would come home, he would intentionally blaspheme so much that Monica prevented him from eating or sleeping at home until the budding rhetorician learned to discipline his tongue. Monica prayed unceasingly for her son’s conversion, beseeching that he would turn in time. She fasted. She got friends to intercede. She arranged for priests to argue with him. She flooded her pillow and various churches with her tears. When Augustine decided he was going to Rome, Monica, fearing lest he never convert, decided to go with him. While waiting in port before their departure across the Mediterranean, however, Augustine lied to his mother about the departure time and left without her, caring so little about her as to leave his own mother helpless in a busy metropolis, without any word as to his whereabouts. But she didn’t “quit her job,” she didn’t give up. A bishop, seeing her weeping, assured her on behalf of God, “It is not possible that the son of so many tears should perish.” So she boarded a ship to Rome to look for Augustine there. She eventually received word that he was among the rhetoricians in Milan, and that’s where she and the Good Shepherd at last found their lost sheep. Thanks to the help of the bishop of Milan, St. Ambrose, who captivated Augustine first by his oratory and then by his faith and charity, Augustine renounced Manicheanism, accepted the Christian faith, made a promise of celibacy and received the gift of baptism at the age of 32. But it wasn’t just Ambrose whom God used for this great miracle. It was the example of the simple. As St. Augustine says it in his Confession, he turned to his friend Alypius and declared, “The unlearned start up and take heaven by force, and we with our learning, and without heart, … we wallow in flesh and blood! Are we ashamed to follow, because others are gone before, and not ashamed not even to follow?” The example of the weak, the foolish, the ignoble of birth by human standards — those like his mother! — pushed him over the limit, led him into the back yard, where he heard God telling him through an angel to take up and read, where he picked up Sacred Scripture and there heard the words that would change him forever: “I returned to the place where Alypius was sitting; for there had I laid the volume of the Apostle when I arose thence. I seized, opened, and in silence read that section on which my eyes first fell: Not in rioting and drunkenness, not in chambering and wantonness, not in strife and envying; but put ye on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make not provision for the flesh, in concupiscence. No further would I read; nor needed I: for instantly at the end of this sentence, by a light as it were of serenity infused into my heart, all the darkness of doubt vanished away.”
Mother and son decided to return home to Africa, but Monica would not make it. She took ill in the Roman port of Ostia and was soon on her deathbed. Augustine was now the one full of tears, but Monica replied, “Son, my hopes in this world are now fulfilled. All I wished to live for was that I might see you a Catholic and a child of heaven. God has granted me more than this in making you despise earthly felicity and consecrate yourself to his service.” What a beautiful testimony of a mother’s chief work, and she rejoiced not just at his baptism but that he had decided to become a celibate to serve God and to strive to become the Lord’s faithful and prudent servant. Monica became a saint precisely because of the way she was a faithful and prudent servant of her family, especially in difficult times. Her prayers, her tears, her fastings, her intercessions, caused because of the problems her family members made for her, ultimately not only helped them get to heaven, but helped her to become even more rich with every spiritual gift.
She was likewise one who was always ready for the last things out of a desire for God and for heaven. As her other son was weeping that she would die outside of her native Africa making it impossible for them to bury her in her native land, she said, “Bury my body wherever you will; let not care of it cause you any concern. One thing only I ask you, that you remember me at the altar of the Lord wherever you may be.” What a powerful preparation that thought is for Mass. Little did she know at the time that her son Augustine would become a priest and a bishop and be able to celebrate Mass for her at the altar. Little did she know that ordained son would keep the fourth commandment by honoring his mother’s faith and tears by eventually becoming one of the most famous Christian theologians of all time. But perhaps most of all, little did she grasp that today, 1637 years later, we would all be remembering her at the altar of the Lord in a continent that no one during her age would have even guessed existed. And all of this happened because she was faithful to her work as a spouse and a mother, even when it was excruciating. All of this happened because she was conscious of God’s presence, of the vocation to holiness not just for her but for her husband, son and mother-in-law, of her prudence in always giving an example of faith and offering an abundance of prayers for them at every time. It was here at Mass where she would bring her ceaseless prayers and where God responded in a way far greater to her good work than she could have ever imagined. Today as we come to pray at Mass as well, we recognize that the Lord comes here not as a thief but humbly, in order to sanctify us, encourage us and strengthen us for every good work. Today he comes to help reward us for prioritizing the weightiest thing of all. Today he’s here to hear, through St. Monica’s intercession, the prayers we make for the conversion and holiness of all our family members.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 THES 2:1-3A, 14-17
We ask you, brothers and sisters,
with regard to the coming of our Lord Jesus Christ
and our assembling with him,
not to be shaken out of your minds suddenly,
or to be alarmed either by a “spirit,” or by an oral statement,
or by a letter allegedly from us
to the effect that the day of the Lord is at hand.
Let no one deceive you in any way.
To this end he has also called you through our Gospel
to possess the glory of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Therefore, brothers and sisters, stand firm
and hold fast to the traditions that you were taught,
either by an oral statement or by a letter of ours.
May our Lord Jesus Christ himself and God our Father,
who has loved us and given us everlasting encouragement
and good hope through his grace,
encourage your hearts and strengthen them
in every good deed and word.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 96:10, 11-12, 13
R. (13b) The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Say among the nations: The LORD is king.
He has made the world firm, not to be moved;
he governs the peoples with equity.
R. The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Let the heavens be glad and the earth rejoice;
let the sea and what fills it resound;
let the plains be joyful and all that is in them!
Then shall all the trees of the forest exult.
R. The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Before the LORD, for he comes;
for he comes to rule the earth.
He shall rule the world with justice
and the peoples with his constancy.
R. The Lord comes to judge the earth.
Gospel
MT 23:23-26
Jesus said:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You pay tithes of mint and dill and cummin,
and have neglected the weightier things of the law:
judgment and mercy and fidelity.
But these you should have done, without neglecting the others.
Blind guides, who strain out the gnat and swallow the camel!
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You cleanse the outside of cup and dish,
but inside they are full of plunder and self-indulgence.
Blind Pharisee, cleanse first the inside of the cup,
so that the outside also may be clean.”
The post Holding Fast to the Weightier Things, Encouraged and Strengthened by Christ, 21st Tuesday (II), August 27, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
24 min
August 26, 2024Becoming Worthy of the Kingdom and of Our Divine Calling, 21st Monday (II), August 26, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the 21st Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of Blessed John Paul I
August 26, 2024
2 Thes 1:1-5.11-2, Ps 96, Mt 23:13-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.26.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
In today’s readings we encounter two totally different visions of the religious life, one that the Lord very much wants of us and the other that the Lord very powerfully condemns. They help us not only to examine our own approach to our Christian life but also to grasp what made Blessed John Paul I, whom the Church celebrates today, such a witness and example for us of how to become worthy of the Kingdom of God and of our divine vocation.
We begin with what God doesn’t want. Today Jesus begins with a serious of seven very forceful denunciations of the religious habits of the Scribes and the Pharisees. When someone is meek and humble of heart, when someone is seldom angry, goes ballistic, it’s much more powerful. Thus, when we see Jesus get as indignant as he does in the 23rd chapter of St. Matthew as he presents seven “woes” against the Jewish religious leaders of his day — he gives us three today, two tomorrow and two Wednesday — we need to take what he says even more seriously and make sure that we don’t imitate any of the habits that he forcefully condemns. To grasp better what he says, we should know a little bit more about the Scribes and Pharisees. The Scribes were the class of scholars of the law who arose after the Jews returned from the Babylonian exile. Under Ezra and Nehemiah the Jewish people made a national commitment to live by the law of God, recognizing that their failure to do so had led to their captivity. The Scribes were the experts on the law who studied what God had given and then developed a whole series of intricate derivative laws and practices to help live by the Lord’s law. Eventually their regulations filled fifty large volumes. The Scribes were the ones, for example, who took the third commandment about keeping holy the Lord’s day and developed the lengthy list of regulations as to what types of exertions would be considered work that would violate the sabbath, whether it was picking a head of grain, or walking a certain number of steps, or even lighting a lamp. The Pharisees were the ones who arose in the second century BC, during the time of the Syrian leader Antioches Epiphanes, who was trying to extirpate the Jewish religion, to dedicate themselves totally to keeping all the scribal legislation of God’s law. The name Pharisees refers to their being “separated ones,” separated not only from the sins of idolatry but also separated frankly from normal human life, as they gave all their attention to living by the 50 volumes of regulations. Over the course of time, for the Scribes and Pharisees, these regulations became just as important — in some ways, even more important — than the actual law of God. Pleasing God became a thing of how one used egg shells ritually to wash one’s hands and other types of ablutions, how meat was prepared, how one avoided activity, including charitable activity, on the sabbath, and so forth. This whole approach was suffocating real religion, which is not a neurotic observation of minutiae, but a loving communion with God that overflows into God-like loving communion among others.
In the first two “woes” today, Jesus describes how the Scribes and the Pharisees are “hypocrites” — literally, actors — for obsessing on outward appearances, on externals, on how they look before others, but whose hearts are far from God and often full of thoughts that are totally ungodly. By this approach, Jesus says, they’re not only not entering the Kingdom Jesus had come from heaven to establish, but serving as impediments for others to enter. When they make a convert, he says, they make him a “child of Gehenna twice as much as [them]selves,” because they form their proselyte to think that religious is all about scribal regulations rather than truly loving God and others, as God wants and teaches. The way they lived their religion was a scandal rather than a bridge for people to come to God and enter his kingdom. Jesus’ condemnation of their approach has a lot to do with us. Since the beginning of his papacy, Pope Francis has preached a lot about the way many today look at the Christian faith as fundamentally the fulfillment of a whole bunch of commandments and rules, what he describes as a “disjointed multitude of doctrines,” rather than the proclamation and living out of the good news that Jesus loves us, came into the world to save us, seeks to walk with us each day, wants to form us to love like him, and entrusts his mission of salvation to us so that we might all fully enter his kingdom here and forever. The Holy Father is obviously not saying that the commandments, that Christian moral life, aren’t important, but that often the way we live our faith and talk about it to others begins with a whole series of do’s and don’ts rather than with God and his merciful love. Jesus wants us fully to enter into his Kingdom by living in loving communion with him the King and then becoming means for others to follow our example and joyfully enter into that kingdom, too.
The third “woe” Jesus describes is the Scribes’ and Pharisees’ whole system of lying while pretending to tell the truth. They taught and believed that if one bound oneself by an oath to God that one had to keep it, but they also believed that only a “binding oath” was obligatory. A binding oath, they said, made God explicitly one of the parties of the oath. Any other oath that didn’t explicitly engage God could be broken, they taught. Often, therefore, they’d make false oaths, pretending that they were committing themselves to something, only to be intending to break it. Jesus exposed their duplicity when they would pretend as if oaths made calling on the temple, or the altar, or heaven were not binding but oaths made by the gold of the temple, or the gift of the altar, or by the throne of God somehow were. They were pretending to be faithful and truthful, while actually lying and intending to lie. Jesus reminded them that when we swear an oath, we’re committing ourselves to have God ensure that we’re telling the truth — and any of the objects mentioned (temple, altar, heaven) are in relationship to God, just as others to whom they would be planning to lie, are in relationship, too. For us as Christians, we need to be aware of the same tendency to keep the outward appearances that we’re Christian and truthful while at the same time trying to deceive others. I remember that in Italy, there was a culture of lying that was actually somewhat shocking. People would tell you one thing and then fake as if they never said it. Such a culture even invaded Catholic universities and seminaries. Here in the US, we have a greater cultural honesty overall, but we are masters in the culture of the half-truths of spin, of the white lie, the calculated perjury of court trials, and the burgeoning practice of fake news and AI-generated deceptions. Jesus in the Sermon on the Mount said he didn’t want us to take oaths at all because he wants us to live in a way that our yes means yes and our no means no and to grasp that anything short of truthfulness comes from the evil one. He doesn’t want us to be actors, pretending one thing and thinking or doing another. He wants us to live the truth that sets us free, which is essential for entering the Kingdom and helping others to enter it, something that the Scribes and Pharisees were not doing.
Before his conversion, St. Paul had been a Pharisee and had excelled beyond his peers in observing all the minutiae of the law. But after the Lord met him on the road to Damascus, he realized that we were not saved by our own efforts and certainly not by the rigid observance of all of the man-made scribal traditions, but that we’re saved by God, more specifically by grace (our participation in God’s very life) through faith (our committed response to God) in Jesus Christ. In his Second Letter to the Thessalonians, in contrast to Jesus’ woes today, St. Paul gives three specific reasons to praise the true religion of the first Christians in Thessalonika who were under attack and persecution. He praised them for their flourishing faith, their growing mutual love and their endurance (hupomone) in all persecutions and afflictions. The Christian life is meant to be a life of flourishing faith, living the truth in God and in what he says in such a way that it overflows beautifully into a consistent life of faith, not externalist pretensions. The most important flower in the garden of faith is love of God and love of neighbor; a faith that doesn’t lead to love is a defective faith. St. Paul praised the Thessalonians for precisely that type of love that existed among them and from them for Christians elsewhere and for those who were persecuting them. The other crucial flower of faith is perseverance in faith under duress, which is what the Thessalonians were likewise doing, remaining true to God even and especially when they were needing to suffer for him who suffered everything for us.St. Paul said that this flourishing faith, overflowing mutual love and constancy were the means by which they would become “worthy” of the Kingdom of God and of their Christian calling to Christ-like holiness. Their faith and love under affliction was what would “bring to fulfillment every good purpose and every effort of faith” and would lead to the glorification of God’s name and their own holy glorification by the radiance of Christ’s life shining through their own.
These virtues of flourishing faith, mutual charity and faithful endurance are likewise the pathway for us to become worthy of our calling, to enter the kingdom, and to help draw others to enter the kingdom with us. Someone who contagiously showed us how to do this is the holy one the Church remembers today, Blessed Pope John Paul I, the former Cardinal Albino Luciani, who was pope for 33 days, from today, August 26 through Sept 28, in 1978. He was the first pope to have a double name, which was a homage to his two immediate predecessors John XXIII who had named him a bishop, and St. Paul VI, who had named him a Cardinal. He was called the “Smiling Pope” because he radiated joy in his whole bearing, especially in the four Wednesday general audience catecheses he gave, passing on the faith with so much pleasure. Unlike the Scribes and Pharisees who complicated the life of faith, he simplified it and showed its beauty. When he was a young priest, he published a book entitled Catechesis in Crumbs, in which he tried to teach the truths of the faith in a simple, direct, and comprehensible way for everyone. When he was made a bishop at the age of 46, he took the motto Humilitas (humility) and said he sought to be a “bishop who is a teacher and a servant.” In 1976, while Cardinal Patriarch of Venice, he published Illustrissimi (“The Illustrious Ones”), a collection of letters addressed to famous figures in history, all with the point of teaching the faith. When he elected he came out on the balcony smiling. St. Teresa of Calcutta would say about him, “He has been the greatest gift of God, a sun beam of God’s love shining in the darkness of the world.” Rather than using the royal “we,” he used the simple “I.” He simplified the papal inauguration, refusing to be crowned and not wanting to be carried in a chair, eventually relenting on the latter when he was told that was the only way people could see him. He sought to help all the faithful become worthy of the kingdom and of their baptismal vocation. Leading up to the Second Vatican Council, anticipating Lumen Gentium’s insistence on the universal call to holiness, he said, “We are called by God to be true saints” and said that by professing love for God, Catholics are saying, “My God, I want to be holy, I will strive to be holy.” He was anything but an actor and he called others to live with Christian integrity too. His feast day is an occasion on which to ask for the virtues of gratitude, love, endurance and faith. It’s a time to beseech divine help so that, like him, we may avoid the hypocrisy of the Scribes and Pharisees and learn, rather, how to imitate his flourishing faith, abounding charity, courageous perseverance, humility and cheerfulness. That is the way we may live with integrity our vocation to holiness in response to our call and infectiously draw many others with us to come to human and Christian fulfillment and glorify the name of our Lord Jesus Christ in accordance with his grace.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 THES 1:1-5, 11-12
Paul, Silvanus, and Timothy to the Church of the Thessalonians
in God our Father and the Lord Jesus Christ:
grace to you and peace from God our Father
and the Lord Jesus Christ.
We ought to thank God always for you, brothers and sisters,
as is fitting, because your faith flourishes ever more,
and the love of every one of you for one another grows ever greater.
Accordingly, we ourselves boast of you in the churches of God
regarding your endurance and faith in all your persecutions
and the afflictions you endure.
This is evidence of the just judgment of God,
so that you may be considered worthy of the Kingdom of God
for which you are suffering.
We always pray for you,
that our God may make you worthy of his calling
and powerfully bring to fulfillment every good purpose
and every effort of faith,
that the name of our Lord Jesus may be glorified in you,
and you in him,
in accord with the grace of our God and Lord Jesus Christ.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 96:1-2A, 2B-3, 4-5
R. (3) Proclaim God’s marvelous deeds to all the nations.
Sing to the LORD a new song;
sing to the LORD, all you lands.
Sing to the LORD; bless his name.
R. Proclaim God’s marvelous deeds to all the nations.
Announce his salvation, day after day.
Tell his glory among the nations;
among all peoples, his wondrous deeds.
R. Proclaim God’s marvelous deeds to all the nations.
For great is the LORD and highly to be praised;
awesome is he, beyond all gods.
For all the gods of the nations are things of nought,
but the LORD made the heavens.
R. Proclaim God’s marvelous deeds to all the nations.
Gospel
MT 23:13-22
Jesus said to the crowds and to his disciples:
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You lock the Kingdom of heaven before men.
You do not enter yourselves,
nor do you allow entrance to those trying to enter.
“Woe to you, scribes and Pharisees, you hypocrites.
You traverse sea and land to make one convert,
and when that happens you make him a child of Gehenna
twice as much as yourselves.
“Woe to you, blind guides, who say,
‘If one swears by the temple, it means nothing,
but if one swears by the gold of the temple, one is obligated.’
Blind fools, which is greater, the gold,
or the temple that made the gold sacred?
And you say, ‘If one swears by the altar, it means nothing,
but if one swears by the gift on the altar, one is obligated.’
You blind ones, which is greater, the gift,
or the altar that makes the gift sacred?
One who swears by the altar swears by it and all that is upon it;
one who swears by the temple swears by it
and by him who dwells in it;
one who swears by heaven swears by the throne of God
and by him who is seated on it.”

The post Becoming Worthy of the Kingdom and of Our Divine Calling, 21st Monday (II), August 26, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
18 min
August 26, 2024 Choosing Today, At the Beginning of the New Academic Year, Whom We’re Going to Serve, 21st Sunday (B), August 25, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
August 25, 2024
Jos 24:1-2.15-18, Ps 34, Eph 5:21-32, Jn 6:60-69

To listen to an audio recording of the homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.25.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The main points of the homily are able to be found here.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Jos 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b
Joshua gathered together all the tribes of Israel at Shechem,
summoning their elders, their leaders,
their judges, and their officers.
When they stood in ranks before God,
Joshua addressed all the people:
“If it does not please you to serve the LORD,
decide today whom you will serve,
the gods your fathers served beyond the River
or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are now dwelling.
As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
But the people answered,
“Far be it from us to forsake the LORD
for the service of other gods.
For it was the LORD, our God,
who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt,
out of a state of slavery.
He performed those great miracles before our very eyes
and protected us along our entire journey
and among the peoples through whom we passed.
Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 34:2-3, 16-17, 18-19, 20-21
R. (9a) Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
I will bless the LORD at all times;
his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
Let my soul glory in the LORD;
the lowly will hear me and be glad.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
The LORD has eyes for the just,
and ears for their cry.
The LORD confronts the evildoers,
to destroy remembrance of them from the earth.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
When the just cry out, the LORD hears them,
and from all their distress he rescues them.
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted;
and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Many are the troubles of the just one,
but out of them all the LORD delivers him;
he watches over all his bones;
not one of them shall be broken.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Reading 2
Eph 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32
Brothers and sisters:
Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is head of his wife
just as Christ is head of the church,
he himself the savior of the body.
As the church is subordinate to Christ,
so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives,
even as Christ loved the church
and handed himself over for her to sanctify her,
cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
that he might present to himself the church in splendor,
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing,
that she might be holy and without blemish.
So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one hates his own flesh
but rather nourishes and cherishes it,
even as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
This is a great mystery,
but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
Alleluia
Jn 6:63c, 68c
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Your words, Lord, are Spirit and life;
you have the words of everlasting life.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 6:60-69
Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said,
“This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this,
he said to them, “Does this shock you?
What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending
to where he was before?
It is the spirit that gives life,
while the flesh is of no avail.
The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
But there are some of you who do not believe.”
Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe
and the one who would betray him.
And he said,
“For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me
unless it is granted him by my Father.”As a result of this,
many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.
Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”

The post Choosing Today, At the Beginning of the New Academic Year, Whom We’re Going to Serve, 21st Sunday (B), August 25, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
30 min
August 25, 2024Choosing to Serve the Eucharistic Lord Jesus, 21st Sunday (B), August 24, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Church of the Holy Family, Manhattan
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
August 25, 2024
Jos 24:1-2.15-18, Ps 34, Eph 5:21-32, Jn 6:60-69

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.25.24_Homily_HF_11_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today’s readings could not be possibly more dramatic — or more relevant for us. They bring us face-to-face with the fact that each of us, like the Israelites in Shechem in today’s first reading and the disciples in Capernaum in the Gospel, are called to make a choice, a choice for or against the God who has already chosen us, for or against the God who created us, loved us from the beginning, revealed himself to us, save us over and over again, sent his only Son to die for us, blessed us in innumerable ways and prepared a place for us in heaven. In theory, the choice is simple: Who would choose against God? But in practice, such a choice is challenging and hard, because by its nature, it demands fidelity each day, in each decision, in all the various aspects of our life. Today’s readings are a gift to help us to choose well.
In the Gospel, Jesus concludes his five-week catechesis on what is the most important reality in the entire world, his own enduring presence — God with us! — in the Holy Eucharist. After several weeks of describing that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink, after encouraging us to work not for perishable food but for this food that endures to eternal life, after describing that this divine gift is far greater and more important for our survival than the manna God used to rain down each day for the Israelites in the desert, we come to the climax, which is just as personal for us as it was for his first listeners: the climax is the choice he wants us to make, the commitment he wants us to give in response to this great divine gift. And insofar as the whole Church in the United States has been having this conversation right after the close of the incredible National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis last month and as we have begun the missionary phase of the National Eucharistic Revival, what Jesus has been saying, and our response to it, are even more important than what we said and did, say, three or six years ago, when Jesus attempts to give us this triennial Eucharistic upgrade. So let’s listen to the dramatic conclusion of his words as if we are hearing them for the first time and ask his help to respond like the saints would and have.
The Church prepares us in the first and second readings today for that choice and commitment Jesus is asking of each of us today. In the first reading, after the tribes of Israel had finally arrived in the Promised Land, Joshua assembled them in Shechem and confronted them with the following choice: “If it does not please you to serve the Lord, choose today whom you will serve, the gods your fathers served beyond the River or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are dwelling. As for me and my household, we will serve the Lord.” In the choice Joshua proposes to the people, we learn a few crucial things about the choice we, too, need to make:
First, no one morally can be an atheist or an agnostic — We either choose to serve the true God to the extent he has revealed himself to us, or we end up serving something else, a false god or the god of our own egos, the god of money, the god of control (power), the god of pleasure or sexuality, and so on. We see this in the life of the people of Israel. Either they worshipped the Lord, or they returned to worshipping the golden calf (a mixture of both animal and money worship), or Baal (the middle-eastern god of sexuality) or nature, in one of various forms. We’re always serving something, or someone, by our actions. Those who often tell Catholics, “Don’t try to force your values on me” are the very ones who want us and society at large to live by their values. Joshua demands that we be up front and explicit about whom we’re serving. We have no choice but to choose which god, which absolute, we’ll serve. The failure to choose is itself a choice, and a bad one.
Second, past choices are not enough — It was one thing for the Israelites to choose the Lord when he started working tremendous miracles to free them from slavery to Pharoah in Egypt, or parted the Red Sea, or fed them miraculously with heavenly manna and water from the Rock, or when he led them visibly in the pillar of cloud. But now they had to choose again. They had just crossed into the promised land and God was going to have them fight local tribes against great odds to obtain it, led by Joshua and completely dependent upon God’s power and instructions. They needed faith in God. Hence Joshua, on behalf of God, was forcing them to renew that choice. “Decide today who you will serve.” They couldn’t live on their past choices. Just like a husband can’t say to his wife, “I was faithful last year,” so a follower of God needs always to be faithful in the present, to choose the Lord in the here and now, especially when temptations arise.
Third, the choice for God is the choice against other gods — Joshua helped the Israelites to see that they couldn’t serve both the true God and the gods their ancestors worshipped. Jesus would say the same thing 1300 years later: “A man cannot serve two masters… You cannot serve both God and mammon” (Mt 6:24). To choose God means to reject Satan, his evil works and his empty promises. To choose God means to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow Christ. To choose God means to reject idolatry and put everything in our lives at God’s service.
In today’s second reading from St. Paul’s Letter to the Ephesians, we see the type of choice Jesus is asking of us very concretely displayed in the choice many of us, and most of our parents and grandparents, have made. St. Paul describes the commitment of Christian marriage, which is a total commitment on the part of a man and a woman to leave father and mother and cling to each other in one flesh, to be subordinate to each other out of reverence for Christ, to imitate Christ’s spousal love in laying down their lives to make each other holy. We are living in a culture that doesn’t like to make big commitments, that seeks to squirm out of lifetime choices. This is particularly the case among young adults in the United States. Many say they want to keep their “options open.” It’s a terrible plague especially for many young women, for example, who believe they have the vocation to marry, but whose boyfriends don’t propose at all or propose but then extend the engagement for years. St. Paul says in the second reading that human love is based on divine love and human marriage is based on the marriage of Christ and the Church. After describing the one flesh union of marriage, St. Paul says, “This is a great mystery, and I am speaking in reference to Christ and the Church.” Christ is not afraid to make a commitment. He died for his bride, to save her life, to make her holy, to make her eternally happy. And we are that bride! Full of love, he proposes to us and wants us to say yes, and faithfully keep saying yes, just as he has said yes and continues to say yes in giving his life for ours.
That brings us now to Jesus’ teaching in the Gospel at the end of his five-week mini-course on the reality of his Body and Blood. Jesus is asking us to make a commitment not just to believe his words that he is the true Manna, that his body is real food and his blood real drink and that whoever gnaws on his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life and will be raised on the last day. He is asking us to structure our lives in accordance with that belief. He’s asking us to live truly Eucharistic lives, drawing our life from him in this supreme gift. He’s asking us to make him the source and the summit of our existence. He’s asking us to choose him who has chosen us, to commit to him who made the ultimate commitment to us, to be as faithful to him as he is faithful to us in the new and eternal Covenant sealed in his body and blood. But that’s not easy. It’s certainly not a given. In the Gospel we read that many of the disciples who heard Jesus’ words said, “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” These were not strangers to Jesus. These were people who had been amazed and astonished by his teaching over the previous two years, who had heard him preach like no one ever before. These were people who had witnessed him make blind men see, deaf men hear, cripples walk, lepers restored to the skin of babies, and possessed people exorcised and liberated. These were people who just the previous day had seen Jesus feed a crowd of 5,000 men, 5,000 women and probably 15,000 kids on five buns and two sardines. They were now saying that was Jesus was asking was too hard for them to stomach.
We have to admit that they were right about Jesus’ teachings being hard. At first glance, they’re disgusting. To eat someone’s flesh and drink his blood smacks of cannibalism. Moreover, for a Jew, they couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure; now Jesus was saying that they needed to drink his blood. What Jesus was indicating seems straight out of a sick vampire novel. Even 2000 years after the Last Supper, when Jesus would show how he would fulfill these words by totally changing bread and wine into his body, blood, soul and divinity, the teaching is still hard. It’s hard to believe that the Creator of the world, the Savior of the human race, the miraculous carpenter from Nazareth, is actually hidden under the appearances of simple human food on the altar. That the Eucharist is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God. That the Eucharist is not bread at all, but God. What Jesus is teaching is hard. But why does that surprise us? Jesus never pretended that his teachings were easy. When he talked about forgiving 70×7 times, about cutting off hands or plucking out eyes if they lead us to sin, about turning the other cheek, denying ourselves, picking up our cross and following him, about losing our lives in order to save them, about loving him more than we loved father and mother, brother and sister, child, work, property, about loving others just as he loved us by sacrificing our lives for them — all of this was hard.
With regard to the question, “Who can accept it?,” however, the answer is, “One with faith in Jesus.” That’s what we see in Peter’s response when, after Jesus watched most of his disciples abandon him because they didn’t want to accept his teaching and turned to the Twelve apostles and asked, poignantly, “Do you also want to leave?,” Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” The teaching wasn’t any easier for Peter than for the thousands of disciples who had just abandoned Jesus. It would only become fathomable a year later during the next Passover when Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands, and totally change them into himself as he said, “This is my body: take and eat,” and “This is the chalice of my blood: take and drink.” But Peter knew that Jesus had the words of eternal life and so, because of his faith in Jesus, he put his faith in Jesus’ words. Likewise, we need to have faith in Jesus’ words. In the great Eucharistic Hymn, Adoro Te Devote, written by St. Thomas Aquinas 760 years ago, we sing, “I belief whatever the Son of God has said. Nothing is truer than the word of truth!” We believe in Jesus’ difficult teaching on the Eucharist precisely because we believe in him and believing in him means basing our entire existence on what he reveals.
And so the choice comes to us today, a choice we cannot duck, because to try to duck the choice is to deny the Lord. Over the course of these five weeks, Jesus has been preparing us for this moment. He multiplied the loaves and fish not only to show his compassion and his power but to foretell what he was planning to do with the multiplication of the Eucharist. He told us to labor for this food more than the hardest working parents strive to put food on the table. He told us that he was the true Manna that the Father wants to give us to sustain us in the desert of human life, the answer to the prayer he put on our lips, “Give us today our super-substantial bread,” and “Sir, give us this Bread always.” He answers that prayer for us every day, but now we have to respond to his personal response, his daily gift of himself. Jesus wants us to draw our life from him, to live a Eucharistic life, to experience a spousal union with him consummated in the one-flesh loving communion that happens on the marriage bed of the altar when we as the Bride of Christ take within us the Body of the Bridegroom, become one flesh with him and are capacitated to bear fruit, to make love, with him in all our actions. Are we ready to make that commitment today? It’s easy to say “yes!,” but do we really mean it?
We have to note that in response to Jesus’ query, “Do you also want to leave me?,” many in our age like the disciples in Capernaum have wandered physically or spiritually away from Jesus in the Eucharist: We can think of so many of our beloved Protestant brothers and sisters who, despite believing that Sacred Scripture is the authoritative word of God and claiming to interpret Sacred Scripture literally, try to pretend, consciously or unconsciously, that Jesus is just speaking symbolically about needing to eat his flesh and drink his blood. But if Jesus were speaking symbolically, he would never have let so many of his disciples — who left Jesus because they had interpreted him literally and thought they couldn’t endure the image — wander away. Jesus knew they were interpreting correctly but just didn’t have the faith in him to believe in the difficult teaching about the Eucharist. We can think of so many of our Catholic brothers and sisters who have sadly wandered away from the practice of Sunday Mass, serving some other god on Sunday — whether it be work, or sports, or sleep, or entertainment — than the Lord. We can think even of those who come to Mass but who do not receive the Lord Jesus with faith, love and reverence, who basically behave as if they’re only receiving consecrated bread rather than the very God who died for them on the Cross. We can also think of some who may show up but whose hearts can’t wait to leave Jesus’ presence and go somewhere else, who don’t consider themselves blessed to be called to the Supper of the Lamb. They haven’t left, but they don’t really want to be there. Both groups are physically present but not present with faith. We can also think of those who show up with hearts and lives divided, who instead of making a total choice for God, are living in some situation where they’re also choosing something incompatible with God, and who nevertheless come up to receive him without converting and going to receive Jesus’ forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession first. There’s a poignant reality, which St. John pointed out, that it was only at the conclusion of this talk in Capernaum, that Jesus “knew the one who would betray him.” Jesus first glimpsed Judas’ betrayal by Judas’ reaction to the Eucharist. And it was during the first Mass a year later — when Jesus gave us his Body and Blood for the first time in the fulfillment of today’s Gospel — that Satan definitively entered into Judas as he left the Last Supper and went out to betray Jesus for 30 pieces of silver. Sometimes people come to Mass and leave, not united to Jesus, but preparing to betray him in one choice or another, accounting him less valuable than, for example, work or pleasure or power.
At the end of this five week course, Jesus says to each of us, “Do you also want to leave?” He’s asking whether we want to live united to Him in the Holy Eucharist or live in some other way. He’s asking whether we will make him in the Eucharist the source, summit, root and center of our life or whether we’ll just try to keep him in the Eucharist “part” of our life and a “small part” at that, something we do out of duty for an hour or so on Sunday.The response he’s hoping for is for us to echo St. Peter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter, James, John, Andrew and the other disciples except Judas had truly left everything to live with Jesus. They spent every day with Jesus, who taught them, who nourished them, who taught them to pray, and who prepared them to take not just his Gospel but his very presence in the Eucharist to the ends of the earth. Unlike them, we don’t have to leave our fishing boats, tax tables, homes and families in order to be with Jesus. He comes to Holy Family Parish and other Catholic Churches every day. The question for us is whether we want really to be with him or whether we want to leave him alone. And if we choose him, that will change not only the way we look at Sunday Mass, but also the way we look at the awesome privilege of daily Mass and the way we approach Eucharistic adoration. If the Eucharist really is Jesus, and if we believe this truth and love Jesus, then we will soon recognize that there’s nothing more we want to do than to come to receive him as well as we can as often as we can. We will reprioritize everything so that we can come to spend more and more time with him and bring our family members and friends to experience this same treasure. That’s what the Eucharistic Revival is all about! And that’s what Jesus has been trying to do in you and me over the course of these last five weeks.
“Choose today whom you will serve.” These words of Joshua reverberate through time. Most Catholics don’t know that “Jesus” is the Greek name for our Savior. The Hebrew name by which Mary and Joseph, Peter and the other apostles would have called Jesus is “Joshua,” pronounced “Yeshua.” Today it is the Joshua to whom the successor of Moses points — Jesus himself —who says to us, “Choose today whom you will serve.” Tomorrow, Yeshua will say the same thing, “Choose today whom you will serve.” And he’ll continue to do it on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and every day for the rest of our life. May we like Joshua say, “As for me and my house, I will choose the Lord!,” and choose him concretely and joyously in the Eucharist each day, because there is no one else to whom we should go, because Jesus not only has the words of eternal life but is that word made flesh who now gives himself to us so that we may in him have eternal life. And so today let’s all say, individually and as a community of faith, “Jesus, I choose you! As for me and my house, we choose you! We love you! We hunger for you!” How blessed indeed we are to be called to the Supper of the Lamb! Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Jos 24:1-2a, 15-17, 18b
Joshua gathered together all the tribes of Israel at Shechem,
summoning their elders, their leaders,
their judges, and their officers.
When they stood in ranks before God,
Joshua addressed all the people:
“If it does not please you to serve the LORD,
decide today whom you will serve,
the gods your fathers served beyond the River
or the gods of the Amorites in whose country you are now dwelling.
As for me and my household, we will serve the LORD.”
But the people answered,
“Far be it from us to forsake the LORD
for the service of other gods.
For it was the LORD, our God,
who brought us and our fathers up out of the land of Egypt,
out of a state of slavery.
He performed those great miracles before our very eyes
and protected us along our entire journey
and among the peoples through whom we passed.
Therefore we also will serve the LORD, for he is our God.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 34:2-3, 16-17, 18-19, 20-21
R. (9a) Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
I will bless the LORD at all times;
his praise shall be ever in my mouth.
Let my soul glory in the LORD;
the lowly will hear me and be glad.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
The LORD has eyes for the just,
and ears for their cry.
The LORD confronts the evildoers,
to destroy remembrance of them from the earth.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
When the just cry out, the LORD hears them,
and from all their distress he rescues them.
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted;
and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Many are the troubles of the just one,
but out of them all the LORD delivers him;
he watches over all his bones;
not one of them shall be broken.
R. Taste and see the goodness of the Lord.
Reading 2
Eph 5:21-32 or 5:2a, 25-32
Brothers and sisters:
Be subordinate to one another out of reverence for Christ.
Wives should be subordinate to their husbands as to the Lord.
For the husband is head of his wife
just as Christ is head of the church,
he himself the savior of the body.
As the church is subordinate to Christ,
so wives should be subordinate to their husbands in everything.
Husbands, love your wives,
even as Christ loved the church
and handed himself over for her to sanctify her,
cleansing her by the bath of water with the word,
that he might present to himself the church in splendor,
without spot or wrinkle or any such thing,
that she might be holy and without blemish.
So also husbands should love their wives as their own bodies.
He who loves his wife loves himself.
For no one hates his own flesh
but rather nourishes and cherishes it,
even as Christ does the church,
because we are members of his body.
For this reason a man shall leave his father and his mother
and be joined to his wife,
and the two shall become one flesh.
This is a great mystery,
but I speak in reference to Christ and the church.
Alleluia
Jn 6:63c, 68c
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Your words, Lord, are Spirit and life;
you have the words of everlasting life.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 6:60-69
Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said,
“This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this,
he said to them, “Does this shock you?
What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending
to where he was before?
It is the spirit that gives life,
while the flesh is of no avail.
The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
But there are some of you who do not believe.”
Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe
and the one who would betray him.
And he said,
“For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me
unless it is granted him by my Father.”As a result of this,
many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.
Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
The post Choosing to Serve the Eucharistic Lord Jesus, 21st Sunday (B), August 24, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
32 min
August 24, 2024True Christian Spouses Without Guile, Nuptial Mass of Kyle Chipman and Natalie Hermes, August 24, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Cathedral of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, Knoxville, Tennessee
Nuptial Mass of Kyle McGregor Chipman and Natalie Cape Hermes
August 24, 2024
Tob 8:4-8, Ps 34, Rom 12:1-2.9-18, Mt 5:13-16

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.24.24_Homily_Kyle_and_Natalie_Chipman_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
It’s such a great joy and privilege to be here today in this exquisitely beautiful new Cathedral of the Most Sacred Heart of Jesus, the mother Church of the Diocese of Knoxville, in which the mystery of Jesus’ sacred humanity as well as of the fusion of his human and divine love, represented by his heart on fire and crowned with thorns, is celebrated and proclaimed. It was in the old Cathedral, just to our northwest, that Natalie’s parents Bill and Victoria were married and where they made a joint commitment, just like Kyle and Natalie will soon echo, to receive children lovingly from God and raise them according to the law of Christ and his Church. Today we celebrate how they, faithful to that promise, indeed received Natalie as a gift from God on April 21, 1997, brought her to be baptized on the 40th day of her life, and have raised her according to Christ’s law of love for God and others, giving her in essence a domestic marriage preparation course that has prepared her for the lifetime commitment she will make to Kyle here today. We likewise celebrate how Kyle’s parents, Dana and Karen, similarly raised him to build his life on Christ as a solid rock so that he, too, could freely and wholeheartedly give his life out of love for Natalie in response to a divine call. We all share their joy in the virtuous Christian man he has become and in the husband he will become today.
There are no coincidences in God, and hence it’s anything but random that God will join you, Natalie and Kyle, in one flesh for the rest of our life on August 24th. Every anniversary you will celebrate — your first, we pray your 50th, and perhaps even your 75th and beyond — will take place on the Feast of the Apostle Saint Bartholomew. On those anniversaries, beyond giving flowers or gifts or sharing a great meal, I hope that you will come to Mass, with the children we pray God will give you, to thank God for the gift of your marriage, to receive his blessing, and there celebrate with the whole Church the feast of this great apostle. Therefore, it is fitting, that you develop, starting today, a great devotion to St Bartholomew, since he, by God’s design, is going to be a central part in your marriage and family moving forward.
Here in the incredibly beautiful dome of the Cathedral, we see the image of Christ the Sacred Heart with his hands raised in blessing upon us all. To his right, we see our Lady. To her right, we behold St. John, who was with her at the foot of the Cross. To St. John’s right, we have St. James the Greater, so important in the life of Natalie, because two years ago, with Kyle’s support and encouragement, she fulfilled a lifelong dream to make a life-changing pilgrimage, the Camino de Santiago, to St. James’ tomb in Spain. And to St. James’ right, we have today’s heavenly honoree, St. Bartholomew, vested in a burgundy cape and teal blue tunic. He is depicted with a sharp, uplifted knife in his right hand and, in his left, his skin and face, significant of the way he was martyred, having been flayed alive in ancient Armenia as he sought to share the Gospel of the Lord Jesus. Just as Christ is often shown risen from the dead carrying, as a light burden, his Cross as a sign of victory, so St. Bartholomew is showed exalting the instrument and result of his torture, as he awaits in Jesus the resurrection of his body. His death revealed what he proclaimed by his life: that his skin was totally in the game, that he was Jesus’ from his head to his heart to his dermis. In the Gospel for his feast day, which was proclaimed here at the Cathedral at the 8:05 Mass this morning, Jesus praised Bartholomew — as Matthew, Mark and Luke call him in Aramaic in relation to his Father, Talmai — but whom St. John calls by his first name Nathaniel, as a “true child of Israel in whom there is no guile,” no duplicity, deception, or dishonesty. Jesus, whom Isaiah would prophesy as someone in whom “no deceit was in his mouth” (Is 53:9), recognized Bartholomew as a man praised by the Psalms: “Happy are those … in whose spirit there is no deceit” (32:2) and lauded him for being forthright, honest, open, plainspoken, straightforward, upfront, earnest, innocent, and unpretentious. This candor, this lack of deception, is an attribute that should be able to be said not just about authentic Israelites but about every Christians. The feast of St. Bartholomew every year is an opportunity for us to make a greater commitment to truth-telling, to live by the truth that sets us free, and to commit to following Christ as the incarnate Truth, Way, and Life (Jn 14:6).
That’s why it’s noteworthy, Kyle and Natalie, that God inspired you to want to have proclaimed as the epistle at your wedding Mass St. Paul’s words to the first Christians in Rome in which he said, “Let your love be sincere.” Sincerity doesn’t just mean “from the heart,” but it means truthful, pure, unmixed and unadulterated, free from pretense and falsehood. That’s what your Christian and marital love ought to be, and that’s why St. Paul then gives a list of behaviors to help you keep your love for each other as sincere as Christ’s love for you: to love sincerely, he stresses, means to hate what is evil and hold onto what is good; to care each other with mutual affection; to anticipate each other in showing honor, the love and honor you will publicly profess in a few minutes you wish to give each other for the rest of your life; to help each other to be fervent and zealous in serving the Lord; to rejoice together in the hope Christ places in you even on days you might be tempted to complain; to endure in affliction even in the midst of the sorrows and contradictions that inevitably accompany every marriage; to persevere in prayer, knowing that God is with you listening and responding; to have the same high regard for each other, never looking down on each other, but always concerned for what is noble; and to live at peace to the extent possible, never letting the sun go down on your anger, and seeking to abide together with the Prince of Peace even after quarrels. Just like with St. Bartholomew, Christ wants to praise you for your honesty, for the sincerity of your love in speech and in your behavior.
That’s not the only connection, however, between today’s feast, your second reading and the marriage you will form in just a few minutes. At the beginning of the passage, St. Paul urges you, “by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship.” In Greek, the text is even clearer, when he says that the only worship that makes sense, that’s logical, is, like St. Bartholomew, to give all, to offer your bodies, even your skin, to hold nothing back, to make your life a commentary on the words of consecration in which you say to each other, “This is my body, this is my blood, this is my heart, my hands, my feet, my sweat, my bones, and my everything and all, given out of love for you.” For you to be capable of such an exchange of self-gifts in love, the apostle tells you, “Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect.” Christ wants to renew you by helping you to put on his own mind, so that you may always discern what God is asking, what is truly good, pleasing to him, perfect and right. Your marriage is, therefore, meant to be a sign of the renewal of minds, of hearts, and of lives that Christ wants to work in the world.
Most of us who are here know and rejoice that your love is sincere. You are both so earnest and, as we saw last night in the toasts at the rehearsal dinner, infectiously make it easier for each other and for your family and friends truly to be themselves around you. We see in you what for centuries the Church has seen in Tobias and Sarah in the first reading you chose, when, on their wedding night, Tobias and Sarah prayed together. “Lord,” Tobias said, “you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose.” He had no ulterior motive. He wasn’t receiving her because of fallen carnal desire or even normal and natural physical attraction, but for the noble purpose accordance with God’s plan for her and for him. Together they praised God and asked for his mercy that they might fulfill his will and live together to a happy old age. They finished the prayer by saying together, “Amen. Amen,” the Hebrew word that means “to uphold” or “to support,” indicating that they wanted to build their whole life on the foundation of God, his mercy, and his noble purpose for each of them and as a couple. That’s what we all believe and celebrate that you’re doing today.
That witness of sincere love for God and each other, that desire each of you has to fulfill God’s will and to attain the noble purpose he has jointly given you, is what brings us to the Gospel you have chosen, in which Jesus calls you to a double-vocation: to be the “salt of the earth” and the “light of the world.” These rich Biblical metaphors describe various aspects of the mission of every follower of Jesus, like St. Barthlomew, but they are particularly fitting to describe the crucial, joint task of Christian married couples today. Sincere love for God and others, Jesus indicates, involves both salt and light.
Salt had three purposes in the ancient world, light two. The most well-known purpose of salt, like today, was to give flavor, to improve the taste of what is bland. The second purpose was as a preservative; in an era without refrigeration, in a place like the Holy Land where temperatures in the summer can regularly reach 125 degrees Fahrenheit, salt was essential for preserving fish and meat. The third purpose was as a fire starter, something that is still used in various impoverished countries today: salt is mixed with animal waste and lit on fire for cooking and heating, much like those in the developed world occasionally use wood and charcoal. And so we see from this analogy that Christian marriages are meant to bring good taste and flavor, joy and vivacity to their surroundings. They’re meant to prevent the persons around them, and their culture, from corrosion and preserve the good. And they’re meant to be catalysts through whom Christ can light a fire on the earth.
We rejoice, Kyle and Natalie, that you already have had a great head start on putting Christ’s words about being salt of the earth into practice. You both told me with gratitude how much flavor the other has brought to your life, how you’ve helped preserve the other’s faith and helped it grow, and how your relationship has ignited both of you to deeper things.
During marriage preparation, Kyle, you sang Natalie’s praises. “One unexpected joy of my relationship with Natalie,” you told me, “has been learning from her example how to balance young adult pressures and stillconsistently prioritize faith and faith She has reignited my faith by consistently inviting me to Mass and social gatherings, by guiding me with genuine enthusiasm through specific Catholic practices likeadoration, confession, reading scripture and a daily commitment to prayer.” You said, “What I love most aboutNatalie is that she is always oriented towards love. Where I choose frustration, she chooses patience and forgiveness; when I default to cynicism, she makes an active choice towards hope; when I tend towards despondency, she rejuvenates herself. She is always oriented towards giving and being a force for good. She uses her talent for gift-giving to demonstrate love. I really enjoy receiving her thoughtful small care packages and art that remind me she is often thinking of me and seeking connection. She is always reflecting on how she can use her gifts and resources to help others, demonstrated by her work in education with under-resourcedcommunities that extends beyond the classroom to after-school activities and one-on-one support of students. This has helped me re-examine my own gifts, and I am excited for us to find opportunities to give together in our marriage and as a family. She is a wonderful friend to others. She is constantly brainstorming gifts or spontaneous acts of kindness to make others feel special out of a spirit of pure selflessness.”
Natalie, in marriage preparation, you were just as effusive about how Kyle has been salt in your life. You stated, “Kyle is so balanced and naturally I admire his thoughtfulness, humility and intelligence. He is extremely generous and a wise and rational risk-taker. I love the way he is present to those around him and seeks first toknow others, not to be known by them. He is a great listener and is very understanding, assuming the best in others. He is comfortable in his own skin and not easily angered. I am so thankful for the way that Kyle has only ever responded patiently and lovingly towards me. He takes my emotions, experiences, and thoughts seriously. He loves the people I love and tries to understand and appreciate my occasionally niche interests. He hasinspired me to live less in my head, and to make real decisions about my life, encouraging me to take action onthings I desire to change about my life. He has helped me and inspired me to make job changes and encouragedme to say yes to following the desires of my heart, like walking the Camino, which I never would have never without his encouragement and help.”
This three-fold salt you are for each other Jesus wants you to be together for many others. To do that, he says, you must ensure that your salt “does not lose its taste.” Chemists tell us that salt loses its flavor when it becomes denatured, when the cations separate from the anions, the sodium from the chloride. Human beings lose their sacred saltiness when become separated from God and each other. To keep your saltiness intact, you must increase your bond not just with each other but together with God. As the great servant of God, Venerable Father Patrick Peyton, and after him, Saint Teresa of Calcutta, made famous: “The family that prays together, stays together.” The Lord is calling you to pray together, Natalie and Kyle, so that your salt might help flavor, preserve and spiritually ignite the earth.
The Lord Jesus also calls you to be the “light of the world.” Light, two thousand years ago and still today, has two fundamental purposes: to illumine and to warm. Christians are called to bring the light of Christ’s truth and the warmth of his love to others. Because of our communion with the One who said he is the “Light of the World,” we’re called to be lighthouses for others in the midst of stormy seas, as well as hearths that can rekindle those worn out by the coldness of a sometimes brutally harsh world. Jesus tells you at the end of this Gospel never to hide this light. “A city set on a mountain,” he said, “cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so,” he concluded, “your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.” Every sacramentally married couple is meant to give the witness of this light. In an age in which many in secular society are trying to pressure believers to hide their Christian faith, especially the Biblical teaching about man, woman, love, sex, marriage and family under a bushel basket, you’re meant to be part of Christ’s response to those trends. Today, bucking that pressure, you are responding to Christ’s call to be live openly and unabashedly in his light. You are making a conspicuous profession about the gift and importance of marriage and the family in the divine plan. You are publicly proclaiming that you’re entering not into a contract but a covenant, a sacred commitment not just to each other but to God, consecrating your love in a special way within the love of the God who created you, brought you together, and who today is making a sacred commitment in return, to accompany you for as long as you live. You’re overtly declaring that you desire not just to make the other happy, but to be God’s instrument to help make the other holy. You’re avowing that the gift you ultimately want to give each other is not just a beautiful ring, or the exchange of a last name, or even the gift of yourself, however faithful, fruitful, free and total. You’re openly affirming that you are seeking to give God to each other, to help the other grow in God’s image and likeness, to assist the other to build your common life together on the indestructible foundation of Christ the Cornerstone. Our world today needs this light and this salt. It needs to believe in love, not as the world defines it, not as the courts define it, not as popular music croons or raps it, but as God has made it. It needs to believe in marriage, in lifetime commitment, in fidelity, in mutual sacrifice, and in the blessing of children. It needs to believe ultimately in God, and to come to faith. For that, it needs the witness most of all Christian spouses and families who show them the difference God makes in daily life. This is what it means to be salt and light. This is the vocation to which God is calling you and will help you to live!
And to help you become the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World, the greatest means we have is Jesus’ self-giving in the Holy Eucharist. There’s great meaning to the fact that you are getting married in the context of the Mass, because there’s a deep connection between the Sacrament of Marriage and the Mass. In this beautiful new Cathedral, just like in so many of the most historic Churches in Christianity, there’s an exquisite baldachin. The early Christians used to illustrate the reality between marriage and the Eucharist in their architecture, covering the altars with a baldachin just like ancient Jewish beds were covered with the same chuppah or canopy underneath which they had exchanged their consent. They did this to communicate that the altar is the marriage bed of the union between Christ the Bridegroom and his Bride, the Church. They were teaching in stone, wood or bronze that it’s here on this altar that we, the Bride of Christ, in the supreme act of love, receive within ourselves, we believe, the body and blood of Jesus, the divine Bridegroom, becoming one-flesh with him and made capable of bearing fruit with him in acts of love.
Catholics believe that every time a sacramentally married couple comes to Mass together, they are essentially renewing and strengthening before the altar their one flesh union, receiving Christ’s love for them and becoming equipped from within to love each other by that same love. This is where husband and wife learn how to make their love for each other ever more sincere and, like St. Bartholomew, how to go all in. This is where they are transformed by the renewal of their minds, so that they may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. This is where best they, together, bless the Lord at all times and magnify and exalt his name. This is where Christ keeps their salt salty and their light radiant. This is where they implore the Lord to pour out his mercy upon them, deliver them from every evil, and strengthen them in the noble purpose of Christian marriage as long as they both shall live. This is where they proclaim together “Amen, Amen!,” openly confessing that they will make Christ and his divine mercy the true foundation of their life. This is where everything in your life, from the first time you met in the Fall of 2020 in Charlotte, from the proposal last September 1 in Riverside Park in New York, even your beautiful wedding today, has been leading. This is where in just a few minutes your joint Camino will begin, not a Camino de Santiago, but a Camino del Cielo, a pilgrimage hand-in-hand through life meant to finish not in northwestern Spain but in the heavenly Jerusalem!
Today around this marriage bed of Christ’s union with the Church and with you, Natalie and Kyle, your family, friends, the Blessed Mother, St. Joseph, St. Bartholomew and all the angels and saints join me in praying that the Lord who has begun this good work in you and brought you here to this altar will nourish your sacred vocation and bring it to completion in the eternal nuptial feast of heaven. We ask the Divine Bridegroom, with his incandescent sacred heart, never to stop blessing you with his holy, spousal, cruciform love and, through the way that you share that salty and resplendent love with each other, never to stop blessing us all!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Tobit
When the girl’s parents left the bedroom and closed the door behind them, Tobiah arose from bed and said to his wife, “My love, get up. Let us pray and beg our Lord to have mercy on us and to grant us deliverance.” She got up, and they started to pray and beg that deliverance might be theirs. He began with these words: “Blessed are you, O God of our fathers; praised be your name forever and ever. Let the heavens and all your creation praise you forever. You made Adam and you gave him his wife Eve to be his help and support; and from these two the human race descended. You said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make him a partner like himself.’ Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose. Call down your mercy on me and on her, and allow us to live together to a happy old age.” They said together, “Amen, amen,”
I Will Bless the Lord At All Times
I will bless the LORD at all times; praise shall be always in my mouth. My soul will glory in the LORD that the poor may hear and be glad. Magnify the LORD with me; let us exalt his name together. I sought the LORD, who answered me, delivered me from all my fears. Look to God that you may be radiant with joy and your faces may not blush for shame. In my misfortune I called, the LORD heard and saved me from all distress.
A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans
I urge you therefore, brothers, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice, holy and pleasing to God, your spiritual worship. Do not conform yourselves to this age but be transformed by the renewal of your mind, that you may discern what is the will of God, what is good and pleasing and perfect. Let love be sincere; hate what is evil, hold on to what is good; love one another with mutual affection; anticipate one another in showing honor. Do not grow slack in zeal, be fervent in spirit, serve the Lord. Rejoice in hope, endure in affliction, persevere in prayer. Contribute to the needs of the holy ones, exercise hospitality. Bless those who persecute [you], bless and do not curse them. Rejoice with those who rejoice, weep with those who weep. Have the same regard for one another; do not be haughty but associate with the lowly; do not be wise in your own estimation. Do not repay anyone evil for evil; be concerned for what is noble in the sight of all. If possible, on your part, live at peace with all.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew
Jesus said to his disciples, “You are the salt of the earth. But if salt loses its taste, with what can it be seasoned? It is no longer good for anything but to be thrown out and trampled underfoot. You are the light of the world. A city set on a mountain cannot be hidden. Nor do they light a lamp and then put it under a bushel basket; it is set on a lampstand, where it gives light to all in the house. Just so, your light must shine before others, that they may see your good deeds and glorify your heavenly Father.

The post True Christian Spouses Without Guile, Nuptial Mass of Kyle Chipman and Natalie Hermes, August 24, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
31 min
August 24, 2024Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 24, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 24, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the finale of the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus has been having with us over the course of the last month with regard to what is the most important reality in the entire world, his own presence in the Holy Eucharist, and what our reaction is to that reality. Insofar as the whole Church in the United States has been having this conversation right after the close of the incredible National Eucharistic Congress in Indianapolis last month as we have been launching the missionary phase of the National Eucharistic Revival, what Jesus has been saying, and our response to it, are even more important than what we said and did three, six, nine, twelve and more years ago, when Jesus attempts to give us this triennial Eucharistic upgrade. So let’s listen to the dramatic conclusion of his words as if we are hearing them for the first time and ask his help to respond like the saints would and have.
Jesus, after having described that his flesh is real food and his blood is real drink, after having encouraged us to work not for perishable food but for this food that endures to eternal life, after having indicated that this divine gift is far greater and more important for our survival than the manna God used to rain down each day for the Israelites in the desert, brings us this Sunday to the climax of his Bread of Life Discourse. It’s just as personal for us as it was for his first listeners. The climax is the choice he wants us to make, the commitment he wants us to give, in response to this great divine gift, which is not just to believe his words that he is the true manna, that his body is real food and his blood real drink and that whoever gnaws on his flesh and drinks his blood has eternal life and will be raised on the last day, but to structure our life in accordance with that belief. He’s asking us to live a truly Eucharistic life, drawing our life from him in this supreme gift. He’s asking us to make him the source and the summit, root and center of our existence. He’s asking us to choose him who has chosen us, to commit to him who made the ultimate commitment to us, to be as faithful to him as he is faithful to us in the new and eternal Covenant sealed in his body and blood.
But that’s not easy. It’s certainly not a given.
In the Gospel we read that many of the disciples who heard Jesus’ words said, “This teaching is difficult. Who can accept it?” These were not strangers to Jesus. These were people who had been amazed and astonished by his teaching over the previous two years, who had heard him preach like no one ever before. These were people who had witnessed him make blind men see, deaf men hear, cripples walk, lepers restored to the skin of babies, and possessed people exorcised and liberated. These were people who the previous day had just seen Jesus feed a crowd of 5,000 men, 5,000 women and probably 15,000 kids on five buns and two sardines. They were now saying that was Jesus was asking was too hard for them to stomach.
We have to admit that they were right about Jesus’ teachings being hard. At first glance, they’re disgusting. To eat someone’s flesh and drink his blood smacks of cannibalism. Moreover, for a Jew, they couldn’t even touch blood without becoming ritually impure; now Jesus is saying that they needed to drink blood, something that seems straight out of a sick vampire novel. Even 2000 years after the Last Supper when Jesus would show how he would fulfill these words by totally changing bread and wine into his body, blood, soul and divinity, the teaching is still hard. It’s hard to believe that the Creator of the whole World, the Savior of the human race, the miraculous carpenter from Nazareth, is actually hidden under the appearances of simple human food on the altar; that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ, the eternal Son of God; that the Eucharist is not bread or wine, but God.
Jesus’ teaching is But does that surprise us? Jesus never pretended that his teachings were easy. When he talked about forgiving 70×7 times, when he spoke about cutting off hands or plucking out eyes if they lead us to sin, when he discussed turning the other cheek, denying ourselves, picking up our cross and following him, when he described losing our lives in order to save them, when he conversed about loving him more than we loved father and mother, brother and sister, child, work, property, when he remarked about loving others just as he loved us by sacrificing our lives for them — all of this was hard.
But with regard to the disciples’ question, “Who can accept it?,” the answer is, “One with faith in Jesus.” That’s what we see in Peter’s response when, after Jesus watched most of his disciples abandon him because they didn’t want to accept his teaching and then turned to the Twelve apostles and asked, poignantly, “Do you also want to leave?,” Peter replied, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy one of God.” The teaching wasn’t any easier for Peter than for the thousands of disciples who had just abandoned Jesus. It would only become fathomable a year later during the next Passover when Jesus would take bread and wine into his hands, and totally change them into himself as he said, “This is my body: take and eat,” and “This is the chalice of my blood: take and drink.” But Peter knew that Jesus had the words of eternal life and so, because of his faith in Jesus, he put his faith in Jesus’ words. Likewise, we need to have faith in Jesus’ words. In the great Eucharistic Hymn, Adoro Te Devote, written by St. Thomas Aquinas, we sing, “I believe whatever the Son of God has said. Nothing is truer than the word of truth!” We believe in Jesus’ difficult teaching on the Eucharist precisely because we believe in him, and believing in him means basing our entire existence on what he reveals.
And so the choice comes to us this Sunday, a choice we cannot duck, because to try to duck the choice is to deny the Lord. Over the course of the last month, Jesus has been preparing us for this moment. He multiplied the loaves and fish not only to show his compassion and his power but to foretell what he was planning to do with the multiplication of the Eucharist. He told us to labor for this food more than the hardest working parents strive to put food on the table. He told us that he was the true manna that the Father wants to give us to sustain us in the desert of human life, the answer to the prayer he put on our lips, “Give us today our super-substantial bread,” and “Sir, give us this Bread always.” Jesus answers that prayer for us every day, but now we have to respond to his personal response, his daily gift of himself. Jesus wants us to draw our life from him, to live a Eucharistic life, to experience a spousal union with him consummated in the one-flesh loving communion that happens on the marriage bed of the altar when we as the Bride of Christ take within us the Body of the Bridegroom, become one flesh with him and are capacitated to bear fruit, to make love, with him in all our actions.
Are we ready to make that commitment? It’s easy to say “Yes!,” but do we really mean it? In response to Jesus’ query, “Do you also want to leave me?,” many in our age like the disciples in Capernaum have wandered physically or spiritually away from Jesus in the Eucharist. We can think of so many of our beloved Protestant brothers and sisters who, despite believing that Sacred Scripture is the authoritative word of God and who interpret Sacred Scripture literally, try to pretend, consciously or unconsciously, that Jesus is just speaking symbolically about needing to eat his flesh and drink his blood. We can think of so many of our Catholic brothers and sisters — five of six Catholics in the United States — who have wandered away from the practice of Sunday Mass, serving some other god than the Lord on Sunday, whether it be work, or sports, or sleep, or entertainment. We can think even of those who come to Mass but who do not receive the Lord Jesus with faith, love and reverence, who basically behave as if they’re only receiving consecrated bread rather than the very God who died for them on the Cross or who seem to be impatient to leave Jesus’ presence and go somewhere else as soon as possible. We can also think of those who show up with hearts and lives divided, who instead of making a total choice for God, live in some situation incompatible with God, and who nevertheless come up to receive him without converting and going to receive Jesus’ forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession first. There’s a poignant reality, which St. John pointed out, that it was only at the conclusion of Jesus’ talk in Capernaum, that Jesus “knew the one who would betray him.” Jesus first glimpsed Judas’ betrayal by Judas’ reaction to the Eucharist. And it’s somehow tragically fitting that Judas betrayed Jesus by leaving the first Mass a year later — when Jesus gave us his Body and Blood for the first time in the fulfillment of this Sunday’s Gospel — before it was done. Sadly some come to Mass to receive him, only to leave and continue to betray Jesus in their moral decisions.
At the end of this five-week course, Jesus asks each of us, “Do you also want to leave?” He asks whether we want to live united to Him in the Holy Eucharist or live in some other way. He queries whether we will make him in the Eucharist the source and the summit of our life or whether we’ll just try to keep him in the Eucharist “part” of our life and a “small part” at that, something we do out of duty for an hour or so on Sunday. The response he’s hoping for is for us to echo St. Peter. “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life. We have come to believe and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.” Peter, James, John, Andrew and the other apostles except Judas had truly left everything to live with Jesus. They spent every day with Jesus, who taught them, who nourished them, who helped them to pray, and who prepared them to take not just his Gospel but his very presence in the Eucharist to the ends of the earth. Unlike them, we don’t have to leave our fishing boats, tax tables, homes and families in order to be with Jesus. He comes to our parish Church every day. The question for us is whether we want really to be with him or whether we want to leave him alone. And if we do want to be with him, that will change not only the way we look at Sunday Mass, but also the way we look at the awesome privilege of daily Mass and the way we approach Eucharistic adoration. If the Eucharist really is Jesus, and we believe this truth and love Jesus, then we will soon recognize that there’s nothing more we want to do than to come to receive him as well as we can as often as we can. If the Eucharist really is Jesus, and we believe this truth and love Jesus, then we will soon reprioritize everything so that we can come to spend more and more time with him and bring our family members and friends to experience this same treasure. That’s what the Eucharistic Revival is all about! And that’s what Jesus has been trying to do in you and me over the course of these last five weeks. God bless you!

The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 6:60-69
Many of Jesus’ disciples who were listening said,
“This saying is hard; who can accept it?”
Since Jesus knew that his disciples were murmuring about this,
he said to them, “Does this shock you?
What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending
to where he was before?
It is the spirit that gives life,
while the flesh is of no avail.
The words I have spoken to you are Spirit and life.
But there are some of you who do not believe.”
Jesus knew from the beginning the ones who would not believe
and the one who would betray him.
And he said,
“For this reason I have told you that no one can come to me
unless it is granted him by my Father.”As a result of this,
many of his disciples returned to their former way of life
and no longer accompanied him.
Jesus then said to the Twelve, “Do you also want to leave?”
Simon Peter answered him, “Master, to whom shall we go?
You have the words of eternal life.
We have come to believe
and are convinced that you are the Holy One of God.”
The post Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 24, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min

About Catholic Preaching

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