Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

April 21, 2024The Good Shepherd’s Leadership Training of His Sheep To Be Shepherds, Fourth Sunday of Easter (B), April 21, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 21, 2024
Acts 4:8-12, Ps 118, 1 John 3:1-2, Jn 10:11-18

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.21.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
During the Advent Season we have a special Sunday of joy called Gaudete Sunday and during Lent we have another entitled Laetare Sunday, both of which help us, in the midst of those seasons, anticipate the joy of Christmas and Easter, respectively, and, conscious of that joy, persevere with hope until those celebrations. During the Easter Season, while there’s no Sunday that is explicitly linked to a Scripture passage and the first word of those respective liturgies bidding us to rejoice, we do have, in the heart of the Easter Season each year, Good Shepherd Sunday, which is given to us to focus our Easter joy on the fact that the Risen Lord Jesus not only rose from the dead, not only remains with us risen, but relates to us, now and until the end of time, as our shepherd. Every year, on the fourth of the seven Sundays of Easter, we focus on a part of the tenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel in which Jesus tells us, “I am the Good Shepherd” and then describes what he does for us, his beloved sheep: He knows us intimately and calls us by name, he leads and walks ahead of us, he protects us from thieves and marauders, he comes in search for us when we’re lost and carries us back, he lays down his life for us, and he seeks to give us life to the full here and forever — if only we receive and respond to his shepherdly care.
Jesus’ words in his Good Shepherd discourse were powerful when he preached them in the Temple area during the Feast of Tabernacles several months before his death. But the Church has us read them in the heart of the Easter Season, on the Sunday closest to the 25th day of the 50-day season, because when looked at in the light of Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection, they take on much deeper meaning. They show us not just how to relate to Jesus risen from the dead, but also how to allow the power of his resurrection to transform us so that we might be able to love others as he has loved us first. These indicate to us how to go from being like faithful sheep who hear Jesus’ voice calling us to follow him to those who model our whole life on him so that we may imitate and extend his shepherdly care to others.
The first step in the transformation the risen Lord Jesus wants to bring about in us is to have us relate to him as our Good Shepherd. This is a challenge for many people today, far from an agrarian context, in which we rebel against the image of supposedly stupid, docile sheep in favor of modern ideologies flowing from Nietzsche’s will-to-power or Marx’s suspicion, cynicism and class warfare. This March 8, during his third Lenten sermon to Pope Francis and the leaders of the Roman Curia, Capuchin Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the Papal Household since 1980 and perhaps not only the greatest Catholic preacher alive but one whom future centuries will regard as among the greatest in the history of the Church, spoke about resistance to Jesus as our Good Shepherd by our proud overreaction to being labeled sheep. Few would object if Jesus had referred to us as lions, bears, elephants or giraffes, all of which have a certain greatness about them, but few would list sheep among their list of most admired animals and readily employ them as images of virtue in children’s fables. Perhaps the most famous nursery rhyme to feature one, Mary Had A Little Lamb, focuses on, basically, the lamb’s pitiable helplessness. Cardinal Cantalamessa, now 90, said, “Let’s face it, the image of the good shepherd, and the related images of sheep and flock, are not really fashionable nowadays. … People disdainfully reject the role of sheep and the idea of a flock. They do not realize, however, how much they experience in practice the situation that they condemn in theory.… We let ourselves be guided supinely by all sorts of manipulation and occult persuasion. Others create models of well-being and behavior, ideals, and goals of progress, and people adopt them. … We eat what they tell us, dress as fashion dictates, and speak as we hear.” Many reject being Jesus’ sheep, we know, but sheepishly follow every latest diet fad, every lame new influencer, every supposed guru, even every popular mob. The truth is that we are essentially always following some shepherd. When we reject following Christ as our Good Shepherd, we often succumb to following some bad or false shepherd. This is something Cardinal Cantalamessa also highlights. Summarizing the Old Testament, he said, “Alongside the image of the good shepherd, that of the bad shepherd makes its appearance. In the prophet Ezekiel we find a terrible indictment against the bad shepherds who feed only themselves. They feed on milk and dress in wool, but they don’t care in the slightest about the sheep whom they actually treat ‘with cruelty and violence’ (Ez 34:1ff). This indictment against bad shepherds is followed by a promise: God himself will one day take loving care of his flock: ‘The lost I will search out, the strays I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, and the sick I will heal’ (Ez 34:16). In the Gospel,” Cantalamessa concludes, “Jesus takes up this theme of the good and bad shepherd, but with something new: ‘I am the good shepherd!,’ he says. God’s promise has become reality, exceeding all expectations.”
The Second Person of the Blessed Trinity came into the world to be our Good Shepherd, surpassing all the hopes of the people of Israel. But his appearances are not enough. His actions are not enough. We need trustingly to relate to him as our Good Shepherd. Based on what Jesus indicates in John 10, he seeks to love us as Shepherd in seven different ways, each of which requires a response on our part.
First, Jesus says that the Good Shepherd knows his sheep and they know him. In tonight’s Gospel, he says something indeed shocking. “I am the Good Shepherd, and I know my sheep and mine know me,” but then he adds: “just as the Father knows me and I know the Father.” It’s not at all startling that Jesus knows us. After all, as we pray in Psalm 139, we can say in truth, “Lord, you have probed me, you know me: you know when I sit and stand; you understand my thoughts from afar. My travels and my rest you mark; with all my ways you are familiar. Even before a word is on my tongue, Lord, you know it all. Behind and before you encircle me and rest your hand upon me.” But what is startling is that he says his sheep know him just like he knows the Father. That’s how intimate he wants our relationship to be. He wants us to know him just like the Father knows him and he knows the Father. That can only happen through a life of prayer and intimate friendship. Cardinal Cantalamessa comments, “In the beginning, Israel was a people of nomadic shepherds. The bedouins of the desert today give us an idea of what life was once like for the tribes of Israel. … An almost personal relationship develops between the shepherd and the flock. Spending day after day together in solitary places, without a living soul around, the shepherd ends up knowing everything about every sheep. The sheep recognize the voice of the shepherd who often talks out loud to the sheep, as if they were people.” The good sheep of the Good Shepherd are meant to have this type of relationship, this friendship, this intimate knowledge with the Lord Jesus.
Second, Jesus says he calls his sheep by name. None of us is a number or an anonymous extra. The Good Shepherd knows us personally and he summons us. Today is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, held annually since 1963, to help us all reflect on how the Good Shepherd calls each of us to be a Christian, calls each of to be a saint, calls each of us within that vocation to holiness to serve God and others in some state of life. Today we pray in a special way for all those whom God is calling to serve his as priests and religious, that everyone he is calling will open their ears to hear his call and say yes to it. We pray in a particular way for those here at Columbia the Good Shepherd is summoning to serve him as priests and religious, that they may have the courage to hear and heed the call.
Third, Jesus calls his sheep to follow him as he leads us, sometimes where we desire to go, sometimes even down dark valleys or across the road where we may not want to go. But Jesus’ good sheep follow him wherever he leads, trusting he knows the direction. They don’t seek to call their own shots, to do their own thing, to imitate the devil in crooning Frank Sinatra’s I Did It My Way. Good Shepherd Sunday is an occasion for which of us to ask, “Do I really follow Jesus? Do I try to emulate his life, his choices, his values? Or do I follow others or am I enslaved to my own will and desires?”
Fourth, Jesus says that as Good Shepherd, he leads us to verdant pastures so that we can graze. He sets a table before us. He feeds us. A good sheep eats what the Master sets — the rich feast of the Word of God, the food of doing the Father’s Will, and most especially the Word made flesh given here for us on the altar.
Fifth, the Good Shepherd leaves the 99 and goes after the lost sheep. He never forgets us. He loves us enough to hunt us down. Many of you know the movie Ransom starring Liam Neeson who with a special set of skills hunts down the human traffickers who have kidnapped his daughter in Paris. That’s Hollywood fiction. Jesus the Good Shepherd, with his far greater set of skills, in real life comes after us when we have gotten lost or captured by others or the desire to fit in. When the Good Shepherd finds us, he wants us to return with him and share his joy.
Sixth, Jesus the Good Shepherd says he protects his sheep and defends them from the thieves, marauders and wolves. He in fact gives his life to protect us. He says no one can take us from his hand. But we can nevertheless wander from his hand. We can leave his hand. To be a good sheep is to persevere in communion and conversion.
Seventh, Jesus the Good Shepherd says he gives his sheep eternal life. This is what everything else points to. His knowledge, his call, his guidance, his food, his individual care, and his protection all are meant to lead us to a relationship that will never end. But we must receive that gift precisely as a gift and make sure that other, lesser ends, do not displace it from the treasure of our heart. Jesus was stressing that eternal life, as he said elsewhere, is to know him and the Father who sent him. It is a relationship that death cannot kill. When we know Jesus truly as a friend, as a Savior, as the Lord, as a Bridegroom, and as a Good Shepherd, when we enter into communion with him, death is nothing other than a change of address, or more accurately, a change of state. As Jesus says in this Good Shepherd discourse, “I give them eternal life and they shall never perish.” That’s why St. Paul would exclaim in his Letter to the Romans, “I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities … nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39). To respond as good sheep of the Good Shepherd is to long for this fulfillment with him and to orient our life to it.
Therefore, the most important thing in life is to learn how to enter into relationship with the Good Shepherd, to choose him, to believe in him, to trust in him, to follow him, to live in him, and to receive his gifts. It means to recognize, as we pondered in St. Peter’s words to the leaders and elders of the people in today’s first reading, that “Jesus Christ the Nazorean, whom you crucified, … God raised from the dead” and “there is no salvation through anyone else, nor any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” It means to become convinced, as we prayed through the Responsorial Psalm, that “it is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes” and to say to the Lord, “I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me and have been my Savior!” It means to embrace the astonishing truth St. John testifies to in today’s epistle, what Jesus has made possible for each of us when we enter into his death and resurrection in the sacred waters of Baptism: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us,” the apostle exclaims, “that we may be called children of God.” It would be the greatest privilege and honor of our life just to becalled God’s son or daughter. But St. John tells us, “Yet that is what we are!” And as if that is not enough, he adds, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. But we know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” We will one day not only be God’s children, but truly like Jesus himself through the beatific vision, by entering into relationship with Jesus, by sharing in his own divine filiation, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if one we suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him,” as St. Paul says (Rom 8:17).
So that’s the first step in the way the Good Shepherd wants us to relate to him as good sheep. But the second step in which he takes us far beyond the caricature of a stupid, docile creature, is by strengthening us through his shepherdly love to become shepherds, true leaders, of others. He wants us who have been fed by him, guided by him, and protected by him, to feed, guide and protect others in this name. He wants to take his disciples and make them apostles. This is what often happens in the lives of young people who become parents. This is what occurs when older brothers and sisters mature and take responsibility for their younger siblings. This is what takes place with godparents who are faithful to their responsibility. This is what is supposed to occur in every Christian as we look at family members, friends, peers, colleagues. If we’re good sheep of Jesus, he wants us to become, with him, true, good shepherds of others. We know that we are experiencing a crisis of leadership in so many areas of life. Many world leaders, rather than paragons of prudence and courageous champions of the common good, are petty and pusillanimous figures unwilling to overcome their weaknesses and grudges to rise to the needs of the moment. Much closer to home on college campuses, including our own, we see many failures of leadership among administrators and student leaders on display since October 7. It’s important and urgent to examine the decisions of leaders not through worldly standards but by the standards of genuine leadership Christ the Good Shepherd gives us. And it’s key that each of us, as Catholics, enroll in the Good Shepherd’s leadership master class so that we can learn from him how to be the salt, light and leaven the crisis of the moment requires and bring his hard won peace to the situation of hatred, hostility and division in which so many are suffering.
We see the type of leadership transformation Christ wants to do in us in the vocation of St. Peter. After the Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked Peter three times: “Simon, Son of John, do you love me more than these?” Jesus was querying whether Peter loved him more than anything and everything else, because the Lord, after Peter’s three fold betrayal on Holy Thursday, wanted that love to be the distinctive mark of Peter’s life from that point forward. Three times Peter responded, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” After each response, Jesus gave him a commission, a task that would be the bedrock of all he would do in Jesus’ name. The first commission was, “Feed my lambs,” telling him in particular to take care of Christ’s young people. The second was “Tend my sheep,” which in the Greek means to guard and guide. The third was “Feed my sheep.” Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was entrusting the care and nourishment of his flock, young and old, to Peter’s loving solicitude. They would always remain Christ’s sheep — feedmy lambs, tend my sheep, Jesus said — but they would be guided by a sheep like themselves whom Christ would choose, appoint, and help to be a shepherd after his own loving heart. And it’s obvious that St. Peter never forgot this lesson. Peter’s love for Jesus — like ours — would be shown in how we love those whom Jesus loves. Jesus wants us to get to know others by name and lead them to him, to help them recognize his voice and to follow him. He wants us to sacrifice ourselves for them. He wants us to help them seize the eternal life he gives and protect them from the spiritual and earthly bandits who are all around us trying to preach a different Gospel and way of salvation than Jesus the Good Shepherd has given us.
And he wants us to do so willingly. One of the most powerful lines in all of Sacred Scripture is found in tonight’s Gospel. It’s when Jesus says, “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me. I freely lay it down. I have the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again.” As our Good Shepherd, Jesus willinglygives his life to save ours. He lays it down freely. And he does so in the present tense, because he is in a perpetual state of self-giving. From his perspective, his crucifixion and death were not a passive victimization, but an active holocaust, the exclamation point of a life that began when he took on our humanity precisely to sacrifice it out of love so that we could share in his divinity.
This free self-giving, this willingness, this refusal to have his life taken from him but rather to give it as a gift, is super important for us to grasp. To be a shepherd like Jesus is to imitate, indeed to share in and extend, his self-giving love — and to do so willingly. We live in an age in which so many see themselves fundamentally as victims. They engage in a diabolical Marxist logic of oppressors-versus-oppressed and, if in the oppressed category, they think that the end of overturning injustice justifies any and all means, including immoral ones. When I was working at the United Nations, some groups tried to compete against each other to show how many victims cards they could put on the table as a result of what they dubbed “multiple and intersectional forms of discrimination.” Some strived to lay down a royal straight flush of victim cards, race, sex, national origin, socio-economic status, disability, and the list went on. There are always real victims of injustice, and we must defend them and sacrifice to help them obtain justice. But while we will always be influenced by the ways we’ve suffered, we shouldn’t be defined by what we’ve endured. Jesus wants his followers, even after the attacks of the wolves, not to view ourselves fundamentally as victims but as courageous shepherds. He would say to us elsewhere that if someone strikes us on the right cheek, freely to offer him the left; if someone wants to go to law with us over our tunic, freely to hand him our cloak as well; if someone wants to press us into service for one mile, freely to go with him for two. He wants us to convert every situation, especially those in which we might be tempted according to human logic to consider ourselves victims, into a circumstance of self-giving love, freely, willingly, laying down our lives for God and others.
This the path we see St. Peter take in the first reading, when he defends himself for a “good deed done to a cripple.” All of us ought to be capable of making the same defense of good deeds done for those everyone else neglects. Today’s second reading reminds us clearly about those for whom we’re caring: fellow children of God, which makes them not strangers but, truly, our brothers and sisters. He wants us to sacrifice for them — the last and the least of the world — not out merely out of religious duty, or a sense of guilt, or even like some religious in fidelity to a special vow to care for the poor and neglected, but willingly out of love. Jesus who said, “No one takes my life from me. I freely lay it down!,” wants us freely to give our life, too, in love. That’s what good sheep who have become good shepherds do. St. John would say in his first letter, just a little bit after the passage in today’s second reading, “The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16). That’s the essence of the Christian life! That’s what the Good Shepherd has done for us. That’s ultimately the metamorphosis of the world Jesus wants to work in an era that rebels against the docility of sheep. Jesus wants to transform us from sheep ultimately to shepherds who care for others as he cares for us. Even more so. He wants us to treat them not as “objects” of our sacrificial care, like helpless sheep, but rather as subjects, who through our help, may be able to be transformed, too, from sheep into shepherds who will in turn take their own responsibility for the good of others. That’s the Good Shepherd’s leadership model, transforming lambs into sheep into shepherds who help other sheep become shepherds, too.
Every Mass is an opportunity for us to experience this transformation that the Good Shepherd wants to bring about in each of us. It’s here that Jesus the Good Shepherd calls each of us by name and seeks to have us grow intimately in knowing him as he knows us. It’s here with his Word that he seeks to guide us along right paths. It’s here that he prepares a banquet for us, one meant to be a foretaste of the eternal banquet. It’s here that he who willingly gave his life for us on Calvary here gives himself anew, saying, “This is my body given for you” and “This is the chalice of my blood poured for out for you,” so that we, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, may enter into communion with him risen from the dead so that we might do this in his memory, laying down our life, giving our body and blood for God’s glory and for others’ good. It’s here that Jesus seeks to fill us with wonder that, if God so loves us that he not only permits us to be called his children, and not only adopts us as his beloved kids, but feeds us with himself, then we can look with hope to the transformation into shepherds that he wants to bring about and ahead with faith-filled eagerness to what this Eucharistic banquet leads to, when we shall become even more like our Good Shepherd, through seeing him as he is.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Acts 4:8-12
Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said:
“Leaders of the people and elders:
If we are being examined today
about a good deed done to a cripple,
namely, by what means he was saved,
then all of you and all the people of Israel should know
that it was in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean
whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead;
in his name this man stands before you healed.
He is the stone rejected by you, the builders,
which has become the cornerstone.
There is no salvation through anyone else,
nor is there any other name under heaven
given to the human race by which we are to be saved.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 118:1, 8-9, 21-23, 26, 28, 29
R. (22) The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
for his mercy endures forever.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in man.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in princes.
R. The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me
and have been my savior.
The stone which the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
By the LORD has this been done;
it is wonderful in our eyes.
R. The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD;
we bless you from the house of the LORD.
I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me
and have been my savior.
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
for his kindness endures forever.
R. The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2
1 Jn 3:1-2
Beloved:
See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.
The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.
We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.
Alleluia
Jn 10:14
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I am the good shepherd, says the Lord;
I know my sheep, and mine know me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 10:11-18
Jesus said:
“I am the good shepherd.
A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
A hired man, who is not a shepherd
and whose sheep are not his own,
sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away,
and the wolf catches and scatters them.
This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd,
and I know mine and mine know me,
just as the Father knows me and I know the Father;
and I will lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice,
and there will be one flock, one shepherd.
This is why the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.
I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.
This command I have received from my Father.”
The post The Good Shepherd’s Leadership Training of His Sheep To Be Shepherds, Fourth Sunday of Easter (B), April 21, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
26 min
April 21, 2024The Transformation the Good Shepherd Wants In Us, Fourth Sunday of Easter (B), April 21, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fourth Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 21, 2024
Acts 4:8-12, Ps 118, 1 John 3:1-2, Jn 10:11-18

To listen to an audio recoding of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.21.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
The Fourth Sunday of Easter is called Good Shepherd Sunday because every year we focus on a part of the tenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel in which Jesus tells us, “I am the Good Shepherd” and then describes what he does for us, his beloved sheep: He knows us intimately and calls us by name, he leads and walks ahead of us, he protects us from thieves and marauders, he comes in search for us when we’re lost and brings us back, he lays down his life for us, and he gives us life to the full.
These words of Jesus were powerful when he preached them in the Temple area during the Feast of Tabernacles several months before his death. But the Church has us read them in the heart, the midway point, of the Easter Season, because when looked at in the light of his Passion, Death and Resurrection, they take on much deeper meaning. They show us not only how to relate to Jesus risen from the dead, but also how to allow the power of his resurrection to transform us so that we might be able to love others as he has loved us first, in order that, being his faithful sheep who hear his voice calling us to follow him, we might in turn become shepherds to others after his own shepherdly heart. For us to live the Easter season well, for us to experience the fullness of our Christian vocation, we must enter into the metamorphosis Jesus seeks to bring about in our lives through his resurrection by helping us to relate to him as our Good Shepherd risen from the dead.
Many of us, when we reflect on the resurrection, think about it as a fact, an event, a mind-blowing occurrence that happened early on a Sunday within Joseph of Arimathea’s freshly hewn tomb outside the city gates in ancient Jerusalem. Yet for Jesus, the resurrection wasn’t so much a fact but a relationship. When Martha, four days after her brother Lazarus had died, told Jesus that if he had been present, Lazarus would still be alive, Jesus told her, “Your brother will rise.” Martha replied, doubtless based on some of the conversations she had had with Jesus in her home in Bethany about what would happen after we die, replied with faith, “I know he will rise in the resurrection on the last day.” But then Jesus upgraded her — and our — understanding of the resurrection. He said, “Iam the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die. Do you believe this?”
Jesus was stressing that eternal life, as he said elsewhere, is to know Christ Jesus and the Father who sent him. It is a relationship that death cannot kill. When we know Jesus truly as a friend, as a Savior, as a Lord, as a Bridegroom, as a Good Shepherd, when we enter into communion with him, death is nothing other than a change of address, or more accurately, a change of state. As Jesus says in this Good Shepherd discourse, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them and they follow me. I give them eternal life and they shall never perish. No one can take them out of my hand.” When we remain in the strong, loving, gloriously scarred hands of Jesus, when we stay in that loving covenant with him, he continues to embrace us into eternal life. That’s why St. Paul would exclaim in his Letter to the Romans, “I am convinced that neither death nor life nor angels nor principalities … nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Rom 8:38-39).
And so the most important thing in life is to learn how to enter into relationship with the Good Shepherd who is the resurrection and the life, to believe in him, to trust in him, to live in him. It means to recognize, as we pondered in St. Peter’s words to the leaders and elders of the people in today’s first reading, that “Jesus Christ the Nazorean, whom you crucified, … God raised from the dead” and “there is no salvation through anyone else, nor any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” It means to become convinced, as we prayed through the Responsorial Psalm, that “it is better to take refuge in the Lord than to trust in princes” and to say to the Lord, “I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me and have been my Savior!” It means to enter into the astonishing truth St. John testifies to in today’s epistle, what Jesus has made possible for each of us when we enter into his death and resurrection in the sacred waters of Baptism: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us,” the apostle exclaims, “that we may be called children of God.” It would be the greatest privilege and honor of our life just to becalled God’s son or daughter. But St. John tells us, “Yet that is what we are!” And as if that is not enough, he adds, “Beloved, we are God’s children now; what we shall be has not yet been revealed. But we know that when it is revealed, we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is.” All of this begins by entering into relationship with Jesus, the Good Shepherd, the Resurrection and the Life. He calls us by name and leads us into his own divine filiation, so that we might become sons and daughters in the Son, and, as St. Paul would say, “and if children, then heirs, heirs of God and joint heirs with Christ, if one we suffer with him so that we may be glorified with him” (Rom 8:17).
The first thing we need to do is to be humble enough to enter into this relationship with Jesus. For some today, there’s a resistance to doing so. On March 8, during his third Lenten sermon to Pope Francis and the leaders of the Roman Curia, Capuchin Cardinal Raniero Cantalamessa, the preacher of the Papal Household since 1980 and one of the greatest preachers in the history of the Church, spoke about resistance to Jesus as our Good Shepherd. He said, “Let’s face it, the image of the good shepherd, and the related images of sheep and flock, are not really fashionable nowadays. … People disdainfully reject the role of sheep and the idea of a flock. They do not realize, however, how much they experience in practice the situation that they condemn in theory.… We let ourselves be guided supinely by all sorts of manipulation and occult persuasion. Others create models of well-being and behavior, ideals, and goals of progress, and people adopt them. … We eat what they tell us, dress as fashion dictates, and speak as we hear.” He went on to describe what Jesus’ original listeners would have understood by the image of being a sheep to the Good Shepherd. “In the beginning,” Cardinal Cantalamessa stated, “Israel was a people of nomadic shepherds. The Bedouins of the desert today give us an idea of what life was once like for the tribes of Israel. In this society, the relationship between shepherd and flock is not only economic, that is, based on interest. An almost personal relationship develops between the shepherd and the flock. Spending day after day together in solitary places, without a living soul around, the shepherd ends up knowing everything about every sheep. The sheep recognize the voice of the shepherd who often talks out loud to the sheep, as if they were people. … With the change of being a nomadic tribe to that of being a settled people, the title of shepherd is given, by extension, also to those who act as representatives of God on earth: kings, priests, leaders in general. But in this case, the symbol diverges; it no longer evokes only images of protection and security, but also exploitation and oppression. Alongside the image of the good shepherd, that of the bad shepherd makes its appearance. In the prophet Ezekiel we find a terrible indictment against the bad shepherds who feed only themselves. They feed on milk and dress in wool, but they don’t care in the slightest about the sheep whom they actually treat ‘with cruelty and violence’ (Ez 34:1ff). This indictment against bad shepherds is followed by a promise: God himself will one day take loving care of his flock: ‘The lost I will search out, the strays I will bring back, the injured I will bind up, and the sick I will heal’ (Ez 34:16). In the Gospel, Jesus takes up this theme of the good and bad shepherd, but with something new: “I am the good shepherd!,” he says. God’s promise has become reality, exceeding all expectations. But we need to allow ourselves to know him who knows us, to call upon him who calls us by name, to follow him, to eat the food he gives, to receive the protection and the love he provides, and to learn how to love the other sheep the way he loves them.
Jesus wants to strengthen his sheep to become shepherds, to take disciples and make them apostles. He wants us who have been fed by him, guided by him, and protected by him, to feed, guide and protect others in this name. This is what is meant to happen in the lives of young people who become parents. This is what occurs when older brothers and sisters mature and take responsibility for their young siblings. This is what takes place with godparents faithful to their responsibility. This is what is supposed to occur in every Christian as we look at family members, friends, peers, colleagues. If we’re good sheep of Jesus, he wants us to become, with him, good shepherds of others. We see this transformation in the vocation of St. Peter. After the Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked Peter three times: “Simon, Son of John, do you love me more than these?” Jesus was querying whether Peter loved him more than anything and everything else, because the Lord wanted that love to be the distinctive mark of Peter’s life from that point forward. Three times Peter responded, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you.” After each response, Jesus gave him a commission, a task that would be the bedrock of all he would do in Jesus’ name. The first commission was, “Feed my lambs,” telling him in particular to take care of Christ’s young people. The second was “Tend my sheep,” which in the Greek means to guard and guide. The third was “Feed my sheep.” Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was entrusting the care and nourishment of his flock, young and old, to Peter’s loving solicitude. They would always remain Christ’s sheep — feedmy lambs, tend my sheep, Jesus said — but they would be guided by a sheep like themselves whom Christ would choose, appoint, and help to be a shepherd after his own loving heart. And it’s obvious that St. Peter never forgot this lesson. Peter’s love for Jesus — and our love for Jesus — would be shown in how we love those whom Jesus loves. Jesus wants us to get to know others by name and lead them to him, to help them recognize his voice and follow him. He wants us to sacrifice ourselves for them. He wants us to help them seize the eternal life he gives and protect them from the spiritual and earthly bandits who are all around us trying to preach a different Gospel and way of salvation than Jesus the Good Shepherd has given us. And he wants us to do so willingly.
One of the most powerful lines in the Gospel today is Jesus’ phrase, “I lay down my life in order to take it up again. No one takes it from me. I freely lay it down. I have the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again.” As our Good Shepherd, Jesus willinglygives his life to save ours. He uses the present tense, because he is in a perpetual state of self-giving. From his perspective, his crucifixion and death was not a passive victimization, but an active holocaust, the exclamation point of a life that began when he took on our humanity precisely to sacrifice it out of love so that we could share in his divinity. To be a shepherd after his heart is to be willing to imitate, indeed to share in and extend, his self-giving love. In an age in which so many see themselves fundamentally as victims, as some try to compete against each other to describe how they’re greater victims of “multiple and intersectional forms of discrimination,” Jesus wants us not to look at ourselves fundamentally as victims but as courageous shepherds. He would say to us elsewhere that if someone strikes us on the right cheek, freely to offer him the left, that if someone wants to go to law with us over our tunic, freely to hand him our cloak as well, that if someone wants to press us into service for one mile, freely to go with him for two. He wants us to convert every situation, especially those in which we might be tempted according to human logic to resist defensively, into a circumstance of self-giving love, freely to lay down our lives for God and others.
We see this in the first reading today when St. Peter defends himself for a “good deed done to a cripple.” All of us are called to be capable of making the same defense. We’re all called by the Lord to do good deeds for those who are in need. Today’s second reading helps us to see clearly those for whom we’re caring: “See what love the Father has bestowed upon us letting us be called children of God; yet that is what we are.” When we care for others, we’re caring for children of our Father, which makes them, truly, our brothers and sisters. They are not anonymous strangers in need, but brothers and sisters. But Jesus gives us an even stronger image: they’re his brothers and sisters, too, and our care for them, even the “least” of the world, he tells us, he takes personally as our care for him. He wants us to do this not out merely out of religious duty, or a sense of guilt, or even fidelity to a fourth vow, but freely out of love. Jesus who said, “No one takes my life from me. I freely lay it down!,” wants us to choose freely to sacrifice. St. John would way in his first letter, just a little bit after the passage in today’s second reading, “The way we came to know love was that he laid down his life for us; so we ought to lay down our lives for our brothers” (1 John 3:16). That’s the essence of the Christian life! That’s what the Good Shepherd has done for us that he wants us, first, to receive and, then, to live. That’s ultimately the transformation Jesus wants to work in the midst of a world who rebels against the docility of sheep. Jesus wants to transform us from sheep ultimately to shepherds who care for others as he cares for us, and not to treat them as “objects” of our sacrificial care, but as subjects we, too, are seeking with him to transform into shepherds who care for others.
Every Mass is an opportunity for us to enter into this transformation that the Good Shepherd wants to bring about in each of us. It’s here that Jesus the Good Shepherd calls each of us by name and seeks to have us grow intimately in knowing him as he knows us. It’s here that he seeks to guide us along right paths. It’s here that he prepares a banquet for us, one that is meant to be a foretaste of the eternal banquet in the Lord’s house where we hope to dwell forever. It’s here that he who willingly gave his life for us on Calvary here gives himself anew, saying, “This is my body given for you” and “This is the chalice of my blood poured for out for you.” It’s here that we, eating his flesh and drinking his blood, enter into communion with him risen from the dead as he seeks to transform us so that we might do this in his memory, laying down our life, giving our body and blood for God’s glory and for others’ good. It’s here that he seeks to fill us with wonder that, if God so loves us that he not only permits us to be called his children, that he not only adopts us as his beloved kids, but that he feeds us with himself, then we can look ahead with faith-filled eagerness to what this Eucharistic banquet leads to, when we shall become even more like our Good Shepherd, when we shall see him as he is.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Acts 4:8-12
Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said:
“Leaders of the people and elders:
If we are being examined today
about a good deed done to a cripple,
namely, by what means he was saved,
then all of you and all the people of Israel should know
that it was in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean
whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead;
in his name this man stands before you healed.
He is the stone rejected by you, the builders,
which has become the cornerstone.
There is no salvation through anyone else,
nor is there any other name under heaven
given to the human race by which we are to be saved.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 118:1, 8-9, 21-23, 26, 28, 29
R. (22) The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good,
for his mercy endures forever.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in man.
It is better to take refuge in the LORD
than to trust in princes.
R. The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me
and have been my savior.
The stone which the builders rejected
has become the cornerstone.
By the LORD has this been done;
it is wonderful in our eyes.
R. The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the LORD;
we bless you from the house of the LORD.
I will give thanks to you, for you have answered me
and have been my savior.
Give thanks to the LORD, for he is good;
for his kindness endures forever.
R. The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2
1 Jn 3:1-2
Beloved:
See what love the Father has bestowed on us
that we may be called the children of God.
Yet so we are.
The reason the world does not know us
is that it did not know him.
Beloved, we are God’s children now;
what we shall be has not yet been revealed.
We do know that when it is revealed we shall be like him,
for we shall see him as he is.
Alleluia
Jn 10:14
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I am the good shepherd, says the Lord;
I know my sheep, and mine know me.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 10:11-18
Jesus said:
“I am the good shepherd.
A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
A hired man, who is not a shepherd
and whose sheep are not his own,
sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away,
and the wolf catches and scatters them.
This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd,
and I know mine and mine know me,
just as the Father knows me and I know the Father;
and I will lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice,
and there will be one flock, one shepherd.
This is why the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.
I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.
This command I have received from my Father.”
The post The Transformation the Good Shepherd Wants In Us, Fourth Sunday of Easter (B), April 21, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
26 min
April 20, 2024Believing in the Eucharist and Walking with Jesus, Third Saturday of Easter, April 20, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, Auriesville, New York
Pilgrimage of Members of the Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage
Saturday of the Third Week of Easter
April 20, 2024
Acts 9:31-42, Ps 116, Jn 6:60-69

To listen to a recording of this homily, please click below:
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The following points were attempted in this homily:
Today we come to the dramatic conclusion, the eighth part of our second Easter octave, the “mystagogical catechesis” of Jesus’ Bread of Life discourse that the Church has us ponder every Easter season to help us to enter more deeply into Jesus’ risen life through the Holy Eucharist. After Jesus communicates to us that he is the True Manna God the Father gives us each day, that in order for us to have life we must live off of him, that he in the Eucharist is the fulfillment of the miracle of the multiplication of loaves and fish, today we are confronted with three possible responses to all he has said. These responses are those of every age, and they can help us gauge our own.
The first response is rejection. Throughout the Discourse, Jesus has been dialoguing fundamentally either with the “crowds” or the leaders of the “Jews.” They struggled with Jesus’ words about gnawing on his flesh and drinking his blood, which — without the Eucharistic context we are now aware of after the Last Supper — sounded cannibalistic and gross. But today Jesus’ dialogue is with the disciples and then with the twelve disciples whom he had chosen as apostles. These were the people who had been with Jesus for up to two years, observing him heal lepers, the lame, the blind, watching him cast out demons and raise the dead, hearing his great sermons and parables, and making the decision to follow him. But many of the disciples slammed on the breaks when it came to what Jesus was saying about the need to eat his flesh and drink his blood to have any life within them. “This saying is hard,” they say in today’s Gospel, “who can accept it?” They were right that the teaching is hard, but let’s face it, many of Jesus’ teachings are hard: to forgive 70 times 7 times, to love our enemies, to pray for our persecutors, to turn the other cheek, to pick up our Cross each day to follow him, to save our life by losing it, to go the way of the grain of wheat, to cut off our hands and feet and pluck out our eyes if they lead us to sin, and — most of all — to love the Lord with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. These are all hard. Some are even excruciatingly hard. But who can accept it? Someone with faith can accept it! These disciples seemed to behave as if they didn’t anticipate Jesus would challenge them to leave their comfort zones, not to mention to die to themselves so as to live by Him. But that’s what he was doing. That’s what he is always doing. And that’s what we have to confront. Jesus calls them out on this. He says, “Does this shock you? What if you were to see the Son of Man ascending to where he was before? … But there are some of you who do not believe.” They simply didn’t have the faith or the willingness to accept something shocking, even if Jesus were saying it. Ultimately they didn’t believe in Jesus enough. And St. John tells us later, “As a result of this, many of his disciples returned to their former way of life and no longer walked with him.” They abandoned Jesus because of his teaching about the Eucharist. Note that Jesus didn’t run after them saying that they had misunderstood him. He also didn’t water down the truth. He knew that they had understood him clearly but they just didn’t have the faith to believe in Him enough to believe in what he taught. Still today there are many who don’t believe in Jesus’ teaching in the Eucharist, finding it too hard to endure. They have some faith in Jesus, they do follow him to some degree, but they find the teaching on the Eucharist revolting. So many of our Protestant brothers and sisters are in this camp just don’t accept the literal meaning of Jesus’ words throughout the Bread of Life Discourse and separate themselves from this great sacrament. But there are many Catholics, too, who don’t believe in Jesus’ real presence in the Eucharist and their need to enter into Communion with him in order to live. The surveys show this lack of faith, that many Catholics just think that the Eucharist is simply bread and wine. But we see it most in the percentage of Catholics who don’t even make the effort to come to receive Jesus worthily on Sundays. They think that keeping Holy the Lord’s day is “hard” and wonder who can accept putting God first on the Lord’s day. We need to pray in a special way for all those, especially, among the disciples, who find Jesus’ teachings hard.
The second response we see today is hypocrisy. This we see in Judas. St. John tells us that in response to his teaching, “Jesus knew the ones who would not believe and the one who would betray him.” But Judas didn’t have the courage to admit it at the time. He continued to follow the Lord on the outside. He continued to pretend as if he believed. But his doubts about Jesus really crystallized right here. Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen used to preach about this Eucharistic beginning of Judas’ betrayal in his powerful retreats to brothers priests. “Scripture gives considerable evidence to prove that a priest begins to fail his priesthood when he fails in his love of the Eucharist,” Sheen wrote in his spiritual autobiography, A Treasure in Clay. “The beginning of the fall of Judas and the end of Judas both revolved around the Eucharist. The first mention that Our Lord knew who it was who would betray him is at the end of the sixth chapter of John, which is the announcement of the Eucharist. The fall of Judas came the night Our Lord gave the Eucharist, the night of the Last Supper. The Eucharist is so essential to our oneness with Christ that as soon as Our Lord announced It in the Gospel, It began to be the test of the fidelity of His followers. First, He lost the masses, for it was too hard a saying and they no longer followed Him. Secondly, He lost some of His disciples: ‘They walked with Him no more.’ Third, it split His apostolic band, for Judas is here announced as the betrayer.” Likewise the fall of many of Jesus’ beloved friends happens in this similar way. They continue to follow Jesus on the outside, but not on the inside. They pretend as if they believe, but they really don’t. Often they’ll come to receive Jesus like Judas did during the Last Supper and go out into the night and betray him. They’ll receive him unworthily, believing that they can remain in communion with Christ here and remain obstinately in sin in other parts of their life. This, in a sense, is even worse than outright rejection, because it lacks sincerity. And when we don’t really believe in Jesus here, when we don’t really seek to unite our entire life to him, when we think we should just go with the routine and receive Jesus even though we know that we’ve sinned against him, then it just leads to greater moral schizophrenia and greater betrayals. We need to learn from where Judas’ great betrayal began.
The third response is the one that the Lord wants from us. After the multitude of his disciples had abandoned him, after he had seen the response of those who didn’t believe and the one who would betray him, Jesus turned to the other members of the twelve and asked, “Do you also want to leave?” It was a question coming from the depth of Jesus’ disappointment, which itself was coming out of the depth of his love for those who were abandoning him in droves, because they thought that his total gift of himself to us in the Eucharist was, rather than the greatest example of divine love, an example of human insanity. But St. Peter shows us what real faith is. He 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.” Jesus’ teaching wasn’t any easier for Peter than for the many disciples who had just abandoned Jesus. He wouldn’t understand what Jesus was saying until a year later when he during the Last Supper would totally change bread and wine into his body and blood. But he 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, our Eucharistic faith is based on our faith in Jesus’ words. In the great Eucharistic Hymn, Adoro Te Devote, written by St. Thomas Aquinas, we sing, “I belief whatever the Son of God has said. Nothing is truer than the Word of truth!” Eucharistic miracles can help buttress our faith in the Eucharist, but they can’t substitute for it. We believe that what we’re about to receive is Jesus’ body and blood because Jesus told us that it was and sent out the apostles from the Upper Room with the command to do this in his memory.
The Eucharistic Lord in whom we believe, from whom we live, wants to bring our whole life into communion with him, so that we may not only “live because of him” but act together with him. This is where he wants our faith to lead us, so that, as we heard yesterday in the Gospel, we draw our life from him in the Eucharist and he is able through us to continue his saving work in the world. We see the consequences of a truly risen Eucharistic life in St. Peter in today’s first reading. He was faithfully allowing Jesus’ risen life to radiate through him as he continued Jesus’ saving mission. We see that first in his healing of Aeneas in Lydda, who had been paralyzed and bedridden for eight years. Echoing the words Jesus said in Capernaum to the paralyzed man lowered through the roof, “Rise, take up your mat, and go home,” Peter said, “Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed.” It wasn’t Peter who was healing Aeneas, but the risen Jesus through Peter. Likewise when Peter was summoned by the disciples to go to Joppa after the death of the little charitable “gazelle,” what the Hebrew Tabitha or the Greek Dorcas means, Peter emulated what Jesus did in the healing of the daughter of the synagogue official Jairus. Peter was one of three apostles present in the room when Jesus said, “Talitha, koum,” (“Little girl, arise!”). So here, Peter, praying at her bedside, then says, “Tabitha, rise up.” The word in both circumstances is the same word for “resurrection.” Jesus directly and then indirectly through Peter was telling each child to share in his resurrection, to arise, to experience newness of life and a foretaste of eternal life. Jesus similarly wants to live through us, to love through us, to preach through us, to minister through us, but for him to be able to do so, we need to be in communion with him and that happens right here at Mass when we learn to live off of him in Holy Communion.
As we prepare for the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage with a pilgrimage today to the Shrine of Our Lady of the Martyrs in Auriesville, we come to invoke the intercession of great saints of the Eucharist. Indeed, we invoke the intercession of Our Lady of Martyrs so that we might all become true martyrs, “witnesses,” of our Eucharistic Lord just like in the 1640s Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and Jean Lalande all gave their lives here out of a desire to bring to the Native Americans in Canada and upstate New York the Eucharistic love of the One who gave his life for us and the way St. Kateri Tekakwitha, born here, would become one of the great witnesses to Eucharistic adoration in the Church’s history.
St. Isaac Jogues, born in France, desired to be a Jesuit, priest, and missionary, in order not just to bring the Gospel of Jesus to the New World but Jesus himself in the Blessed Sacrament. His priestly ordination was accelerated so that he would be able to join a group of Jesuits leaving in 1636 for New France. He loved Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and was accustomed in seminary not only to attending Mass every day but to spending long vigils in prayer before the tabernacle. He well knew that as a missionary, traveling by canoe for days, with limited supplies of unleavened bread and wine, there would likely be times when he would not have access to the altar or tabernacle, but he longed to be able to found new chapels, altars, and tabernacles so that many others who did not know yet the ongoing reality of Christ’s incarnation might come to realize that God is with them, too. After six years as a missionary, he was captured by the Mohawks close to Three Rivers in Quebec. He would soon realize just how much he would suffer without God in order to try to bring him to the very ones who were depriving him. With Rene Goupil and their Huron guides and companions, St. Isaac was brought down rivers, lakes and land to the village of Ossernenon, modern Aurieville, on the northern lip of the Mohawk River. Among the tortures St. Isaac needed to endure was to have his thumbs and index fingers severely mutilated, which meant that even if he had the liberty to celebrate Mass, he would no longer be able to, because according to the rubrics at the time, the priest had to hold the consecrated host exclusively with those severed digits. This man of the Eucharist ended up going 17 months without even being able to receive the Eucharist, until, with the help of the Dutch, he was able to escape through modern day Albany, Manhattan, and England to arrive in France on Christmas Day 1643. As soon as he disembarked and had asked directions to the closest Church, he went to confession, attended Mass and received Holy Communion. “It was then,” he said, “that I began to live again and tasted the sweetness of my deliverance.” He eventually was able to get to the Jesuit seminary in Rennes, where his confrères were well aware from the Jesuit Relations of his captivity. When, not recognizing him, the rector asked impatiently if their visitor had news of Father Jogues, he replied with an appreciative smile, “He is at liberty and is the one speaking to you.” Through the help and insistence of the Jesuit Provincial and the Queen of France, he petitioned Pope Urban VIII for a dispensation from the rubrics so that he would be able to celebrate Mass with the hands and fingers he still had. Pope Urban VIII, most famous for adorning the altar of St. Peter with its famous bronze Baldachin, beautifully replied through the Jesuit General and French Ambassador, “Indignum esset Christi martyrem Christi non bibere sanguinem.” “It would be unworthy that a martyr of Christ not drink Christ’s blood.” Finally, in March 1644, after 20 months, he was able to go up to the altar of God, hold Christ in his mangled hands, and receive Christ’s Precious Body and Blood. Despite the tortures he had endured, he wished to return to the missionary fields. His wish was granted. In 1646, he was asked by the French territorial government to lead a diplomatic mission to Ossernenon. Along the way, he traveled on a lake on which no European had yet traversed. He named it, fittingly, Lac du Saint Sacrement, not only out of love for the Blessed Sacrament but because it was the vigil of Corpus Christi; that remained its name for 109 years, before the English renamed it after King George II. Because of the protection of the French, he was able to minister to those whom he had previously baptized and formed during his captivity. As he was leaving, anticipating his return, he left a “Mass kit,” containing everything he needed for Mass, so that he wouldn’t have to transport one the next time. That would prove his earthly undoing. The Mohawks caught an influenza a few months later and they superstitiously blamed it on the black box the priest had left behind. When Fr. Jogues soon thereafter returned with Jean Lalande, the Mohawks were poised for attack, and both were tomahawked, respectively, on successive days. He died, we could say, out of preparation for Mass, out of a desire to bring the Mass here for the people, symbolized by his Mass kit.
Feet from where he died, St. Kateri was born ten years later, of a Christian Algonquin mom and a Mohawk dad, both of whom died of smallpox when she was four. When she was 19, she had a chance to talk to the recently arrived Jesuit Father Jacques de Lamberville, telling him she wanted to learn more about prayer and be baptized. “Who can tell me what is most pleasing to God that I may do it?,” she asked. After he tested her resolve, she was baptized the following Easter, and grew quickly in faith. Her Christian life was such a sign of contradiction to her fellow Mohawks that Father de Lamberville, to save her life, arranged for her escape to the Jesuit village of Caughnawaga, 200 miles north, just south of Montreal. There she made her first Holy Communion on Christmas 1677. From that point forward she lived a thoroughly Eucharistic life, adoring Jesus outside the locked chapel — on her knees, despite snow, ice and freezing cold —for an hour until it opened at 5 am, attending Mass and adoring Jesus inside until it was time for work and acts of charity, and returning after work for several more hours of adoration. When she traveled outside the village for the hunting season, she prayed in spiritual communion and adoration before a crucifix she would place in a tree. She died on the cusp of Holy Thursday in 1680, at the age of 24. Her final words were a summary of her brief but profound Eucharistic faith and life: “Jesus, I love you.” The Shrine of Our Lady of the Martyrs, with its three tabernacles, is a unique place of Eucharistic Revival. There one can learn, through the example and intercession of Saints Isaac and Kateri, how to “live again,” to “taste the sweetness” of what Christ has won for us, and to love him by doing “what is most pleasing to him,” what he told us on Holy Thursday to do in his memory.
Today as we finish this eight day catechesis on his feast day, we focus on how the disciples in the Gospel who rejected Jesus’ teaching in the Eucharist “no longer walked with” Jesus. To believe in the Eucharist is, to some extent, to commit to walk with the Eucharistic Jesus. That’s what we’re here to ask. We ask the Lord for the gift of faith so that we may stake our existence, too, on his words of eternal life, “This is my body!” and “This is chalice of my blood!” and offer our body and blood for him and for others. In response to the awesome gift of the Holy Eucharist, we, together with Saints Isaac, Rene, Jean and Kateri, make our own today’s Psalm, “How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?,” we asked in the Psalm. And we make that response now: “The cup of salvation I will take up, and I will call upon the name of the Lord.”

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ACTS 9:31-42
The Church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria
was at peace.
She was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord,
and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit she grew in numbers.
As Peter was passing through every region,
he went down to the holy ones living in Lydda.
There he found a man named Aeneas,
who had been confined to bed for eight years, for he was paralyzed.
Peter said to him,
“Aeneas, Jesus Christ heals you. Get up and make your bed.”
He got up at once.
And all the inhabitants of Lydda and Sharon saw him,
and they turned to the Lord.
Now in Joppa there was a disciple named Tabitha
(which translated is Dorcas).
She was completely occupied with good deeds and almsgiving.
Now during those days she fell sick and died,
so after washing her, they laid her out in a room upstairs.
Since Lydda was near Joppa,
the disciples, hearing that Peter was there,
sent two men to him with the request,
“Please come to us without delay.”
So Peter got up and went with them.
When he arrived, they took him to the room upstairs
where all the widows came to him weeping
and showing him the tunics and cloaks
that Dorcas had made while she was with them.
Peter sent them all out and knelt down and prayed.
Then he turned to her body and said, “Tabitha, rise up.”
She opened her eyes, saw Peter, and sat up.
He gave her his hand and raised her up,
and when he had called the holy ones and the widows,
he presented her alive.
This became known all over Joppa,
and many came to believe in the Lord.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 116:12-13, 14-15, 16-17
R. (12) How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?
or:
R. Alleluia.
How shall I make a return to the LORD
for all the good he has done for me?
The cup of salvation I will take up,
and I will call upon the name of the LORD
R. How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?
or:
R. Alleluia.
My vows to the LORD I will pay
in the presence of all his people.
Precious in the eyes of the LORD
is the death of his faithful ones.
R. How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?
or:
R. Alleluia.
O LORD, I am your servant;
I am your servant, the son of your handmaid;
you have loosed my bonds.
To you will I offer sacrifice of thanksgiving,
and I will call upon the name of the LORD.
R. How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the good he has done for me?
or:
R. Alleluia.
Gospel
JN 6:60-69
Many of the disciples of Jesus 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 walked with 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 Believing in the Eucharist and Walking with Jesus, Third Saturday of Easter, April 20, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
23 min
April 20, 2024Fourth Sunday of Easter (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 20, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Easter, Vigil
April 20, 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 joy 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.
The Fourth Sunday of Easter each year is called Good Shepherd Sunday, because on this day the Church focuses on the tenth Chapter of the Gospel of St. John in which Jesus reveals the relationship he has with each of his faithful followers. Jesus first reveals about himself: “I am the Good Shepherd.” He discloses the way he seeks to relate to us. And that self-revelation leads to a disclosure about who we are: we are his people, the sheep of his flock. We respond with some of the most famous words God has ever inspired, saying, “The Lord is my shepherd. I want, I lack, for nothing!” We mark this truth in the heart of the Easter Season each year, because it is the heart of our Easter joy: with the Risen Lord Jesus as our Shepherd, with our being his beloved sheep, we truly have it all!
But it’s key for us to believe and live by those famous words of Psalm 23. By them, we publicly confess as Catholics that our treasure is Jesus, that if we have him, but don’t have everything else in the world, we still recognize how rich we are. In the midst of a consumerist society, in which we’re bombarded with advertisements that pretend that we’ll be happy only if we obtain what they’re selling, that we’ll be fulfilled only if we have money and houses, fame and fortune, power and position, we focus instead on the Jesus the Good Shepherd, risen from the death, as the pearl of great price. We confess that what Jesus provides, the relationship we have with him, is far more fundamental to happiness in this world, and absolutely essential to eternal felicity with him in the eternal sheepfold, than anything and everything else.
Throughout the Good Shepherd discourse Jesus gives us in the tenth Chapter of St. John, roughly a different of third of which we get each year, Jesus reveals that he does for us essentially three things. For us to be good sheep of the Good Shepherd, we need to allow him to shepherd us in these three ways:
First, he knows us, calls each of us by name and leads us out. He knows us and his sheep know him. We are not a number, just one of a vast multitude. We are unique to him. He knows our story. He knows us like no other, our strengths and weaknesses. And we are called to know him in return, to live in relationship with him, to relate to him, for example, like Mary and the saints, like Mary Magdalene and so many reconciled sinners. And knowing us as he does, he calls us. He gives us a vocation. We hear his call and recognize his voice. And that call is not a one-time summons, rather, as our Shepherd he guides us always. We not only have to hear that call but need it — tofollow the Good Shepherd as he leads us sometimes down dark valleys, sometimes onto verdant pastures, and ultimately to the eternal fold. This is the first characteristic of him as our shepherd and ourselves as his sheep: the personal relationship he, risen from the dead, wants to have with each of us.
Second, as Good Shepherd, he lays down his life for us. “No one,” he says, “takes my life from me; I freely lay it down. I have the power to lay it down and the power to take it up again.” That’s what Jesus does in his passion, death and resurrection. And he does all of this because he loves us. He told us during the Last Supper, “No one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends.” That’s the type of love he has for us, freely and willingly giving his life so that we might live. He loves us so much that he will leave the 99 behind and comes after us! He does not want one to be lost and each of us is, he deems, worth risking and giving his life.
The third characteristic is that he gives us eternal life, he puts us securely in the Father’s strong hands, he protects us from thieves and marauders and promises that if we remain with him we shall never perish. He not only saves us from so many dangerous and difficult situations, including eternal perils, but wants to give us the greatest of all time, eternal life, through coming into communion with him who is the Resurrection and the Life.
Jesus the Good Shepherd continues to befriend, call and guide us, to defend and lay down his life for us, and to save us and give us eternal life, but does it for the most part by calling some of his sheep and making them effective shepherds. He takes disciples and makes them apostles and guardians. He wants to do this with each of us. If we’re good sheep, then he wants us to become in our own circumstances a good shepherd of others, someone who helps Jesus feed, guide and protect others in his name. This is what is meant to happen in the lives of young people who become parents. This is what occurs when older brothers and sisters mature and care for their younger siblings. This is what occurs with godparents faithful to their responsibility. This is what is supposed to happen in every Christian as we look out at family members, friends, peers, colleagues, so many who are like sheep without a shepherd. If we’re good sheep of Jesus, he wants us to become, with him, good shepherds of others, leading them to come to know him and enter into relationship with him as the Good Shepherd with whom we want for nothing else. We see this transformation in the vocation of St. Peter. After the Resurrection, when Jesus appeared to the disciples on the shore of the Sea of Galilee, Jesus asked Peter three times: “Simon, Son of John, do you love me more than these?” Three times Peter responded, “Yes, Lord, you know that I love you,” and after each response, Jesus gave him a commission, a task that would be the bedrock of all he would do in Jesus’ name. The first commission was, “Feed my lambs,” telling him in particular to take care of Christ’s young people. The second was “Tend my sheep,” which in the Greek means to guard and guide. The third was “Feed my sheep.” Jesus, the Good Shepherd, was entrusting the care and nourishment of his flock, young and old, to Peter’s loving solicitude. They would always remain Christ’s sheep — Jesus said, feed my lambs, tend my sheep — but they would be guided by a sheep like themselves whom Christ would choose, appoint, and help to be a shepherd after his own loving heart. And it’s obvious that St. Peter never forgot this lesson. Peter’s love for Jesus, as well as our love for Jesus, would be shown in how we love those whom Jesus loves. Jesus wants us to know them by name and lead them to him, to help them recognize his voice and follow him. He wants us to sacrifice ourselves for them so that they may become beneficiaries of Christ’s own sacrifice. Like Christ, we have the power to lay our time, our money, even our lives down, trusting in Jesus’ power to raise us up again. Jesus wants us to help others seize the eternal life he gives and protect them from the spiritual and earthly conmen who are all around us trying to preach a different Gospel and way of salvation than Jesus the Good Shepherd has given us. We all have that vocation as good sheep of the Good Shepherd to imitate his shepherdly care.
But on Good Shepherd Sunday for the last 61 years, the Church has always marked the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, focusing especially on one group of disciples whom the Lord summons in a particular way to be shepherds in his image. It’s on this day that we unite ourselves to the Pope and to Catholics all over the world in praying to God the Father, the Harvest Master, to send out priest laborers, true shepherds, into the fields and among the flocks. Priests are the Good Shepherd’s indispensable instruments to feed his flock with himself in the Holy Eucharist, but they also nourish us with his holy Word and the teaching of the Church. Priests guide Jesus’ flock one-on-one in the ministry of mercy in the Confessional, in spiritual direction and counseling and guide the entire flock in their work as pastors, the Latin word for shepherd. They also seek to protect the flock of Christ from what Jesus calls in this Sunday’s Gospel “thieves and marauders,” those who would seek to harm them, those who would seek to profit from them, by metaphorically shearing them, milking them, killing and eating them. Having heard Jesus calling them by name, priests lay down their life for Jesus and for his flock, seeking to help them enter into a communion with Jesus, the Resurrection and the Life, from which no one will be able to take them from the Father’s hand. On the World Day of Prayer for Vocations, we thank Jesus for the way that he has fed and tended us as his lambs and sheep throughout our life by those who love Christ enough to leave a family of their own, money and possessions, and their own will, in order to serve us with the prayer, with the sacraments, with their charity, with their whole life in communion with the poor, chaste and obedient Christ. We pray in a particular way on Good Shepherd Sunday, in an age in which the Church and the world is yearning for real leadership, that God may hear our prayers and raise up many such shepherds from among the boys of our families and our parish families. It’s a day to pray to the Good Shepherd for all those who have already responded to his call, that they may think not of themselves and profit from the sheep, but of the sheep and offer themselves fully.
Jesus is the Good Shepherd who never leaves his flock untended. He continues to feed, lead and protect us. He continues to nourish, guide and defend us, in a particular through the priests he makes pastors after his own heart. As we prepare to listen to the Good Shepherd’s voice speaking to us in the Gospel this Sunday, we ask him to make us ever more grateful for the “table he has prepared for us” and for the priesthood that uniquely makes this great banquet of life possible. And we ask him to make us ever more attentive to his voice speaking to us through the Church, so that we might know how to follow him, through his priests, all the way to the verdant pastures and sheepfold of heaven.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 10:11-18
Jesus said:
“I am the good shepherd.
A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.
A hired man, who is not a shepherd
and whose sheep are not his own,
sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away,
and the wolf catches and scatters them.
This is because he works for pay and has no concern for the sheep.
I am the good shepherd,
and I know mine and mine know me,
just as the Father knows me and I know the Father;
and I will lay down my life for the sheep.
I have other sheep that do not belong to this fold.
These also I must lead, and they will hear my voice,
and there will be one flock, one shepherd.
This is why the Father loves me,
because I lay down my life in order to take it up again.
No one takes it from me, but I lay it down on my own.
I have power to lay it down, and power to take it up again.
This command I have received from my Father.”
The post Fourth Sunday of Easter (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, April 20, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
April 19, 2024Feeding on Christ, Third Friday of Easter, April 19, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time
Anniversary of My Baptism
April 19, 2024
Acts 9:1-20, Ps 117, Jn 6:52-59

To listen to a recording of this homily, please click below:
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The following points were attempted in this homily:
Today and tomorrow Jesus gets to the climax of his Bread of Life discourse in the Capernaum Synagogue that the Church has us ponder as a mystagogical catechesis every Easter season so that we may experience the “newness of life” that Jesus died and rose to give us. Today we get to the doctrinal climax; tomorrow to the moral climax. After speaking to us about how he is the True Manna given to us every day as our supersubstantial nourishment, how the Father draws us to this gift, and how we’re supposed to respond to this gift by faith — listening to, learning and lovingly doing what Jesus says — today Jesus summarizes everything in words that would have sounded almost brutally raw and somewhat sickening to his original listeners.
After Jesus stated at the end of yesterday’s Gospel that the bread he would give for the life of the world “is my flesh,” the Jews quarreled among themselves, asking a totally understandable question, “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?” At first glance it would seem almost as if he were calling them to cannibalism. None of what Jesus was asking would make sense until a year later when Jesus would take bread and wine during the Last Supper, totally change it into his Body and Blood and give it to them to eat and drink. But Jesus was here stressing anew the essential aspect of faith, that trusting in him means to trust in what he was saying. They might have legitimate questions about how they would eat his flesh and drink his blood, but they shouldn’t doubt the reality of what he was saying. And Jesus would say that whether or not they ate and drank his body and blood worthily was something of tremendous consequences.
Swearing an oath, he said, “Amen, amen I say to you, unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood, you do not have life within you.” The Greek word for “eat” is actually “gnaw,” the way an animal rips every last ounce of meat off of a bone. Jesus assures us that we’re lifeless unless we enter into communion with him through his Body and Blood. We’re lifeless unless we’re living off of him. But if we live off of him we will live forever: “Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood has eternal life, and I will raise him on the last day.” Then he gives two analogies as to how this works, the first of food and the second of filiation. “For my Flesh is true food, and my Blood is true drink. Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood remains in me and I in him.” We simply become what we eat and if we eat Jesus’ living flesh and blood, we will be transformed into him: we will remain in him and his irrepressible life will remain in us. The second analogy is filiation: “Just as the living Father sent me and I have life because of the Father, so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.” Jesus in the Eucharist will become the source of our regeneration, our rebirth, our remaking through our entering into his own eternal sonship. That’s the essence of the Christian life. In baptism, we die in Christ and are raised from the dead in him, but we grow in that new life day-by-day through Eucharistic communion with Jesus. Today as I celebrate the anniversary of my baptism (and my twin brother’s), I think about how that filiation first experienced in Baptism leads to its intensification at the altar. The Church symbolizes this in the Baptismal Rite when, after the Baptism itself, the anointing with Sacred Chrism in preparation for Confirmation, the blessing of the baptismal garment, the lighting of the Baptismal candle, and the prayer over the newly baptized’s ears and mouth, the Church processes to the altar to pray the Our Father, showing that the logical consequence of the bath of baptism is the feeding at the altar. In the Eucharist, we continue to draw our very life from the one who gave us that supernatural life in the baptismal womb of the Church.
This lesson about living off of Jesus in Holy Communion each day and thereby becoming one with him is illustrated in today’s memorable first reading that details the conversion of St. Paul. When Saul was “breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord” and had gone 117 miles to Damascus to try to arrest Christians and drag them back to Jerusalem in chains — just as he had been terrorizing the Christians in and around Jerusalem and ripping them from their homes — he was met outside the gates of the Syrian city by Jesus himself. Jesus came like a bolt of lightning that flashed all around and blinded Saul. He heard a voice saying to him, not, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting my Church?” Not “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting those who believe in me.” Instead he said, “Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me.” When Saul asked, “Who are you, Sir?” The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.” So great is Jesus’ identification with the members of his Body through Holy Communion that what Saul was doing to Christians Jesus was receiving personally. The rest of the reading shows how Jesus wanted to lead Saul to his Risen life. His conversion itself, as Pope Benedict emphasized, was ultimately a death and a resurrection, a death to the old man and his old ways of pursuing holiness by works of the law, and a rising to live in Christ by means of faith in response to grace. His blindness was a sign of how he had been acting blindly and how he needed to learn how to see with the eyes of faith. His fasting was a sign of his need for repentance, a Lent before Easter. And his baptism was the means by which he began to experience Jesus’ own Risen Life, a life-changing encounter for which he would spend his entire life trying to bring to others. He would sum up his apostolic life in a Eucharistic key in his earliest letter, writing to the Corinthians, “For I received from the Lord what I also handed on to you, that the Lord Jesus, on the night he was handed over, took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’ In the same way also the cup, after supper, saying, ‘This cup is the new covenant in my blood. Do this, as often as you drink it, in remembrance of me.’” Later in the same letter he would introduce the kerygma (1 Cor 15) by the same expression, that he handed on to us what he himself had received, a link that points to the fact that in the Eucharist we encounter Jesus and enter into the kerygma, his death, resurrection and appearances. And from that Eucharistic reality and his experience on the road to Damascus, he would develop his theology of the Mystical Body of Christ, that we are all members of Christ’s body and that therefore anyone who persecutes a member persecutes Christ and anyone who loves and honors a member, loves and honors Christ. So great was Paul’s personal identification with his Eucharistic Lord that he would be able to write to the Galatians, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.” That’s the type of new, risen life, begun in baptism and nourished through Holy Communion, that is meant to characterize any believer. And it leads to Christ-like love, as we enter into communion with Jesus’ total self-giving, his giving his body, blood and earthly life out of love for the Father and for us. That’s why Paul courageously was willing to suffer so much as he was poured out like a libation.
Today we ask the Lord through St. Paul’s intercession for the grace so that we might learn to live off of Christ just like Paul did, and just like Jesus lives because of the Father, so that we might experience even in this world a foretaste of the eternal life to which our Eucharistic communion with Jesus and with each other through Jesus is meant to lead.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 ACTS 9:1-20
Saul, still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord,
went to the high priest and asked him
for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, that,
if he should find any men or women who belonged to the Way,
he might bring them back to Jerusalem in chains.
On his journey, as he was nearing Damascus,
a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him.
He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him,
“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
He said, “Who are you, sir?”
The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.”
The men who were traveling with him stood speechless,
for they heard the voice but could see no one.
Saul got up from the ground,
but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing;
so they led him by the hand and brought him to Damascus.
For three days he was unable to see, and he neither ate nor drank.
There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias,
and the Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.”
He answered, “Here I am, Lord.”
The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight
and ask at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul.
He is there praying,
and in a vision he has seen a man named Ananias
come in and lay his hands on him,
that he may regain his sight.”
But Ananias replied,
“Lord, I have heard from many sources about this man,
what evil things he has done to your holy ones in Jerusalem.
And here he has authority from the chief priests
to imprison all who call upon your name.”
But the Lord said to him,
“Go, for this man is a chosen instrument of mine
to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and children of Israel,
and I will show him what he will have to suffer for my name.”
So Ananias went and entered the house;
laying his hands on him, he said,
“Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me,
Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came,
that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Immediately things like scales fell from his eyes
and he regained his sight.
He got up and was baptized,
and when he had eaten, he recovered his strength.
He stayed some days with the disciples in Damascus,
and he began at once to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues,
that he is the Son of God.
Responsorial Psalm PS 117:1BC, 2
R. (Mark 16:15) Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise the LORD, all you nations;
glorify him, all you peoples!
R. Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.
or:
R. Alleluia.
For steadfast is his kindness toward us,
and the fidelity of the LORD endures forever.
R. Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Alleluia JN 6:56
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood,
remains in me and I in him, says the Lord.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel JN 6:52-59
The Jews quarreled among themselves, saying,
“How can this man give us his Flesh to eat?”
Jesus said to them,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless you eat the Flesh of the Son of Man and drink his Blood,
you do not have life within you.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
has eternal life,
and I will raise him on the last day.
For my Flesh is true food,
and my Blood is true drink.
Whoever eats my Flesh and drinks my Blood
remains in me and I in him.
Just as the living Father sent me
and I have life because of the Father,
so also the one who feeds on me will have life because of me.
This is the bread that came down from heaven.
Unlike your ancestors who ate and still died,
whoever eats this bread will live forever.”
These things he said while teaching in the synagogue in Capernaum.
The post Feeding on Christ, Third Friday of Easter, April 19, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
April 18, 2024Being Taught and Fed by God, Third Thursday of Easter, April 18, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the Third Week of Easter
April 18, 2024
Acts 8:26-40, Ps 66, Jn 6:44-51

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.18.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today Jesus continues his Bread of Life discourse reinforcing a couple of the points he’s made earlier during the mystagogical catechesis of this “second octave of Easter,” focused on how we encounter him Risen from the dead in the holy Eucharist and how we enter into communion with the eternal life he gives us through that encounter. As the true Manna, he compares and contrasts himself to the manna God provided in the desert. “Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died. This is the bread that comes down from heaven so that one may eat of it and not die.” He is the daily food of everlasting life that God gives. But we need to respond with faith and action to this gift. Jesus says, “Whoever eats this bread will live forever… and the bread that I will give for the life of the world is my flesh.” Just like the Jews needed to eat the Passover lamb, just like the Israelites needed to consume the manna, so we need to eat the nourishment God gives us. But doing so isn’t a magical act, that if we consume the Eucharist we will automatically live forever. St. Paul tells us that those who eat the body and blood of the Lord unworthily eat and drink condemnation upon themselves (1 Cor 11:29). The Sequence of Corpus Christi reminds us that the Bread of Life becomes the bread of death for those who consume unworthily (Sumunt boni, sumunt mali, sorte tamen inaequali, vitae vel interitus. Mors est malis, vita bonis: vide paris sumptionis quam sit dispar exitus: “Both good and bad receive, but to totally different results, one to life and the other to the tomb. Death to the evil, life to the good. Behold how different is the end of a similar consumption.”) Eating the Body and drinking the Blood of the Lord are meant to lead us to a true Holy Communion of life with Jesus, to enter into a new life, a risen life, and it’s that communion of life that brings us to eternal life.
This main focus of this section is how to approach Jesus in the Eucharist with consequential faith, as he seeks to train us to enter into that communion with him. It’s about docility. Right before this passage, Jesus’ listeners objected saying, “Is this not Jesus, the son of Joseph? Don’t we know his mom and dad? How can he say, ‘I have come down from heaven?’” In tomorrow’s passage, we’ll see how many of Jesus’ disciples object to his “difficult” teaching asking, “Who can endure it?” And on Saturday, Jesus will ask his apostles point-blank whether they can accept what Jesus is saying or whether they’ll abandon him over his teaching on the Eucharist. So just as Jesus yesterday talked about faith, today he talks about the docility that comes in faith. “No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him, and I will raise him on the last day.” God will give us the grace to be drawn to the Eucharist, but we need to let him help us overcome our resistance. Jesus adds, “It is written in the prophets, ‘They shall all be taught by God,” and we need to allow ourselves to be taught by him. This involves both listening and learning. Jesus says, “Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.” God the Father draws us by letting us hear his words through his Son, but we need to do more than hear idly. We need to allow Jesus the Master to teach us. We must become his faithful disciples (students), by believing what he teaches, learning the truth, and living it. In the Opening Prayer of today’s Mass, we asked God to “let us feel your compassion more readily during these days” in a specific way, by “cling[ing] more faithfully to the teachings of your truth.” God out of mercy teaches us and draws us — and we receive that gift by listening, learning, clinging to it and sharing with others what we have heard, learned and spousally embraced. St. Paul, in a famous passage in the tenth chapter of his Letter to the Romans wrote, “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved. But how can they call on him in whom they have not believed? And how can they believe in him of whom they have not heard? And how can they hear without someone to preach? And how can people preach unless they are sent? As it is written, ‘How beautiful are the feet of those who bring [the] good news!’” We thank the Lord today for those whom he used to teach us and we thank him for the awesome privilege he has given us, united with Him in the Holy Eucharist, to be sent out to others so that, hearing from us what we have heard from God, they may call upon the name of the Lord and be saved.
These lessons — docility and an eagerness to bring others to be God’s teaching assistant — are shown for us in all their beauty in today’s first reading in the story of the Ethiopian Eunuch. Like many ancients from polytheistic cultures that were often licentious, he had likely come to Jerusalem with fascination for the Jewish monotheistic and moral religion, drawn by the Father to seek the truth. As he was leaving Jerusalem heading back to his own country — a journey of well more than a thousand miles through the desert — on the Road to Gaza, he was pondering the Prophet Isaiah and particularly Isaiah’s fourth suffering servant song (Is 53). The Holy Spirit said to the Deacon Philip, “Go and join up with that chariot,” and Philip did something beautiful. He ran to catch up. He was zealous to cooperate. He was docile to the Spirit’s guidance — and he met another who likewise was being drawn by God. When Philip heard the Eunuch reading the Prophet Isaiah, he asked him, very adroitly, “Do you understand what you are reading?” And the Eunuch said that he couldn’t “unless someone instructs me.” But they will all be taught by God and the Eunuch would be instructed by the Holy Spirit through Deacon Philip. Philip helped the Eunuch to see that the Prophet Isaiah was speaking about Jesus and, starting from that passage, “proclaimed Jesus to him” in such a way that seeing a body of water — a body of water in the desert! — the Eunuch immediately asked to be baptized. That’s docility! That’s the type of cooperation with God’s drawing us to Jesus that should characterize every Christian life. That’s the way we should allow the Lord to draw us to Jesus in the Eucharist.
The docility to which Jesus calls us begins by listening, then it is following by learning, as we permit ourselves to be instructed by God, but then it involves becoming God’s instruments, like the Deacon Philip allowed, so that God may instruct others through us. That accompaniment of helping others to unite themselves to the Lord begins by entering into communion with God here so that we can become his instruments to help others whom God is likewise drawing into communion. As we give thanks to the Lord for drawing us to him today, we pray that we may be likewise docile to the apostolate that flows from it!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ACTS 8:26-40
The angel of the Lord spoke to Philip,
“Get up and head south on the road
that goes down from Jerusalem to Gaza, the desert route.”
So he got up and set out.
Now there was an Ethiopian eunuch,
a court official of the Candace,
that is, the queen of the Ethiopians,
in charge of her entire treasury,
who had come to Jerusalem to worship, and was returning home.
Seated in his chariot, he was reading the prophet Isaiah.
The Spirit said to Philip,
“Go and join up with that chariot.”
Philip ran up and heard him reading Isaiah the prophet and said,
“Do you understand what you are reading?”
He replied,
“How can I, unless someone instructs me?”
So he invited Philip to get in and sit with him.
This was the Scripture passage he was reading:
Like a sheep he was led to the slaughter,
and as a lamb before its shearer is silent,
so he opened not his mouth.
In his humiliation justice was denied him.
Who will tell of his posterity?
For his life is taken from the earth.
Then the eunuch said to Philip in reply,
“I beg you, about whom is the prophet saying this?
About himself, or about someone else?”
Then Philip opened his mouth and,
beginning with this Scripture passage,
he proclaimed Jesus to him.
As they traveled along the road
they came to some water,
and the eunuch said, “Look, there is water.
What is to prevent my being baptized?”
Then he ordered the chariot to stop,
and Philip and the eunuch both went down into the water,
and he baptized him.
When they came out of the water,
the Spirit of the Lord snatched Philip away,
and the eunuch saw him no more,
but continued on his way rejoicing.
Philip came to Azotus, and went about proclaiming the good news
to all the towns until he reached Caesarea.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 66:8-9, 16-17, 20
R. (1) Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Bless our God, you peoples,
loudly sound his praise;
He has given life to our souls,
and has not let our feet slip.
R. Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Hear now, all you who fear God, while I declare
what he has done for me.
When I appealed to him in words,
praise was on the tip of my tongue.
R. Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Blessed be God who refused me not
my prayer or his kindness!
R. Let all the earth cry out to God with joy.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Gospel
JN 6:44-51
Jesus said to the crowds:
“No one can come to me unless the Father who sent me draw him,
and I will raise him on the last day.
It is written in the prophets:
They shall all be taught by God.
Everyone who listens to my Father and learns from him comes to me.
Not that anyone has seen the Father
except the one who is from God;
he has seen the Father.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever believes has eternal life.
I am the bread of life.
Your ancestors ate the manna in the desert, but they died;
this is the bread that comes down from heaven
so that one may eat it and not die.
I am the living bread that came down from heaven;
whoever eats this bread will live forever;
and the bread that I will give
is my Flesh for the life of the world.”
The post Being Taught and Fed by God, Third Thursday of Easter, April 18, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
April 16, 2024“Sir, Give Us This Bread Always,” Third Tuesday of Easter, April 16, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Third Week of Easter
Memorial of St. Bernadette Soubirous
April 16, 2024
Acts 7:51-8:1, Ps 31, Jn 6:30-35

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.16.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we enter into the fourth day of the Octave of mystagogical catechesis on the Holy Eucharist and how through this divine gift we intensify our relationship with the Risen Christ. After Jesus stressed that the work of God was to believe in Him whom the Father had sent — which, to facilitate that faith, Jesus had worked the “sign” of the multiplication of loaves and fish and walked on water — the crowds nevertheless asked, “What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?” The sign that he had just worked across the Sea of Galilee for them, multiplying a small boy’s dinner of five buns and two small fish to feed a crowd of 5,000 men, a sign that got them to follow him several miles along the upper lip of the Sea in a flotilla of boats, was apparently not miraculous enough for them, nor were any of the scores of cures that he had worked in Capernaum in previous visits. Still obsessed about food and free meals, they asked him for a sign that the rabbis had long said that the prophet whom Moses had promised would eventually come after him (Deut 18:15) would work to show that he was Moses’ successor: just like Moses had fed the Israelites in the desert with manna, so the one who would come after him would do the same and rain down from them this daily nourishment from heaven. So they said to him, “What can you do? Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written, ‘He gave them bread from heaven to eat.’”
We remember the story of the manna. The Jews were grumbling in the desert, fearful that they would starve to death. So Moses brought their complaints and pleas to God, and God replied by saying, “I am going to rain bread from heaven for you, and each day the people shall go out and gather enough for that day” (Exod 16:4). And every morning for forty years, they awoke to find a miraculous edible dew that looked like coriander seed, with the white like gum resin, tasting like wafers made with honey (Num 11:7; Exod 16:31). They Israelites had no idea what it was, and hence called it “manna,” which literally means, “What is it?” Moses told them, “It is the bread that the Lord has given you to eat” and instructed them to gather as much of it as each needed for a day. This is how they survived in the desert for forty years, until they reached the promised land.
In reply to that test for a sign, Jesus first corrected them, saying it wasn’t Moses who gave them the manna, but God the Father. Then he basically said that the rabbis were right and the One to whom Moses would point would in fact give them this celestial food, but that he was that true Manna, the food that people need to survive in the desert of human life: “Amen, amen, I say to you, it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven; my Father gives you the true bread from heaven. For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world.” Their response was materialistic but nevertheless prophetic: “Sir, give us this bread always,” and Jesus made plain what the sign he would give a year later during the Last Supper as a perpetual response to that prayer would be: “I am the bread of life; whoever comes to me will never hunger, and whoever believes in me will never thirst.” That’s the food for which he wants us to labor — as he told us in yesterday’s section of this discourse — more than the most hardworking parent strives to put material food on his kids’ table.
I’ve always been struck that God in his wisdom made the Israelites have to go get the manna every morning except the Sabbath (so that they wouldn’t have to work). Even on the Sabbath, however, they would eat the second daily portion of manna that they had gotten the day before. God said he made them do this every day in order to “test them,” Exodus recalls, to see whether or not they would follow his instruction and be faithful (Exod 16:4). Throughout their entire time in the desert until they entered the promised land, they received this heavenly gift through this daily work and daily sustenance. In a similar way, Jesus taught us to pray in the Our Father, not, “Give us today all the bread we’re going to need this week” or “Give us now all we’ll ever need,” but “Give us this day our daily bread,” because he wanted us to recognize that every day God wants to grant that prayer. The early saints of the Church commented at length about the Greek word we translate as “daily” — epi-ousios — which literally means “super-substantial.” They said it referred less to the material bread that we need to consume for physical survival, but to the bread that goes beyond our substance — the Eucharist — that we need for our souls. The early saints said that Jesus was teaching them to pray that the Father would give them every day the Eucharist. In other words, when Jesus said that he was the “real manna,” the “true bread come down from heaven,” he was intending to be our daily portion of food throughout our lifetime in the desert of life, until, God-willing, we enter into the eternal promised land of heaven, the eternal life that is the consequence of genuinely entering into communion with Christ through the Holy Eucharist. In response to the request of the Jews, “Sir, give us this bread always,” Jesus has, by giving us his body and blood and making it available not just on Sunday in special way, but every day, in the places where there is a priest who is faithful to the daily celebration of the Mass. This is among the gifts we are celebrating during the ongoing Eucharistic Revival.
That brings us to what our response is to this incredible gift of himself that the Lord gives us every day. Why do we think he does it? Do we think it’s merely to provide some “bonus” to those like us who can conveniently come to Mass each day, or rather to give sustenance to all the people he created and redeemed because he knows we need him every day? It was of course possible for a Jew in the desert to skip a day, or two or three, in going out to obtain the daily manna. But over the course of time, the person would become weaker, hungrier and more vulnerable. If God went through the effort to feed them every morning, it’s because he knew that they needed to be fed every day. It’s the same way with the “real Manna” of the Holy Eucharist. God has desired to give us each day this “daily bread come down from heaven,” because he knows that we need to be spiritually fed each day. I’m convinced from both personal and pastoral experience that one of the real proofs of whether we recognize that the Eucharist really is Jesus, and whether we truly love the Lord, can be seen in our attitude toward daily Mass. Even if a Catholic cannot physically be present every day at Mass because of other pressing responsibilities, our hearts should always be longing for this encounter. That should be our great hunger. “Give us that bread always” and “Give us today our supersubstantial Bread!” should be our most persistent aspirations. And our gratitude to God’s answering that prayer by raining down for us each day this true Bread from heaven should know no bounds. For those of us who have daily Mass as part of our spiritual regimen, it’s not enough for it to remain there. One of our tasks is to help the whole Church come to appreciate this gift and join us in receiving Him. Jesus says, “For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven and gives life to the world,” and later he will add that unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood we have no life, no zoe (supernatural life), in us, even if we still have bios (biological life). Those who aren’t living Eucharistic lives are, to some degree, spiritually dead, or at least not anywhere near as spiritually alive as God would want them to be, as he wants to help them to be through communion with Him Risen from the dead.
Today we can focus on two examples of those who lived truly Eucharistic lives. The first is in today’s first reading. St. Stephen’s strength came from his faith in the One God has sent, from his communion with Jesus’ risen life that could not be extinguished even if all the rocks and stones of the world had landed on him at once. He was fed by the Lord to give witness to his living presence, his face radiated with the risen presence of God-with-us, and even as he was being stoned to death, he was totally united to the Lord. As he was thrown into the pit and began to beg pelted, his first words were not, “Help me, Jesus!” or even “Save me, Jesus!,” which would have been totally legitimate prayers of faith. Instead it was, “Lord Jesus, receive my spirit,” a sign that he had regularly been entrusting his body and spirit to Jesus in their regular meeting in the celebration of the Eucharist. And later he showed the depth of his communion with the One who had told us to love our enemies, do good to those who hate us, and pray for our persecutors when he, echoing Jesus’ words to the Father from the Cross, “forgive them for they know not what they do,” said, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them.” And that prayer, made in communion with Christ, was efficacious in the life of Saul, who converted to become the greatest apostle of all. The zoe, the supernatural life in St. Stephen, was in a sense prayerfully and contagiously passed on to Saul, so that as Paul he could eventually bring many others to say with him, “For me to live is Christ” and the “life I now live in the flesh I live by faith in the Son of God.” And he sought to pass on to those who were opposing him a similar faith. When St. Stephen spoke to them as a “stiff-necked people” incapable of turning to the right or left, he was saying that they don’t want to be converted and appealing to them in mercy. When he said that they were “uncircumcised in heart and ears,” he meant that their heart and ears weren’t consecrated to God, they weren’t open to faith, which comes through hearing and loving before we ever understand it. When he said, “You always oppose the Holy Spirit … just like your ancestors,” he was seeking to open them up to what God was seeking to do in them now. It’s a call for us to be docile, to turn our faces through our necks always to the Lord, to consecrate our ears to faithfully receiving his message and our hearts to burning for life for him who speaks, and to follow always the Spirit’s promptings just like our saintly ancestors!
The second example is the inspiring and humble saint the Church celebrates today, whose statue is prominently right next to me in this grotto dedicated to Our Lady of Lourdes. St. Bernadette Soubirous died 145 years ago today. The Blessed Virgin Mary appeared 18 times to her in 1858 in Lourdes. I had the great joy to invoke her as the patroness of the second parish where I was pastor. She was one who labored for the food that endures to eternal life. Because she was illiterate and couldn’t read her catechism, she still hadn’t made her first Holy Communion by the time the Blessed Virgin started appearing to her when Bernadette was 14. Once it became clear to her pastor, however, that Mary was favoring her in this way, he was somewhat ashamed that he hadn’t done his duty in preparing her for Holy Communion, so he asked the parochial vicar to get her ready to receive Jesus. After she had made her first Holy Communion, a woman named Mademoiselle Estrade asked her, “What made you happier, Bernadette, first Holy Communion or the Apparitions?” Bernadette replied, “The two go together. They cannot be compared. I only know that I was very happy on both occasions.” With her simple wisdom, Bernadette points all of us to something really important. St. Bernadette is famous today because God chose her to be the recipient of Mary’s apparitions, but she was clearly indicating that the gift each of us receives in Holy Communion is just as important. (I actually think it’s even more important to receive Jesus, the Son of God, than his mother, but insofar as both were special gifts of the same divine Giver, it’s acceptable to equate them). She shows us to treat the reception of Holy Communion each day as a gift as valuable as a rare apparition of the Blessed Mother that would make us famous 145 years after our death? Later in life, St. Bernadette wrote about how God had made her great, not so much through the apparitions, but through the Eucharist. “I was nothing and of this nothing God made something great. In Holy Communion I am heart to heart with Jesus. How sublime is my destiny!” How sublime is all of our destinies! Today on her feast day, we recognize how sublime is our destiny, to receive Jesus, the Bread of Life, as our daily manna.
“Sir, give us this Bread always.” Jesus has answered that prayer. Full of gratitude, like St. Stephen and St. Bernadette, let us now receive that response!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ACTS 7:51-8:1A
Stephen said to the people, the elders, and the scribes:
“You stiff-necked people, uncircumcised in heart and ears,
you always oppose the Holy Spirit;
you are just like your ancestors.
Which of the prophets did your ancestors not persecute?
They put to death those who foretold the coming of the righteous one,
whose betrayers and murderers you have now become.
You received the law as transmitted by angels,
but you did not observe it.”
When they heard this, they were infuriated,
and they ground their teeth at him.
But Stephen, filled with the Holy Spirit,
looked up intently to heaven and saw the glory of God
and Jesus standing at the right hand of God,
and Stephen said, “Behold, I see the heavens opened
and the Son of Man standing at the right hand of God.”
But they cried out in a loud voice,
covered their ears, and rushed upon him together.
They threw him out of the city, and began to stone him.
The witnesses laid down their cloaks
at the feet of a young man named Saul.
As they were stoning Stephen, he called out,
“Lord Jesus, receive my spirit.”
Then he fell to his knees and cried out in a loud voice,
“Lord, do not hold this sin against them”;
and when he said this, he fell asleep.
Now Saul was consenting to his execution.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 31:3CD-4, 6 AND 7B AND 8A, 17 AND 21AB
R. (6a) Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Be my rock of refuge,
a stronghold to give me safety.
You are my rock and my fortress;
for your name’s sake you will lead and guide me.
R. Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Into your hands I commend my spirit;
you will redeem me, O LORD, O faithful God.
My trust is in the LORD;
I will rejoice and be glad of your mercy.
R. Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Let your face shine upon your servant;
save me in your kindness.
You hide them in the shelter of your presence
from the plottings of men.
R. Into your hands, O Lord, I commend my spirit.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Gospel
JN 6:30-35
The crowd said to Jesus:
“What sign can you do, that we may see and believe in you?
What can you do?
Our ancestors ate manna in the desert, as it is written:
He gave them bread from heaven to eat.”
So Jesus said to them,
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
it was not Moses who gave the bread from heaven;
my Father gives you the true bread from heaven.
For the bread of God is that which comes down from heaven
and gives life to the world.”
So they said to Jesus,
“Sir, give us this bread always.”
Jesus said to them, “I am the bread of life;
whoever comes to me will never hunger,
and whoever believes in me will never thirst.”
The post “Sir, Give Us This Bread Always,” Third Tuesday of Easter, April 16, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
25 min
April 15, 2024Laboring for Everlasting Food, Third Monday of Easter, April 15, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Parish, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week of Easter
April 15, 2024
Acts 6:8-15, Ps 119, Jn 6:22-29

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.15.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the Gospel we continue our annual “second” Easter Octave within the Church’s mystagogical season of Easter, allowing Jesus to show us the most important way we will be able to experience the newness of life to which our share in his Resurrection that begins in baptism is meant to lead us: a communion with him in his Risen life by means of the Holy Eucharist. This is particularly important during the ongoing Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States.
On Friday, we witnessed the foretaste of the miraculous multiplication of his Body and Blood throughout all time and space in the multiplication of the loaves and fish. This was not only a Messianic sign, even a divine sign of the Lord’s preparing a banquet on a mountain for his people (Is 25), but something pointing to the two greater banquets: the banquet of the Eucharist and the banquet of eternal life. Immediately after that miracle, Jesus went up on the mountain to pray and the disciples got into the boat from and crossed westward toward Capernaum. As we saw on Saturday, Jesus walked on the water toward them to show that he transcended the power of death, symbolized by the churning waters and the drowning they portended, so that, upon disembarking, he would be able to take those following him from the natural to the supernatural, by offering them the food that would help them transcend the power of death by entering into communion with Him risen from the dead.
Those who had received the free meal had come the seven-mile journey along the north lip of the Sea of Galilee looking for Jesus there. Because they knew Jesus hadn’t gotten into the boat with the other disciples, they asked, “Rabbi, when did you get there?” But Jesus wasn’t interested in small talk. He wanted to help them to grow in faith, to help them to recognize why they were following him and to challenge him to follow him for the right reasons. “Amen, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs” — in other words, because you saw me perform a miracle and it’s led you to put faith in me and in my words — “but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” They came looking for another free meal, a divine handout, seeking Jesus as a means to address their material hungers and needs. This is not evil in itself. Jesus would teach us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Many come to the Lord not just with wants but real material needs, not knowing how to pay the rent, or put food on the table, purchase medications, or find a job to help support loved ones. God wants to hear these prayers. As a loving Father, he wants us to bring our needs to him. It wasn’t this that Jesus was criticizing. Jesus was criticizing the fact that they had stopped there, that they were concerned most about their material needs. Just as with all the healing miracles, however, Jesus in the multiplication of the loaves and the fish was doing a sign to help them to come to ask him for something far more than loaves and fish.
Jesus tells them, and tells us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” So many people, good people, spend most of their lives working to put food on the table, to nourish themselves and their families. We all know how important that is, but Jesus is saying that as hard as we work to fulfill that duty of love, we must work much harder for the food that he will give us, the food of eternal life. What is that food that God puts on the table? What is that nourishment of eternal life? If most people spend forty hours a week or more, sometimes in addition working two or three jobs, for perishables, what is the imperishable nutrition for which Jesus tells us we should labor even more strenuously?
There are four interconnected answers to that question:
The first response is knowing God’s Word. In the battles to which Jesus was exposed in the desert, Jesus was asked by the devil to turn stone into bread to feed his incredible hunger after having fasted for 40 days and 40 nights. Jesus responded by saying, as we heard in the Alleluia verse, “Man does not live on bread alone, but on every word that comes from the mouth of God.” To work for this food means to strive to know, understand, treasure and put into practice all the words that come from God’s mouth to feed us.
This leads directly to the second common interpretation: Doing God’s will. Jesus says elsewhere in the Gospel, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to accomplish his work.” To work for the food that endures for eternal life is to strive to do God’s will. That’s why it’s unsurprising that Jesus later in this Bread of Life Discourse at the Capernaum synagogue, will say, “For I have come down from heaven, not to do my own will, but the will of him who sent me; and this is the will of him who sent me, that I should lose nothing of all that he has given me, but raise it up at the last day.” We sang in today’s Psalm that blessed are those who follow the law of the Lord, who do his will, who obey what he commands. Jesus wants us to have that beatitude!
The third is the work of faith. When Jesus says, “Do not work for food that perishes but for the food that endures for eternal life, that the Son of Man will give you,” the crowds immediately replied, “What can we do to accomplish the works of God?” There’s a particular type of work necessary to labor for the enduring nourishment Christ gives, and Jesus makes it very clear: “This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.” We need to believe in Jesus and believe in what he says and does. That work of faith is the most essential element in laboring for eternal life in general, but also it’s essential for us to believe in what Jesus says about the upcoming fourth response.
The fourth answer is the one that ought to be obvious to us who have heard the Bread of Life discourse many times: it’s Jesus’ presence in the Eucharist. As Jesus will explain to us in upcoming days, the Eucharist is the food prophesied by the Old Testament daily miracle of the manna. Just as God rained down manna each day to feed the people of God as they wandered in the desert before coming to the promised land, so God the Father rains down Jesus, the Living Bread come down from heaven, each day as our spiritual food in the Eucharist.
All four of these interpretations, of course, go together in the celebration of the Mass. We begin with God’s word, we make an act of faith with regard to it, we unite ourselves with God’s will and “do this in memory of [him]” and then have the awesome privilege of receiving the Word made Flesh, God’s daily spiritual manna, in the Eucharist. Becoming one body with Christ in the Eucharist is meant to help us become one with his will and faithfully accomplish it in the world, as we, united with Christ our head, become his hands, his feet, his heart, and his mouth in the world. This is what the risen life of a Christian in union with Risen Jesus is all about.
But the main point for us is not simply to know what is the imperishable nourishment for which we should be striving but actually to live for it, to labor for it. Many Catholics, just like the first century Jews, spend more of our time hungering and working for hamburgers and french fries, for pancakes and sausages, for salads and sweets, than we do for Jesus’ word, will and flesh and blood. That’s why Jesus repeats this Eucharistic course for us year during the Easter Season, because so many of us have not really put these words into action — and Jesus wants to help us.
In today’s first reading, St. Stephen, one of the first seven deacons, men “filled with faith and the Holy Spirit,” ordained by the apostles to help carry out the Church’s charity, is an example of someone who labored for the food that God gave. He was willing to give his whole life to obtain the food of everlasting life. Today in the first reading we see him, “filled with grace and power [and] working great wonders and signs among the people.” Jews from various nations had come to debate him, but they couldn’t withstand his wisdom and the power of the Holy Spirit speaking through him. So they sought to do to him what the Sanhedrin had previously done to Jesus: accuse him with false witnesses of blasphemously speaking against Moses, God and the Temple because he was passing on the Words of Jesus, on every syllable of which he was constructing his life. Tomorrow we will have the account of his martyrdom. But in between, what we unfortunately won’t hear at Mass is his tremendous testimony before the Sanhedrin. I’d urge you to read it at home today by turning to the sixth and seventh chapters of the Acts of the Apostles. What we see there is just how deeply he has assimilated the Word of God and was living on every syllable of it, showing how all of salvation history had culminated in Jesus and was meant to culminate in the life of every believer. So much was he laboring with faith for God’s word, will, and Word-made-flesh that the mortal danger he was in didn’t frighten him. He had become so united with Jesus Christ in his Eucharistic self-offering that he would give his own body and shed his own blood in union with Jesus’ for the salvation of the very members of the Sanhedrin who would sentence him to death and especially for the conversion of the man (Saul of Tarsus) who was presiding over his execution. Now St. Stephen shares in the eternal wedding banquet, being nourished forever by the food of eternity. We ask him to intercede for us that we will likewise be characterized by the same hunger, the same faith, the same grace and power, the same risen Christian life, and strive today, in all our work, for the food that endures forever.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ACTS 6:8-15
Stephen, filled with grace and power,
was working great wonders and signs among the people.
Certain members of the so-called Synagogue of Freedmen,
Cyreneans, and Alexandrians,
and people from Cilicia and Asia,
came forward and debated with Stephen,
but they could not withstand the wisdom and the Spirit with which he spoke.
Then they instigated some men to say,
“We have heard him speaking blasphemous words
against Moses and God.”
They stirred up the people, the elders, and the scribes,
accosted him, seized him,
and brought him before the Sanhedrin.
They presented false witnesses who testified,
“This man never stops saying things against this holy place and the law.
For we have heard him claim
that this Jesus the Nazorean will destroy this place
and change the customs that Moses handed down to us.”
All those who sat in the Sanhedrin looked intently at him
and saw that his face was like the face of an angel.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 119:23-24, 26-27, 29-30
R. (1ab) Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!
or:
R. Alleluia.
Though princes meet and talk against me,
your servant meditates on your statutes.
Yes, your decrees are my delight;
they are my counselors.
R. Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!
or:
R. Alleluia.
I declared my ways, and you answered me;
teach me your statutes.
Make me understand the way of your precepts,
and I will meditate on your wondrous deeds.
R. Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!
or:
R. Alleluia.
Remove from me the way of falsehood,
and favor me with your law.
The way of truth I have chosen;
I have set your ordinances before me.
R. Blessed are they who follow the law of the Lord!
or:
R. Alleluia.
Gospel
JN 6:22-29
[After Jesus had fed the five thousand men, his disciples saw him walking on the sea.]
The next day, the crowd that remained across the sea
saw that there had been only one boat there,
and that Jesus had not gone along with his disciples in the boat,
but only his disciples had left.
Other boats came from Tiberias
near the place where they had eaten the bread
when the Lord gave thanks.
When the crowd saw that neither Jesus nor his disciples were there,
they themselves got into boats
and came to Capernaum looking for Jesus.
And when they found him across the sea they said to him,
“Rabbi, when did you get here?”
Jesus answered them and said,
“Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me
not because you saw signs
but because you ate the loaves and were filled.
Do not work for food that perishes
but for the food that endures for eternal life,
which the Son of Man will give you.
For on him the Father, God, has set his seal.”
So they said to him,
“What can we do to accomplish the works of God?”
Jesus answered and said to them,
“This is the work of God, that you believe in the one he sent.”
Ruins of the ancient great Jewish synagogue at Capernaum or Kfar Nahum at the shore of Galilee lake northern Israel
The post Laboring for Everlasting Food, Third Monday of Easter, April 15, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
18 min
April 15, 2024Jesus’ Final Preparations of His Witnesses, Third Sunday of Easter (B), April 14, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Third Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 14, 2024
Acts 3:13-15.17-19, Ps 4, 1 John 2:1-5, Lk 24:35-48

To listen to a digital recording of this homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
What was the point of all of Jesus’ post-resurrection appearances, like the one we have just heard in tonight’s Gospel? It wasn’t just to celebrate the greatest victory in all of human history, his own over Satan, sin and the death to which sin leads. It wasn’t just to cheer the apostles and disciples up, after the traumatic experience of his arrest, sham trial, brutal crucifixion and death, not to mention Judas’ suicide, their betrayals and more. It wasn’t just to prove to them the reality of his rising from the dead, allowing them all, and Thomas later, to see and probe his wounds as well as to watch him eat some fish, which a ghost obviously couldn’t consume. It was ultimately to prepare them to carry on Jesus’ mission of the salvation of the human race. Jesus, with his earthly life, public ministry, passion, death and resurrection had completed his mission, taking upon himself all the sins of the human race from Adam’s and Eve’s, to yours and mine, to those who will be alive when he returns for the second coming, forgiving us of them, and making possible for us to live anew in a communion with God that is meant to last into eternity. Now, in the appearances he would make over 40 days between his resurrection and ascension, he wanted to finish his preparation of the apostles, the disciples, and the Church to complete our part of his saving work, and bring the fruits of all Jesus has said and done to the ends of the earth.
That’s what he was doing in all of his appearances. He was convincing them he was real. He was helping them to understand the meaning of the Scriptures and how everything that happened to him was foretold to happen. He was clarifying them exactly what their task was and empowering them to do it. Much like universities have traditionally sought to do at the end of students’ tenures on campus, through comprehensive exams, theses and dissertations, and graduation exercises in which various speakers — university presidents and deans, student standouts and leaders, and famous invited speakers — try to summarize the point of all their labors and inspire them to use what they’ve received to make a positive impact on the world, so Jesus was concluding three years of formation of his apostles and disciples for the mission for which he had chosen and called them. He was engaging in a sporadic 40-day commencement as he was preparing to launch his fishers of men on the seas of the world.
What Jesus did for them nearly 2000 years ago, he wants to do for us tonight. He wants us to grasp the same lessons and to be inspired for the same mission. He wants not only to teach us but empower us to carry out our part of his saving work just like his first followers were faithful until death in doing their part and getting the whole mission of the Church, meant to continue until the end of time, rolling. That’s why rather than a party, Jesus, on the night he rose from the dead, with a certain urgency, turned the Upper Room into a vocational training school to finish the apostolic formation of the members of the early Church. By this point, Jesus had already spent three years with the apostles, teaching them, sending them out to preach in his name, cure the sick, expel demons and even raise the dead. He had already shown them the example of service, washing their feet in the Upper Room three days earlier and instructing them to go to do the same. He had already ordained them priests on the same night and given them the ability to bring down his body and blood to the altars and later to forgive and retain sins in his name. He had already given them his whole life as a model to follow, living for God and dying out of love for God and for others. The last stage was to prepare them to be witnesses to him, to his words, to his life, to his triumph over death, to his incredible self-sacrificial love for every member of the human race. Jesus says at the end of tonight’s Gospel, “You are witnesses of these things.” And in the first reading, we see Peter, several weeks later after Pentecost, giving that testimony after healing a crippled man at the beautiful gate. He was preaching, as Jesus had instructed, “repentance for forgiveness of sins … to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” He cut them to the heart by reminding them that they had “denied the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released” to them, but added that he knew they had “acted out of ignorance,” just as their leaders, and then told them, “Repent, therefore, and be converted that your sins may be wiped away.” The summary of the Good News, that conversion and forgiveness of sins was possible, was when he said, “The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead, of this we are witnesses!” He was inviting them through repentance, through baptism, through reconciliation, to share in that resurrection.
Nine years ago, in a powerful Regina Caeli meditation to tens of thousands in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Francis, reminded us that “every baptized person is called to give witness, with their words and with their lives, that Jesus is risen, that He is alive and present among us. We all are called to give witness that Jesus is alive!” But he asked, “Who is the witness?” and what we need to do to become the witnesses Jesus wants and needs? He said that there are three qualifications of a witness: “The witness is one who has seen, who remembers and who recounts. To see, to remember and to tell, are the three verbs that describes the identity and mission” of the witness.
The first criterion is to see Jesus. That was easy for the first disciples and apostles who had seen Jesus physically in his earthly life and in his glorified body after the Resurrection. But as we heard last Sunday, when Jesus blessed Thomas for having seen him, but blessed all those who had not seen him but still believed that there is a way of seeing by faith that is just as real. We are able to meet the same Lord Jesus in prayer, in the Sacraments, in Sacred Scripture, in the disguise of those we care for. We need to give witness that Jesus is alive. This encounter with the Lord Jesus cannot be taken for granted. There are many Catholics who keep the Ten Commandments, who are engaged in good, charitable works, but who really only know aboutJesus rather than truly know him personally. They “say their prayers” but don’t enter into a genuine prayerful dialogue with the risen Lord. They go to confession and forensically audit their soul, but do so as if they were engaging in a good spiritual exercise rather than meeting the Lord Jesus who out of mercy died to take those sins away. They come to Mass as if they were attending just a commemoration or sacred ceremony, rather than truly meeting the same Jesus who was wrapped in swaddling clothes, walked the dusty streets of the Holy Land, hurdled the saves of the Galilean Sea, was hammered to the Tree on Calvary, rose from the dead, and entered the Upper Room risen. In my work as a parish priest, high school chaplain, and even here at Columbia, I have met many young people who often live by the solid Catholic values they’ve inherited from their parents, grandparents and godparents, but who haven’t yet made those values personal. They’re comfortable answering the first question Jesus asked in Caesarea Philippi, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?,” but not the second, “Who do you say that I am?,” because they really don’t yet have a personal relationship with Jesus that comes from really encountering him as he presents himself. The same Jesus who in tonight’s Gospel said, “Touch me and see,” and showed them his hands and his feet, wants us to hear him speaking to us live in Sacred Scripture, to see him in prayerful adoration, and touch him in Holy Communion, which is meant to be the most intimate experience in human life. Jesus wants to have a personal relationship with each of us. He not only calls each of us his friends, because he has revealed to us everything he has heard from his Father, but he wants to be our best friend. He wants us to receive that gift and reciprocate that commitment. If we’re tempted to go through the motions in our relationship with him, tonight he wants to wake us up from our sleep walking and notice that he’s really here, out of love, risen from the dead, and to have us encounter him deeply in faith.
The second step of giving effective witness, Pope Francis said, is to remember Jesus. In tonight’s Gospel, similar to what he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, he turned the Upper Room into a Sunday Bible School. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled,” he said, as “he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” He probably started with the proto-Gospel of how the offspring of the woman would stomp on the devil’s head. He doubtless talked about how he was the fulfillment of Abel unjustly killed by his brother; of Isaac, who carried the wood for the Sacrifice like Jesus carried the wood of the Cross and was the Lamb Abraham said would be provided; of Moses, as he completed the ancient Passover rite and was leading the people through the desert of death into the eternal promised land; of the just man beset by evil doers and the suffering servant announced by Isaiah; and of Jonah who would rise from the belly of the earth on the third day and fulfill Ezekiel’s prophecy of the dry bones, so that Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s, Ezekiel’s and Daniel’s prophecies that God’s salvation would be brought to the end of the earth would all come true. Jesus finished today’s account by summarizing all of this: ‘Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” They were to be the eyewitnesses of the person of Jesus, of his suffering and death, of his resurrection, of his call to a new life, of his truth that sets people free, of his words that lead to eternal life. The witness Jesus calls us to make obviously will include what Jesus said and did in the Gospels in fulfillment of all of the prophecies, but, to be credible, it must always include what Jesus has done in my life and yours. Even if Jesus is the most important figure in history, he’s much more than an historical figure. He is meant to be the most important person in any person’s life today. That’s why Pope Francis will say that the kerygma, the essential proclamation of Jesus, isn’t just about his saving passion, death and resurrection, but rather, “Jesus Christ loves you; he gave his life to save you; and now he is living at your side every day to enlighten, strengthen and free you” (EG 164). We remember not just what did 2,000 years ago but what he has done for me, what he is still doing for me, the graces given in prayer, the conversions big and small, the miracles major or minor, the insights, the sacramental encounters, the joys, the accompaniment through sorrows and more. And we thank him in the one-on-one dialogue in prayer and are willing, unabashed, to thank him publicly.
That leads to the third step in being a witness: telling others what Jesus has done. The litmus test as to whether we’ve really encountered Jesus in the way he wants to be met is if we are able to say from the deepest parts of our innards, like St. Paul, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16). We see this holy compulsion in the Gospels. Once Andrew had met Jesus, he ran to bring his brother Simon to meet Jesus, and Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter and said he would eventually build his Church on him. Once the Samaritan woman met Jesus at the well, she ran to her townspeople and encouraged all of them to come to meet Jesus, too, and they were able to find for themselves that he was the savior of the world. Once various people had been cured by Jesus, they couldn’t help but spread word of Jesus and what he had done for them to others, even when he instructed them to tell no one. If we’ve really encountered Jesus, we can’t help but share him. In the most beautiful paragraph of his apostolic exhortation on The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis said that the Christian, the true witness, is one who is “convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. It is not the same thing to try to build the world with his Gospel as to try to do so by our own lights. We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize” (EG 266). Jesus wants all of us to be ready to give witness of what the Lord in his goodness has done for us in our need. He wants us to encourage others to open themselves up for his blessings. He wants us to tell them, not just by our words, but by our whole life, that we are his disciples. We call to show his way of being, acting, and interacting, and the way he changes us for the better. Everyone we meet should be able to spot in us someone who knows Jesus in faith, who remembers him and his words, who has grateful had his or her life totally changed by him, and who recognizes that the greatest gift he could ever give to anyone else is the gift of the Lord. This means, obviously, that we seek to live like Jesus lived. St. John the Evangelist, who did seek to pattern his entire life after Jesus and to try to help the first Christians do the same, stressed in today’s second reading the importance of this Christian integrity and the example that flows from it. “The way we may be sure that we know [Jesus Christ],” he said, “is to keep his commandments. Those who say, ‘I know him,’ but do not keep his commandments are liars and the truth is not in them.” A Catholic for example who holds grudges rather than prays for persecutors, who uses others for pleasure, who dishonors parents and other family members and elders, who thinks that other things are more important that Jesus even on the Lord’s day, who lies or steals or blasphemes or places his faith, hope and love in money and what money can buy other than in God, is a counter-witness. Correlatively, the one who tries to live like Jesus, even and especially when it is hard, is the most powerful witness of all, like we see in the lives of the martyrs. The fact is that all of us we give witness to what we believe whether we want to or not. We show our faith or our lack of faith. The question for us is whether we will give witness to the Risen Christ and his unbelievable gift of salvation, his teaching, his love, his presence, his Church, or whether we will give witness that we don’t really believe what we profess we believe.
To help us give effective and convincing witness, Jesus does not leave us on his own. He gives us his own divine help to perfect our human powers and even to prepare and soften the ears and hearts of those with whom we’ll share the Gospel. The culmination of all of Jesus’ post-resurrection formation of the members of the early Church was to get them ready to receive the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. Jesus would astonishingly say during the Last Supper that it was good for him to go so that the Holy Spirit would be given to us. He taught us throughout his public ministry and particularly during the Last Supper that the Holy Spirit would teach us how to pray, because we don’t know how to pray as we ought. He would help us to cry out “Lord, Lord!” in personal encounter as well as to help us learn how to pray to God the Father as beloved sons and daughters, exclaiming, “Abba, Father.” The Holy Spirit, he promised, would remind us of all that Jesus has taught us, so that we might live by those words and be able to transmit them to those we meet. He would lead us into all truth so that we could apply Jesus’ words to every context that might arise over time. He would help us to live according to the Spirit and put to death whatever in us is earthly, so that we might be effective witnesses of the risen Christ and seek the things that are above. He would give each of us a “manifestation of the Spirit,” a special gift or talent, for the common good of the Church and the world, and help us to use it. But most of all, just like he came down upon the members of the early Church as tongues of fire and rested on them, so he would fill us with himself that with our tongues we might proclaim the risen Christ with ardor. The Holy Spirit would help us give witness together with him (Acts 5:32). Jesus promised us that even should we be betrayed for our faith and brought before the authorities, we shouldn’t worry about what we are to say, because “we will be given at that hour what we are to say, for it will not be [us] speaking but the Holy Spirit” (Mk 13:11).
That’s why it’s so fitting tonight, as we focus on this commission of Jesus to be his witnesses, and of the help of the Holy Spirit he gives us to encounter him, remember him, and tell others of him, that we celebrate the confirmation of seven of our brothers and sisters, Cecilia, Agathe, Rodrigo, Elliott, Adelin, Gabriel, and Peter. The gift of the Holy Spirit that they receive tonight is meant to strengthen them precisely for this witness. It’s also meant to be a reminder to each of us of how the Holy Spirit has come down on us at our own Confirmation. The Holy Spirit comes to make us his Temple, to dwell within us as long as we remain in the state of grace, and to help us with his gifts of knowledge and understanding, wisdom and prudence, reverence and awe, and — perhaps most important today in the face of so many general anxieties not to mention pressures to have Christians enter a witness protection program — courage. We ask God the Father through the Risen Jesus, as he seals them with the gift of the Holy Spirit, to reinvigorate the gift of the Holy Spirit within us, so that we can all give collective witness, with the gifts we have in common not to mention our own manifestations of the Holy Spirit for the common good, of the risen life of Christ on Columbia’s campus and beyond.
This Easter Season, this third Sunday of Easter, through the work of the Holy Spirit who raised Jesus from the dead, Jesus wants to raise us all from the dead with him. He wants to give us new life. He wants to help us to experience the power of his resurrection, so that we will no longer by “troubled” with “questions aris[ing] in our hearts,” like his first disciples, but so that we will be “incredulous for joy,” “amazed” and eager to share that joy and astonishment with others. Just as much as St. Peter, instructed by Christ in today’s Gospel and filled with the Holy Spirit on Pentecost, was out in the middle of the crowd in Jerusalem giving witness to the Risen Lord Jesus, so we, encountering the same Jesus here, are supposed to go out and give witness in Morningside and beyond.
On Easter Sunday evening, Jesus didn’t throw a big party, but instead formed us for the urgent task of going out and inviting everyone to the greatest celebration that will ever be held. God is indeed planning a feast that will know no end and he is sending us out into the world with the invitation and the spiritual dress code. That garment, as Jesus indicates to us in one of his parables (Mt 22:1-14), is meant to be our baptismal garment, which on the day of baptism we’re instructed to keep unstained for the eternal life of heaven, to have it grow with us, so that we will always be found rejecting Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and not just believing but professing our faith in God the Father, in God the Son risen from the dead, in God the Holy Spirit, in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. The Easter season is meant to help us to revivify these baptismal graces so that we might experience Jesus’ risen life in this world and forever. The Sacrament of Confirmation is meant to seal them. Tonight, we thank God for these gifts and beg for his grace to be faithful to them. At every Mass, as we enter into the Upper Room where Jesus first gave us his body and blood and 53 days later sent the Holy Spirit, God ultimately seeks to strengthen us for our Christian mission. Each Sunday, in fact every day, he meets us here, he teaches us, he strengthens us, he equips us, and he feeds us. He sends the Holy Spirit upon the altar to change bread and wine into himself and men and women into his mystical body. We receive him risen from the dead in Holy Communion. He comes to encounter us. We do this in his memory. And then at the end of Mass, he blesses us, and sends us with Holy Spirit to announce the Gospel of the Lord. Of this we are all witnesses, eyewitnesses, ear witnesses, tongue witnesses, heart witnesses. May our testimony do justice to this incredible gift. Amen!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19
Peter said to the people:
“The God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,
the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus,
whom you handed over and denied in Pilate’s presence
when he had decided to release him.
You denied the Holy and Righteous One
and asked that a murderer be released to you.
The author of life you put to death,
but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses.
Now I know, brothers,
that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did;
but God has thus brought to fulfillment
what he had announced beforehand
through the mouth of all the prophets,
that his Christ would suffer.
Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9
R. (7a) Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
When I call, answer me, O my just God,
you who relieve me when I am in distress;
have pity on me, and hear my prayer!
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Know that the LORD does wonders for his faithful one;
the LORD will hear me when I call upon him.
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
O LORD, let the light of your countenance shine upon us!
You put gladness into my heart.
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
As soon as I lie down, I fall peacefully asleep,
for you alone, O LORD,
bring security to my dwelling.
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2
1 Jn 2:1-5a
My children, I am writing this to you
so that you may not commit sin.
But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the righteous one.
He is expiation for our sins,
and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world.
The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep
his commandments.
Those who say, “I know him,” but do not keep his commandments
are liars, and the truth is not in them.
But whoever keeps his word,
the love of God is truly perfected in him.
Alleluia
Cf. Lk 24:32
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Lord Jesus, open the Scriptures to us;
make our hearts burn while you speak to us.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Lk 24:35-48
The two disciples recounted what had taken place on the way,
and how Jesus was made known to them
in the breaking of bread.While they were still speaking about this,
he stood in their midst and said to them,
“Peace be with you.”
But they were startled and terrified
and thought that they were seeing a ghost.
Then he said to them, “Why are you troubled?
And why do questions arise in your hearts?
Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.
Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones
as you can see I have.”
And as he said this,
he showed them his hands and his feet.
While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed,
he asked them, “Have you anything here to eat?”
They gave him a piece of baked fish;
he took it and ate it in front of them.He said to them,
“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,
that everything written about me in the law of Moses
and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.”
Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.
And he said to them,
“Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer
and rise from the dead on the third day
and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,
would be preached in his name
to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses of these things.”
The post Jesus’ Final Preparations of His Witnesses, Third Sunday of Easter (B), April 14, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
35 min
April 14, 2024Jesus’ Final Preparations for the Church’s Mission, Third Sunday of Easter (B), April 14, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Third Sunday of Easter, Year B
April 14, 2024
Acts 3:13-15.17-19, Ps 4, 1 John 2:1-5, Lk 24:35-48

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.14.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
If ever there were a day for a party, it was the day Jesus rose from the dead! It was objectively the happiest day in all of human history, made more jubilant by ending the terrible despair and dejection of the disciples over the previous two days. And once the immense shock of seeing Jesus risen from the dead walk through the closed doors of the Upper Room to greet them had worn off, St. Luke tells us that the disciples were “incredulous for joy and amazed.” They didn’t, however, run out for gallons of wine or ask Jesus to convert water into champagne. Jesus didn’t call for cakes and fruit and other Middle Eastern celebratory fare. Instead, in the midst of the joy of his resurrection, Jesus turned the Upper Room into a vocational training school and began to finish the formation of the disciples and apostles to fulfill his saving mission. There was a certain urgency involved in this that Jesus didn’t want to delay: the fields were white and ready for the harvest (Jn 4:35) and Jesus wanted the apostles, and the disciples with them, to get ready to go out to take in that harvest.
We know that by this scene in the Gospel, Jesus had already spent three years with the apostles, teaching them, sending them out to preach in his name, cure the sick, and even raise the dead. He had already shown them the example of service, washing their feet in the Upper Room three days earlier and instructing them to go to do the same. He had already ordained them priests on the same night and given them the ability to bring down his body and blood to the altars. He had already shown them the example of his whole life as a model to follow, living for God and dying out of love for God and for others. In today’s Gospel, we see how he finishes his preparations so that they might become his witnesses to all nations.
Back in 2015, Pope Francis gave a beautiful reflection on this scene during his Regina Caelimeditation in St. Peter’s Square. He focused on the reality of being a witness for Christ and sought to help us all to grasp that the commission Jesus gave those in the Upper Room is the same as the one he has given us all by Baptism and Confirmation. “In the biblical readings of today’s liturgy,” Pope Francis began, “the word ‘witness’ resounds twice. The first time is on the lips of Peter [in the first reading]: he, after the healing of the paralytic at the door of the temple of Jerusalem, exclaims: ‘The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses’ (Acts 3:15). The second time is on the lips of Jesus Risen: He, on the evening of Passover opens the minds of the disciples to the mystery of His death and resurrection and says to them: ‘You are witnesses of these things’ (Lk. 24:48). The Apostles, who saw with their own eyes the Risen Christ, could not keep silent about their extraordinary experience. He had revealed himself to them so that the truth of his resurrection could reach everyone through their witness. And the Church has the duty to prolong this mission, every baptized person is called to give witness, with their words and with their lives, that Jesus is risen, that He is alive and present among us. We all are called to give witness that Jesus is alive!”
Then Pope Francis asked, “Who is the witness?” What do we need to do to become the witnesses Jesus wants and needs? Pope Francis answered by describing the three qualifications of a witness: “The witness is one who has seen, who remembers and who recounts. To see, to remember and to tell are the three verbs that describes the identity and mission” of the witness. He fleshed out how each of us is called to see Jesus, to remember him, and to tell of him to others. “The witness,” Pope Francis stated, “is one who has seen with objective eyes, he has seen a reality, but not with indifferent eyes; he has seen and involves himself in the event.” In other words, the witness is not a dispassionate, “objective” observer but someone who has entered into the event with passion. “That is why he remembers,” Pope Francis continued, “not only because he knows how precisely to reconstruct the events, but also because those facts have spoken and he has grasped their profound meaning.” And because he recognizes that meaning, while intensely personal, is not meant merely for him, he seeks to help others have a similar experience. “Then the witness recounts, not in a cold and detached way, but as one who has questioned himself, and from that the day has changed his life. The witness is someone who has had his life changed. The content of a Christian witness is … a message of salvation, a concrete event, indeed a Person: it is Christ Risen, living and sole Savior of all.”
Jesus was preparing the apostles in this room to give this three-fold witness. First, he allowed himself to be seen, to be encountered, to be embraced. “Touch me and see,” he exclaimed, and showed them his hands and his feet. Then he helped them to remember. Like he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, he turned the Upper Room into a Bible School. “These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you, that everything written about me in the law of Moses and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled,” he said, as “he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.” He probably started with the proto-Gospel of how the offspring of the woman would stomp on the devil’s head. He doubtless talked about how he was the fulfillment of Abel unjustly killed by his brother; of Isaac, who carried the wood for the Sacrifice like Jesus carried the wood of the Cross and was the Lamb Abraham said would be provided; of Moses, as he completed the ancient Passover rite and was leading the people through the desert of death into the eternal promised land; of the just man beset by evil doers and the suffering servant announced by Isaiah; and of Jonah who would rise from the belly of the earth on the third day and fulfill Ezekiel’s prophecy of the dry bones, so that Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s, Ezekiel’s and Daniel’s prophecies that God’s salvation would be brought to the end of the earth would all come true. Jesus finished in today’s account by summarizing all of this: ‘Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer and rise from the dead on the third day and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins, would be preached in his name to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem. You are witnesses of these things.” They were to be the eyewitnesses of the person of Jesus, of his truth that sets people free, of his words that lead to eternal life.
Jesus wants to train us in that same vocational school to send us out just like he sent his first apostles. He wants us to be his witnesses, those who see him, remember him and his words, and tell of him and those words to others. This path of training for us, Pope Francis said, happens through the “personal experience of [Jesus], in prayer and in the Church, through a path that has its foundation in Baptism, its nourishment in the Eucharist, its seal in Confirmation, its continuing conversion in Penance. Thanks to this path, always guided by the Word of God, every Christian can become a witness of Jesus Risen. And his witness is all the more credible the more evident it is by a way of living that is evangelical, joyful, courageous, meek, peaceful, merciful.”
So the first step in witness is encounter with the Risen Jesus, and this step can’t be taken for granted. There are many Catholics who keep the Ten Commandments, who are engaged in good, charitable works, but who only know about Jesus rather than really know him personally. They “say their prayers” rather than enter into a genuine prayerful dialogue with the risen Lord. They go to confession and forensically audit their soul, but do so as if they were engaging in a good spiritual exercise rather than meeting the Lord Jesus who out of mercy died to take those sins away. They come to Mass as if they were attending just a commemoration or sacred ceremony, rather than truly meeting the same Jesus who was wrapped in swaddling clothes, who walked the dusty streets of the Holy Land and hurdled the saves of the Galilean Sea, who was hammered to the Tree on Calvary, rose from the dead, and entered the Upper Room. In my work as a high school chaplain, university chaplain and parish priest, I have met many young people live by the solid Catholic values they’ve inherited from their parents, grandparents and godparents, but who haven’t yet made those values personal. They’ve comfortable answering the first question Jesus asked in Caesarea Philippi, “Who do people say that the Son of Man is?,” but not the second, “Who do you say that I am?,” because they really haven’t had that personal encounter with Jesus. This lack of personal knowledge can happen even to priests and religious, who, for example like Judas Iscariot, have worked miracles for Jesus, who have proclaimed his word in the streets, raised the dead, but in the final analysis have not really come to know him.
So, in order to become a witness, however, we need to do more than merely encounter Jesus. We know that there were many people in Jesus’ time who met him, who heard his words, who even could repeat them, but they chose not to follow him and not to help bring others to encounter and follow him as well. Nicodemus, for example, as we saw this last week at daily Mass, came to meet Jesus by night, because he was too afraid to encounter him in the daylight and potentially put at risk his position with the Sanhedrin. We are called to be Jesus’ witnesses, not — as Cardinal Sean O’Malley of Boston likes to say — members of a witness protection program. Jesus meets us not only to change our lives forever but to make us his instruments to change others lives in the same radical way. Once Andrew had met Jesus, he went and brought his brother Simon to meet him, and Jesus changed Simon’s name to Peter and would eventually build his Church on him. Once the Samaritan woman met Jesus, she ran to her townspeople and encouraged all of them to come to meet Jesus, too, and they were able to find for themselves that he was the savior of the world. Once various people had been cured by Jesus, they couldn’t help but spread word of Jesus and what he had done for them to others, even when he instructed them to tell no one. If we’ve really encountered Jesus, we can’t help but share him. In the most beautiful paragraph of his apostolic exhortation on The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis said that the Christian, the true witness, is one who is “convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. It is not the same thing to try to build the world with his Gospel as to try to do so by our own lights. We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize. A true missionary, who never ceases to be a disciple, knows that Jesus walks with him, speaks to him, breathes with him, works with him. He senses Jesus alive with him in the midst of the missionary enterprise.” And so one litmus test as to whether we’ve really encountered Jesus in the way he wants to be encountered is if we are able to say, with St. Paul, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel!” (1 Cor 9:16).
But there’s a third aspect of giving witness that we need to confront. The witness we’re called to give is one truly of Jesus, of his way of being, acting, interacting, and of the way he changes us for the better. We ought to be on guard about giving a scandalous counter-witness that rather than bringing people to Jesus can drive them away. Pope Francis warned, “If the Christian lets himself be taken by comfort, by vanity, by selfishness, if he becomes deaf and blind to the question of the ‘resurrection’ of so many brothers, how can he communicate the living Jesus, how can he communicate the liberating power of Jesus Christ, his infinite tenderness?” The 19th-century German Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead” and whose thoughts on the will to power provided one of the main philosophical foundations for the Nazist ideology, once said, “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed.” He had never met someone, he claimed, who really lived the Christian faith, who reminded him of Jesus, who seemed to enflesh the Christian promise that we carry within the real presence of the risen Jesus Christ whom we receive in Holy Communion, whom we supposedly meet and listen to in prayer, and whose example we seek to make the real pattern of our life. The reality is that everyone who encounters us as Christians is meant to encounter someone redeemed. Everyone we meet should be able to spot in us someone who has seen Jesus in faith, who remembers him and his words, who has had his life totally changed by him, and who recognizes that the greatest gift he could ever give someone else is the gift of the Lord. This means, obviously, that we seek to live like Jesus. St. John, who did seek to pattern his entire life after Jesus and to try to help the first Christians do the same, stressed in today’s second reading the importance of this Christian integrity and the example that flows from it. “The way we may be sure that we know [Jesus Christ],” he said, “is to keep his commandments. Those who say, ‘I know him,’ but do not keep his commandments are liars and the truth is not in them.” A Catholic for example who holds grudges rather than prays for persecutors, who uses others for pleasure, who dishonors parents and other family members and elders, who lies or steals or blasphemes or places his faith, hope and love in money and what money can buy other than in God, is a counter-witness. Perhaps one of the worst forms of counter-witness we can give is of lukewarmness and lack of enthusiasm. Sometimes Catholics come to Mass, for example, as if they going to watch paint dry. Even though they’ll joyfully sing “Happy Birthday!” to a young family member, they won’t sing to God. Rather than behaving as if they truly believe the words, “We have lifted [our hearts] up to the Lord” and “Blessed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb,” they behave like the frozen chosen. And this is a particular scandal to the young. Over the course of my priesthood in various parishes, some of the young, when I ask them why they aren’t coming to Mass, have replied, “Why should I want to go to Mass when so few who show up seem to want to be there either?!” This is one of the reasons why the first pillar of the U.S. Bishops’ Leaders Playbook for the parish phase of the Eucharistic Revival is “Revitalizing Worship,” because in many places, the way Mass is celebrated needs to evince much more that it is a sacred, joyous encounter with the Risen Lord Jesus in our midst. All of this points to a truth that as Christians we give witness to what we believe whether we want to or not. The question for us is whether we will give witness to the Risen Christ and his unbelievable gift of salvation, his teaching, his love, his presence, his Church, or whether we will give witness that we don’t really believe what we profess we believe — or if we believe it conceptually, that we don’t love the Lord and the gift of our faith. This Easter Season, this third Sunday of Easter, Jesus wants to raise us all from the dead with him. He wants to help us to experience the power of his resurrection, so that we will no longer by “troubled” with “questions aris[ing] in our hearts,” but so that we will be “incredulous for joy” and “amazed.”
Just as much as St. Peter, instructed by Christ in today’s Gospel and filled with the Holy Spirit 50 days later on Pentecost, was out in the middle of the crowd in Jerusalem giving witness to the Risen Lord Jesus, so we, encountering the same Jesus here, are supposed to go out into the Bronx and Manhattan and give witness. We’re supposed to be witnesses, first, of all that happened to Jesus, his life, death and resurrection; witnesses, second, to repentance and forgiveness of sins — that we ourselves have been reconciled through the mercy we have been commissioned to proclaim; witnesses ultimately of our first hand, life-changing contact with the Lord in prayer, in the Eucharist, in Sacred Scripture, in his merciful love, in Christian charity and even in our picking up our daily Crosses. We see and encounter the Risen Jesus in each of these ways. We remember him and what he said. And then we burst with the desire to share this good news, this antidote to death, this answer to the deepest of all human questions, with others, so that they might experience the Easter gifts of joy and peace that come from communion with God and with his Church. We can become, as St. John Paul II called all consecrated and religious to be, in his beautiful exhortation on the Consecrated Life, “living signs of the resurrection.”
On Easter Sunday evening, Jesus didn’t throw a big party, but instead formed us for the urgent task of going out and inviting everyone to a party. God is indeed planning such a celebration, a feast that will know no end, in heaven, and he is sending us out into the world with the invitation and the spiritual dress code. That garment, as Jesus indicates to us in one of his parables (Mt 22:1-14), is meant to be our baptismal garment, which on the day of baptism we’re instructed to keep unstained for the eternal life of heaven, to have it grow with us, so that we will always be found rejecting Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and not just believing but professing our faith in God the Father, in God the Son risen from the dead, in God the Holy Spirit, in the Holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting. The Easter season is meant to help us to revivify these baptismal graces so that we might experience Jesus’ risen life in this world and forever. Today, we can all thank God for this gift and beg for his grace to have our ears and mouths opened again to hear God’s word and proclaim his faith to the praise and glory of God the Father. God gives us that grace and strengthens us for our Christian mission here in the Upper Room, where Jesus weekly — even daily —meets us, teaches us, strengthens us, equips us, and feeds us. Jesus has risen from the dead and this has changed everything, including our life. May we joyfully share this encounter today with him risen from the dead and this greatest news of all time with all those we meet.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19
Peter said to the people:
“The God of Abraham,
the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob,
the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus,
whom you handed over and denied in Pilate’s presence
when he had decided to release him.
You denied the Holy and Righteous One
and asked that a murderer be released to you.
The author of life you put to death,
but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses.
Now I know, brothers,
that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did;
but God has thus brought to fulfillment
what he had announced beforehand
through the mouth of all the prophets,
that his Christ would suffer.
Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away.”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 4:2, 4, 7-8, 9
R. (7a) Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
When I call, answer me, O my just God,
you who relieve me when I am in distress;
have pity on me, and hear my prayer!
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Know that the LORD does wonders for his faithful one;
the LORD will hear me when I call upon him.
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
O LORD, let the light of your countenance shine upon us!
You put gladness into my heart.
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
As soon as I lie down, I fall peacefully asleep,
for you alone, O LORD,
bring security to my dwelling.
R. Lord, let your face shine on us.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2
1 Jn 2:1-5a
My children, I am writing this to you
so that you may not commit sin.
But if anyone does sin, we have an Advocate with the Father,
Jesus Christ the righteous one.
He is expiation for our sins,
and not for our sins only but for those of the whole world.
The way we may be sure that we know him is to keep
his commandments.
Those who say, “I know him,” but do not keep his commandments
are liars, and the truth is not in them.
But whoever keeps his word,
the love of God is truly perfected in him.
Alleluia
Cf. Lk 24:32
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Lord Jesus, open the Scriptures to us;
make our hearts burn while you speak to us.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Lk 24:35-48
The two disciples recounted what had taken place on the way,
and how Jesus was made known to them
in the breaking of bread.While they were still speaking about this,
he stood in their midst and said to them,
“Peace be with you.”
But they were startled and terrified
and thought that they were seeing a ghost.
Then he said to them, “Why are you troubled?
And why do questions arise in your hearts?
Look at my hands and my feet, that it is I myself.
Touch me and see, because a ghost does not have flesh and bones
as you can see I have.”
And as he said this,
he showed them his hands and his feet.
While they were still incredulous for joy and were amazed,
he asked them, “Have you anything here to eat?”
They gave him a piece of baked fish;
he took it and ate it in front of them.He said to them,
“These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you,
that everything written about me in the law of Moses
and in the prophets and psalms must be fulfilled.”
Then he opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.
And he said to them,
“Thus it is written that the Christ would suffer
and rise from the dead on the third day
and that repentance, for the forgiveness of sins,
would be preached in his name
to all the nations, beginning from Jerusalem.
You are witnesses of these things.”
The post Jesus’ Final Preparations for the Church’s Mission, Third Sunday of Easter (B), April 14, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
26 min

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