Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

March 29, 2024You Are Not That Man’s Disciple, Are You?, Good Friday, March 29, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Manhattan
Commemoration of the Lord’s Passion
Good Friday 2024
March 29, 2024
Is 52:13-53:12, Ps 31, Heb 4:14-16.5:7-9, Jn 18:1-19:42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
Today on Good Friday we ponder all that Jesus out of love for us suffered in order to save us. It’s difficult for us behold him, as Isaiah prophesied in today’s first reading, “marred … beyond human semblance,” with “no stately bearing to make us look at him,” “spurned and avoided,” “a man of suffering … from whom people hide their faces,” “held in no esteem,” “pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins,” “harshly treated,” “like a lamb led to the slaughter,” “oppressed and condemned,” “cut off,” and “smitten.” It’s painful for us to ponder him who loves us so, with the predictive words of today’s Psalm, as “an object of reproach,” a “laughingstock,” a “dread to [his] friends,” “like a dish that is broken.” It’s excruciating to actualize the Gospel as we see him betrayed by Judas, abandoned by the apostles, seized, bound, dragged, spat upon and struck repeatedly by the soldiers, interrogated in bad faith by the chief priests, the Sanhedrin, Pontius Pilate and Herod, unpreferred even to Barabbas, scourged, crowned with thorns, scorned by the mob that clamored for his crucifixion, stripped naked, hammered to the Cross, mocked by the thieves, passersby and the chief priests, dehydrated to the point of dessication, and finally dead.
John says that after Jesus’ unbeating heart was pierced by a soldier’s lance and a torrent of blood and water flowed out, it happened so that “they [would] look upon him whom they have pierced.” It’s agonizing to ponder Jesus like this, even though the prophets and psalms predicted that this would always be the fate of the Messiah. It’s grievous even though Isaiah in today’s prophecy stated that “the will of the Lord shall be accomplished through him,” that “by his stripes we [would be] healed,” that “through his suffering, [he would] justify many,” that “he [would] take away the sins of many and win pardon for their offenses” and that he would receive “a portion among the great.” It’s terrible even though Jesus himself three times in the Gospel had confided that he would be betrayed, mocked, crucified and on the third day raised. Looking on Jesus pierced for our offenses, it’s normal for our eyes and heart to be filled with blood and water, with pain and sorrow, of their own.
But as we behold Jesus this way, despised, drubbed, dead and seemingly defeated, the question asked in the high priest’s courtyard of St. Peter can likewise be asked of each of us. “You are not one of that man’s disciples, are you?” You don’t want to follow this guy, do you? You don’t live by this crucified loser’s teachings, do you? Didn’t he tell you that in order to be his disciple, you yourself need to pick up your cross each day and follow him toward crucifixion, right? You don’t want what happened to him to happen to you, do you? These are tough, direct questions, just as personal and poignant for us in 2024 as they were for Peter early in the morning on that first Good Friday.
We know how Peter responded. Even though hours earlier during the Last Supper he had said, “Though all may have their faith in you shaken, mine will never be,” and “even if I should have to die for you, I will not deny you” (Mt 26:33-35), before the cock crowed a second time, he had three times denied even knowing Jesus. When the going had gotten tough, even though Peter really did love the Lord, even though he really was a fervent disciple and a chosen apostle, even though he had lived with Jesus non-stop for three years, even though he had heard him preach, make the blind sea, the deaf hear, the mute speak, the lame walk, the lepers cleansed, the winds calmed, the seas abated, the demons expunged and even the dead raised, even after he himself had been given the Lord’s authority to preach, heal the sick, expel demons and raise the dead, he denied that he was Lord’s follower and friend not just once, not just twice, but three times. Why did this happen to Saint Peter?
Jesus himself gave us the fundamental reason in the Garden of Gethsemane, when Peter, James and John didn’t have the will to stay awake to pray. Jesus told them, “Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test. The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” (Mk 14:38). Despite his bravado, despite the knife he would wield to cut off the ear of the high priest’s guard Malchus, Peter’s flesh was weak because he wasn’t yet a man of vigilant prayer. He didn’t realize the dangers. He wasn’t prepared through prayer to remain faithful when things got tough. Ultimately, he wasn’t ready for the Cross. When Jesus gave the first prediction of his Passion, it was right after Simon Peter, responding to the grace of God the Father, had confessed Jesus to be the Messiah and the Son of the Living God. But when Jesus told him that he would be a suffering Messiah, Peter objected and said, “God forbid it, Lord! No such thing should ever happen to you!,” before Jesus called him “Satan,” and told him to get behind him rather than to try to lead him. Peter, however, really didn’t learn the lesson. On later occasions when Jesus predicted his passion and betrayal, Peter and the other disciples, rather than praying about what would occur and being vigilant, just debated which among them was the greatest — and no doubt Peter, who had had his name changed by Jesus to “Rock,” would have been making his own case for intra-apostolic supremacy (Mt 16:13-26). Peter’s lack of seriousness in preparing for what the Lord Jesus had said numerous times would occur all culminated in the high priest’s courtyard when his weak flesh couldn’t summon the courage to confess with a willing spirit that he was indeed Jesus’ disciple and that Jesus was still very much the Messiah and Son of the Living God, to whom we should go because he has the Words of Eternal Life.
Have we learned from Peter’s infamous and sinful failure? Each of us is here, not out of curiosity on a Friday afternoon, but because we are a disciple of Jesus. We do believe in him. We are grateful for loving us so much that he gave his life so that we might not perish but have eternal life. But are we ready to confess our faith in him, our friendship, when the going gets tough? When someone, for example, invites us to do something else on Good Friday than spend the day with Jesus or to spend time with them on the Lord’s Day than come to Mass, what do we say? How do we respond when someone pressures us into experimenting with drugs or tries to exploit our loneliness to take advantage of us sexually? How do we respond when our peers raise hot button political issues on which the obvious Christian position is unpopular? What do we do when telling the truth is inconvenient? How do we react when everyone else is cheating and we’re tempted to think we have to do the same in order to keep up? When people mock Jesus’ teachings on chastity, poverty and obedience in favor of hedonism, materialism and libertarian individualism? Or even when someone invites us for lunch on a Friday in Lent and orders us a hamburger? All of these are means by which our contemporaries say to us: You are not really that man’s disciple are you? You don’t really take his teachings seriously, do you? So the question is: Are we really Jesus’ disciple? Are we willing to suffer, even a little, for him? Are ready, through vigilant prayer, to suffer a lot for him who suffered everything for us?
Last year I mentioned the powerful, award-winning 2019 movie called A Hidden Life about the martyr Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, an Austrian Catholic who was executed by the Nazis in 1943 for his opposition to their ideology. There is a scene in which Franz, a volunteer sacristan in his village Church in Radegund, was helping an artist named Ohlendorf as he was painting in the Church a beautiful image of Jesus surrounded by angels in glory. But it wasn’t what Ohlendorfreally wanted to paint. The painter said that he really longed to be able to depict Jesus in his real exaltation, his real glorification, on the Cross, with his body torn apart, blood pouring down his face and from his wounds, a true icon of Isaiah’s words from today’s first reading. Trusting in Franz, Ohlendorf spoke of artists like himself working for Church commissions and said, “What we do is just create sympathy. We create admirers. We don’t create followers. Christ’s life is a demand. [They] don’t want to be reminded of it. … I paint their comfortable Christ, with a halo over his head. … Someday I might have the courage to venture, not yet. Someday I’ll paint the true Christ. … I help people look up from those pews and dream. They look up and they imagine if they [had] lived back in Christ’s time, they wouldn’t have done what the others did. They wouldn’t have murdered those whom we now adore.” Ohlendorf’s point was that, in Austria under the Nazis, there were many admirers of Christ, but few true disciples. The fans or admirers were all capitulating to the National Socialists despite all their lies and atrocities. Franz, on the other hand, proved to be a true disciple and remained faithful to his conscience all the way until the Nazis beheaded him. He remained a true disciple despite his cowardly parish priest and overly-calculating bishop both trying to persuade him to take a Nazi oath falsely just to save his life in this world. Even when those who were supposed to be true disciples were preferring a “comfortable Christ” and an easy-going Gospel, Franz was willing to stand up for the truth and not run away from the Cross. When he was asked, essentially, “You’re not that man’s disciple, are you?,” he firmly said that he was and he proved it. The same Lord who strengthened him will strengthen us if only we cooperate.
To be a disciple of the Lord is to sign up to follow a crucified Savior and to follow him all the way. The Church seeks to make this clear at the very beginning of a Christian’s life. During the baptismal ceremony of a little child, after the parents give the child’s name and ask the Church for baptism, faith and eternal life for their child, they accept the responsibility of raising the child in the practice of the faith, and the Godparents commit to helping them in that supreme duty. Then the bishop, priest or deacon says to the child, “The Church of God receives you with great joy. In her name, I sign you with the Sign of the Cross of Christ Our Savior; then, after me, your parents and godparents will do the same.” He then makes a sign of the Cross on the child’s forehead, and the mom and dad, the godfather and godmother all do so. When I prepare young parents for the baptism of their child, I always ask them why, they think, the Church starts off the whole baptism ceremony by making the cross five times over their beautiful little son or daughter. The most common answer is, “I don’t know.” The second most common answer is, “We’re asking God to bless the child.” But then I ask, “Well, why don’t we just put our hand on the baby’s head if we’re blessing?” I then query: if at that point of the baptism ceremony, the Church were instead to ask all five of us to put a hemp stamp of an electric chair, or a noose, guillotine or some other sign of public execution on their beautiful baby’s forehead, wouldn’t they think that that was at least a little weird? They do. So then, I ask anew, “Why do you think we make a sign of the Cross on their forehead?” We are indeed blessing the baby, recognizing that the cross is not a curse but a blessing. When parents and godparents bring a child to be baptized, they are committing to raise the baby in the school of the Cross, which is not fundamentally a sign of pain, but of the love that makes even the pain of crucifixion bearable, as Christ has taught us. This is super counterintuitive for most parents, who would prefer their child never even to catch a cold. They have fairytale-esque hopes for their child whom they want to be happy all the days of life and therefore, they think, never suffer. But Christians preach a different message, of a love for God and others that includes a willingness to suffer, to die, and even to be crucified. After our baptism, as we know, we’re taught to make the sign of the Cross over ourselves. We begin and finish every Mass with the Sign of the Cross. The sign of the Cross is involved in every other sacrament and in almost every form of ecclesial blessing. And on Good Friday, we venerate the Cross, genuflecting before it like we would before Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament, because, as we’ll sing later in the liturgy, we recognize that on the wood of the Cross hung the Savior of the World. The Christian life is one marked by the blessing of the Cross from its beginning to its end.
Good Friday is a day on which the Church puts before us the wood of the Cross and the Crucified Christ so that we know what we’re committing to whenever someone should ask, in one way or another, “You’re not that man’s disciple are you?” It’s a day on which we, looking at him whom we have pierced, learn how to love him and others as he has loved us first. It’s a day on which we are strengthened to make the commitment to follow Christ each day along the way of the Cross, to deny ourselves, pick up our cross and follow the Crucified one, and to find in the cross God’s power, wisdom and glory.
Yesterday I received an email from a priest friend in Uganda who is a spiritual director in a seminary teeming with future priests. Every June 3, the feast of the Ugandan martyrs, I try to email him and to find out how they’re celebrating. The Ugandan martyrs are one of the greatest stories in the history of the Church. There were 22 of them, between the ages of 14-25, killed in the mid-1880s, just a few years after the White Fathers had arrived as missionaries. Because he liked the Christian teaching on the afterlife, the Ugandan king had allowed missionaries to evangelize among the members of his court, including the pages. Some Ugandan members of the court, having converted, began to evangelize others and help them renounce slavery, polygamy and other practices contrary to the Gospel, and to dedicate themselves heroically to serving those in need. When the baptized Joseph Mkasa and the catechumen Charles Lwanga began to recognize, however, that the king was homosexually-attracted to the teenage boys and solicitous to have them brought into his private company, they sought by various means to thwart the king’s designs and teach the boys how to resist his advances. The king grew increasingly frustrated. The King decided brutally to execute Joseph Mkasa for disloyalty, for having put the commands of another king, “The God of the Christians,” over him. He made it known that he was intending to put to death all the Christians in his court. One day, after the king returned from a fishing trip and saw one of the routine objects of his sordid desire receiving catechetical instruction, he summoned the catechist, St. Denis Ssebuggwawo, put a spear through his chest and then had his executioners hack him to pieces. The following day, the king, fuming, assembled all the pages and demanded that they make a choice between God and him, between life and death. “Let all those who do not pray stay here by my side,” he said, waving to his right, and “those who pray” he told to stand by the fence at his left. Charles Lwanga and over 20 Christian pages headed toward the fence. He asked them whether they intended to remain Christians. “Until death!,” they replied. “Then put them to death!,” the king responded, sentencing them to be burnt alive in Namugongo, a village 37 miles away. That is what happened. All of them, not long after their baptism, about the age of Columbia students and even younger, chose to remain Christians, chose to be people of prayer and vigilance, chose Christ and the Cross over their murderous leader and his corrupt court, chose eternal life over earthly life. When they were asked, “You are not this man’s disciples, are you?,” they all replied, with courage and conviction, that they were, that they indeed knew the God-man, and would remain true to him until death. They show us what is possible for every Christian.
To be a disciple is to choose to stand before Jesus at the foot of the Cross, like Mary, Mary the wife of Clopas, Mary Magdalene and John. To be a disciple is to carry the Cross together with Jesus like Simon. To be a disciple is to be willing to say it to and live it, despite natural human fears. We strengthen our flesh against those fears each day by self-denial. Just as people in past centuries would take ice cold baths in the winter to prepare them better to handle the cold outside, just like good coaches work their players hard in practice to prepare them for game time pressures, just like those in boot camp are put into difficult training situations to prepare to endure and overcome them afterward, so self-denial helps us to be willing to carry the Cross, to be faithful in season and out of season. Picking up our Cross each day to follow Christ allows us to be able to pick it up when our own Good Friday comes and, in response to the question, “You’re not that man’s disciple, are you?,” to be able to reply like the Ugandan Martyrs, like Blessed Franz Jagerstatter, like Mary, Mary Magdalene, and John, “Yes I am,” with gratitude and unabashed. We are indeed disciples of Jesus, the one who loved us to the end, the one who prayed for us on Calvary, the one who has called us to follow him through Calvary to the eternal Jerusalem. We are indeed disciples of the one who has conquered the world. To him be praise and glory, wisdom and thanksgiving, honor, power and might, forever and ever. Amen!

The Gospel of the Passion on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 18:1—19:42
Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley
to where there was a garden,
into which he and his disciples entered.
Judas his betrayer also knew the place,
because Jesus had often met there with his disciples.
So Judas got a band of soldiers and guards
from the chief priests and the Pharisees
and went there with lanterns, torches, and weapons.
Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him,
went out and said to them, “Whom are you looking for?”
They answered him, “Jesus the Nazorean.”
He said to them, “I AM.”
Judas his betrayer was also with them.
When he said to them, “I AM, “
they turned away and fell to the ground.
So he again asked them,
“Whom are you looking for?”
They said, “Jesus the Nazorean.”
Jesus answered,
“I told you that I AM.
So if you are looking for me, let these men go.”
This was to fulfill what he had said,
“I have not lost any of those you gave me.”
Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it,
struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear.
The slave’s name was Malchus.
Jesus said to Peter,
“Put your sword into its scabbard.
Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?”
So the band of soldiers, the tribune, and the Jewish guards seized Jesus,
bound him, and brought him to Annas first.
He was the father-in-law of Caiaphas,
who was high priest that year.
It was Caiaphas who had counseled the Jews
that it was better that one man should die rather than the people.
Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus.
Now the other disciple was known to the high priest,
and he entered the courtyard of the high priest with Jesus.
But Peter stood at the gate outside.
So the other disciple, the acquaintance of the high priest,
went out and spoke to the gatekeeper and brought Peter in.
Then the maid who was the gatekeeper said to Peter,
“You are not one of this man’s disciples, are you?”
He said, “I am not.”
Now the slaves and the guards were standing around a charcoal fire
that they had made, because it was cold,
and were warming themselves.
Peter was also standing there keeping warm.
The high priest questioned Jesus
about his disciples and about his doctrine.
Jesus answered him,
“I have spoken publicly to the world.
I have always taught in a synagogue
or in the temple area where all the Jews gather,
and in secret I have said nothing. Why ask me?
Ask those who heard me what I said to them.
They know what I said.”
When he had said this,
one of the temple guards standing there struck Jesus and said,
“Is this the way you answer the high priest?”
Jesus answered him,
“If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong;
but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?”
Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest.
Now Simon Peter was standing there keeping warm.
And they said to him,
“You are not one of his disciples, are you?”
He denied it and said,
“I am not.”
One of the slaves of the high priest,
a relative of the one whose ear Peter had cut off, said,
“Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?”
Again Peter denied it.
And immediately the cock crowed.
Then they brought Jesus from Caiaphas to the praetorium.
It was morning.
And they themselves did not enter the praetorium,
in order not to be defiled so that they could eat the Passover.
So Pilate came out to them and said,
“What charge do you bring against this man?”
They answered and said to him,
“If he were not a criminal,
we would not have handed him over to you.”
At this, Pilate said to them,
“Take him yourselves, and judge him according to your law.”
The Jews answered him,
“We do not have the right to execute anyone, “
in order that the word of Jesus might be fulfilled
that he said indicating the kind of death he would die.
So Pilate went back into the praetorium
and summoned Jesus and said to him,
“Are you the King of the Jews?”
Jesus answered,
“Do you say this on your own
or have others told you about me?”
Pilate answered,
“I am not a Jew, am I?
Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me.
What have you done?”
Jesus answered,
“My kingdom does not belong to this world.
If my kingdom did belong to this world,
my attendants would be fighting
to keep me from being handed over to the Jews.
But as it is, my kingdom is not here.”
So Pilate said to him,
“Then you are a king?”
Jesus answered,
“You say I am a king.
For this I was born and for this I came into the world,
to testify to the truth.
Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.”
Pilate said to him, “What is truth?”
When he had said this,
he again went out to the Jews and said to them,
“I find no guilt in him.
But you have a custom that I release one prisoner to you at Passover.
Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?”
They cried out again,
“Not this one but Barabbas!”
Now Barabbas was a revolutionary.
Then Pilate took Jesus and had him scourged.
And the soldiers wove a crown out of thorns and placed it on his head,
and clothed him in a purple cloak,
and they came to him and said,
“Hail, King of the Jews!”
And they struck him repeatedly.
Once more Pilate went out and said to them,
“Look, I am bringing him out to you,
so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.”
So Jesus came out,
wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak.
And he said to them, “Behold, the man!”
When the chief priests and the guards saw him they cried out,
“Crucify him, crucify him!”
Pilate said to them,
“Take him yourselves and crucify him.
I find no guilt in him.”
The Jews answered,
“We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die,
because he made himself the Son of God.”
Now when Pilate heard this statement,
he became even more afraid,
and went back into the praetorium and said to Jesus,
“Where are you from?”
Jesus did not answer him.
So Pilate said to him,
“Do you not speak to me?
Do you not know that I have power to release you
and I have power to crucify you?”
Jesus answered him,
“You would have no power over me
if it had not been given to you from above.
For this reason the one who handed me over to you
has the greater sin.”
Consequently, Pilate tried to release him; but the Jews cried out,
“If you release him, you are not a Friend of Caesar.
Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.”
When Pilate heard these words he brought Jesus out
and seated him on the judge’s bench
in the place called Stone Pavement, in Hebrew, Gabbatha.
It was preparation day for Passover, and it was about noon.
And he said to the Jews,
“Behold, your king!”
They cried out,
“Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!”
Pilate said to them,
“Shall I crucify your king?”
The chief priests answered,
“We have no king but Caesar.”
Then he handed him over to them to be crucified.
So they took Jesus, and, carrying the cross himself,
he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull,
in Hebrew, Golgotha.
There they crucified him, and with him two others,
one on either side, with Jesus in the middle.
Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross.
It read,
“Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews.”
Now many of the Jews read this inscription,
because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city;
and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek.
So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate,
“Do not write ‘The King of the Jews,’
but that he said, ‘I am the King of the Jews’.”
Pilate answered,
“What I have written, I have written.”
When the soldiers had crucified Jesus,
they took his clothes and divided them into four shares,
a share for each soldier.
They also took his tunic, but the tunic was seamless,
woven in one piece from the top down.
So they said to one another,
“Let’s not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it will be, “
in order that the passage of Scripture might be fulfilled that says:
They divided my garments among them,
and for my vesture they cast lots.
This is what the soldiers did.
Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother
and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas,
and Mary of Magdala.
When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved
he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.”
Then he said to the disciple,
“Behold, your mother.”
And from that hour the disciple took her into his home.
After this, aware that everything was now finished,
in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled,
Jesus said, “I thirst.”
There was a vessel filled with common wine.
So they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop
and put it up to his mouth.
When Jesus had taken the wine, he said,
“It is finished.”
And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit.
Here all kneel and pause for a short time.
Now since it was preparation day,
in order that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the sabbath,
for the sabbath day of that week was a solemn one,
the Jews asked Pilate that their legs be broken
and that they be taken down.
So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first
and then of the other one who was crucified with Jesus.
But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead,
they did not break his legs,
but one soldier thrust his lance into his side,
and immediately blood and water flowed out.
An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true;
he knows that he is speaking the truth,
so that you also may come to believe.
For this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled:
Not a bone of it will be broken.
And again another passage says:
They will look upon him whom they have pierced.
After this, Joseph of Arimathea,
secretly a disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews,
asked Pilate if he could remove the body of Jesus.
And Pilate permitted it.
So he came and took his body.
Nicodemus, the one who had first come to him at night,
also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes
weighing about one hundred pounds.
They took the body of Jesus
and bound it with burial cloths along with the spices,
according to the Jewish burial custom.
Now in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden,
and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been buried.
So they laid Jesus there because of the Jewish preparation day;
for the tomb was close by.
The post You Are Not That Man’s Disciple, Are You?, Good Friday, March 29, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
32 min
March 28, 2024O Res Mirabilis: The Ways Christ Loves Us To The End, Holy Thursday, March 28, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Manhattan
Holy Thursday 2024
March 28, 2024
Ex 12:1-8.11-14, Ps 116, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Jn 13:1-15

To listen to an audio recording, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
The beginning of the Gospel for the Mass of the Lord’s Supper summarizes not only what tonight is about but also the meaning of his incarnation, the motivation for his passion and death, and the interpretive key for everything else Jesus has said and done. St. John tells us: “Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.” By “end,” St. John does not mean to say merely that Jesus loved us to the finish line of his earthly life, but loved us to the extreme, to the maximal possibilities of love, with all he had, holding nothing back. “No one has greater love,” Jesus would tell the apostles later tonight, “than to lay down his life for his friends,” and we see the greatest manifestations of his total self-giving love in what he did during the Last Supper, how he gave himself for us on Golgotha, and how he triumphed over all that harms and kills us in his Resurrection. To understand the importance of this night, to know Jesus, and to grasp our own deepest identity, we need to see that Jesus’ whole life was a sacrament, an efficacious external sign, of how “God so loved the world that he gave his only Son so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life” (Jn 3:16).
During the Last Supper, Jesus showed this extreme love in three powerful ways. The Church, in her instructions to bishops, priests and deacons for Holy Thursday, tells them that in their homily they are to “shed light” on the three “principal mysteries that are commemorated in this Mass: namely, the institution of the Holy Eucharist, [the institution] of the priestly Order, and the commandment of the Lord concerning fraternal charity.” Each of these are a manifestation of the boundless love of the Lord Jesus for us.
Let’s begin with the Lord’s washing the feet of the apostles, a gesture that puts into unforgettable body language the command, “love one another as I have loved you,” Jesus would give later in the Last Supper. Washing another’s feet, 2000 years ago, was the menial work of a servant or slave. Most people walked barefoot or at most with simple sandals. Along lengthy journeys on dirt roads, their feet accumulated dust on dry days, mud on wet days, and even human and animal waste from time-to-time. The closest modern equivalent to washing feet in the ancient world would be to wash public bathrooms in parks or bus stations. That Jesus himself would take on the form of a slave to do for his creatures shows all of us that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to serve and save us.
But the apostles needed to have the faith and humility to allow Jesus to love them in this extreme fashion. St. Peter, as we see, was deeply uncomfortable with this prospect. “You will never wash my feet,” he exclaimed. Jesus replied that unless he did so, Peter would have no part of him; in order to be part of Jesus, in other words, in order to enter into his self-offering to God the Father for our salvation, we have to allow Jesus, first, to cleanse us. Peter, eventually realizing this and wanting to be totally with the Lord, gave him permission to wash not just his feet but his hands and his head as well. Jesus’ gesture and dialogue with Peter give us a chance to examine our own receptivity to what God wants to do in us. What does it mean for us to have our feet washed today? The early saints of the Church, when they looked at Jesus’ statement that once we’ve been bathed only our feet need to be cleansed, said that this is meant to refer to the sacraments of Baptism and Penance, respectively. In Baptism, we’re thoroughly washed, but over the course of our journeying each day, our feet come into contact with the filth of the world and we need to allow Jesus to take that grime away. That’s what he does in the Sacrament of Reconciliation, where Jesus is continually on his knees at our feet, dying we could say to take our sins away. We need to be humble enough to allow Jesus to clean not just the soles of our feet but the immortal souls he has infused within us and redeemed. One of the reasons why Jesus washes feet at the beginning of the Last Supper, Pope Benedict once commented, is to show us that before he gives his Body and Blood, he in fact wants to cleanse us, hence the need for us, if we’re aware of any serious sins, to go to Jesus working through priests in the Sacrament of Confession before we come to receive through the same priests his Body and Blood in the Mass.
But there’s a second application to Jesus’ washing our feet. It’s to set an example of service for all of us toward others. After Jesus had carried out this unforgettable gesture of extreme love, he told his apostles and all of us why he had done it: “Do you realize what I have done to you? You call me Teacher and Master — and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the Master and Teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you also should do.” Jesus is clearly calling us to imitate his loving abasement in service of others, to be willing humbly to do the “dirty work” of bending down in order to lift others up: to be truly patient and understanding of them and their defects; to suffer for them, especially those whom the world doesn’t value; to love them as Christ has loved us, even when they resist, object to, or oppose us and that love. During the celebration of the Last Supper, the Church has her priests imitate Jesus’ gesture of the washing of the feet of the apostles to remind them that to be ordained in the person of Christ means not just to become configured to him for the celebration of the Sacraments but also to be interiorly aligned to him in the humblest forms of service. And the example of priests doing this is meant to inspire every Catholic to exercise this extreme love in their families, neighborhoods, parishes, schools, workplaces, and beyond.
The second expression of Jesus’ extreme love to which we need to respond with maximal receptivity is the Lord’s incredible gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus’ self-emptying didn’t stop with his taking the form of a slave and doing a slave’s work to cleanse us. His boundless charity went so much further when he took on the form of our food to become our very nourishment. This is why Jesus himself in his revelations to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque as well as the Church herself in her Eucharistic documents, have called the Eucharist the “sacrament of love.” We could call it the “sacrament of extreme love.” It wasn’t enough for the eternal Son of God, the second Person of the Blessed Trinity to humble himself to assume our human nature and be born in a borrowed cave. It wasn’t enough as an infant to be hunted down by assassins and become a refugee. It wasn’t enough to live and work in relative obscurity in a place from which some wondered whether any good could come. It wasn’t enough to preach, teach, exorcise, heal, and travel almost non-stop through Judah, Galilee, Samaria and the pagan territories, often enduring derision and rejection. It wasn’t enough to be betrayed by those closest to him, sadistically tortured, and ignominiously crucified. It wasn’t even enough to rise on the third day victorious and ascend gloriously to the Father’s right hand. Jesus loved us so much that, to remain with us always until the end of time, he most humbly of all conceals himself — his Body, his Blood, his Soul and even his majestic divinity — under the simple appearances of human food, of bread and wine.
What Jesus did on Holy Thursday, and which the Church does each day in memory of him, is the fulfillment of the ancient Passover rite that we heard described in the first reading. Just like the ancient Jews needed to do in Egypt with the Passover lamb, so we Christians have to eat the unblemished Lamb of God. Just like they needed to wipe the lamb’s blood on our doorposts and lintels, so he wants us to paint our insides by drinking his blood, as we will have the privilege to do tonight. God called his chosen people through Moses to make the Passover a “perpetual pilgrimage,” to leave their homes and come to meet the Lord. This is what we Christians do at Mass, not just on Holy Thursday, but each Lord’s Day, and indeed have the awesome privilege to do even each day during the week.
Thomas Aquinas, the 750th anniversary of whose death the Church celebrated three weeks ago, the second greatest teacher in the history of the Church only to Jesus himself, the patron saint of university students and teachers, whose learning was exceeded only by his Eucharistic love, wrote about this mystery of Jesus’ extreme love in his hymn Sacris Solemnis. The fifth verse of that him is known by its first words, Panis Angelicus. In it, St. Thomas exclaimed, “O res mirabilis! manducat Dominum pauper et servus humilis!” “O what a mind-blowing reality! A poor and humble servant eats the Lord!” It’s in the Eucharist that Jesus says in the present tense — as St. Paul reminded the Christians in Corinth in today’s second reading — “This is my body that is for you” and “This cup is the new covenant in my blood.” The Lord eagerly desires to give himself to us in this way. He considers himself the only nourishment worthy of our soul. As he told us in the Capernaum synagogue, he wants us to eat his flesh and drink his blood and draw our very life from him.
What’s our response to the Lord’s extreme Eucharistic charity? The Responsorial Psalm tonight takes up this question and answers it. We prayed, “How shall I make a return to the Lord for all the goods he has done for me?” God wants us to take up the cup of salvation and call on the Lord’s name. The Eucharist, from the Greek word for thanksgiving, is indeed the way we express gratitude for the greatest expression of all of Jesus’ incomprehensible and immeasurable love. In response to his love, Jesus tells us to “do this” in memory of him. That means to celebrate the Mass, to make it the source, summit, root and center of our whole life. We are now in the midst of a three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the United States. It’s a response to a crisis of Eucharistic knowledge, faith, amazement, gratitude, love and life. We see that crisis in terms of Mass attendance, where only one of six Catholics in our country comes to Mass on the Lord’s Day, and far fewer, for example, tonight, come to thank Jesus for his extreme Eucharistic love. We see the crisis in the fact that seven of ten Catholics think the Eucharist is a “thing,” not Jesus himself, the same Jesus under a different sacramental appearance who gestated in Mary’s womb, was held in her arms, and gave his body and blood on Calvary. We see it in the crisis of how few Catholics take advantage of the incredible opportunity to be with Jesus in prayerful Eucharistic adoration. I mentioned earlier how Jesus, in his apparitions to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque, referred to his Eucharistic self-gift as the “Sacrament of Love.” A little later, he told her, that in response to his extreme love in the Eucharist, “most” treat him with indifference, irreverence, coldness, sacrilege and scorn. Jesus, like anyone who loves another, wants his love to be received and requited. Instead of indifference, he wants us to make him in the Eucharist, the biggest difference in our life. In response to irreverence, he wants us to treat him in the Eucharist with great piety and devotion. Rather than coldness, he longs to see passion, enthusiasm, excitement. In place of sacrilege, he wants us to receive him in a holy way, with our souls cleansed by him by means of the same priests through whom he gives us his Body and Blood. And rather than scorn and contempt, he wants us to treat him with praise and gratitude. The Eucharistic Revival is a grace-filled opportunity for us to celebrate the incredible treasure we have, Jesus himself in the Holy Eucharist, so that we might allow Jesus to transform us through his extreme Eucharistic love and, in transforming us, transform the world.
The third action of extreme love Jesus gives us on Holy Thursday is the institution of the priesthood. So great was Jesus’ desire to continue to wash and purify us, so eager was his longing to give his body and blood to unite us in love with him, that he did something perhaps even more mind-blowing than humbly giving himself to us under the miraculous appearances of simple human food. He instituted the priesthood, using frail men, sinful men, at times scandalous men, in order to continue to be able to cleanse us and feed us until the end of time. On Holy Thursday he instituted the priesthood, consecrating the apostles in the truth of his word to celebrate the Mass in his memory and to bring his healing and real presence to the world until the end of time. He did this knowing that, within the first hours after their ordination, all of the apostles would have their faith in Jesus shaken and would abandon him. But 11 of the 12 would return and faithfully serve him and the Church he founded on them until they would share definitively and fully in his resurrection.
Holy Thursday is a night on which we thank the Lord for the gift of the priesthood. Describing what Christ did during the Last Supper, St. Thomas Aquinas wrote in his Sacris Solemnis, “Sic sacrificium istud instituit, cuius officium committi voluit solis presbyteris, quibus sic congruit, ut sumant, et dent ceteris,” meaning, “Christ thus instituted the Sacrifice of the Eucharist, whose ministry he willed to be entrusted only to priests, whom he thus made fit to receive the sacrifice and give it to others.” Priests are first those who are supposed to “receive” the gift of Jesus in the Eucharist, to be truly Eucharistic men, whose lives are centered around the sacrifice of the altar, who zealously spend time in daily conversation with the Lord present for us in the tabernacle. Then they are those whom Christ has chosen to “give” to others —at Mass, in hospitals, even on death beds — the most precious treasure in the whole world, Jesus’ own Eucharistic self-gift. The priests are called, in other words, to be Eucharistic disciples and Eucharistic apostles, going to Jesus in the Eucharist with faith and giving Jesus in the Eucharist with fire.
Tonight we thank Jesus for the priests he has chosen, called, ordained and sent to serve us in this Eucharistic way, both now and over the course of our Christian life. We thank him for the priests who have baptized us, heard our confessions, prepared us for Confirmation, given us Jesus’ body and blood, anointed us and our loved ones when we were in danger of death, joined our hands in marriage, vested us at ordination and been the “servants of Christ and stewards of his mysteries” as we have sought to discern and follow faithfully our vocations. Tonight we give thanks to God for having called Father Peter Heasley, Father Michael Holleran, Father Emmanuel Okpalauwaekwe, Father Jean-Sebastien Laurent, Father Jean-David Carossio, Father Osiris Salcedo, and Father James Plantania and we thank them for their steady yeses, each day, in response to that call. In this year in which I will celebrate in three months the 25thanniversary of my priestly ordination, I give the Lord particular thanks for the gift and mystery of the priesthood and for all those whom he has sent me to serve, through whom he has sought to sculpt me into a priest after his image. On Holy Thursday, the Church prays for all the priests Jesus has chosen that they may be more and more like him, faithful and loving until the end, washing the feet of the whole world. We pray for those whom Jesus is calling to the priesthood, including from among the young men here at Columbia and from Corpus Christi Notre Dame Parish, that they may cooperate with the grace of God to recognize their vocation and give a wholehearted consent to that summons. Jesus indeed loved us so much that he humbly entrusted his saving work to simple, limited men, who out of love for him and others have been willing freely to give up their freedom to join themselves to Christ’s obedience until death, to forgo the blessing of marriage and families of their own to imitate Christ’s own chaste, spousal love, and to forsake so many worldly goods and possibilities to emulate Christ’s rich poverty in spirit. We pray for all 407,000 ordained priests across the world to whom Jesus has given the priestly vocation, and for all those who Christ is beckoning to build on their labors, so that they might “receive and give to others” the gift of Christ’s Eucharistic sacrifice and, like Christ and the 11 saintly apostles, prove faithful to the end and loving of God and us to the extreme.
Christ, having loved those who were his own in the world, loved us all the way. Tonight we come to thank him for that love. As we prepare to actualize his command of brotherly love in the washing of feet, we ask him to help every priest and Christian to learn how to love others with the same humility and generosity with which Christ loves us. As we prepare to celebrate the Eucharist, to “do this in memory of” of him, we ask Jesus to help us all live truly Eucharistic lives, giving our body, our blood, our sweat, our tears, all we are and have out of love for him and others. And as we pray for our priests, present and future, we ask the Eucharistic Lord to help them all, like the 11 faithful apostles, to become saints so that through them he might sanctify us and help us become for the world examples and missionaries of his extreme love, his saving love, to the end. This is what we celebrate tonight. This is what Christ this evening eagerly hungers to do in and through us. Blessed indeed are those who are called to the Supper of the Lamb!

The readings for tonight’s Mass were:
Gospel
Jn 13:1-15
Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come
to pass from this world to the Father.
He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.
The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over.
So, during supper,
fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power
and that he had come from God and was returning to God,
he rose from supper and took off his outer garments.
He took a towel and tied it around his waist.
Then he poured water into a basin
and began to wash the disciples’ feet
and dry them with the towel around his waist.
He came to Simon Peter, who said to him,
“Master, are you going to wash my feet?”
Jesus answered and said to him,
“What I am doing, you do not understand now,
but you will understand later.”
Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.”
Jesus answered him,
“Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.”
Simon Peter said to him,
“Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.”
Jesus said to him,
“Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed,
for he is clean all over;
so you are clean, but not all.”
For he knew who would betray him;
for this reason, he said, “Not all of you are clean.”
So when he had washed their feet
and put his garments back on and reclined at table again,
he said to them, “Do you realize what I have done for you?
You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am.
If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet,
you ought to wash one another’s feet.
I have given you a model to follow,
so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”
The post O Res Mirabilis: The Ways Christ Loves Us To The End, Holy Thursday, March 28, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
24 min
March 27, 2024Understanding Judas’ Betrayal, Wednesday of Holy Week, March 27, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of Holy Week
March 27, 2024
Is 50:4-9, Ps 69, Mt 26:14-25

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.27.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were pondered in the homily:
On this last day of Lent — tomorrow we enter into a new liturgical season, the shortest of the year, the Sacred Triduum — it’s key for us to grasp what the Lord is calling us to do as we turn away from sin and seek to be faithful to the Gospel. Today in the first reading, the third of four Suffering Servant Songs, we hear Isaiah’s reflections about what he and Jesus after him wants to do in us: “The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them.” With eloquence, Jesus wants to arouse us from our spiritual somnolence. What’s the “word” that will actually do that? It’s what he speaks with his body language: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting,” all things we will be pondering over the next couple of days. The word of what our sins have done to Jesus should arouse us to contrition, to repentance, to entrusting ourselves to his mercy, and to amendment and the pursuit of holiness. Isaiah says, foretelling Jesus’ mindset, “I have not rebelled, have not turned back. … The Lord God is my help, therefore I am not disgraced; I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame.” He was resolute, setting his face toward Jerusalem (Lk 9:51) like flint, the very hard rock always placed at the tips of spears in the ancient world. Jesus wants us to have that same firm resolve to set our faces toward him with trust and not to rebel or to turn back. He preaches this eloquent “word” to arouse the “weary,” because he knows that more than anything else our sins wear us down. We’re also worn down by trying to struggle against evil on our own without God. He comes to join us in that fight and help us set our faces on Jerusalem together with his.
That brings us to the Gospel. Yesterday with the help of St. John’s account of the beginning of the Last Supper, we were able to look at Judas’ betrayal and contrast it with St. Peter’s. Today we look at the betrayal again from the perspective of St. Matthew. St. Matthew records something very important that Jesus said about Judas during this supper: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.” That brings us face-to-face not only with the tragedy of the life of Judas but also the point of your life and mine. The lamentable misfortune of the life of Judas, the reason why it was better for him never to have been born, is not simply because the names “Judas” and “Iscariot” have become synonymous with the most notorious traitor in the history of the world. It’s because he had never come to grasp the point of human life. Even though he had been up close with the Lord Jesus for three years, he had never really come to know him and his merciful love. He had totally missed the point of Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep, lost coin and lost son. He hadn’t grasped that when Jesus called Peter and the others to forgive 70 times 7 times, God himself would do the same. He hadn’t let penetrate the lessons Jesus had taught in forgiving the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s House, the Paralytic, the Woman Caught in Adultery or Zacchaeus. He hadn’t grasped why Jesus had called Simon bar Jonah, whose first words to Jesus were, “Depart from me because I am a sinful man,” or Matthew, who was a despicable tax collector. Despite three years with Jesus, he still hadn’t gotten the most important thing about Jesus and his Mission: that he was mercy incarnate and had come desiring mercy not sacrifice. The real tragedy of the life of Judas is that at the end of his life when he looked at what he had done, he saw no way past the shame. Consequently, he ended his life rather came to receive forgiveness from the one who was preparing to die to take away his sins. It is similarly better for anyone who doesn’t come to know the love and mercy of the Lord never to be born because, frankly, their sins — and the unexpiated guilt of their sins — will kill them in this life and forever, even though Jesus totally has the antidote to the poison of sin that kills us and wants to give it to us. This is the one of the most essential messages of Holy Week, to learn from Judas’ fatal mistake and entrust ourselves to the mercy of the Lord of life. Jesus wants to rouse us from the weariness that comes from the weight of our sins by taking them away and nailing them to the Cross. But, roused, we need to go to him for this gift of loving forgiveness.
To grow in how he seeks to rouse us in this way, it helps to enter more fully into the betrayal of Judas. Why did he sell out the Lord?
Most think it was for the money, that he was a greedy thief and would sell out Jesus for what he could get. “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?,” he asked. They gave him 30 shekels of silver, the price of a slave, or about 90 days wages. Jesus had said that we cannot serve both God and money because we will love one and hate the other. Some think that Judas’ avarice led him to love money and consequently to hate Jesus. But I don’t think that’s the reason because later he threw the money back in the temple area when he recognized he had betrayed an innocent man.
Another reason that is proposed is because Judas himself thought he had been betrayed by Jesus. It’s possible that he had thought that hooking himself to Jesus’ train would be the path to satisfy his human ambitions, that he would become Secretary of the Treasury in the new Messianic administration; when he began to grasp that that was not in the cards, that his hopes in Jesus would not be fulfilled, aggrieved he turned on him.
Another explanation is that he might have been seeking impatiently for Jesus to inaugurate his kingdom. Much like Mary at the wedding feast of Cana went to Jesus and precipitated his “hour” by asking him to do a miracle for the young couple, so some think Judas may have been provoking Jesus to reveal himself and his kingdom fully when he would be placed in the hands of those whom Judas thought Jesus had come into the world to overthrow. Getting him arrested would lead him to overthrow them sooner rather than later.
A fourth interpretation is less psychological than spiritual: he had allowed Satan to enter into his heart for some reason beyond our knowledge and then Satan tempted him to turn on Jesus and then turn on himself.
What I think is most plausible comes from Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen. He said that Judas’ betrayal began with Judas’ rejection of Jesus in the Eucharist. His betrayal was traceable ultimately to a lack of faith in the Lord such that he refused to believe what Jesus said about the Sacrament of his Body and Blood. 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.” We see this lack of faith in how everyone else in the Gospel was saying, “Surely not I, Lord,” whereas Judas asked, “Surely not I, Rabbi.” For Judas, Jesus was a teacher owed respect, not a Lord owed faith. And that lack of faith was seen most of all in his approach to the Eucharist.
What began Judas’ downfall is meant to begin our rise. His refusal to accept Jesus’ words should be repaired by our total commitment not just to believe the truth of the Lord’s real presence, but how he reigns, how he saves, how he sanctifies through the Eucharist. The words Jesus preaches to the weary are, “This is my Body, which will be given up for you,” “This is the chalice of my blood,” and “Do this in memory of me!” This is what gives us the strength to set our faces with his like flint toward Calvary and not turn back. Jesus’ whole passion, death and resurrection is what fortifies us resolutely to follow him all the way through Golgotha to the Father’s eternal right side.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
IS 50:4-9A
The Lord GOD has given me
a well-trained tongue,
That I might know how to speak to the weary
a word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
he opens my ear that I may hear;
And I have not rebelled,
have not turned back.
I gave my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;
My face I did not shield
from buffets and spitting.
The Lord GOD is my help,
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.
He is near who upholds my right;
if anyone wishes to oppose me,
let us appear together.
Who disputes my right?
Let him confront me.
See, the Lord GOD is my help;
who will prove me wrong?
Responsorial Psalm
PS 69:8-10, 21-22, 31 AND 33-34
R. (14c) Lord, in your great love, answer me.
For your sake I bear insult,
and shame covers my face.
I have become an outcast to my brothers,
a stranger to my mother’s sons,
because zeal for your house consumes me,
and the insults of those who blaspheme you fall upon me.
R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.
Insult has broken my heart, and I am weak,
I looked for sympathy, but there was none;
for consolers, not one could I find.
Rather they put gall in my food,
and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.
R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.
I will praise the name of God in song,
and I will glorify him with thanksgiving:
“See, you lowly ones, and be glad;
you who seek God, may your hearts revive!
For the LORD hears the poor,
and his own who are in bonds he spurns not.”
R. Lord, in your great love, answer me.
Gospel
MT 26:14-25
One of the Twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot,
went to the chief priests and said,
“What are you willing to give me
if I hand him over to you?”
They paid him thirty pieces of silver,
and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over.
On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread,
the disciples approached Jesus and said,
“Where do you want us to prepare
for you to eat the Passover?”
He said,
“Go into the city to a certain man and tell him,
‘The teacher says,
“My appointed time draws near;
in your house I shall celebrate the Passover with my disciples.”‘“
The disciples then did as Jesus had ordered,
and prepared the Passover.
When it was evening,
he reclined at table with the Twelve.
And while they were eating, he said,
“Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”
Deeply distressed at this,
they began to say to him one after another,
“Surely it is not I, Lord?”
He said in reply,
“He who has dipped his hand into the dish with me
is the one who will betray me.
The Son of Man indeed goes, as it is written of him,
but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.
It would be better for that man if he had never been born.”
Then Judas, his betrayer, said in reply,
“Surely it is not I, Rabbi?”
He answered, “You have said so.”
The post Understanding Judas’ Betrayal, Wednesday of Holy Week, March 27, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
March 25, 2024The Lavish Love That Is Meant to Characterize Holy Week, Monday of Holy Week, March 25, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of Holy Week
March 25, 2024
Is 42:1-7, Ps 27, Jn 12:1-11

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
As we enter more deeply into this holiest week of the year, the Church gives us an important frame for how we’re supposed to see what God is doing this week from his perspective and how we’re supposed to respond. We see this in the two different anointings of Jesus that the readings describe today. They show us, respectively, how Christ was anointed as Messiah to restore us to our relationship with God and others and how we, filled with the gift received, should want to show how lavish is our gratitude.
The first anointing we see is the one God the Father does of his Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s spoken of today in the first reading from the Prophet Isaiah. (This reading is the first of the four “Suffering Servant Songs” found in Isaiah, which are the most explicit prophecies of what Jesus himself would suffer and accomplish for us this week out of merciful love. Today we ponder the first of the four, from Isaiah 42; tomorrow, we tackle the second, from Isaiah 49; Wednesday we’ll discuss the third, from Isaiah 50; and on Good Friday, we’ll have the fourth and most moving of all, from Isaiah 52-53.) Today we see what God himself says and does. “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am pleased, upon whom I have put my Spirit,” he tells us through the Prophet. This is true of every prophet, but it is especially true of the one to whom all the prophets point, Jesus. The Father will anoint the Son at Jesus’ baptism when the Holy Spirit comes down upon him like a dove. Earlier in Isaiah, with words that were fulfilled in Jesus, Isaiah says, “The spirit of the Lord shall rest upon him: a spirit of wisdom and of understanding, a spirit of counsel and of strength, a spirit of knowledge and of fear of the Lord” (Isaiah 11:1).
Today a job description that flows from that anointing is given to us, a description Jesus will fulfill to the letter this week: “He shall bring forth justice to the nations, not crying out, not shouting, not making his voice heard in the street. A bruised reed he shall not break, and a smoldering wick he shall not quench, until he establishes justice on the earth.” We know that several times during his publicly ministry Jesus shouted out against the hypocrisy of the Scribes and the Pharisees. We know that he overturned money changers’ tables and drove out animals from the temple area with a whip. But this week, he didn’t cry out as he was carrying his Cross through the streets. This week he didn’t exert any force sufficient to break a frail reed. He was doing this to establish justice on the earth — a right relationship between us and God — taking all the sin upon himself so that, in removing all of our interior poison, he could save and vivify us.
As he was doing this, he was not alone. God the Father and the Holy Spirit were with him, guiding him, every step along the way of the Cross. “I, the Lord, have called you for the victory of justice, I have grasped you by the hand.” And he foretold that he would guide him to this fulfillment from his earliest days in Mary’s womb: “I formed you, and set you as a covenant of the people, a light for the nations, to open the eyes of the blind, to bring out prisoners from confinement, and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.” Jesus would become the light and salvation — as we prayed in the Psalm — not just of the Jews, but of the nations, whom he would lead from confinement and dark dungeons into the light of life. He would not just seal a Covenant between God and man but become that new and eternal Covenant. All of these actions were those of merciful liberation. This frames all that Jesus will be doing this week. This frames what he seeks to do every week and for all time. He was anointed to do all of this as the Suffering Servant.
What should our response be to that incredible love of God that would permit all of this? It’s shown in the Gospel, in the second anointing of we encounter today. During a dinner that took place likely very soon after Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead, Mary of Bethany took a liter of costly aromatic spikenard, 300 days wages worth — about a full year’s salary since the person would take the Sabbath off — and with lavish love “wasted” it on Jesus’ feet (St. Mark says she poured it on his head as well), wiping the oil with her hair, a real gesture of total commitment to Jesus. We recall an earlier scene in St. Luke’s Gospel when a sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and wiped them with her hair, how Jesus said she loved much because she had been forgiven much (Lk 7). Mary of Bethany, although we do not know what type of life she lived before Jesus entered her and her family members’ lives, doubtless loved God very much because, regardless of her past sins, she knew that God’s love was greater. The fragrant nard came from the oil of the roots of a flower that grows only in China, India and Nepal that would need to be crushed to get a minuscule amount of oil out of it. Just imagine one would need to crush to get a liter of oil — no wonder why it was so costly. Last night I looked on Amazon and 5 milliliters of this aromatic spikenard cost $72.00. Multiply that by 200 and you get a liter, for $14,400, and that’s much less expensive today that it was in Mary’s time, but still, to pour it out on Jesus’ feet was a sign of lavish love. Judas expressed his outrage that someone would show such overflowing attention to Jesus. As Archbishop Fulton J. Sheen noted, he knew the price of everything and the value of nothing. Mary had just wasted on Jesus’ feet, according to Judas’ calculations, more than three times what Judas himself would receive for betraying Jesus, because the 30 silver shekels Judas would be awarded were equivalent to 90 days wages.
But Jesus defended Mary and gave us in a sentence three very important principles: “Leave her alone,” he said. “Let her keep this for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
Jesus tells us, first, that he is about to die and be buried, something that seemed to surprise Judas when Jesus was condemned to death after Judas’ treachery. Mary had grasped what Jesus must have told her, Martha and Lazarus in their home that he would die and rise again and so lead us, as she said before the raising of her brother on the fourth day, to the “resurrection on the last day.” She believed and wanted to thank Jesus in advance. She wanted to anticipate what the women would do on Good Friday and what they would attempt to do early on the first day of the week. We learn from it that we need to be prepared for his passion, death and resurrection and already begin anointing him in anticipation of the Last Supper, Calvary and the tomb.
Second, he tells us that we will always have the poor among us, because God always wants them to teach the world about spiritual poverty and dependence on God but also so that the world may become ever more a place of love by compelling people out of their selfishness to become Good Samaritans and mercifully help those in need. We’ll always have the poor with us because Jesus will be with us until the end of time in the disguise of the poor, hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, estranged or imprisoned (Mt 25:31-46), and Jesus wants us to care for them with the lavish love with which Mary of Bethany cared for him. Judas’ words about caring for the poor were, we know in retrospect, just a cover. They were a fake compassion. Many times people can fake caring about the poor, pretending to be merciful, virtue signaling, because they want to draw attention to themselves. They can also do so because they are envious toward those who are munificent, lavish lovers of Christ.
But the most important principle is that we need to prioritize Jesus and never take him for granted. It’s a constant temptation for us to put other things, activities or persons — especially good things, activities and persons! — above Jesus. So many of us are tempted to behave as if Jesus can always wait as we run all our errands while saying “I’ll pray later,” only to run out of gas at the end of the day and pray very poorly. Our other activities can become an excuse for us to love Jesus less, even during Holy Week. Mary of Bethany’s lavish love for him is a reminder to us of how we should love him. If she was willing to “waste” a year’s work on Jesus, we can certainly “waste” a week!
We need to learn from Mary of Bethany how to anoint Jesus with lavish love this week and beyond. We need to learn from her how to express our gratitude for his merciful love. We see from the Gospel that “the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.” Our hearts and our homes should be filled with the fragrance of what that aromatic nard symbolizes, lavish love for Jesus. At a practical level we can ask: how can we imitate Mary of Bethany’s gesture of anointing Jesus’s feet with precious oil and wiping them with her feet? How can we fill our lives with the fragrance of that oil? I’d like to propose three ways.
The first is by sitting at Jesus’ feet in prayer, which will allow Jesus to do what he wants to do in us this Holy Week. On another occasion when Jesus was invited over to their house for dinner, Mary sat at his feet as Martha was once again serving. Martha criticized Mary for what she interpreted as her laziness, but Jesus defended her, saying that Mary had chosen the better part and it wouldn’t be taken away from her, that she had recognized the one thing necessary and was willing to give everything for that pearl of precious price. She grasped what Martha didn’t, that Jesus had come to their home not to be fed but to feed and she sat at his feet anointing them with her faithful receptivity. She spent time with him. She listened to him. In short, she was engaging in contemplative prayer. That’s the first way we can anoint Jesus’ feet this week, by coming with love to spend time with him, fully attentive, sitting at his feet, and letting him feed us. We’ll always have our problems. We’ll always have others in need. But we can’t think that we’ll always have the opportunity to be with him. This is a week to anoint Jesus’ feet and whole person with our love, with the fruits of our work, with our lives, with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, just as she did.
The second way we can anoint Jesus’ feet is to walk in his footsteps. Jesus’ feet aren’t static; they’re on the move. If we’re going to anoint him we need to be moving with him. Elsewhere in the Gospel Jesus said, “Whoever wants to serve me, let him follow me, and where I am, there also my servant shall be” (Jn 12:26). St. Peter commented on this, “Christ suffered for you, leaving you an example, that you should follow in his footsteps” (1 Pet 2:21). Christ’s whole passion was an act of love meant to get us to trust in his mercy and follow his ways. This week we’re called to anoint his feet as he seeks to wash the feet of his disciples and to commission them to wash and anoint Christ’s feet in others. We’re called to anoint his feet as he heads out into the Garden and asks us to come with him to spend an hour in prayer. We’re summoned to anoint his feet each step along the way of the Cross. We’re called to venerate his feet pierced with rude nails and hammered to a tree. We’re beckoned to anoint his feet just like Nicodemus and the women did as his body was taken down from the Cross and laid in the tomb. And we’re invited to enter into the wounds of his feet, like doubting Thomas, as Jesus is raised from the dead. To follow Jesus’ footsteps up close each of the days of this holiest of weeks so that we may be strengthened to follow those same steps in going out with him to save the world.
The third is that we can anoint his feet in anointing others. During the Last Supper, he washed feet as an example so that as he did, so we too should do. But we’re called not just to serve others with “water,” but with “water and Spirit,” pouring out God together with our sacrifice of love.
Today as we prepare to receive within us Jesus, the new and eternal Covenant, our Light and our Salvation, recognizing that we can never take him for granted and that therefore we’re called to prioritize him as the one thing necessary and better part, we thank his Father for anointing him and sending him to us to suffer so that he may say to us today, “This is the chalice of my blood, … which will be poured out for you and for many,” an interior anointing far more valuable than the precious nard poured from Mary’s jar. And we ask now for the grace that we may love him like Mary of Bethany, anointing him with lavish love at Mass, in prayer, in our Christian discipleship — and filling the world with the fragrance of that love!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
IS 42:1-7
Here is my servant whom I uphold,
my chosen one with whom I am pleased,
Upon whom I have put my Spirit;
he shall bring forth justice to the nations,
Not crying out, not shouting,
not making his voice heard in the street.
A bruised reed he shall not break,
and a smoldering wick he shall not quench,
Until he establishes justice on the earth;
the coastlands will wait for his teaching.
Thus says God, the LORD,
who created the heavens and stretched them out,
who spreads out the earth with its crops,
Who gives breath to its people
and spirit to those who walk on it:
I, the LORD, have called you for the victory of justice,
I have grasped you by the hand;
I formed you, and set you
as a covenant of the people,
a light for the nations,
To open the eyes of the blind,
to bring out prisoners from confinement,
and from the dungeon, those who live in darkness.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 27:1, 2, 3, 13-14
R. (1a) The Lord is my light and my salvation.
The LORD is my light and my salvation;
whom should I fear?
The LORD is my life’s refuge;
of whom should I be afraid?
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
When evildoers come at me
to devour my flesh,
My foes and my enemies
themselves stumble and fall.
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
Though an army encamp against me,
my heart will not fear;
Though war be waged upon me,
even then will I trust.
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
I believe that I shall see the bounty of the LORD
in the land of the living.
Wait for the LORD with courage;
be stouthearted, and wait for the LORD.
R. The Lord is my light and my salvation.
Gospel
JN 12:1-11
Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany,
where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead.
They gave a dinner for him there, and Martha served,
while Lazarus was one of those reclining at table with him.
Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil
made from genuine aromatic nard
and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair;
the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.
Then Judas the Iscariot, one of his disciples,
and the one who would betray him, said,
“Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages
and given to the poor?”
He said this not because he cared about the poor
but because he was a thief and held the money bag
and used to steal the contributions.
So Jesus said, “Leave her alone.
Let her keep this for the day of my burial.
You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”
The large crowd of the Jews found out that he was there and came,
not only because of him, but also to see Lazarus,
whom he had raised from the dead.
And the chief priests plotted to kill Lazarus too,
because many of the Jews were turning away
and believing in Jesus because of him.
The post The Lavish Love That Is Meant to Characterize Holy Week, Monday of Holy Week, March 25, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
16 min
March 24, 2024Processing with Christ Rather Than Trying to Follow Him At A Distance, Palm Sunday (B), March 24, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Palm Sunday, Year B
March 24, 2024
Mk 11:1-10, Is 50:4-7, Ps 22, Phil 2:6-11, Mk 14:1-15:47

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
In the two Gospels that the Church ponders on Palm Sunday, the passage at the beginning of Mass that details Christ’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem and the solemn reading just completed of Christ’s Passion and the way of the Cross that led him out of the holy city, there is a focus on two different, contrasting, but nevertheless interconnected, processions. Joining and participating full in these processions is the journey of Palm Sunday, of Holy Week, and of the Christian life. Both processions involve preparation, assistance, branches, and exclamations. Together let us briefly these elements so that we may better accompany Christ today, this week and beyond.
First, Christ prepares for each journey and wants us to imitate his preparation. When Jesus and the disciples drew near to Jerusalem, on the Mount of Olives, he told two of his disciples, “Go into the village opposite you, and immediately upon entering it, you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat. Untie it and bring it here. If anyone should say, ‘Why are doing this?, reply, ‘The Master has need of it and will send it back here at once.’ So the disciples went off and found a colt tethered at a gate outside on the street and they untied it. Some of the bystanders said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ The disciples answered the bystanders just as Jesus had told them to, and the bystanders permitted them to do it. So the disciples brought the colt to Jesus.” Similarly, in the Passion, Jesus again said to two of his disciples, “Go into the city and a man will meet you, carrying a jar of water. Follow him. Wherever he enters, say to the master of the house, ‘The Teacher says, “Where is my guest room where I may eat the Passover with my disciples.” Then he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready. Make the preparations for us there.’ The disciples then went off, entered the city, and found it just as he had told them, and they prepared the Passover.”
In each passage, we see Jesus’ preparation. He was ready. He was eager. He was meticulous. He was in charge. In Isaiah’s prophecy that we heard in the first reading, the Suffering Servant said, “I have set my face like flint, knowing that I will not be put to shame,” meaning that he had fixed his face as solidly as that hard, dark quartz on what he was to accomplish, and he would not be deterred. He was organized and we might even say psyched for what was about to happen. We also see how much he wanted to include the efforts of his disciples, working together.
Both lessons teach us a lot about Palm Sunday, Holy Week and the Christian life.
Jesus’ detailed immediate preparation for these culminating scenes in his earthly life are just a glimpse of his remote preparation across the centuries — indeed from the time of the Fall, or some theologians would say, because God is eternal, from before the foundation of the world — for the redemption he would accomplish during that first Holy Week. Jesus similarly wants us to be prepared. To be conscious of what we’re doing. To choose to make the time. To get ready and eager for what we are doing. Sometimes there is the temptation for Catholics during Holy Week just to wing it, to show up unprepared, to play spiritual “Simon says” and go with the flow, to be led by others, or to remain as bystanders. That obviously is what would characterize many in the crowd on Palm Sunday and the mob in Pilate’s courtyard and along the way of the Cross on Good Friday. To follow Christ, however, to receive all that he won for us and desires to give us this week, we must be prepared. All of Lent has been to prime us for these moments. Our whole Christian life has been the remote preparation. As St. Paul reminded us on Ash Wednesday, “Now is the acceptable time. Now is the day of salvation!”
Moreover, it’s not enough just to prepare individually; Christ wants us to prepare together. He could have easily sent one faithful disciple to commandeer the colt or make ready the Upper Room, but he sent two, just like he had previously sent out the 12 apostles and the 72 disciples two-by-two to proclaim the Gospel, so that they could love each other, forgive each other, support each other, in short, live the Gospel, as they labored together. He wants us similarly to collaborate, to cooperate, to accompany and support each other this week. Look around each other with gratitude; each of us is meant to inspire the others and be inspired by them. The Good Shepherd who came, as St. John told us in the Gospel yesterday, “to gather into one the dispersed children of God,” wants us to live this week truly united and mutually strengthened.
The second element is that Jesus wanted help for the journey. On Palm Sunday, he could have easily walked into the city; after all, except for occasional boat rides, he walked everywhere, including sometimes on the waves of the Galilean sea! But on Palm Sunday he wanted to ride the foal of a donkey. Similarly, on Good Friday, he who had come to die alone, “obedient until death, death on a Cross,” could have completed the agonizing Via Dolorosa simply with human fortitude and divine strength. By divine will, however, the soldiers “pressed into service a passer-by, Simon, a Cyrenian, who was coming in from the country … to carry the Cross.”
The use of the animal was a fulfillment of the Messianic prophecy announced by Zechariah, who had written, “Rejoice heartily, O daughter Zion, shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem! See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden” (Zech 9:9). Just as King Solomon had ridden a mule, so Jesus was riding a consecrated colt no one had ever used, an indication that he was indeed the Son of David and rightful successor to his throne. Whereas riding a horse would have been a sign of war, to ride a donkey was a sign that the one riding was coming in peace. Zechariah’s prophecy continues: “He shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. … Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit” (Zech 9:10-11). This King of peace riding on the foal of a donkey would be a universal king “from sea to sea” who would set people free not from political enemies but from the “waterless pit,” in other words, from death.
As we begin this most holy of weeks, we learn from this colt, and from Simon of Cyrene, that the Master — despite his divine omnipotence, according to his humble humanity — has need of us, too. He wants us not only to collaborate with others in preparation for his saving work, but to collaborate intimately with him in execution. In the ancient Gregorian chant for the famous hymn “All Glory Laud and Honor” that Christians sing today, there is a verse in Latin, “Sis pius ascensor, tuus et nos simus asellus. Tecum nos capitat urbs veneranda Dei,” which can be translated as, “May you be the holy Rider and we your little colt, so that the renowned City of God may embrace us together with you.” “Tecum,” the Latin for “with you,” is the way Jesus wants us to approach this week. He wants us to enter the Holy City with him. He wants us to collaborate with him in this work of his salvation. St. Josemaria Escriva, the great 20th century apostle of the laity, sought to imitate and help others to emulate this donkey in assisting Jesus accomplish his work. “There are hundreds of animals more beautiful, more deft and strong,” he wrote. “But it was a donkey Christ chose when he presented himself to the people as king in response to their acclamation.” Jesus wants us, like a donkey, to be a docile, diligent, steady companion. That’s the type of companion Simon of Cyrene became, united to Christ in carrying the Cross. As Archbishop Fulton Sheen stated in his famous meditations on the Way of the Cross that we pray each Friday in Lent: initially, “Simon saw in the cross only a shameful burden of wood, not the burden of the world’s sins. Hence, he became at first an unwilling helper. But a few minutes in the sweet company of Jesus changed his outlook; his slavery became freedom, his constraint became love, and his reluctance became sweet abandon.” That’s the type of cooperation Jesus wants from us during this week, that’s the help we could say he needs, and that’s the type of transformation he wants to give us this Holy Week and beyond.
The third element we can mention are the branches that characterized each procession. St. Mark tells us that before Jesus entered the gates of the city, “Many people spread their cloaks on the road and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields.” In the Passion account, we have a different set of branches, the wood of the patibulum — or horizontal beam — of the Cross. In the famous hymn Vexilla Regis Christians for 1,500 years have sung today and Good Friday, the Church states about the Cross, which it calls our “only hope”: “Beata, cuius brachiis pretium pependit saeculi: statera facta corporis, praedam tulitque tartari,” which can be translated, “O blessed tree whose branches bore the ransom of the world! Like a scale weighing the worth of the body, it took away Hell’s expected prize.” Just as we bless, wave and carry the palms at the beginning of Mass, so, too, we are called to be blessed, carried and waved by the Cross that unites us to the Crucified Lord. That’s the reason why it’s so that in Christian devotion, when we take the blessed palms home, we put or hang them behind a crucifix, because the branches of the palms are linked to the branches of the Cross.
Throughout the Middle East, at Jesus’ time and still today, palm branches are a symbol of victory, joy, goodness, peace, and, because of the nourishing dates that Palm trees produce, life. God instructed the Jews to use palm branches during the Feast of Tabernacles (Lev 23:40). King David was welcomed with palm branches the day he was enthroned (2 Kings 9:13). King Solomon had palm branches carved into the walls and doors of the Temple (1 Kings 6:29). The Maccabeans used palm branches to celebrate after they defeated the Greeks in battle (1 Macc 13:51). The Book of Revelation describes the redeemed as “wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands” as they stand before the throne of God and of Jesus the Lamb (Rev 7:9). At the beginning of Holy Week, we Christians take up palm branches, we could say, to roll out the red carpet to welcome the Lord Jesus as he enters this week. We proclaim with joy his victory, his goodness, his peace and how he leads us to a life that will know no end. The priest prays as he blesses the branches: “Almighty ever-living God, sanctify these branches with your blessing, that we who follow Christ the King in exultation, may reach the eternal Jerusalem through him.” Renewing ourselves in the white robes of our baptism and holding palm branches in our hands, we come to stand before the Lamb as he takes away our sins through what he accomplished on Good Friday and then hope to join him, the Lamb looking as if he has been slain, and enter with him into the eternal Jerusalem. Just as we lift the palm branches, with similar fervor, according to one of our most famous Lenten hymns, we “lift high the Cross, the love of Christ proclaim, till all the world adore his sacred name.” This is the triumphant song behind which the conquering ranks combine. These are the branches Satan’s legions fear and angels revere. This is the glorious tree by which Christ draws all to himself. And we lift the branches of the Cross high as the fulfillment of the palms, the sign of victory, the means by which the Lamb takes away our sins, and the tree that produces eternal life. We lift Christ’s cross, and our cross, heavenward, as a sign and means of triumph along the daily effort of self-denial and the way of the Cross that constitutes the Christian life.
The last element we can ponder are the expressions that are shouted as the battle march, we could say, of each procession. Those with palm branches jubilantly shout as Jesus enters Jerusalem on the colt: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come! Hosanna in the highest!” Hosanna is a Jewish expression that means, “Save now” or “Deliver us promptly.” It’s a recognition that Jesus was coming as the Son of David, as the King, to save them. These words are excerpted from Psalm 118, which the Jews used to sing on the Feast of Tabernacles: “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord… The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.… Save us [Hosanna], we beseech you, O Lord! … Give us success! Blessed be he who enters in the name of the Lord! …Bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altar! You are my God and I will give you thanks” (Psalm 118:19,22,25-28). Jesus, they were proclaiming, was coming in the name of the Lord to deliver them and to lead them with thanksgiving ultimately to the Temple, to the altar, and to sacrifice. Little did they know what the fulfillment of what they were praying in the Psalm would entail! Likewise, in the Passion account, as the procession to Calvary was about to begin, the crowds erupted repeatedly with the cacophonous clamor, “Crucify him! … Crucify him!” Every day we echo those expressions. As Sheen wrote in his meditations on the Way of the Cross, “As often as I choose to speak the uncharitable word, do the dishonest action, or consent to the evil thought, I say in so many words, ‘Release to me Barabbas,’ and to choose Barabbas means to crucify Christ.” We call for Christ’s crucifixion every time we choose to sin. But every day at Mass we make our own the words of Psalm 118 and cry out for deliverance. We pray, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” as we sing or shout, “Hosanna,” “deliver us,” “save us.” Christ comes each day to lead us to the Upper Room and Calvary, where he was crucified for that deliverance. On the branches of the Cross, he takes away our sins, every time we’ve chosen his crucifixion by opting for Barabbas in disguise. And it’s then that, like St. Paul, we begin to learn how he wants to change the words, “Crucify him,” from a murderous roar to a proclamation of God’s power, wisdom and love (1 Cor 1:24), as we recognize that on the Cross he cried out for the Father to forgive us because we really don’t know fully what we do by our sins, as he showed mercy and paradise to the repentant thief, as he made the Cross our sole boast and glory, the means by which the world is crucified to us and us to the world, indeed, our only hope.
The drama of Palm Sunday, Holy Week and beyond revolves around whether we will prepare with Christ, whether we will collaborate with him and others, whether we will wave palm branches and be saved by the branches of the Cross, and whether we will cry out for deliverance and mercy as he sheds his blood for the forgiveness of sins. Jesus wants us to be intimately involved in his work of redemption. But if devil can’t prevent altogether our being present, he at least wants us to show up without real participation, or worse. Judas, we remember, was present at the Last Supper, but betrayed Jesus. Jesus said to the remaining eleven, “All of you will have your faith shaken, for it is written: ‘I will strike the shepherd and the sheep will be dispersed’” (Zech 13:7). When Jesus was arrested, all of the apostles fled. Peter had sworn that even should others have their faith rocked, even if he had to die, he wouldn’t betray the Lord, but we know what he did. He thought he could follow Jesus at a safe distance, but when he was outed as a disciple, he swore three times that he didn’t even know who Jesus was. We see a similar thing in the young man who followed Jesus after his arrest, covered in nothing but a priestly linen cloth. After the mobs recognized him as a disciple and grabbed the cloth, he ran away naked and exposed. Many scholars in Christian history have long believed that the only reason why this seemingly extraneous detail was included exclusively in St. Mark’s account was that that young man was St. Mark himself. Regardless of his identity, we all learn a lesson that is meant to guide our week: we have to make a choice to process with Christ up close, and we can’t take that choice for granted. It’s impossible to remain faithful at a distance. Holy Week is that time that we choose, even at personal cost, to remain with the Good Shepherd as he is struck down for our salvation, so that when he is struck, rather than fleeing, rather than denying, rather than having our lack of faith exposed, rather than being scattered, we will give witness to our faith, a witness like we see in Mary the Mother of Jesus, Mary, Magdalene, and a converted St. John at the foot of the Cross. This choice between proximity and distance, between explicit collaboration and fear, is one we must all make each day this week.
And the choice we make is one that overflows into the entirety of our Christian life. Living Holy Week at a distance is one of the surest signs of lukewarmness. Living Holy Week up close, coming to the liturgies of the Triduum and even on Monday through Wednesday of Holy Week, is, on the other hand, a sign and means by which to grow in fidelity, love and courage. The Church’s journey through time can be likened to the continuation of the procession begun on Palm Sunday and Good Friday. The Church is, as the Second Vatican Council emphasized and Eucharistic Prayer III proclaims, a “pilgrim Church on earth.” We journey with Jesus in and out of the gates of the earthly Jerusalem toward the new and eternal Jerusalem. And that journey is ultimately Eucharistic. It’s in the Holy Eucharist that Jesus, who never ceases to call us to follow him, chooses to have us follow him. It’s in the Eucharist that Jesus keeps his promise to remain with us — indeed within us — until the end of time.
That’s why, as we think about how Jesus wants us to join him in procession on Palm Sunday and on the road to Calvary, it’s key that we remember that Jesus wants us to continue this journey through a Eucharistic life. The Church’s pilgrimage through time is ultimately a Eucharistic procession. That’s one reason why, during the ongoing Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in the USA, there will be a 65-day Eucharistic pilgrimage, making a sign of the Cross over our country from the north, south, east and west, and culminating in the first national Eucharistic Congress in 83 years taking place this July in Indianapolis. One procession will begin in San Francisco; another from the birthplace of the Mississippi River in Minnesota, near the Canadian border; a third from Brownsville, Texas, near the Mexican border; and the last will begin at the tomb of Blessed Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, in New Haven. Columbia will be more represented than any other university in the countries, with Chas East on the western route and Marina Frattaroli and your chaplain on the eastern route. Like the donkey on Palm Sunday and Simon of Cyrene on Good Friday, I will be able to carry the Lord not into Jerusalem but into New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and many other cities and towns along our journey, and priests on the other pilgrimage routes, starting May 18, will be doing the same in cities all across our land. If you cannot be present in Indianapolis, I would urge you to try to participate for a day somewhere along one of the four routes. The procession will be here in New York City on Memorial Day weekend. This is not only the biggest Eucharistic procession in the history of the United States but in the history of the Church. Just as Christ made immediate preparations for the colt and the room and remote preparations for what he would do with both, so Christ wants us to prepare not just for a particular Eucharistic journey but for the Eucharistic procession of life that this pilgrimage symbolizes. Jesus wants us to lift up the palm branches of our joys and the arms of our bitter crosses and unite them to him as he saves us through his passion, death and resurrection that we enter into every Mass. The Eucharist is ultimately where Jesus wants us to meet him as he comes to us each day in the name of the Lord, to receive the fruit of what he won for us by his crucifixion, that will strengthen us to continue the journey with him all the way to the Father’s embrace.
At the beginning of Mass today, in the prayer the priest said on behalf of the Church, we see the connection between the procession of Palm Sunday, the procession of the Way of the Cross, and the procession of the Church through time. The Church prays: “Today, we gather together to herald with the whole Church the beginning of the celebration of our Lord’s paschal mystery, that is to say, of his Passion and Resurrection. For it was to accomplish this mystery that he entered his own city of Jerusalem. Therefore, with all faith and devotion, let us commemorate the Lord’s entry into the city for our salvation, following in his footsteps, so that, being made by his grace partakers of the Cross, we may have a share also in his Resurrection and in his life.” This is the way Holy Week turns into a holy life. This is the way we become followers up close and united rather than at a distance. Let us ask our Lord who prepared in detail for centuries for our imminent Eucharistic encounter to give us the grace to continue walking with him each day in a Eucharistic life, until with him and others we cross the gates of the heavenly Jerusalem that he blew open for us by all he accomplished during these most sacred days.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
At the Procession with Palms – Gospel
Mk 11:1-10
When Jesus and his disciples drew near to Jerusalem,
to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives,
he sent two of his disciples and said to them,
“Go into the village opposite you,
and immediately on entering it,
you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat.
Untie it and bring it here.
If anyone should say to you,
‘Why are you doing this?’ reply,
‘The Master has need of it
and will send it back here at once.’”
So they went off
and found a colt tethered at a gate outside on the street,
and they untied it.
Some of the bystanders said to them,
“What are you doing, untying the colt?”
They answered them just as Jesus had told them to,
and they permitted them to do it.
So they brought the colt to Jesus
and put their cloaks over it.
And he sat on it.
Many people spread their cloaks on the road,
and others spread leafy branches
that they had cut from the fields.
Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out:
“Hosanna!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!
Hosanna in the highest!”

At the Mass – Reading I
Is 50:4-7
The Lord GOD has given me
a well-trained tongue,
that I might know how to speak to the weary
a word that will rouse them.
Morning after morning
he opens my ear that I may hear;
and I have not rebelled,
have not turned back.
I gave my back to those who beat me,
my cheeks to those who plucked my beard;
my face I did not shield
from buffets and spitting.
The Lord GOD is my help,
therefore I am not disgraced;
I have set my face like flint,
knowing that I shall not be put to shame.
Responsorial Psalm
22:8-9, 17-18, 19-20, 23-24
R. (2a) My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
All who see me scoff at me;
they mock me with parted lips, they wag their heads:
“He relied on the LORD; let him deliver him,
let him rescue him, if he loves him.”
R. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Indeed, many dogs surround me,
a pack of evildoers closes in upon me;
They have pierced my hands and my feet;
I can count all my bones.
R. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
They divide my garments among them,
and for my vesture they cast lots.
But you, O LORD, be not far from me;
O my help, hasten to aid me.
R. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
I will proclaim your name to my brethren;
in the midst of the assembly I will praise you:
“You who fear the LORD, praise him;
all you descendants of Jacob, give glory to him;
revere him, all you descendants of Israel!”
R. My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Reading II
Phil 2:6-11
Christ Jesus, though he was in the form of God,
did not regard equality with God
something to be grasped.
Rather, he emptied himself,
taking the form of a slave,
coming in human likeness;
and found human in appearance,
he humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.
Verse before the Gospel
Phil 2:8-9
Christ became obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name which is above every name.
Gospel
Mk 14:1—15:47
The Passover and the Feast of Unleavened Bread
were to take place in two days’ time.
So the chief priests and the scribes were seeking a way
to arrest him by treachery and put him to death.
They said, “Not during the festival,
for fear that there may be a riot among the people.”
When he was in Bethany reclining at table
in the house of Simon the leper,
a woman came with an alabaster jar of perfumed oil,
costly genuine spikenard.
She broke the alabaster jar and poured it on his head.
There were some who were indignant.
“Why has there been this waste of perfumed oil?
It could have been sold for more than three hundred days’ wages
and the money given to the poor.”
They were infuriated with her.
Jesus said, “Let her alone.
Why do you make trouble for her?
She has done a good thing for me.
The poor you will always have with you,
and whenever you wish you can do good to them,
but you will not always have me.
She has done what she could.
She has anticipated anointing my body for burial.
Amen, I say to you,
wherever the gospel is proclaimed to the whole world,
what she has done will be told in memory of her.”
Then Judas Iscariot, one of the Twelve,
went off to the chief priests to hand him over to them.
When they heard him they were pleased and promised to pay him money.
Then he looked for an opportunity to hand him over.
On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread,
when they sacrificed the Passover lamb,
his disciples said to him,
“Where do you want us to go
and prepare for you to eat the Passover?”
He sent two of his disciples and said to them,
“Go into the city and a man will meet you,
carrying a jar of water.
Follow him.
Wherever he enters, say to the master of the house,
‘The Teacher says, “Where is my guest room
where I may eat the Passover with my disciples?”’
Then he will show you a large upper room furnished and ready.
Make the preparations for us there.”
The disciples then went off, entered the city,
and found it just as he had told them;
and they prepared the Passover.
When it was evening, he came with the Twelve.
And as they reclined at table and were eating, Jesus said,
“Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me,
one who is eating with me.”
They began to be distressed and to say to him, one by one,
“Surely it is not I?”
He said to them,
“One of the Twelve, the one who dips with me into the dish.
For the Son of Man indeed goes, as it is written of him,
but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed.
It would be better for that man if he had never been born.”
While they were eating,
he took bread, said the blessing,
broke it, and gave it to them, and said,
“Take it; this is my body.”
Then he took a cup, gave thanks, and gave it to them,
and they all drank from it.
He said to them,
“This is my blood of the covenant,
which will be shed for many.
Amen, I say to you,
I shall not drink again the fruit of the vine
until the day when I drink it new in the kingdom of God.”
Then, after singing a hymn,
they went out to the Mount of Olives.
Then Jesus said to them,
“All of you will have your faith shaken, for it is written:
I will strike the shepherd,
and the sheep will be dispersed.
But after I have been raised up,
I shall go before you to Galilee.”
Peter said to him,
“Even though all should have their faith shaken,
mine will not be.”
Then Jesus said to him,
“Amen, I say to you,
this very night before the cock crows twice
you will deny me three times.”
But he vehemently replied,
“Even though I should have to die with you,
I will not deny you.”
And they all spoke similarly.
Then they came to a place named Gethsemane,
and he said to his disciples,
“Sit here while I pray.”
He took with him Peter, James, and John,
and began to be troubled and distressed.
Then he said to them, “My soul is sorrowful even to death.
Remain here and keep watch.”
He advanced a little and fell to the ground and prayed
that if it were possible the hour might pass by him;
he said, “Abba, Father, all things are possible to you.
Take this cup away from me,
but not what I will but what you will.”
When he returned he found them asleep.
He said to Peter, “Simon, are you asleep?
Could you not keep watch for one hour?
Watch and pray that you may not undergo the test.
The spirit is willing but the flesh is weak.”
Withdrawing again, he prayed, saying the same thing.
Then he returned once more and found them asleep,
for they could not keep their eyes open
and did not know what to answer him.
He returned a third time and said to them,
“Are you still sleeping and taking your rest?
It is enough. The hour has come.
Behold, the Son of Man is to be handed over to sinners.
Get up, let us go.
See, my betrayer is at hand.”
Then, while he was still speaking,
Judas, one of the Twelve, arrived,
accompanied by a crowd with swords and clubs
who had come from the chief priests,
the scribes, and the elders.
His betrayer had arranged a signal with them, saying,
“The man I shall kiss is the one;
arrest him and lead him away securely.”
He came and immediately went over to him and said,
“Rabbi.” And he kissed him.
At this they laid hands on him and arrested him.
One of the bystanders drew his sword,
struck the high priest’s servant, and cut off his ear.
Jesus said to them in reply,
“Have you come out as against a robber,
with swords and clubs, to seize me?
Day after day I was with you teaching in the temple area,
yet you did not arrest me;
but that the Scriptures may be fulfilled.”
And they all left him and fled.
Now a young man followed him
wearing nothing but a linen cloth about his body.
They seized him,
but he left the cloth behind and ran off naked.
They led Jesus away to the high priest,
and all the chief priests and the elders and the scribes came together.
Peter followed him at a distance into the high priest’s courtyard
and was seated with the guards, warming himself at the fire.
The chief priests and the entire Sanhedrin
kept trying to obtain testimony against Jesus
in order to put him to death, but they found none.
Many gave false witness against him,
but their testimony did not agree.
Some took the stand and testified falsely against him,
alleging, “We heard him say,
‘I will destroy this temple made with hands
and within three days I will build another
not made with hands.’”
Even so their testimony did not agree.
The high priest rose before the assembly and questioned Jesus,
saying, “Have you no answer?
What are these men testifying against you?”
But he was silent and answered nothing.
Again the high priest asked him and said to him,
“Are you the Christ, the son of the Blessed One?”
Then Jesus answered, “I am;
and ‘you will see the Son of Man
seated at the right hand of the Power
and coming with the clouds of heaven.’”
At that the high priest tore his garments and said,
“What further need have we of witnesses?
You have heard the blasphemy.
What do you think?”
They all condemned him as deserving to die.
Some began to spit on him.
They blindfolded him and struck him and said to him, “Prophesy!”
And the guards greeted him with blows.
While Peter was below in the courtyard,
one of the high priest’s maids came along.
Seeing Peter warming himself,
she looked intently at him and said,
“You too were with the Nazarene, Jesus.”
But he denied it saying,
“I neither know nor understand what you are talking about.”
So he went out into the outer court.
Then the cock crowed.
The maid saw him and began again to say to the bystanders,
“This man is one of them.”
Once again he denied it.
A little later the bystanders said to Peter once more,
“Surely you are one of them; for you too are a Galilean.”
He began to curse and to swear,
“I do not know this man about whom you are talking.”
And immediately a cock crowed a second time.
Then Peter remembered the word that Jesus had said to him,
“Before the cock crows twice you will deny me three times.”
He broke down and wept.
As soon as morning came,
the chief priests with the elders and the scribes,
that is, the whole Sanhedrin held a council.
They bound Jesus, led him away, and handed him over to Pilate.
Pilate questioned him,
“Are you the king of the Jews?”
He said to him in reply, “You say so.”
The chief priests accused him of many things.
Again Pilate questioned him,
“Have you no answer?
See how many things they accuse you of.”
Jesus gave him no further answer, so that Pilate was amazed.
Now on the occasion of the feast he used to release to them
one prisoner whom they requested.
A man called Barabbas was then in prison
along with the rebels who had committed murder in a rebellion.
The crowd came forward and began to ask him
to do for them as he was accustomed.
Pilate answered,
“Do you want me to release to you the king of the Jews?”
For he knew that it was out of envy
that the chief priests had handed him over.
But the chief priests stirred up the crowd
to have him release Barabbas for them instead.
Pilate again said to them in reply,
“Then what do you want me to do
with the man you call the king of the Jews?”
They shouted again, “Crucify him.”
Pilate said to them, “Why? What evil has he done?”
They only shouted the louder, “Crucify him.”
So Pilate, wishing to satisfy the crowd,
released Barabbas to them and, after he had Jesus scourged,
handed him over to be crucified.
The soldiers led him away inside the palace,
that is, the praetorium, and assembled the whole cohort.
They clothed him in purple and,
weaving a crown of thorns, placed it on him.
They began to salute him with, “Hail, King of the Jews!”
and kept striking his head with a reed and spitting upon him.
They knelt before him in homage.
And when they had mocked him,
they stripped him of the purple cloak,
dressed him in his own clothes,
and led him out to crucify him.
They pressed into service a passer-by, Simon,
a Cyrenian, who was coming in from the country,
the father of Alexander and Rufus,
to carry his cross.
They brought him to the place of Golgotha
— which is translated Place of the Skull —,
They gave him wine drugged with myrrh,
but he did not take it.
Then they crucified him and divided his garments
by casting lots for them to see what each should take.
It was nine o’clock in the morning when they crucified him.
The inscription of the charge against him read,
“The King of the Jews.”
With him they crucified two revolutionaries,
one on his right and one on his left.
Those passing by reviled him,
shaking their heads and saying,
“Aha! You who would destroy the temple
and rebuild it in three days,
save yourself by coming down from the cross.”
Likewise the chief priests, with the scribes,
mocked him among themselves and said,
“He saved others; he cannot save himself.
Let the Christ, the King of Israel,
come down now from the cross
that we may see and believe.”
Those who were crucified with him also kept abusing him.
At noon darkness came over the whole land
until three in the afternoon.
And at three o’clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice,
“Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?”
which is translated,
“My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”
Some of the bystanders who heard it said,
“Look, he is calling Elijah.”
One of them ran, soaked a sponge with wine, put it on a reed
and gave it to him to drink saying,
“Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to take him down.”
Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed his last.
Here all kneel and pause for a short time.
The veil of the sanctuary was torn in two from top to bottom.
When the centurion who stood facing him
saw how he breathed his last he said,
“Truly this man was the Son of God!”
There were also women looking on from a distance.
Among them were Mary Magdalene,
Mary the mother of the younger James and of Joses, and Salome.
These women had followed him when he was in Galilee
and ministered to him.
There were also many other women
who had come up with him to Jerusalem.
When it was already evening,
since it was the day of preparation,
the day before the sabbath, Joseph of Arimathea,
a distinguished member of the council,
who was himself awaiting the kingdom of God,
came and courageously went to Pilate
and asked for the body of Jesus.
Pilate was amazed that he was already dead.
He summoned the centurion
and asked him if Jesus had already died.
And when he learned of it from the centurion,
he gave the body to Joseph.
Having bought a linen cloth, he took him down,
wrapped him in the linen cloth,
and laid him in a tomb that had been hewn out of the rock.
Then he rolled a stone against the entrance to the tomb.
Mary Magdalene and Mary the mother of Joses
watched where he was laid.
The post Processing with Christ Rather Than Trying to Follow Him At A Distance, Palm Sunday (B), March 24, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
30 min
March 23, 2024Palm Sunday (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 23, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Palm Sunday, B, Vigil
March 23, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.23.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we prepare for Holy Week by focusing on the life-changing dialogue the Lord Jesus wants to have with us throughout the week as we retrace with him the most important events in the history of the world.
Holy Week begins with Palm Sunday, the only Mass during the year in which we have two Gospel passages, one at the start of the Mass in which we ponder Jesus’ triumphal entry into Jerusalem, when the crowds hail him with Palm branches and shouts of “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!” The second is the solemn reading of the Lord’s passion, in which we enter into Jesus’ self-giving during the Last Supper and retrace his suffering as the fickle crowds should, “Crucify Him!” It’s normal on Palm Sunday for preachers to focus on the Passion, the longest Gospel passage read throughout the year and, with the passages on the resurrection, the real heart of the Gospel. Today, however, to orient us for Holy Week, I would like to preach on first Gospel, the Gospel of Palm Sunday proper, because it shows us how to welcome Jesus and journey with him not only throughout these holy days but in life.
The details are few but highly significant. Let’s begin with Jesus’ transportation. Jesus sent two of his disciples to go the village opposite them where they’d find a tethered colt on which no one had ever sat, to untie it and bring it to him. When the owner asked, “Why are you untying this colt?,” they replied, as Jesus had instructed them, “the Master has need of it.” Jesus then rode that colt into Jerusalem. Jesus could have easily walked into the city; after all, except for occasional boat rides across the Sea of Galilee, he walked everywhere. But he wanted to ride the foal of a donkey on which no one had ever sat. He had need of it to fulfill the Messianic prophecy announced by Zechariah, who wrote, “Rejoice heartily, O daughter Zion, shout for joy, O daughter Jerusalem! See, your king shall come to you; a just savior is he, humble and riding on an ass, on a colt, the foal of a beast of burden.” Just as Solomon had ridden a mule, so Jesus was riding a consecrated colt no one had ever used, an indication that he was indeed the Son of David and rightful successor to him. Whereas riding a horse would have been a sign of war, to ride a donkey was a sign that the one riding was coming in peace. Zechariah’s prophecy continues: “He shall command peace to the nations; his dominion shall be from sea to sea, and from the River to the ends of the earth. … Because of the blood of my covenant with you, I will set your captives free from the waterless pit.” This King of peace riding on the foal of a donkey would be a universal king “from sea to sea” who would set people free not from political enemies but from the “waterless pit,” in other words, from death.
As we prepare for this most holy of weeks, we can learn a lot from this colt. The Master has need of us, too. In the ancient Gregorian chant for the hymn Christians sing on Palm Sunday, “All Glory Laud and Honor,” there is a verse in Latin that reads, “Sis pius ascensor, tuus et nos simus asellus. Tecum nos capitat urbs veneranda Dei,” which can be translated as, “May you be the holy Rider and we your little colt, so that the venerated City of God may grasp us together with you.” Jesus wants us to enter the Holy City with him. He wants us to collaborate with him in this work of his salvation. St. Josemaria Escriva, the 20th century apostle of the sanctification of the laity, sought to imitate and help others to emulate this donkey in welcoming Jesus and assisting his work. “There are hundreds of animals more beautiful, more deft and strong,” he wrote. “But it was a donkey Christ chose when he presented himself to the people as king in response to their acclamation.” Jesus wants us, like a donkey, to be a docile, diligent, steady companion. That’s the type of cooperation Jesus wants in all of us this Holy Week and beyond.
The second thing we can mention are the Palm branches, which the priest blesses at the beginning of Palm Sunday Mass. St. Mark tells us, “Many people spread their cloaks on the road and others spread leafy branches that they had cut from the fields.” Throughout the Middle East, at Jesus’ time and still today, the palm branch is a symbol of victory, joy, goodness, peace, and, because of the nourishing dates that Palm trees produce, life, even eternal life. God instructed the Jews to use Palm Branches during the Feast of Tabernacles. David was welcomed with palm branches the day he was enthroned (2 Kings 9:13). Solomon had palm branches carved into the walls and doors of the Temple. The Maccabeans (1 Macc 13:51) used them after they defeated the Greeks in battle in Old Testament times. The Book of Revelation describes the redeemed as “wearing white robes and holding palm branches in their hands” as the stand before the throne of God and of Jesus the Lamb. At the beginning of Holy Week, we Christians take up Palm Branches, we could say, to roll out the red carpet to welcome the Lord Jesus as he enters this week. We proclaim with joy his victory, his goodness, his peace and how he leads us to eternal life. The priest prays as he blesses the branches: “Almighty ever-living God, sanctify these branches with your blessing, that we who follow Christ the King in exultation, may reach the eternal Jerusalem through him.” Renewing ourselves in the white robes of our baptism and holding palm branches in our hands, we stand before the Lamb as he takes away our sins by what he accomplished on Good Friday and then seek to join him, the Lamb looking as if he has been slain, as we seek to enter with him into the eternal Jerusalem.
The third element we can mention is what those with palm branches jubilantly shout as Jesus enters Jerusalem on the colt: “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord! Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come! Hosanna in the highest!” Hosanna is a Jewish expression that means, “Save now” or “Deliver us promptly.” It’s a recognition that Jesus is coming as the Son of David, as the King, to save. What the people were shouting were excerpts from Psalm 118, which the Jews used to sing on the Feast of Tabernacles: “Open to me the gates of righteousness, that I may enter through them and give thanks to the Lord… The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone.… Save us [Hosanna], we beseech you, O Lord! … Give us success! Blessed be he who enters in the name of the Lord! …Bind the festal procession with branches, up to the horns of the altar! You are my God, and I will give you thanks (Psalm 118:19,22, 25-28). Jesus, they were proclaiming, was coming in the Lord’s name to deliver them and to lead them ultimately to the altar, to sacrifice, with thanksgiving to God. Little did they know what that fulfillment would entail! But we know. Every Mass we make our own the words of Psalm 118 and the joyful shouts of the people. We focus on how God is holy, holy, holy and how heaven and earth are full of his glory, before saying, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord,” as we cry out, “Hosanna,” “deliver us,” “save us.” This is what we do, as well, at the beginning of Holy Week. We recognize that it is in this week that Jesus comes in the name of God the Father to bring us to salvation. He comes to lead us to the Upper Room and Calvary, where he offers himself to the Father for that deliverance and wants to help us to offer ourselves together with him. Like Moses and the Israelites, Jesus comes to lead us on an exodus, a journey, a procession. That’s what happens during Holy Week. Jesus wants us to do more than wave branches, lay cloaks, and cite the Psalms. He wants us to journey with him. He wants us to follow him. Even more, like the colt, he has need of us.
The Church’s journey through time can be likened to the continuation of the procession begun on Palm Sunday. The Church is, as the Second Vatican Council emphasized and Eucharistic Prayer III proclaims, a “pilgrim Church on earth.” We journey with Jesus toward the heavenly Jerusalem. This year, however, during the ongoing Eucharistic Revival taking place in the Church in our country, we will have the opportunity to focus on how our earthly pilgrimage is ultimately Eucharistic. In preparation for the Eucharistic Congress taking place in Indianapolis July 17-21, there will be four, 65-day nationwide Eucharistic pilgrimages walking with the Eucharistic Jesus to Indianapolis. One from the west will leave from San Francisco; another from the north will start at the birthplace of the Mississippi River near the Canadian border; a third from the south will begin in Brownsville, Texas, near the Mexican border; the last from the east will begin at the tomb of Blessed Michael McGivney, founder of the Knights of Columbus, in New Haven. I have the privilege to be the priest on this eastern route. Like the donkey on Palm Sunday, I will be able to carry the Lord not into Jerusalem but into New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, DC, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Indianapolis and many other cities and towns along our journey. Starting on May 18, priests on other pilgrimages will be doing the same in cities all across our country. I would urge you to visit eucharisticpilgrimage.org to find out the closest place this Eucharistic Pilgrimage will be coming to you. Go out to meet Jesus like the crowds did in Jerusalem; and, if you can, to come celebrate in July in Indianapolis, with Catholics from across the country, what Jesus did for us this week, through giving his body and blood for us and our salvation.
The Eucharistic Pilgrimage, just like the procession on Palm Sunday, is meant to lead us into these mysteries and help us follow Jesus up close. At the beginning of Mass this Sunday, the priest will pray: “Today we gather together to herald with the whole Church the beginning of the celebration of our Lord’s paschal mystery, that is to say, of his Passion and Resurrection. For it was to accomplish this mystery that he entered his own city of Jerusalem. Therefore, with all faith and devotion, let us commemorate the Lord’s entry into the city for our salvation, following in his footsteps, so that, being made by his grace partakers of the Cross, we may have a share also in his Resurrection and in his life.” The Church calls us to follow in Jesus’ footsteps as he seeks to lead us during Holy Week to a holy life. And let us ask for the grace to continue walking with him each day through a Eucharistic life, as we seek to receive fully all that he accomplished for us during these most sacred days.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
Mk 11:1-10
When Jesus and his disciples drew near to Jerusalem,
to Bethphage and Bethany at the Mount of Olives,
he sent two of his disciples and said to them,
“Go into the village opposite you,
and immediately on entering it,
you will find a colt tethered on which no one has ever sat.
Untie it and bring it here.
If anyone should say to you,
‘Why are you doing this?’ reply,
‘The Master has need of it
and will send it back here at once.’”
So they went off
and found a colt tethered at a gate outside on the street,
and they untied it.
Some of the bystanders said to them,
“What are you doing, untying the colt?”
They answered them just as Jesus had told them to,
and they permitted them to do it.
So they brought the colt to Jesus
and put their cloaks over it.
And he sat on it.
Many people spread their cloaks on the road,
and others spread leafy branches
that they had cut from the fields.
Those preceding him as well as those following kept crying out:
“Hosanna!
Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!
Hosanna in the highest!”
The post Palm Sunday (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 23, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
11 min
March 21, 2024Faith like Abraham in the One Far Greater Than Abraham, Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent, March 21, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent
March 21, 2024
Gen 17:3-9, Ps 105, Jn 8:51-59

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.21.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
As Lent began, we were smudged with ashes as a priest said to us, in Jesus’ name and repeating his words, “Repent and believe in the Gospel.” The essential Lenten journey is geared toward helping us live by faith, by having us turn away from all of those ways of infidelity in which we have not lived in communion with God and assisting us — through prayer, fasting, almsgiving — to unite ourselves to God: our thoughts (prayer), our deepest desires (hungering through fasting for what God most hungers) and interrelation with others (charity through union with God’s love and providence). Today the Church has us focus again on the whole meaning of faith. Faith is not fundamentally believing in a series of truths; faith, rather, is a believing in Someone who gives witness to those truths. To grow in faith means first to grow in trust in the One in whom we believe and then, as a result of that trust, to adhere much more to what he says.
That’s why today we focus on Abraham, our father in faith. Abraham shows us what a genuine trust in God means: that we believe in what he says, even when he asks us to do something hard, even when he challenges us beyond what we know. Every Second Sunday of Lent, we encounter Abraham and his adventure of faith to help us with the coordinates of Lent and Christian life. Lent is meant to be a journey of faith by imitating the acts of faith we see in Abraham. Jesus calls us to leave our own Ur of the Chaldeans, our own comfort zones, to travel to where he wants to lead us. He calls us to believe in all of his promises, even though they might seem impossible to believe, like Abraham’s not only becoming a dad but a father of many nations when he was childless past retirement age. He calls us to have the faith to be willing to sacrifice what we hold dearest, like Abraham was willing to sacrifice Isaac, the “son of the promise,” knowing that God would be able to raise him from the dead and can give life even to those sacrifices.
When we don’t have that relationship of trust — a gift God will provide if we’re open — then we often distrust what is said. We see that illustrated for us in today’s Gospel. Yesterday, Jesus spoke to those challenging him about their slavery to sin. They replied, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.” Jesus retorted, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who told you the truth I heard from God. Abraham did not do this.” To be a spiritual descendent of Abraham is to live by faith, to have our faith operative in deeds of love toward God and others. Rather than accepting Christ’s message in faith, however, the interlocutors were, in a way totally contrary to faith, plotting to kill the Messenger to extinguish his message. They thought that if Jesus were veering from their preconceived notions, then all his indisputable works couldn’t be coming from God but had to be coming from Beelzebul, the prince of demons. That’s what explains the beginning of today’s Gospel passage. When Jesus says, “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death,” they responded, “Now we are sure that you are possessed.” In other words, they were 99 percent convinced prior that we was possessed, but now they had no doubt. They listed various holy persons who kept the word of God and nevertheless died, Abraham and the prophets, and said that by this statement Jesus was making himself out to be greater than them, and his words more salvific than theirs. “Who do you make yourself out to be?,” they asked. The fact that he would be greater than Abraham and the prophets, that he would be the Son of God, they refused to accept. And because of that refusal, they were suspicious of everything else, as if Jesus were a blasphemous lunatic.
When Jesus said, “Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day; he saw it and was glad,” he was pointing to various aspects of the transformation that happens by faith, which he wanted to happen in them if only they opened up. We can understand this phrase of Jesus at least in three ways: Abraham saw Jesus’ resurrection with the birth of his son Isaac from two people whose reproductive systems were basically dead; Abraham saw Jesus in the multitude of nations of which Abraham would be a father, because he would become the father of all nations of the earth through his offspring, Jesus, who would establish God’s covenant with the entire human race; Abraham glimpsed him in the sacrifice of Isaac, when God the Father did in fact provide the Lamb, but also in foreseeing that God would raise his son from the dead.
It’s important for all of us in faith to learn from Abraham how to trust in God, how to let him lead us, how to let God never cease to surprise us and move us beyond our finite categories. It’s important for us to rejoice in Christ’s day and live the faith in the fulfillment of the joy Abraham merely glimpsed. The Lord made a covenant with Abraham and remembers his covenant for ever, as we prayed in the Responsorial Psalm. His fidelity is the ground of our own. And the covenant he made with us in his Son is even greater than the covenant he made with Abraham and his descendants forever. And so it calls for an ever greater fidelity with God through grace. If God said to Abraham, “On your part, you and your descendants after you must keep my covenant throughout the ages,” so he says to us, “You and your family must keep my covenant forever!” And we know what the payoff is. Jesus swears an oath about it: “Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever keeps my word will never see death.”
The way we renew that covenant and are strengthened by God to keep it is in the Mass, in which we enter into a communion of body and soul with the body, blood, soul and divinity of Jesus. He gives us his body and blood as the “new and eternal Covenant” and instructs us to “do this” in his memory, not only celebrating this Covenant but living the covenant in communion with him, faithfully adhering to his promises and to the commandments of love that constitute our own end of that sacred alliance. Abraham “rejoiced to see my day,” Jesus said. How joyful we ought to be not just to see it but to live it together with Jesus! And if we live it here, death with be nothing other than a change of address, to a place where we will be able to rejoice with Abraham over Christ’s triumph over sin and death for all eternity.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
GN 17:3-9
When Abram prostrated himself, God spoke to him:
“My covenant with you is this:
you are to become the father of a host of nations.
No longer shall you be called Abram;
your name shall be Abraham,
for I am making you the father of a host of nations.
I will render you exceedingly fertile;
I will make nations of you;
kings shall stem from you.
I will maintain my covenant with you
and your descendants after you
throughout the ages as an everlasting pact,
to be your God and the God of your descendants after you.
I will give to you
and to your descendants after you
the land in which you are now staying,
the whole land of Canaan, as a permanent possession;
and I will be their God.”God also said to Abraham:
“On your part, you and your descendants after you
must keep my covenant throughout the ages.”
Responsorial Psalm
PS 105:4-5, 6-7, 8-9
R. (8a) The Lord remembers his covenant for ever.
Look to the LORD in his strength;
seek to serve him constantly.
Recall the wondrous deeds that he has wrought,
his portents, and the judgments he has uttered.
R. The Lord remembers his covenant for ever.
You descendants of Abraham, his servants,
sons of Jacob, his chosen ones!
He, the LORD, is our God;
throughout the earth his judgments prevail.
R. The Lord remembers his covenant for ever.
He remembers forever his covenant
which he made binding for a thousand generations –
Which he entered into with Abraham
and by his oath to Isaac.
R. The Lord remembers his covenant for ever.
Gospel
JN 8:51-59
Jesus said to the Jews:
“Amen, amen, I say to you,
whoever keeps my word will never see death.”
So the Jews said to him,
“Now we are sure that you are possessed.
Abraham died, as did the prophets, yet you say,
‘Whoever keeps my word will never taste death.’
Are you greater than our father Abraham, who died?
Or the prophets, who died?
Who do you make yourself out to be?”
Jesus answered,
“If I glorify myself, my glory is worth nothing;
but it is my Father who glorifies me,
of whom you say, ‘He is our God.’
You do not know him, but I know him.
And if I should say that I do not know him,
I would be like you a liar.
But I do know him and I keep his word.
Abraham your father rejoiced to see my day;
he saw it and was glad.”
So the Jews said to him,
“You are not yet fifty years old and you have seen Abraham?”
Jesus said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
before Abraham came to be, I AM.”
So they picked up stones to throw at him;
but Jesus hid and went out of the temple area.
The post Faith like Abraham in the One Far Greater Than Abraham, Thursday of the Fifth Week of Lent, March 21, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
11 min
March 20, 2024Lenten Liberation Through the Truth, Fifth Wednesday of Lent, March 20, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fifth Week of Lent
March 20, 2024
Dan 3:14-20.91-92.95, Dan 3:52-26, Jn 8:31-42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.20.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Lent is about liberation. Throughout this holy season we retrace — at a much deeper spiritual level — the liberation of the Israelites from slavery as Jesus, the new Moses, seeks to lead us by means of the new and eternal Passover on a journey with him through the desert of life, through even death, into the eternal promised land. Lent is about being set free from the domination of the temptations of the evil one by spending 40 days with Jesus in a spiritual desert. It’s about journeying from the self-imposed pigsty back to the Father’s house. The three practices of prayer, fasting and almsgiving all point to this liberation: liberation from egocentric self-dependence through putting God in his proper place in prayer, from giving into our lower appetites by the self-mastery that comes via fasting, from obsessing about our needs wants and needs by sacrificially giving of ourselves, time and possessions for those whose needs are greater.
Today in the Gospel Jesus speaks about liberation and slavery and describes three great interconnected means by which he wants to help us in Lent experience the freedom he came into the world to give us.
The first great means is faith. There are many who believe that faith enslaves, that it binds us by commandments, that it leads us to depend on something or someone other than what we can empirically verify, but faith helps us to recognize that what we can perceive through our senses is not all that there is. We see the liberating power of faith in the three young men in the fiery furnace in today’s first reading from the Book of Daniel. Even though they were bound and thrown into the white hot oven, they were interiorly free through faith, which liberated them from the fear of Nebuchadnezzar, from the fear of pain and suffering, from the fear even of death, and, as we see in the reading, from presumption. With faith, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar, “If our God, whom we serve, can save us from the white-hot furnace and from your hands, O king, may he save us! But even if he will not, know, O king, that we will not serve your god or worship the golden statue that you set up.” The courage came from their fidelity. And their fidelity coupled to God’s fidelity led to a great conversion of the King and many others as they were rescued by what seems to have been an angel of God. Nebuchadnezzar would exclaim at the end, “Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted [had faith] in him; they disobeyed the royal command and yielded their bodies rather than serve or worship any god except their own God.” Lent is meant to help us grow in that type of faith — that faith that is meant to be characteristic of our baptism, in which we renounce Satan and all his evil and empty works and proclaim our faith in our Triune God — so that no matter what white hot furnaces of suffering we may need to endure, we may remain true to the Lord, asking him to save us in this world and even more importantly save us forever from the fiery furnace of Hell.
The second great means is his word of truth. It’s important for us to grasp that weak faith is not enough. Jesus addressed his words in today’s Gospel to those who “believed in him,” but who nevertheless would seek to have him killed. Faith alone, understood as believing something to be true, is not enough. The act of faith essentially involves believing something on the basis of our trust in someone, and for us that means a trust in God, who sent his Son. Jesus tells us that we need to go from the “word” to the One who speaks, from the truth as an idea to the Truth as a person. Jesus tells us, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” The truth sets us free from the ignorance and lies that enslave us. But it’s not enough to be familiar with the truth as “facts.” We need to abide in the truth. Jesus indicates a four-step process: remaining in his word, becoming in truth his disciples, knowing the truth and being liberated through the truth. First we must remain in his word, dwelling in it, resting in it, familiarizing ourselves with it, reading it, meditating upon it. It’s an action verb. We can’t remain in the word of God unless we’re seeking to immerse ourselves in it. If we do this, Jesus says, we will really be his disciples, because we’re only his disciples if we’re putting what he teaches us into practice, and the only way we can do that is to know more and more deeply what he teaches. The way we follow Jesus concretely is by remaining and living his word. Following him along the way of his holy wisdom will help us to know the truth, not in the way we know Wikipedia articles but the way we know a friend or the way Adam knew Eve. For those who know other languages, it’s connaitre not savoir, conhecer not saber, conoscere not sapere. We become one with the truth not just at the level of our minds but in our hearts and actions. And once this happens, the truth sets us free, because we’re no longer walking in darkness without the light of faith, we’re no longer in ignorance about the most important things, we’re no longer enslaved to our egos, appetites, others’ opinions, or the devil’s machinations. Lent is a time in which we are called to grow in remaining, following, knowing and living the Word of God. The readings throughout Lent at daily Mass are a great help in this liberation but we must go beyond them with the help of the Holy Spirit in personal prayer and study. Jesus pointed out to his interlocutors in today’s passage that even though on one level they said they believed in him, at the same time he added, “You are trying to kill me because my word has no room among you.” We need to live in his word in order that our faith grow and not lead us to turn on God by trying to live our faith by halves.
But liberation through this process of entrustment to the God who speaks to us his word is itself not enough. God wants more than a relationship of mere trust. He wants a particular type of trust, the confidence of a child in a loving parent. He wants to us to live our divine filiation, to remember we are the beloved sons and daughters of the Father described in the Parable of the Prodigal Son. This is the third great means. Those opposing Jesus in the Gospel today proudly announced they were children of Abraham, but they were really only descendants according to the flesh not according to faith. In fact by their lack of faith and love, they were slaves rather than sons in God’s household. After they said to Jesus, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone,” Jesus replied, “Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.” Sadly they didn’t want to be set free by the Son to be sons in the Son. Jesus continued, “I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me … I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence; then do what you have heard from the Father.” They insisted that they were children of Abraham, but Jesus replied, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!” They insisted anew that they are not illegitimate children but have “one Father, God,” a curious admission because they were trying to kill Jesus because he insisted he was the Father’s Son. But Jesus told them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here.” Jesus would go to say immediately after today’s Gospel passage stops who their real father is: “You belong to your father the devil and you willingly carry out your father’s desires. He was a murderer from the beginning and does not stand in truth, because there is no truth in him. When he tells a lie, he speaks in character, because he is a liar and the father of lies.” They had exchanged their divine filiation for a diabolical one by their failure to believe as Abraham believed in God, by their choice to live a lie rather than “stand in truth,” which would set them free, by their choice for sin rather than true sanctity, despite their show. Lent is an occasion for all of us to become like the Father, to be as merciful as the Father is merciful, holy as he is holy, perfect as he is perfect, to love as he loves. In prayer we’re supposed to pray in the intimacy of communion with the Father in our inner treasure room, to fast for what he hungers, to give generously and sacrificially of what he has providentially deposited into our hands so that we might share in his care for all his sons and daughters. Lent is the time during which we overcome the blindness of the older son in the parable of the Prodigal Son who, even though he was in the house, related to the Father as a slave would, obeying the Father’s orders rather than living in and sharing the Father’s love.
The great gift God gives us every day to help us in this liberation through faith, truth and divine filiation occurs here at Mass. Mass is a mini-Lent and Easter celebration all in one. We begin with the rite of conversion in which we publicly confess that we are great sinners who have sinned through our own grievous fault, faithfully begging God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit respectively for mercy. God gives us the ability to remain in his word so that we may be strengthened in our discipleship to become one with that Word of Truth and liberated. And we become one with that truth as we receive the Truth incarnate in Holy Communion, entering into the interior life of the Blessed Trinity through him by the power of the Holy Spirit so that together with the Son and with each other we might cry out, “Abba, Father, who art in heaven, hallowed be your name!” This is what strengthens us in confidence in God’s liberating power in every circumstance.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
DN 3:14-20, 91-92, 95
King Nebuchadnezzar said:
“Is it true, Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,
that you will not serve my god,
or worship the golden statue that I set up?
Be ready now to fall down and worship the statue I had made,
whenever you hear the sound of the trumpet,
flute, lyre, harp, psaltery, bagpipe,
and all the other musical instruments;
otherwise, you shall be instantly cast into the white-hot furnace;
and who is the God who can deliver you out of my hands?”
Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego answered King Nebuchadnezzar,
“There is no need for us to defend ourselves before you in this matter.
If our God, whom we serve,
can save us from the white-hot furnace
and from your hands, O king, may he save us!
But even if he will not, know, O king,
that we will not serve your god
or worship the golden statue that you set up.”
King Nebuchadnezzar’s face became livid with utter rage
against Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego.
He ordered the furnace to be heated seven times more than usual
and had some of the strongest men in his army
bind Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego
and cast them into the white-hot furnace.
Nebuchadnezzar rose in haste and asked his nobles,
“Did we not cast three men bound into the fire?”
“Assuredly, O king,” they answered.
“But,” he replied, “I see four men unfettered and unhurt,
walking in the fire, and the fourth looks like a son of God.”
Nebuchadnezzar exclaimed,
“Blessed be the God of Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego,
who sent his angel to deliver the servants who trusted in him;
they disobeyed the royal command and yielded their bodies
rather than serve or worship any god
except their own God.”
Responsorial Psalm
DN 3:52, 53, 54, 55, 56
R. (52b) Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you, O Lord, the God of our fathers,
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever;
And blessed is your holy and glorious name,
praiseworthy and exalted above all for all ages.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you in the temple of your holy glory,
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever.
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you on the throne of your kingdom,
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you who look into the depths
from your throne upon the cherubim;
praiseworthy and exalted above all forever.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
“Blessed are you in the firmament of heaven,
praiseworthy and glorious forever.”
R. Glory and praise for ever!
Gospel
JN 8:31-42
Jesus said to those Jews who believed in him,
“If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples,
and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.”
They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham
and have never been enslaved to anyone.
How can you say, ‘You will become free’?”
Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.
A slave does not remain in a household forever,
but a son always remains.
So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free.
I know that you are descendants of Abraham.
But you are trying to kill me,
because my word has no room among you.
I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence;
then do what you have heard from the Father.”
They answered and said to him, “Our father is Abraham.”
Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children,
you would be doing the works of Abraham.
But now you are trying to kill me,
a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God;
Abraham did not do this.
You are doing the works of your father!”
So they said to him, “We were not born of fornication.
We have one Father, God.”
Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me,
for I came from God and am here;
I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”
The post Lenten Liberation Through the Truth, Fifth Wednesday of Lent, March 20, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
March 19, 2024Emulating St. Joseph, Solemnity of St. Joseph, March 19, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of St. Joseph
March 19, 2024
2 Sam 7:4-5.12-14.16, Ps 89, Rom 4:13.16-18.22, Mt 1:16.18-21.24

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following points were attempted in the homily: [to be filled out]
One of the great joys of my priesthood has been to see how the Church has been growing in devotion to St. Joseph. At the beginning of his pontificate, Pope Francis extended St. John XXIII’s decision to include St. Joseph in Eucharistic Prayer I to all of the other Eucharistic Prayers. A few years ago, the Church marked a Year of St. Joseph, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of the December 8, 1870 declaration by Bl. Pope Pius IX of St. Joseph’s being declared patron of the universal church. Many, helped by Fr. Donald Calloway’s book, have been consecrating themselves to St. Joseph and his protection. In an age in which authentic manliness and the importance of fatherhood have been underappreciated not just in popular culture and education but in various pockets of the Church, devotion to St. Joseph is a very healthy remedy. Today is an opportunity for us to express our gratitude for, and receive more deeply, the protection and provision God wants to give us through Saint Joseph, entrusting ourselves to his spiritual fatherhood and intercession. The best way, however, to mark this great feast — like the feast of any saint — is to seek to emulate St. Joseph in his holiness. As Pope Leo XIII wrote, “There is no doubt that [Joseph] approached nearer than any other to that super-eminent dignity of [Mary] by which the Mother of God surpasses all created natures.” For Pope Leo, St. Joseph is second on the hierarchy of holiness right behind his immaculate and sinless spouse. Today we can ponder ten special features of his holiness, ten virtues that he contagiously and helpfully exemplifies.
First, St. Joseph is just — St. Matthew writes that St. Joseph was a “just” or “righteous” man, a synonym for “holy,” a person in a right relationship with God. He may not have been flashy on the outside but he shone on the inside. St. Frances de Sales once said about him, “He was ‘a just man,’ and so his will was at all times attuned, conformed and united to the will of God.” As Pope Benedict once said in a rare play on words, St. Joseph “ad-justed” his life to the word of God. His whole life was in relationship to God. He shows us how to attune our lives fully to God’s will.
Second, he is faithful based on total trust in God— Like Abraham, to whom he is implicitly compared in today’s second reading, St. Joseph is a “father in faith” to us. His example invites us to imitate his loving trust, his total abandonment to divine Providence, to take God “at his word,” that is, without clearly seeing his design. When the angel said to him, “Do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home,” he did as the angel had commanded him precisely because he believed. Bishop Jacques Bénigne Bossuet commented in his famous 17th-century panegyrics, “The Bible commends Abraham to us as the pattern of perfect faith (Rom. 4:11), but Joseph’s faith was greater: Abraham is praised because he believed that a barren woman would bear a child (Gen. 15:6); Joseph believed the same of a virgin, and in simplicity accepted that inscrutable mystery of child-bearing maidenhood.” Pope Benedict said 15 years ago today in Cameroon, “Throughout all of history, Joseph is the man who gives God the greatest display of trust, even in the face of such astonishing news.” To say that his is the greatest display of trust of all is something extraordinary, considering he was married to the Blessed Virgin! But that’s a worthy description for his heroic faith. He wants to help us live by faith too.
Third, he is obedient — St. Joseph was “righteous” precisely because he was docile and obedient to God and was “faithful” because he did with trust what the Lord asked him. We see his prompt obedience in his response to the angel of God’s interventions in his dreams. When God sent his angel in a dream to tell him not to be afraid to receive Mary into his home because the child was conceived by the Holy Spirit, Joseph awoke and “did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him.” After Jesus’ birth, when the angel appeared to him again and instructed him to “rise, take the child and his mother, and flee to Egypt, and stay there until I tell you,” he rose, awakened them, and began their journey that night. A few years later, when the angel appeared to him in Egypt and told him to return with them to Israel, he did. When along the journey, the angel appeared a fourth time and told him to head to Nazareth, he likewise did. It would have been easy for Joseph, even in a pre-Freudian age, to deconstruct these dreams according to the standard of his conscious desires. Each dream was asking him to do something totally life-changing: to alter completely his notion of what his marriage would entail, so as to be the chaste spouse of the Virgin and the foster father of the Son of God and Savior of the world; to leave his job and his relatives completely behind and journey through the desert to an unknown land; to return after life was settled. But in each of these circumstances, Joseph acted immediately. He was so prone to hear God’s word and put it into practice that at the merest indication of the Lord, he didn’t debate or negotiate, but obeyed. St. Joseph repeatedly sacrificed whatever his own plans might have been to fulfill God’s plans, embracing his vocation to help Jesus and Mary accomplish theirs. To obey — ob-audire in Latin — means to listen intensively, to hang on every word. In Hebrew, there’s no distinction between the words to listen and to obey, because if we’re really listening to God we faith, we listen to do that word. There was no distinction between those words in St. Joseph. There’s the new devotion to the sleeping or dreaming St. Joseph popularized by Pope Francis. The Holy Father normally tucks special intentions under the statue of the sleeping St. Joseph at his bedside with confidence that St. Joseph can hear them as the Pope sleeps. But we also can pray to the sleeping Saint Joseph that we will be able to obey God as St. Joseph did.
Fourth, he is chaste — We invoke St. Joseph in the Divine Praises as Mary’s “most chaste spouse.” We remember what St. Paul wrote in his First Letter to the Thessalonians: “This is God’s will for you, your sanctification,” and he immediately says thereafter, “Therefore, avoid all porneia,” or unchastity. Sexual sins take us in the opposite direction of holiness, since lust is the opposite of love. To grow in holiness, we not only have to avoid all unchastity, but to be chaste. St. Joseph is holy because he is “most chaste.” He is often depicted with a lily, as a sign of purity, as he is in the statue at this altar at the bottom of his left foot, showing, symbolically, that chastity was the foundation of his life. His life shows us that the full gift of self toward another does not necessarily have to involve genital relations. He loved Mary and that meant that he was willing to dedicate himself to what was best for her and for the divine Son she was carrying. He put all his love and his life at the service of their vocations, and in doing he fulfilled his own vocation. St. Joseph teaches us that it is possible to love without possessing. Chastity is a virtue that helps a person to have self-mastery so that one can give oneself to others in the way that is best for them. Chastity raises one’s love and attraction up to the dignity of the other. Chastity allows one to see purely (to see God in another) and with piety (to reverence the divine image one beholds). That’s what Joseph was able to do in the case of his immaculate wife. Chastity in his case and every case is what allows man to be a protector of women rather than a predator. He’s interceding for us that we might become “most chaste” like him, regardless of our state of life.
Fifth, he is humble — It takes humility to dedicate ourselves totally to the service of someone else. And St. Joseph is a model of humility, in the way he cared for Jesus and Mary. One area in which this humility was important was in his day to day life raising the Son of God. He was the one who taught Jesus to pray, together with Mary. In particular Joseph himself must have taken Jesus to the Synagogue for the rites of the Sabbath, as well as to Jerusalem for the great feasts of the people of Israel, because men and women were totally separated. Joseph, moreover, in accordance with the Jewish tradition, would have led the prayers at home both every day — in the morning, in the evening, at meals — and on the principal religious feasts. The great third century theologian Origen writes beautifully that “Joseph understood that Jesus was superior to him even as he submitted to him, and, knowing the superiority of his charge, he commanded him with respect and moderation. Everyone should reflect on this: frequently a lesser man is placed over people who are greater, and it happens at times that an inferior is more worthy than the one who appears to be set above him. If a person of greater dignity understands this, then he will not be puffed up with pride because of his higher rank; he will know that his inferior may well be superior to him, even as Jesus was subject to Joseph.” At the age of 12, Jesus was already capable of dazzling the greatest masters of the law, and yet he went up to Nazareth and was obedient to Joseph and Mary. What an incredible mystery! How could that not fill Joseph with humble awe? How can it not fill us with humility before all those whom the Lord entrusts to us so that we may serve them like we would him? St. Joseph wants to help us place ourselves at the service of the vocation and mission of Jesus to save the world and of Mary, who seeks to support that redemptive work.
Sixth, he is diligent — St. Joseph was a tekton, a construction worker, a builder. Everyone knew him as such, asking about Jesus, “Is this not the carpenter’s son?” His spiritual currency was in callouses. John Paul II said about St. Joseph’s work: “Joseph guided and supported the boy Jesus, introducing him to the knowledge of the religious and social customs of the Jewish people and getting him started in the carpenter’s trade, whose every secret he had learned in so many years of practicing it. This is an aspect that I feel compelled to stress: …Saint Joseph taught Jesus human work, in which he was an expert. The Divine Child worked beside him, and by listening to him and observing him, he too learned to manage the carpenter’s tools with the diligence and the dedication that the example of his foster father transmitted to him.   This too is a great lesson: … if the Son of God was willing to learn a human work from a man, this indicates that there is in work a specific moral value with a precise meaning for man and for his self-fulfillment.” Pope St. John Paul called St. Joseph the “very epitome of the Gospel of work.” He made not only tables and chairs and houses, but formed himself and his family in virtue in the process. In the rhythm of the days he spent at Nazareth, in the simple home and in his workshop, Jesus learned to alternate prayer and work, ora et labora, and to unite the two into one continuous “work of prayer” in which he not only offered to God his labor but earned the bread the family needed. He is perhaps the greatest intercessor of all to help us consecrate ourselves to God through our work, to sanctify our work, sanctify others through our work and sanctify ourselves through our work. I always have a statue of St. Joseph on my desk to inspire me to do my work as he did his.
Seventh, he is contemplative — If we think Mary’s heart was contemplative, piecing together everything as a mosaic and holding on it with all her strength (what it means that she pondered these things, treasuring them in her heart), how easy it is to see a similar heart in St. Joseph. I used to say, with many others, that St. Joseph never said a recorded word in Sacred Scripture, because he was treasuring everything inside. Once I received series of holy cards of the saints with their images on the front and some of their famous words on the back. On the Saint Joseph card, there was nothing on the back and I initially thought someone just forgot, until I realized he was speaking through silence! Nevertheless, I said about that I “used to” say he never said a recorded word because a few years ago, a religious sister named after him reminded me that there is one recorded word of his in Sacred Scripture. We see it referred to in today’s Gospel: namely, the word Jesus. The angel instructed him, “You are to name him Jesus,” which the father was to do at the circumcision on the eighth day. We have every confidence that Joseph would have obeyed that command of the angel just like all the rest. And so he is the man of one word, the word “Jesus.” His whole life spoke God the Father’s definitive word, “God saves.” He used it as a vocative. He used it in his quiet way to evangelize. He used it all the time in prayer. Holiness comes through imitating his prayerful contemplation and his speaking the name of Jesus.
Eighth, he is charitable — St. Alphonsus Liguori preached about him, “On the last day our Savior will say to the elect: ‘I was hungry and you gave me to eat; I was thirsty and you gave me to drink; I was a stranger and you took me in; naked and you covered me …’ (Matt. 25:35). These will have fed Jesus Christ, lodged or clothed Him, in the persons of the poor; but St. Joseph found food, shelter and raiment for Christ in His own person. Furthermore, our Lord has promised reward to whoever gives a cup of water in His name. St. Joseph can say to Jesus Christ that ‘Not only did I furnish you with food, house and clothing: I saved you from death at the hands of Herod.’ What then must be his reward?” Holiness is the perfection of charity and we see that selfless outpouring in him.
Ninth, he is Marian — St. Joseph is a model of how to relate to Mary. It’s traditional to relate to Mary as the model disciple. It’s natural for us to relate to her as spiritual Mother given to us by her Son on Calvary. But St. Joseph shows us how to relate to her as virginal spouse. In the recent book of meditations In Sinu Iesu by an anonymous Benedictine monk, in which the priest hears Christ and Mary speaking to him during adoration, Mary says to him, “I want to reveal myself to priests as Virgin Bride and Mother. This is a secret that I have held in my heart for this time of trial for the Church. To every priest who desires it and asks me for it, I will give the grace of living in my presence as Virgin Bride (this was the vocation given to Saint Joseph) and of living in my presence as Mother (this was the vocation given to Saint John when, from the Cross, my Son entrusted me to him and him to me).” This special vocation for priests, I think, to love Mary with the chaste spousal love we see in St. Joseph is an indication of the type of committed love each of us is meant to have with her. St. Joseph teaches us to treat her with reverence, to help her fulfill her vocation as a disciple, apostle, and mother, as she seeks to help us to grow in the likeness of her holy, holy, holy Son.
Lastly, he is Eucharistic — St. Joseph is a model for us for how to approach the Eucharist. This connection between Joseph and the Holy Eucharist has been growing in the Church; as I mentioned earlier, we invoke him now in every Mass, as well we should, in prayers for the Church. Fr. Frederic Faber, the great 19th century British priest, author and sacred lyricist, compared Joseph’s care of the Holy Family to the priest’s care of the altar. “The priest, who has most reason to deplore the poverty of his attainments in humility, is humble at least when he comes to consecrate at Mass. For years Joseph lived in the awful sanctity of that which to the priest is but a moment. The little house at Nazareth was as the outspread square of the white corporal. All the words he spoke were almost words of consecration.” He lived perpetually in the real presence. If Simeon rejoiced to hold Jesus in his arms once, St. Joseph was able to do it every day for years. St. Joseph’s life was a commentary on the words of consecration Christ would utter later. As St. Paul VI once preached on this feast day, “This is the secret of the greatness of St. Joseph…: [he] made his life a service, a sacrifice, to the mystery of the Incarnation and to the redemptive mission that is joined to it; [he gave] his total gift of himself, of his life, of his work; having converted his human vocation to domestic love into the superhuman oblation of himself, of his heart and of all his abilities, into the love placed at the service of the Messiah conceived in his home.” He shows us how to make our lives Eucharistic, giving our body and blood, our sweat and tears, our joys, our whole being to God and with him for others.
Today as we celebrate with Mary, Jesus and the whole communion of saints the feast of this just man and our great and virtuous patron, we do so mindful of the ancient aphorism placed on so many statues and altars dedicated to him, like above this altar here in this Church: Ite ad Ioseph (Gen 41:55), “Go to Joseph,” based on the words by Pharaoh about his viceroy to the Egyptians when they were in need because of the famine. Since the 800s, St. Joseph has been called the “Nutritor Domini,” the nourisher of the Lord, because he was the one who put food on the table for the Holy Family. Today he leads us to the greatest nourishment of all. As we prepare to receive the same Son he used to hold in his arms, as we prepare to be nourished by the divine child who in his humanity was nourished by the work of St. Joseph’s hands, let us go to Joseph. In this statue we see him holding Jesus in his strong left arm and pointing to him with his right, indicating to us how St. Joseph always seeks to point and lead us to Jesus. Let us to ask him to intercede for us today, so that we may imitate his righteousness, faith, obedience, chastity, humility, diligence, prayer, charity, Marian love and Christ-centered Eucharistic way of life, and, thereby growing in holiness, we may, like him, serve Christ with love and come through a happy death to experience eternal joy with Joseph and Mary and all the saints around Jesus, to whom Joseph’s whole life points, like the statue at this altar, points.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 2 Sm 7:4-5a, 12-14a, 16
The LORD spoke to Nathan and said:
“Go, tell my servant David,
‘When your time comes and you rest with your ancestors,
I will raise up your heir after you, sprung from your loins,
and I will make his kingdom firm.
It is he who shall build a house for my name.
And I will make his royal throne firm forever.
I will be a father to him,
and he shall be a son to me.
Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me;
your throne shall stand firm forever.’”
Responsorial Psalm Ps 89:2-3, 4-5, 27 and 29
R. (37) The son of David will live for ever.
The promises of the LORD I will sing forever;
through all generations my mouth shall proclaim your faithfulness,
For you have said, “My kindness is established forever”;
in heaven you have confirmed your faithfulness.
R. The son of David will live for ever.
“I have made a covenant with my chosen one,
I have sworn to David my servant:
Forever will I confirm your posterity
and establish your throne for all generations.”
R. The son of David will live for ever.
“He shall say of me, ‘You are my father,
my God, the Rock, my savior.’
Forever I will maintain my kindness toward him,
and my covenant with him stands firm.”
R. The son of David will live for ever.
Reading 2 Rom 4:13, 16-18, 22
Brothers and sisters:
It was not through the law
that the promise was made to Abraham and his descendants
that he would inherit the world,
but through the righteousness that comes from faith.
For this reason, it depends on faith,
so that it may be a gift,
and the promise may be guaranteed to all his descendants,
not to those who only adhere to the law
but to those who follow the faith of Abraham,
who is the father of all of us, as it is written,
I have made you father of many nations.
He is our father in the sight of God,
in whom he believed, who gives life to the dead
and calls into being what does not exist.
He believed, hoping against hope,
that he would become the father of many nations,
according to what was said, Thus shall your descendants be.
That is why it was credited to him as righteousness.
Verse Before the Gospel Ps 84:5
Blessed are those who dwell in your house, O Lord;
they never cease to praise you.
Gospel Mt 1:16, 18-21, 24a
Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary.
Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.
Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about.
When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph,
but before they lived together,
she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.
Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man,
yet unwilling to expose her to shame,
decided to divorce her quietly.
Such was his intention when, behold,
the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said,
“Joseph, son of David,
do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.
For it is through the Holy Spirit
that this child has been conceived in her.
She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus,
because he will save his people from their sins.”
When Joseph awoke,
he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him
and took his wife into his home.
The post Emulating St. Joseph, Solemnity of St. Joseph, March 19, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
24 min
March 19, 2024 Evangelizing with Truth and Charity, Seton Teaching Fellows Formation Night, March 18, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Seton Teaching Fellows Formation Night
Bronx, NY
March 18, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s lecture please click below:
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To download a PDF of the slides of the conference, please click below:
Evangelizing with Truth and Charity

The post Evangelizing with Truth and Charity, Seton Teaching Fellows Formation Night, March 18, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
1 hr 27 min

About Catholic Preaching

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