Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

March 18, 2024Mercy and Salvation Are From the Lord, Fifth Monday of Lent, March 18, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Solemnity of St. Patrick (Observed)
Readings from Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent
March 18, 2024
Dan 13:1-9.15-17.19-30.33-62, Ps 23, Jn 8:1-11

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.18.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today the Church in New York observes the feast of St. Patrick, her archdiocesan patron. St. Patrick is a model of asceticism, courage, and evangelization, but he’s also a witness of mercy received and shared. He begins his brief, 62-paragraph autobiography saying, “My name is Patrick. I am a sinner … and the least of all believers.” Despite being the son of a deacon in present day Scotland and the grandson of a married priest, he said he “did not know the true God.” After he was captured and 16 and made a slave in Ireland, despite his “lack of faith,” he turned to God for help and, he said, the Lord “looked down on my lowliness and had mercy on my youthful ignorance.” Eventually after six years of slavery and a miraculous escape, he returned home, but he couldn’t stop thinking about his captors and the other Irish who did not know God. Moved by God’s words through Hosea about how God had mercy on his people, he became God’s instrument to bring mercy and salvation to the Irish. He went to seminary in France and returned as an instrument of mercy and salvation to set free those in the land of his captivity. At the end of his famous Lorica, which he would use as a morning offering and have sewn into his clothing, he wrote, “Salvation is of the Lord. Salvation is of the Christ.” He became a man, minister and missionary of the Lord’s saving mercy.
Today’s readings are two dramatic accounts of saving mercy, specifically the rescue of women from stoning through accusations of adultery, We can look at them at four different levels: the literal sense in which God rescued the innocent Susanna and the anonymous adulterous woman; the way that God similarly rescues us, whether guilty or innocent; the way that these actions point to the betrayal of Jesus by the “elders” whose consciences had been corrupted; and the way that God wants to transform us to have a similar care for those facing accusation, trial and even death.
Let’s begin with the literal sense of these passages, which requires the majority of our attention since they are the basis for the others. In the first reading, we see the utter corruption of two old men — judges of the people chosen to exact justice — in the story of Susanna. The opposite of love is not hatred but concupiscence or lust, and in contrast to the beauty of self-giving love, we see today the real hideousness of rapacious iniquity. Either these judges would assassinate her soul through adultery or they would have her tried and killed by a false accusation if she didn’t succumb to their advances. While the desires of the flesh may attenuate over time, the lust for power, for control, for satisfying the insatiable desires of a corrupt heart can actually grow, as the conscience gets more and more deadened, such that it’s no longer a crime of the flesh but of calculation, using one’s prestige and office to do evil rather than good, to do injustice rather than implement justice. Daniel says that they “suppressed their consciences. They would not allow their eyes to look to heaven [in prayer], and did not keep in mind just judgment.” They had been thoroughly corrupted and their sins against the sixth commandment led, as they routinely do, to sins against the eighth, against the fifth and obviously against the first.
In the Gospel we see similar wickedness. Another set of elders with a reputation for being religious and fair brought to Jesus a woman caught in the very act of adultery, using her to make a point, as a pawn, for their own lust for power. Two things stick out initially about their catching her and bringing her to Jesus. First, how did they catch her in the very act of adultery unless their eyes were already on her? And how come they didn’t bring the guy who was her partner in sin, but just her? Is it possibly because they excused the male because they themselves had often committed adultery with this woman in their own hearts? They brought her before Jesus to try to entrap him with the question as to whether she should be stoned in accordance with the law of Moses. If Jesus had replied, “No,” he would be setting himself up against the Mosaic Law and they could use that against him with faithful Jews. If he said, “Yes,” not only would he lose the support of the sinners he had come to call, save and reconcile, but he would put himself against the Roman authorities who had taken to themselves the sole authority to implement capital punishment. In their sinfulness, they were using her as a mere pawn to try to bring down Jesus.
But God rescued each of them. Susanna said to herself, “I am completely trapped. If I yield, it will be my death; if I refuse, I cannot escape your power. Yet it is better for me to fall into your power without guilt than to sin before the Lord.” The early saints said that it was better to die than to sin. Susanna entrusted herself to God. When she was brought to trial and heard the false accusations that brought with them the death penalty, she prayed, “O eternal God, you know what is hidden and are aware of all things before they come to be: you know that they have testified falsely against me. Here I am about to die, though I have done none of the things with which these wicked men have charged me.” And her trust in God would not be in vain. As we heard in the Responsorial Psalm, “The Lord is my shepherd. … Even though I walk in the valley of darkness I fear no evil for you are with me with your rod and your staff to give me comfort.” The Good Shepherd responded by sending Daniel the Prophet, who at the risk of his own life — for the same lying elders easily could have accused him of being the “young man” whom they claimed to have seen Susanna with in her garden — courageously defended Susanna and helped to expose the evil men’s lies.
Daniel’s defense of Susannah, a woman falsely accused of adultery, is a foreshadowing of the way Jesus defended the woman actually caught in adultery in today’s Gospel. We don’t know if she was married, the man was married, or both were married to others, but it’s plain that Jesus was defending a guilty woman. Daniel’s response was one of justice and mercy. Jesus’ was as well, mercy toward the woman and justice toward her accusers. Jesus began his defense by writing on the ground twice. The Greek word employed, katagraphein, is the word used in legal settings for writing an indictment. Several saints say he was writing on the ground the sins of those with stones in their hands as he said, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” This was not denying that the woman had done evil, but reminding all her accusers to remember the planks in their own eyes as well. The men grasped that they, too, were sinners and that if they threw stones against the woman, those stones could turn into boomerangs to come back to hit them. The men didn’t have the humility to apologize. They just walked away, one by one, in their isolation, with the eldest, those who were probably more aware of the history of their sinfulness, leading the way. They had come together in wickedness to try to condemn both the woman and Jesus. They left in the solitude of sin, witnessing to their lack of communion with God and others. Then we get to most beautiful part of the Gospel: how Jesus heals and helps the woman. He wasn’t just going to leave her there without any broken bones, contusions, concussions and black eyes from stones cast. That wasn’t adequate to his mercy. He said that no one was present any longer to condemn her and that he wasn’t condemning her either. He had come into the world, he told us in St. John’s Gospel, not to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through him. And that’s what he wanted her to experience. He told her to go but from now not to sin any more. Jesus wasn’t soft on her sin of adultery. He wanted her free of it. But he offered her a totally second chance.
The second application is about the way Christ seeks to rescue us whether we’re in the condition of Susanna or the adulterous woman, whether we’re in danger in this world or eschatologically. St. Paul would write in his letter to the Romans, “Christ, while we were still helpless, yet died at the appointed time for the ungodly. Indeed, only with difficulty does one die for a just person, though perhaps for a good person one might even find courage to die. But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us” (Rom 5:6-8). In other words, it would have been an incredible act of God’s mercy for him to take on our nature, enter our world and die out of love for us if we were all sinless like the Blessed Virgin. But the fact that he did all he did while we had chosen to separate ourselves from God by sin is all the more extraordinary. There’s obviously a larger point in both of these scenes. Throughout the Old Testament fulfilled by Jesus in the New, especially through the Prophets Isaiah, Jeremiah, Hosea and Ezekiel, God’s covenantal relationship with his people was described as a marriage and the sin and infidelity of his people referred to as adultery. By every sin we’ve committed, we have adulterously broken our covenant with God, but God doesn’t want us condemned because of that adultery, but at the same time he wants us to sin no more. Jesus doesn’t want us to be dragged by mobs to the temple area; rather he wants us to bring ourselves voluntarily to him in confession, from which he wants to heal us of our own accusations and strengthen us to go and sin no more. Jesus doesn’t want us to go to Hell. He wants us to follow him on the path of love and fidelity instead of lust and adultery. He wants us to recognize that he knows all our sins and writes them down, not on stone, but on sand, because when they’re forgiven he can wipe them away. But at the same time he also commands us out of love not to sin any more. And instead of picking up stones to throw against other sinners, even with the slingshots of our tongues, he wants us to use those stones to build sturdy bridges of communion with others. It’s in that experience of his mercy that he strengthens us both to defend the innocent and reconcile the sinful. Today we see how he in his mercy saves both the innocent and the guilty, and along the way we see the terrible ugliness of evil contrasted with the tremendous beauty of God’s intervention.
The third application is to Jesus himself. These scenes were foreshadowings of the evil conspiring of both sets of chief priests, the elders, the scribes and Pharisees would conspire to betray the most innocent one of all, Jesus: specifically, the way that they would allow him to be murdered in order to advance their own lust to be in control of the relationship between us and God and between us and others. Their consciences were deadened and they no longer looked up to God. They used Jesus as a pawn in their own game for power with the Romans, thinking it better for an innocent man to die than for them to lose political control and hope. But God the Father likewise rescued his Son, saving him from death by raising him to life on the third day. As the Letter to the Hebrews comments, “In the days when he was in the flesh, he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death, and he was heard because of his reverence” (5:7). He was heard and saved and in that death and resurrection saved us all.
The fourth application is to how we are called to be God’s instruments in helping him save others, to respond to the gift of the Spirit as Daniel did, to raise up to defend the innocent and defend the rights of the guilty. The devil remains the great accuser and is constantly trying to drag down the innocent and the guilty through false or true accusation, to lead them to despair, so that they may be tempted forward toward definitive self-alienation, with consciences suppressed and hearts unable to look toward God. We are called by our Baptism and Confirmation to the role of Daniel and Christ, to defend them from those who seek to do them harm, whether the devil or those who are perpetrating injustice or seeking to lead them into sin. God wants to strengthen us to render that service. This is what St. Patrick gave his adult life doing in Ireland.
At the end of the first reading, by far the longest of the entire liturgical year, we see that “the whole assembly cried aloud, blessing God who saves those who hope in him.” God indeed blesses those who hope in him! He wants us, like Susanna, to “fall into God’s power.” He wants to bring us together as his sacred “qahal” his “ekklesia,” his assembly, to cry out together in gratitude and help us become more attentive to the cries of others. That’s what we seek to do here at Mass in gratitude for all that the Lord has rescued us from false accusation or defended us from the just consequences of our sins. We also pray to him in supplication for others for whom Jesus is calling us to go out as their Daniels. Today the Lord Jesus, our Savior and Good Shepherd, reminds us that he is with us in every dark valley so that through us he can be with all those who are in distress. But he doesn’t allow us and them to stay in that dark valley. He leads us through the Lenten process of sincere repentance with his rod and his staff to the verdant pastures where, as we mark in the Eucharist, he sets a table for us and makes our cup overflow.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
DN 13:1-19, 15-17, 19-30, 33-62
In Babylon there lived a man named Joakim,
who married a very beautiful and God-fearing woman, Susanna,
the daughter of Hilkiah;
her pious parents had trained their daughter
according to the law of Moses.
Joakim was very rich;
he had a garden near his house,
and the Jews had recourse to him often
because he was the most respected of them all.
That year, two elders of the people were appointed judges,
of whom the Lord said, “Wickedness has come out of Babylon:
from the elders who were to govern the people as judges.”
These men, to whom all brought their cases,
frequented the house of Joakim.
When the people left at noon,
Susanna used to enter her husband’s garden for a walk.
When the old men saw her enter every day for her walk,
they began to lust for her.
They suppressed their consciences;
they would not allow their eyes to look to heaven,
and did not keep in mind just judgments.
One day, while they were waiting for the right moment,
she entered the garden as usual, with two maids only.
She decided to bathe, for the weather was warm.
Nobody else was there except the two elders,
who had hidden themselves and were watching her.
“Bring me oil and soap,” she said to the maids,
“and shut the garden doors while I bathe.”
As soon as the maids had left,
the two old men got up and hurried to her.
“Look,” they said, “the garden doors are shut, and no one can see us;
give in to our desire, and lie with us.
If you refuse, we will testify against you
that you dismissed your maids because a young man was here with you.”
“I am completely trapped,” Susanna groaned.
“If I yield, it will be my death;
if I refuse, I cannot escape your power.
Yet it is better for me to fall into your power without guilt
than to sin before the Lord.”
Then Susanna shrieked, and the old men also shouted at her,
as one of them ran to open the garden doors.
When the people in the house heard the cries from the garden,
they rushed in by the side gate to see what had happened to her.
At the accusations by the old men,
the servants felt very much ashamed,
for never had any such thing been said about Susanna.
When the people came to her husband Joakim the next day,
the two wicked elders also came,
fully determined to put Susanna to death.
Before all the people they ordered:
“Send for Susanna, the daughter of Hilkiah,
the wife of Joakim.”
When she was sent for,
she came with her parents, children and all her relatives.
All her relatives and the onlookers were weeping.
In the midst of the people the two elders rose up
and laid their hands on her head.
Through tears she looked up to heaven,
for she trusted in the Lord wholeheartedly.
The elders made this accusation:
“As we were walking in the garden alone,
this woman entered with two girls
and shut the doors of the garden, dismissing the girls.
A young man, who was hidden there, came and lay with her.
When we, in a corner of the garden, saw this crime,
we ran toward them.
We saw them lying together,
but the man we could not hold, because he was stronger than we;
he opened the doors and ran off.
Then we seized her and asked who the young man was,
but she refused to tell us.
We testify to this.”
The assembly believed them,
since they were elders and judges of the people,
and they condemned her to death.
But Susanna cried aloud:
“O eternal God, you know what is hidden
and are aware of all things before they come to be:
you know that they have testified falsely against me.
Here I am about to die,
though I have done none of the things
with which these wicked men have charged me.”
The Lord heard her prayer.
As she was being led to execution,
God stirred up the holy spirit of a young boy named Daniel,
and he cried aloud:
“I will have no part in the death of this woman.”
All the people turned and asked him,
“What is this you are saying?”
He stood in their midst and continued,
“Are you such fools, O children of Israel!
To condemn a woman of Israel without examination
and without clear evidence?
Return to court, for they have testified falsely against her.”
Then all the people returned in haste.
To Daniel the elders said,
“Come, sit with us and inform us,
since God has given you the prestige of old age.”
But he replied,
“Separate these two far from each other that I may examine them.”
After they were separated one from the other,
he called one of them and said:
“How you have grown evil with age!
Now have your past sins come to term:
passing unjust sentences, condemning the innocent,
and freeing the guilty, although the Lord says,
‘The innocent and the just you shall not put to death.’
Now, then, if you were a witness,
tell me under what tree you saw them together.”
“Under a mastic tree,” he answered.
Daniel replied, “Your fine lie has cost you your head,
for the angel of God shall receive the sentence from him
and split you in two.”
Putting him to one side, he ordered the other one to be brought.
Daniel said to him,
“Offspring of Canaan, not of Judah, beauty has seduced you,
lust has subverted your conscience.
This is how you acted with the daughters of Israel,
and in their fear they yielded to you;
but a daughter of Judah did not tolerate your wickedness.
Now, then, tell me under what tree you surprised them together.”
“Under an oak,” he said.
Daniel replied, “Your fine lie has cost you also your head,
for the angel of God waits with a sword to cut you in two
so as to make an end of you both.”
The whole assembly cried aloud,
blessing God who saves those who hope in him.
They rose up against the two elders,
for by their own words Daniel had convicted them of perjury.
According to the law of Moses,
they inflicted on them
the penalty they had plotted to impose on their neighbor:
they put them to death.
Thus was innocent blood spared that day.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 23:1-3A, 3B-4, 5, 6
R. (4ab) Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil; for you are at my side.
The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want.
In verdant pastures he gives me repose;
Beside restful waters he leads me;
he refreshes my soul.
R. Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil; for you are at my side.
He guides me in right paths
for his name’s sake.
Even though I walk in the dark valley
I fear no evil; for you are at my side
With your rod and your staff
that give me courage.
R. Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil; for you are at my side.
You spread the table before me
in the sight of my foes;
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
R. Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil; for you are at my side.
Only goodness and kindness follow me
all the days of my life;
And I shall dwell in the house of the LORD
for years to come.
R. Even though I walk in the dark valley I fear no evil; for you are at my side.
Gospel
JN 8:1-11
Jesus went to the Mount of Olives.
But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area,
and all the people started coming to him,
and he sat down and taught them.
Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman
who had been caught in adultery
and made her stand in the middle.
They said to him,
“Teacher, this woman was caught
in the very act of committing adultery.
Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women.
So what do you say?”
They said this to test him,
so that they could have some charge to bring against him.
Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger.
But when they continued asking him,
he straightened up and said to them,
“Let the one among you who is without sin
be the first to throw a stone at her.”
Again he bent down and wrote on the ground.
And in response, they went away one by one,
beginning with the elders.
So he was left alone with the woman before him.
Then Jesus straightened up and said to her,
“Woman, where are they?
Has no one condemned you?”
She replied, “No one, sir.”
Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you.
Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”
The post Mercy and Salvation Are From the Lord, Fifth Monday of Lent, March 18, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
March 18, 2024The Path to the New and Eternal Covenant, Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), March 17, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B
March 17, 2024
Jer 31:31-34, Ps 51, Heb 5:7-9, Jn 12:20-33

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.17.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Throughout the Sundays of Lent this year, in the Old Testament readings we have been encountering the various covenants God has made with his people. On the first Sunday, we looked at the covenant with Noah after the flood. On the second, God’s covenant with Abraham and his descendants. On the third, the Covenant with the Moses in the Ten Commandments. Last week, we pondered, with the help of Second Chronicles, how the infidelity to the covenants led to the Babylonian exile. Today we come to the culmination of the series, what God through Jeremiah promised his people before the exile. A covenant is a sacred family bond, like a marital vow, in which God espouses himself to his people and his people give commitment themselves for life in return. It was always made by a blood sacrifice, since blood is the source of life, and God, the Lord of life, was promising to give his people life. Noah sacrificed one of every beast and bird he had brought on the ark (Gen 8:20). Abraham sacrificed a heifer, she-goat, ram, turtledove and pigeon and walked through them, and later was willing to sacrifice his own son Isaac (Gen 15:9; 22:10). Moses sacrificed bulls and sprinkled half the blood on the altar representing God and the other half on the people (Ex 24:6-8).
Today God tells us through Jeremiah about the covenant God would himself make after the expiation of the exile. “The days are coming, says the Lord, when I will make a new covenant with the house or Israel and the house of Judah. It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers, when I took them by the hand to lead them forth from the land of Egypt; for they broke my covenant. … This is the covenant I will make with the house of Israel after those days, says the Lord. I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts. I will be their God and they shall be my people. No longer will they need to teach their friends and relatives how to know the Lord. All from the least to greatest shall know him, says the Lord, for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sins no more.” This is the only time the word “new” is used with Covenant in the entire Old Testament. And Christ fulfilled the prophecy of Jeremiah with his passion, death and resurrection, and did so with his own blood, which he didn’t sprinkle upon us on the outside, but wanted us to drink on the inside. During the Last Supper, he took the chalice filled with wine and prayed, as we reiterate each Mass: “Take this, all of you and drink from it. For this is the chalice of my blood. The blood of the new and eternal covenant, which will be poured out for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Do this in memory of me.” Jesus sealed this special spousal bond with his own blood in the new and eternal, the definitive, covenant not only with the houses of Israel and Judah — all twelve tribes — but with all the nations.
This is what we prepare for throughout Lent. We prepare for the Sacred Triduum in which we, in time, enter into the new and eternal Covenant, which Jesus effectuated in his divinity and humanity. Those preparing for baptism are preparing to become parties to this Covenant at the Easter Vigil. Those already baptized are preparing to renew, through our baptismal promises, our covenantal commitment to believe in, love, and serve God and renounce the person, lies and works of the devil. Our anticipation is supposed to be growing week-by-week, day-by-day, as we draw closer to the Sacred Triduum.
Today in the Gospel Jesus indicates to us the path of this new and eternal Covenant. It’s a path both historic and moral. Some Greeks come up to the apostle St. Philip in the Gospel and tell him, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” On the surface it seems like an ordinary occurrence. Jesus, by this point, was well-known and lots of people wanted to meet him. But when Philip told Andrew and Andrew told Jesus, Jesus didn’t say what we might expect, like “Okay, bring them to me,” or “Fine, please take me to them.” Instead, he exclaims, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.” Throughout the Gospel of St. John, Jesus was speaking about his “hour,” the time of his suffering. He had hesitated to work the miracle in Cana because it wasn’t yet his “hour.” He told the Samaritan woman that when his “hour” came, the Samaritans would worship in spirit in truth. St. John says multiple times that those seeking to arrest Jesus couldn’t, because “his hour had not yet come.” And Jesus, as soon as he heard that Greeks were seeking him, cried out that now was his hour of glorification. It would be the time when the covenant long foretold would be opened for all the nations represented by the Greeks.
Then he described what his glorification would be. It wouldn’t be a public manifestation of the glory he shown Peter, James and John at his transfiguration. It wouldn’t be a celebration like one might expect for the accession into power of a great civil leader. No, Jesus said the Greeks representing all of the nations would see him glorified when he would be lifted up from the earth on the Cross. It’s then that Jesus, in fulfillment of Daniel’s, Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s prophecies that eventually the light would be given to all nations, would draw all people to himself. To see that light, to behold Jesus who is the Light of the World, they would have to recognize him as a grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, landing cold on the ground and being covered with dirt, but then raised as the new Tree of Life. If we’re seeking Jesus, this is where, he says, we must look for him and find him. He tells us in today’s Gospel: “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find Jesus, we have no alternative than to follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it, of denying ourselves rather than affirming ourselves, picking up our Cross and dying to ourselves on it. To enter into the new and eternal Covenant, we must only receive the unmerited gift of Jesus’ going the way of the grain of wheat for us, his losing his life to save ours, but we must also follow him along that path of the grain of wheat, of losing our life in order to be saved. In order to be glorified with Jesus, in other words, we must ourselves experience a crucified exaltation; like a magnet, our Cross has got to be lifted up on Calvary with Jesus’ cross, our life, our body and blood, together with his.
Pope Benedict commented this reality of what this new and eternal covenant is back in 2006 in his first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est). Evoking the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt that was part of the covenant of God with the Israelites through Moses, Pope Benedict wrote, “Love is… a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: ‘Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it,’ as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.” The essence of love, the deepest meaning of human life, Pope Benedict underlined, is this exaltation through exodus, this glorification through self-giving. Jesus, the grain of wheat who fell to the ground three times on the way of the Cross and died on Golgotha in order to give us life to the full, turns to each of us and says, “Come, follow me!” “Come, join me!” “Come enter into the new and eternal Covenant.”
This new and eternal covenant Passover on which Jesus as the new Moses wants to lead each of us, is, Pope Benedict describes, an “exodus from the inward-looking self to liberation through self-giving, authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” We will only find the meaning of our life, we will only discover God and come to see him, when we leave self-centeredness behind, when we stop trying to “preserve our life” and learn to give it like a grain of wheat, dying to ourselves in order to bear great fruit for God and others. Each of us must travel this exodus from saving our life to losing it, from the inward-looking self to the freedom of giving ourselves in loving sacrifice for God and others. How do we do this?
The exodus needs to occur first in our prayer, in which we “lose our life” in communion with God in order to “preserve it.” This is the way we come to see Jesus intimately with the eyes of the soul. Very often our prayer can be more about us than God. We can focus so much on our petitions that we can forget about praising and thanking God. Unlike Samuel who said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” we often say by our posture, “Listen, Lord, for I’ve got the floor.” We can come to the Lord with so many of our problems and occupy all our time with them that we can fail to lift up our hearts to God who is and has the solution. The first way to see Jesus is by living the exodus out of ourselves to him and others in prayer.
An exodus also needs to occur in our almsgiving. We’re called to die to our obsession with our own interests and begin to see Jesus in others, especially in those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, ill, in prison or otherwise in need. When we sacrifice generously out of love for them, Jesus tells us in St. Matthew’s Gospel, we sacrifice for him. The more we give of ourselves, the more we gain ourselves. We can only keep what we give away. We’ll only bear fruit that will last forever when we follow Jesus down the path of the grain of wheat in charity.
An exodus also needs to occur in our moral life, from saying, “My will be done” to “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Our will wants to save itself, to preserve itself, to assert itself. We need to discipline it through obedience to God. We need to put to death life according to the flesh in order to live according to the Holy Spirit. That’s what Jesus did, as we see in the second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. The sacred author tells us that Jesus was perfected through his obedience to the will of God the Father and thus he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Likewise, we will become perfected — and become an instrument of salvation in the lives of those we care about and so many others we may not even know — only through our obedience to God’s will, by morally dying to our own self-preservation and self-affirmation so that God may live. In some cases, as in Jesus’ life, as in the lives of the prophets who pointed to him and the apostles who announced him, this moral path may lead to our being literally lifted up on the Cross, to being martyred out of obedience to God. But for most of us, our perfection will happen through little things each day. It will happen through our fasting. It will happen through our self-denial in order to prioritize the desires of God needs of others. If we remain faithful in these daily little exoduses, then we will be strengthened to remain faithful in the supreme moments and save our life forever.
That’s the application of today’s Gospel to our discipleship, to our own personal following of Jesus. But our keeping the new and eternal covenant with Jesus involves more than our personal sanctity. It involves seeking to bring his light to others, to helping them learn the essence of love and of human life itself by joining Jesus and us on the path of thee grain of wheat. So let’s apply what God is teaching us today to our apostolate, our vocation as fishers of men, our mission and duty to bring others to the Lord.
So many today, like the Greeks in today’s Gospel, still want to see Jesus. They look to those in the Church, like the Greeks looked to Philip, to try to bring them to Jesus. And each of us, and our communities, need to be ready to help them find the face of Jesus when they come. This is especially important as we approach Holy Week and look across campus at all those we know who are searching for God, hunting for love, foraging for meaning. How can we help them? How must we help them?
First, we have to help them find Jesus by the life we lead. There are many who are longing for Jesus, but they don’t find him in the Catholics they know. There’s the famous saying of Mahatma Gandhi. He was always fascinated by Jesus, whom he said taught like no one else. He would quote the words of Christ, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, very often. Once a missionary, E. Stanley Jones, asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is it that you appear so adamantly to reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject Christ! I love Christ! It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ. If Christians would really live according to the teaching of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” These are stunning words. Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead and if he weren’t we’d have to kill him,” and whose thoughts were one of the seeds of Nazism, said something far more severe: “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed!” Just think about what history might have been if Nietzsche, who took his own life, and whose thoughts contributed to Hitler’s craziness, to the concentration camps, to World War II, if only he had found someone truly redeemed, someone who reminded him of Christ the Redeemer. The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) pondered this point when it said, “Believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.” By our fully Christian life, we are called to reveal, not conceal, Christ’s face for whom they seek.
Second, we need to reveal Christ by the way we approach him as he speaks to us in Sacred Scripture. People expect, for example, that when they come to Mass in Catholic churches or chapels, they’re going to find people who believe in what Jesus taught, that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. They expect that they’re going to have people who know that Jesus has the words of eternal life, who love word of God, not do not just hear it, but know and live it. They expect they’ll find ministers and people who are on fire, who long to see Jesus and hear his words. Yet, this is sadly not the reality everywhere. One of the reasons why so many in Latin America are going to the Pentecostal churches, and why so many ex-Catholics are found in storefront pentecostal churches in our country, is because they expected to find a real love of the Word of God in Catholic Churches, but in many places didn’t. People are hungering for Jesus to nourish them with the word of life and we need to help them find him through our own holy habits and hungers.
Third, we need to reveal Jesus by the joy we have in encountering him in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. When they come to Catholic Churches, they anticipate that they’re going to find people who are the most joyous on earth, who rejoice to be in the presence of God, who know how blessed they are to be called to the Lord’s Supper. They expect to see incredible reverence for God who comes down from heaven to earth and hides himself humbly and miraculously under the appearances of bread and wine. They expect to find people who are giving their best in terms of prayer and singing, who are wearing their best, who are behaving the best. They want to befriend people who are centering their lives of Jesus in the Eucharist as the source and summit of their life, who order their entire life around the celebration of Mass rather than just try to squeeze it in and check it off a to-do list. And, yet, when they come to churches in many places, that’s not their experience. One of the reasons why there is a need for the Eucharistic Revival in the Church in our country is because the worship in a sizable percentage of the 17,000 Catholic churches in the country is rather moribund. The first pillar in the parish phase of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival is to “revitalize worship,” so that through the way we celebrate Mass we communicate clearly and contagiously that we are celebrating the truth that the same Christ who was in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, the same Christ who was lifted up on the Cross, the same Christ who rose from the dead, is here with us; he just looks different. If we don’t celebrate with that joy and reverence, if we don’t behave like those who know they see, encounter and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, it is harder for everyone to see Jesus, too.
Fourth, we need to reveal Jesus by the love we have for others. Jesus called us to love others as he has loved us first. When people come to Catholic Churches, when students approach campus ministry, they anticipate they’re going to encounter love, love for them, love for each other, love for those who are not there. They expect to find a community where not only everyone knows each other’s names, but where they care for each other, cheer each other up when they’re down or suffering, help each other when they’re struggling, pray for each other, and enjoy each other’s company. They expect that the Catholics they meet are going to sacrifice to care for those in need, through the corporal and especially spiritual works of mercy, passing on the faith to others with zeal as the greatest good and charity to others as a real privilege. They also expect — and deeply desire — that others are going to look at them with the eyes of Jesus, warmly embrace them into the community, help them to feel truly at home in God’s house, take an interest in them, and seek to help them become better friends with Jesus and all Jesus’ friends. In short, they expect to see and find Jesus acting in his Mystical Body the Church, which continues to follow the path of the grain of wheat together with the Lord. When they find it, they feel at home and begin to try to make up for lost time. When they don’t find it, they become spiritually disoriented and their restless hearts, which will only rest in God, begin to look for God elsewhere.
So today God is asking that each of us become like St. Philip, approachable, someone who is willing to be a bridge of others to come to Jesus because we are already following Jesus the Way up close on the path of the grain of wheat. I’d urge you, as we draw closer to Holy Week, to think about those whom you might be able to invite to join you here as we all seek together to follow Jesus as he prepares to be glorified for us on Palm Sunday, on Holy Thursday, on Good Friday, the Easter Vigil and beyond.
As I alluded to above, the greatest way of all to find Jesus in this world is in his real presence in the Holy Eucharist. Jesus is the grain of wheat who dies, but from that lifeless grain that fell along the way of the Cross has come forth the great multiplication of the Bread of Life that will endure until the end of time. This is how we enter into the new and eternal Covenant in his blood, the way we keep our end of the Covenant as we seek to do this in his memory. The Eucharistic Lord Jesus is the divine response to the hunger of all humanity that longs not just to see God’s face but to become one with him in love. As Pope Francis wrote in his 2022 Apostolic Letter on the Sacred Liturgy, Desiderio Desideravi, if people had “somehow arrived in Jerusalem after Pentecost and had felt the desire not only to have information about Jesus of Nazareth but rather the desire still to be able to meet him, [they] would have had no other possibility … of a true encounter with him” than coming to the celebration of the Mass with the early Christian community. Hence Pope Francis says, “For this reason the Church has always protected as its most precious treasure the command of the Lord, ‘Do this in memory of me.’”It’s at Mass that Jesus, who gave his body and blood when he was lifted on the Cross, continues to be elevated and to give that body and blood for the world. It’s at Mass that he seeks to transform us to follow him down the path of self-giving love for our and others’ salvation. All those who wish to see Jesus here behold him as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. It’s here that that Lamb comes to see us, feed us and send us forth as grains of wheat to be scattered fruitfully throughout the world. The Eucharist is the means by which Jesus transforms us from within to become his face, his hands, his feet, his heart in the world, and so be able to draw everyone attracted to him onto his path, the path of the exodus that lead to life eternal. Getting on this path is the ultimate purpose of Lent. It is the fulfillment of all the covenants. It is, as Pope Benedict tells us, the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Jer 31:31-34
The days are coming, says the LORD,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers
the day I took them by the hand
to lead them forth from the land of Egypt;
for they broke my covenant,
and I had to show myself their master, says the LORD.
But this is the covenant that I will make
with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD.
I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts;
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the LORD.
All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD,
for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
Responsorial Psalm
51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15
R. (12a) Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
Thoroughly wash me from my guilt
and of my sin cleanse me.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
A clean heart create for me, O God,
and a steadfast spirit renew within me.
Cast me not out from your presence,
and your Holy Spirit take not from me.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.
I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners shall return to you.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Reading II
Heb 5:7-9
In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
Verse Before the Gospel
Jn 12:26
Whoever serves me must follow me, says the Lord;
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
Gospel
Jn 12:20-33
Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”
Philip went and told Andrew;
then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
The Father will honor whoever serves me.
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.”
Then a voice came from heaven,
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;
but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”
Jesus answered and said,
“This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself.”
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.
The post The Path to the New and Eternal Covenant, Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), March 17, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
37 min
March 17, 2024The Essence of Love and Human Life, Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), March 17, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B
March 17, 2024
Jer 31:31-34, Ps 51, Heb 5:7-9, Jn 12:20-33

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.17.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
In many of the majestic pulpits in European Churches, they would often inscribe on the inside part that only the preacher could see certain phrases from the Bible to remind him about what he was mounting that pulpit to try to do. One of the most common, and probably my favorite, comes from today’s Gospel: “Domne, volumus Iesum videre,” “Sir, we wish to see Jesus!” People come to Mass ultimately to meet Jesus, to hear his words, to see him from different and new angles, to get to know him. And the preacher’s job is to help the faithful see him more clearly, to perceive his burning love for them, to discern more precisely what he’s asking of them.
“Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” So the Greeks in today’s Gospel said to the apostle St. Philip. Perhaps they had witnessed Jesus expel the moneychangers and animals from the Courtyard of the Gentiles in the Temple, as we focused on two weeks ago. Perhaps they had heard his reputation for miracles or for speaking with amazing and astonishing authority and wanted to hear him for themselves. Whatever the reason, they had come to see Jesus, probably not just to have a “been there, done that” experience with a religious celebrity, but really to get to know him.
This desire to see Jesus hasn’t waned in the 2,000 years since. In fact, this desire is far older than 2,000 years. The psalms are full of those seeking the face of God, longing to come into face-to-face communion with him. Psalm 27 proclaims, in words that Pope Benedict once said sum up Catholic religious life in particular, “Your face, O Lord, I seek.” Little did those who were praying throughout Old Testament times to behold God’s visage know that God would eventually take on a human face similar to theirs! Still today, just as the ancient Israelites longed for God, just as the Greeks came to Philip searching for Jesus, many come to us and other members of the Church probing for God, hunting for love, foraging for meaning, and we need to be able, like Philip and Andrew, to bring them to the Lord. That’s what the new evangelization is all about, trying to help catalyze the encounter between God himself and the deepest desires he has placed in every heart, so that people, in seeing God, may recognize that God has always had them as the apple of his eye.
Jesus’ response to the Greeks’ desire to see him is not just surprising but outright shocking. He announced that they would see him glorified, but glorified not in the way everyone might have expected as an exalted civil leader, not like he was during the Transfiguration or will be at the end of time. No, Jesus said they would see him glorified when he would be lifted up from the earth on the Cross. It’s then that Jesus, in fulfillment of Daniel’s, Isaiah’s, Jeremiah’s and Ezekiel’s prophecies that eventually the light would be given to all nations, would draw all people to himself. To see that light, to behold Jesus who is the Light of the World, they would have to recognize him as a grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, landing cold on the ground and being covered with dirt, but then raised as the new Tree of Life. If we’re seeking Jesus, this is where we must look for him and find him. Jesus says in today’s Gospel: “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find Jesus, we have no alternative than to follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it, of denying ourselves rather than affirming ourselves, picking up our Cross and dying to ourselves on it. This second point about where and how we must find Jesus is perhaps just as shocking as Jesus’ glorification not on a throne but on the Cross. To understand either reality, however, we must grasp that and how both are motivated by divine love.
Pope Benedict commented this reality of divine love in today’s Gospel back in 2006 in his first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est). He called Jesus’ path — which is supposed to become our path in faith — the “essence of love and indeed of human life itself.” Listen to the premises he gives to that extraordinary conclusion: “Love is… a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: ‘Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it,’ as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.”
The new and eternal covenant that Jeremiah prophesies in the first reading and that Jesus himself established, the new Passover on which Jesus as the new Moses wants to lead each of us, is an “exodus from the inward-looking self to liberation through self-giving, authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” We will only see God, we will only find our life, when we leave self-centeredness behind, when we stop trying to “preserve our life” and learn to give our life as a grain of wheat, dying to ourselves in order to bear great fruit for God and others. This is the path, Pope Benedict says, to the discovery of God and true self-discovery.
So the first application of today’s Gospel is to ourselves who wish to see Jesus and love him in this world and forever. We must travel this exodus from saving our life to losing it, from the inward-looking self to the freedom of giving ourselves in loving sacrifice for God and others.
This needs to occur in our prayer, in which we “lose our life” in communion with God in order to “preserve it.” This is the way we come to see Jesus intimately with the eyes of the soul. Very often our prayer can be more about us than God. We can focus so much on our petitions that we can forget about praising and thanking God. Unlike Samuel who said, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening,” we often say by our posture, “Listen, Lord, for I’ve got the floor.” We can come to the Lord with so many of our problems and occupy all our time with them that we can fail to lift up our hearts to God who is and has the solution. The first way to see Jesus is by living the exodus out of ourselves to him and others in prayer.
The exodus also needs to occur in our generosity. We’re called to die to our obsession with our own interests and begin to see Jesus in others, especially in those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, ill, in prison or otherwise in need. When we sacrifice out of love for them, Jesus tells us in St. Matthew’s Gospel, we sacrifice for him. The more we give of ourselves, the more we gain ourselves. We can only keep what we give away. We’ll only bear fruit that will last forever when we follow Jesus down the path of the grain of wheat in charity.
The exodus also needs to occur in our moral life in general. The moral life is the Passover, from saying, “My will be done” to “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” Our will wants to save itself, to preserve itself, to assert itself. We need to discipline it through obedience to God. We need to put to death life according to the flesh in order to live according to the Holy Spirit. That’s what Jesus did, as we see in the second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews. He was perfected through his obedience to the will of God the Father and he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him. Likewise, we will become perfected — and become an instrument of salvation in the lives of those we care about and so many others we may not even know — only through our obedience to God’s will, by morally dying to ourselves so that God may live. In some cases, as in Jesus’ life, as in the lives of the prophets who pointed to him and the apostles who announced him, this moral path may lead to our being lifted up on the Cross, to being martyred out of obedience to God. In order to remain faithful then, we must travel down the path of fidelity and self-denial out of love for and affirmation of Jesus each day. And if we remain faithful in these daily little exoduses, then we will be strengthened to remain faithful in the supreme moments and save our life forever.
That’s the application of today’s Gospel to our discipleship, to our own personal following of Jesus. But there’s always an application as well to our aposolate, to our being fishers of men, to our carrying out the new evangelization and bringing others to the Lord.
So many today, like the Greeks in the Gospel, still want to see Jesus. They look to those in the Church, like the Greeks looked to Philip, to try to bring them to Jesus. And we need to be ready not only to assist them in coming to Jesus but as a community we have a duty to help them find the face of Jesus when they come. Let’s see a few ways we need to help people find Jesus.
First, we have to help them find Jesus by the life we lead. There are many who are longing for Jesus, but they don’t find him where in the Catholics they know. There’s the famous saying of Mahatma Gandhi. He was always fascinated by Jesus, whom he said taught like no one else. He would quote the words of Christ, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, very often. Once a missionary, E. Stanley Jones, asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is it that you appear so adamantly to reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject Christ! I love Christ! It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ. If Christians would really live according to the teaching of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” These are stunning words. Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead and if he weren’t we’d have to kill him,” and whose thoughts were one of the seeds of Nazism, said something far more severe: “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed!” The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) pondered this point when it said, “Believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.” By our fully Christian life, we are called to reveal, not conceal, Christ’s face for whom they seek.
Second, we need to reveal Christ by the way we approach him as he speaks to us in Sacred Scripture. People expect, for example, that when they come to Mass in Catholic churches or chapels, they’re going to find people who believe in what Jesus taught, that man doesn’t live on bread alone but on every word that comes from the mouth of God. They expect that they’re going to have people who know that Jesus has the words of eternal life, who love word of God, not do not just hear it, but know and live it. They expect they’ll find ministers and people who are on fire, who long to see Jesus and hear his words just like they do. Yet, this is sadly not the reality everywhere. One of the reasons why so many in Latin America are going to the Pentecostal churches, and why so many ex-Catholics are found in storefront pentecostal churches in our country is because they expected to find a real love of the Word of God in Catholic Churches, but in many places didn’t. People are hungering for Jesus to nourish them with the word of life and they need to find him.
Third, we need to reveal Jesus by the joy we have in encountering him in the sacraments, especially the Eucharist. When they come to Catholic Churches, they anticipate that they’re going to find people who are the most joyous on earth, who rejoice to be in the presence of God, who know how blessed they are to be called to the Supper of the Lord. They expect to see incredible reverence for God who comes down from heaven to earth and hides himself humbly and miraculously under the appearances of bread and wine. They expect to find people who are giving their best in terms of prayer and singing, who are wearing their best, who are behaving the best. They want to befriend people who are centering their lives of Jesus in the Eucharist as the source and summit of their life, who order their entire life around the celebration of Mass rather than just try to squeeze it in and check it off a to do list. And, yet, when they come to churches in many places, that’s not their experience. One of the reasons why there is a need for the Eucharistic Revival in the Church in our country is because the worship in a good percentage of the 17,000 Catholic churches in the country is rather moribund. The first pillar in the parish phase of the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival is to “revitalize worship,” so that through the way we celebrate Mass we communicate clearly and contagiously that we are celebrating the truth that the same Christ who was in the womb of the Blessed Virgin, the same Christ who was lifted up on the Cross, the same Christ who rose from the dead, is here with us. If we don’t celebrate with that joy and reverence, if we don’t behave like those who see and encounter and receive Jesus in the Eucharist, it is harder for everyone — Catholics who are growing in faith or with doubt, non-Catholics with questions, and others — to see Jesus, too.
Fourth, we need to reveal Jesus by the love we have for others. He called us to love others as he has loved us first. When people come to Catholic Churches, they anticipate they’re going to encounter love, love for them, love for each other, love for those who are not there. They expect to find a community where not only everyone knows each other’s names, but where they care for each other, cheer each other up when they’re down or suffering, help each other when they’re struggling, pray for each other, and enjoy each other’s company. They expect that the Catholics they meet are going to sacrifice to care for those in need, through the corporal and especially spiritual works of mercy, passing on the faith to others with zeal as the greatest good and charity to others as a real privilege. They also expect — and deeply desire — that others are going to look at them with the eyes of Jesus, warmly embrace them into the community, help them to feel truly at home in God’s house, take an interest in them, and seek to help them become better friends with Jesus and all Jesus’ friends. In short, they expect to see and find Jesus acting in his Mystical Body the Church, which continues to follow the path of the grain of wheat together with the Lord. When they find it, they begin to try to make up for lost time. When they don’t find it, they become spiritually disoriented and their restless hearts can begin to look elsewhere.
The greatest way of all we find Jesus in this world is in his real presence in the Holy Eucharist. He is the grain of wheat who dies, but from that lifeless grain that fell along the way of the Cross has come forth the great multiplication of the Bread of Life that will endure until the end of time. Jesus in the Eucharist is the divine response to the hunger of all humanity that longs not just to see God’s face but to become one with him in love. As Pope Francis wrote in his 2022 Apostolic Letter on the Sacred Liturgy, Desiderio Desideravi, if people had “somehow arrived in Jerusalem after Pentecost and had felt the desire not only to have information about Jesus of Nazareth but rather the desire still to be able to meet him, [they] would have had no other possibility … of a true encounter with him” than coming to the celebration of the Mass with the early Christian community. Hence Pope Francis says, “For this reason the Church has always protected as its most precious treasure the command of the Lord, ‘Do this in memory of me.’”It’s at Mass that Jesus, who gave his body and blood when he was lifted on the Cross, continues to be elevated and to give that body and blood for the world. It’s at Mass that he seeks to transform us, as we do this in memory of him, to follow him down the path of self-giving love for our and others’ salvation. We wish to see Jesus and here we behold the Lamb of God who not only takes away the sins of the world, but comes to see us, feed us and send us forth as grains of wheat to be scattered fruitfully throughout the world. The Eucharist is the means by which, through our transformation by the Sacrament of love into a sacrament of love, that we become Jesus’ face, his hands, his feet, his heart in the world, and so be able to draw everyone onto his path, the path of the exodus that lead to life eternal. This is the ultimate meaning of Lent. This is, as Pope Benedict tells us, the essence of love and indeed of human life itself. This is the Gospel of the Lord.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
Jer 31:31-34
The days are coming, says the LORD,
when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel
and the house of Judah.
It will not be like the covenant I made with their fathers
the day I took them by the hand
to lead them forth from the land of Egypt;
for they broke my covenant,
and I had to show myself their master, says the LORD.
But this is the covenant that I will make
with the house of Israel after those days, says the LORD.
I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts;
I will be their God, and they shall be my people.
No longer will they have need to teach their friends and relatives
how to know the LORD.
All, from least to greatest, shall know me, says the LORD,
for I will forgive their evildoing and remember their sin no more.
Responsorial Psalm
51:3-4, 12-13, 14-15
R. (12a) Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Have mercy on me, O God, in your goodness;
in the greatness of your compassion wipe out my offense.
Thoroughly wash me from my guilt
and of my sin cleanse me.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
A clean heart create for me, O God,
and a steadfast spirit renew within me.
Cast me not out from your presence,
and your Holy Spirit take not from me.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Give me back the joy of your salvation,
and a willing spirit sustain in me.
I will teach transgressors your ways,
and sinners shall return to you.
R. Create a clean heart in me, O God.
Reading II
Heb 5:7-9
In the days when Christ Jesus was in the flesh,
he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears
to the one who was able to save him from death,
and he was heard because of his reverence.
Son though he was, he learned obedience from what he suffered;
and when he was made perfect,
he became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey him.
Verse Before the Gospel
Jn 12:26
Whoever serves me must follow me, says the Lord;
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
Gospel
Jn 12:20-33
Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”
Philip went and told Andrew;
then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
The Father will honor whoever serves me.
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.”
Then a voice came from heaven,
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;
but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”
Jesus answered and said,
“This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself.”
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.
The post The Essence of Love and Human Life, Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), March 17, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
26 min
March 16, 2024 St. Patrick and Lent, Leonine Forum NYC Chapter Lenten Day of Recollection, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan, March 16, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum Day of Recollection
Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
March 16, 2024
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.16.24_St._Patrick_LF_Day_of_Recollection_1.mp3
The post St. Patrick and Lent, Leonine Forum NYC Chapter Lenten Day of Recollection, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan, March 16, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
45 min
March 16, 2024 Lent and the Eucharistic Revival, Leonine Forum NYC Chapter Lenten Day of Recollection, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan, March 16, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum Day of Recollection
Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
March 16, 2024
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.16.24_Eucharistic_Revival_LF_Day_of_Recollection_1.mp3
The post Lent and the Eucharistic Revival, Leonine Forum NYC Chapter Lenten Day of Recollection, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan, March 16, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
57 min
March 16, 2024The Division Provoked By The Trusting Lamb Led to the Slaughter, Saturday of the Fourth Week in Lent, March 16, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Leonine Forum Lenten Day of Recollection
Saturday of the Fourth Week of Lent
March 16, 2024
Jer 11:18-20, Ps 7, Jn 7:40-53

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.16.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
As we conclude our Lenten Day of Recollection, the readings of today’s Mass help us to focus on the dramatic circumstance in the life of Jeremiah in which he placed his trust in God, and how his dependence was a prophecy of the type of self-entrustment Jesus himself would make in today’s Gospel and above all on Calvary. “Like a trusting lamb led to the slaughter,” Jeremiah writes in words that were applied by the evangelists to Jesus, “they were hatching plots against me,” trying to “destroy the tree in its vigor, cut[ting] him off from the land of the living so that his name may be spoken of no more.” We see those plots against Jesus getting fulfilled in today’s Gospel. The temple guards were sent out by the Jewish leaders to arrest Jesus because, as we’ve been seeing in recent days, the leaders considered Jesus an untrained blasphemer and worse. They were seeking to kill him because they were convinced that he was an agent of the devil, working miracles not by the power of God but by the power of Beelzebul to destroy the Jewish religion by violating the Sabbath with works of charity, driving money changers out of the temple, speaking about the Temple’s destruction and rebuilding, befriending notorious sinners, daring to try to forgive sins, and various other practices that conveyed that Jesus was attempting to show not only that he was acting with divine authority but that he believed himself to be the actual Son of God. Rather than being filled with joy when Jesus reconciled sinners, or made the lame walk, made the blind see, made the deaf hear, or freed the possessed of their demons, they responded with envy, anger and unholy homicidal thoughts.
But not everyone obviously saw Jesus this way. St. John tells us today there was “division because of him.” Some thought he was “the Prophet,” the fulfillment of Moses’ words that after him someone would come to whom they should listen and obey just like the listened to and obeyed him (Deut 18:15). Others said, “This is the Messiah (Christ).” Others retorted that the Messiah could never come from Galilee, because he was prophesied to come from Bethlehem. None of those critics, however, ever bothered to ask Jesus where he was born. They heard he was a Nazarene and that’s all they needed in order to dismiss him as the Messiah because they didn’t want to accept the type of Messianic reign he was heralding, one far different than the Messianic kingdom for which they longed.
It’s important for us to grasp, as Christians in 2024, that Jesus always provokes division. He himself said elsewhere in the Gospel, “Do not think that I have come to bring peace upon the earth. I have come to bring not peace but the sword. For I have come to set a man against his father, a daughter against her mother, and a daughter-in-law against her mother-in-law; and one’s enemies will be those of his household” (Mt 10:34-36). While he is the Prince of Peace who came to give and leave us his peace and establish the definitive peace treaty between us and God through the forgiveness of sins (Jn 14:27), he at the same time knew that he would be a “sign of contradiction” (Lk 2:34), as Simeon prophesied at his presentation, because no one would be able to remain neutral in response to him. We would either be “with him” or “against him,” we’d either “gather with him” or “scatter” (Mt 12:30). It’s not that he would personally cause division because he had come to bring peace; but division would ensue because of him, because there would be some who would accept him, come to the light and follow him and there would be others who would refuse and reject him, remain in the darkness and oppose him.
As disciples of Jesus, we need to grasp that often, we, too, especially if we seek to follow him up close and for real, will be signs of contradiction, too. People will claim we’re divisive because we will align ourselves to his wisdom and way of life and not to theirs. But we can’t forget that it’s not Jesus who divides, but sin. None of us — Jesus foremost — wants division. He came so that we all might be one. But he leaves us free and through sin we and others choose division. It’s the devil, not Christ, who is the diabolos, the one who throws us off course. And therefore we need to be ready for how he will provoke others to oppose faithful Christians the same way he riled up mobs to oppose Jesus. We should never forget that when he was seeking to give others the greatest gift in the history of the world — his own body and blood in the Eucharist — the evil was able to get most of his disciples separate from him (Jn 6).
Today in the Gospel we see three different ways of responding to Jesus that we ought to consider because they shine a mirror for us to examine our own response to Jesus during this prayer on retreat.
The first happens with the Temple guards. They had been sent to arrest Jesus but they couldn’t bring themselves to do it. When they were asked, “Why didn’t you bring him?,” they replied, “Never before has anyone spoken like this man!” They were astonished and amazed at Jesus’ incredible words. Their souls were touched. They knew that a man who spoke like that couldn’t possibly be a malefactor. It would be like police officers today being sent to arrest a beautiful four-year-old girl or sweet 106-year-old great-great-great-grandmother, bound her in cuffs and parade her before the media because some superior officer commanded them to do it in order to put on a show. Beyond that simple common sense that they were being sent to arrest someone good not a criminal, however, they were fascinated by Jesus and his words. These were not a bunch of naturally pious people. They were cops, basically soldiers, hearty men, cynical in the ways of the world, who probably spent much of their time engaged in the types of things men of force engage in whenever they’re together on duty but not engaged in work. They were not a group accustomed to singing praise and worship songs together! And yet these coarse men were profoundly touched by Jesus — which teaches us something about Jesus and the power of his words. For us it should leave us wondering that if those men could be so moved by Jesus’ words, recognizing that no man had ever spoken like him before, are we even more amazed and astonished by his words?
The second reaction is by the chief priests and Pharisees. Hearing the guards testify to the power of Jesus’ exhortations, they said, “Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, which does not know the law,” by which they meant the guard and other, “is accursed.” They called the guard and everyone who didn’t see things their way “damned.” They had no openness whatsoever to Jesus. They already concluded that he was evil and nothing was going to change their opinion. They condescendingly spoke to the guards as if they who were accustomed to giving interrogations were gullible of being lied to; after all, they stated, none of their leaders had accepted Jesus and therefore no one else should have either. We can look back with a cultural distance and say, “Foolish Pharisees,” but the type of division they caused from their ivory perches still happens today. The chief priests and Pharisees represent the elites who in every age foster division against Jesus, because they don’t want to accept him, his teaching, or his deeds. There are many, inside and outside the Church, who think Jesus’ teaching that that we’re supposed to love enemies and pray for persecutors is foolish, that his teaching that divorce-and-remarriage is sinful adultery is foolish, that his teaching that the way we treat illegal immigrants is the way we treat him is foolish. The list goes on today with regard to the Church’s teaching with regard to various teachings that contradict fallen worldly ways, that the Church’s teachings, based on Christ’s, with regard to forgiveness, peace, sex as a noun and a verb, abortion, IVF, euthanasia, and others are all foolish. The end of today’s Gospel summarizes effectively the division that comes when everyone is not united in the courageously following and worshipping the one true God: “They each went to his own house,” because they were each worshipping his own safe, domesticated deity.
The third response we see in the Gospel is that of Nicodemus. Nicodemus, we remember, is the member of the Sanhedrin who came to Jesus “at night,” because he was too afraid to be seen with him during the daylight. He was himself drawn to Jesus but he really didn’t want to pay the cost of discipleship. While the series The Chosen in its first season tries to depict him as a wise seeker of the truth, various scholars throughout history have called him the “tentative” or “reluctant” disciple. Cardinal Bergoglio back in a 2006 retreat to Spanish bishops said he was an example of a conditional disciple, someone who would follow Jesus only if Jesus accepted his terms: “He wants a dialogue in security, coming under the cover of night to ask him questions,” the future Pope told the Spanish hierarchy. “And Jesus, because he senses that the Pharisee is not well disposed, lets him remain wrapped up in his trivial objections. For Nicodemus, such objections serve as an egoistic refuge for not being honest.” Today we see that assessment on full display. He knows that the objections of the chief priests and the Pharisees against Jesus are flowing out of envy because they’re not only afraid to change but afraid that they might lose their status. But instead of defending Jesus fully, he, because of cowardice, just raises a procedural or legal objection. “Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him and finds out what he is doing?,” he asks. And when they accuse him of being a Galilean and an idiot who fails to grasp that “no prophet arises from Galilee,” that no one consequential will ever come from those backwaters, he remains silent. Later, as a member of the Sanhedrin, he could have defended Jesus when the Lord was being condemned in a mock trial in which he was one of the judges, he didn’t. After Jesus was crucified, he did come, however, to anoint his dead body. He recognized who Jesus was and wanted to follow him, but his timidity regularly got the worst of him. His example of following Jesus “a little” rather than all the way, of wanting to be his disciple but caving into human respect, ought to provoke in us the question of how courageous we are in being publicly identified with Jesus, of defending him, and his teachings, and the Church he founded when it comes under attack, or whether we prefer to come to Jesus in the shadows, when it won’t cost us too much, when our commitment won’t be total.
On this Saturday, in this beautiful Church of Notre Dame, we should consider one more example, that of our Blessed Mother. She was one who was never in contradiction with the Lord. She was one who was never divided from him, from the first moment of her conception. Like the guards, she was able to recognize with astonishment the power of God’s word and, at the Annunciation and beyond, in a total act of faith, she allowed her life to develop according to that word — even though she knew it would inevitably lead to suffering and perhaps even her being stoned to death. She allowed her own heart to be pierced for her union with his Son, the Sign of Contradiction. She was still with him, standing, as he was hammered to that sign of contradiction on Calvary. And it was there, under the foot of the Cross, as she with the help of the women and Joseph of Arimathea were preparing Jesus’ body for burial, that with maternal love she welcomed Nicodemus. To the extent that we in our own lives have followed Jesus only at a distance, without a full commitment, without a willingness to pay the price, today she wants to welcome us, to help us not to be afraid to approach her Son to receive his mercy, and not to be afraid to follow him all the way.
She’s with us here at the Mass where she wants to help us respond to Jesus’ word and his very person in his body, blood, soul and divinity with all we’ve got. In the first reading, Jeremiah wanted to see the vengeance God would take on those who were persecuting him. Mary witnessed the vengeance God took on those who killed her Son as he was fulfilling the prophecy of Jeremiah’s life, being led like a trusting lamb to slaughter. The vengeance God took was mercy, with Jesus praying for persecutors and loving those who had made themselves his enemy, laying down his life so that they might live forever. Jesus’ vengeance is to overcome evil with good, hatred with love, persecution with pity. As we come forward to receive in Holy Communion that incarnate “vengeance” God the Father took, we ask the Lord we’re about to receive to help us to become inflamed with a longing for that same holy, merciful revenge and to become part of it, through being willing to suffer courageously with him, like our Lady, as signs of contradiction!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 Jer 11:18-20
I knew their plot because the LORD informed me;
at that time you, O LORD, showed me their doings.
Yet I, like a trusting lamb led to slaughter,
had not realized that they were hatching plots against me:
“Let us destroy the tree in its vigor;
let us cut him off from the land of the living,
so that his name will be spoken no more.”
But, you, O LORD of hosts, O just Judge,
searcher of mind and heart,
Let me witness the vengeance you take on them,
for to you I have entrusted my cause!
Responsorial Psalm Ps 7:2-3, 9bc-10, 11-12
R. (2a) O Lord, my God, in you I take refuge.
O LORD, my God, in you I take refuge;
save me from all my pursuers and rescue me,
Lest I become like the lion’s prey,
to be torn to pieces, with no one to rescue me.
R. O Lord, my God, in you I take refuge.
Do me justice, O LORD, because I am just,
and because of the innocence that is mine.
Let the malice of the wicked come to an end,
but sustain the just,
O searcher of heart and soul, O just God.
R. O Lord, my God, in you I take refuge.
A shield before me is God,
who saves the upright of heart;
A just judge is God,
a God who punishes day by day.
R. O Lord, my God, in you I take refuge.
Verse Before the Gospel See Lk 8:15
Blessed are they who have kept the word with a generous heart
and yield a harvest through perseverance.
Gospel Jn 7:40-53
Some in the crowd who heard these words of Jesus said,
“This is truly the Prophet.”
Others said, “This is the Christ.”
But others said,
“The Christ will not come from Galilee, will he?
Does not Scripture say that the Christ will be of David’s family
and come from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?”
So a division occurred in the crowd because of him.
Some of them even wanted to arrest him,
but no one laid hands on him.
So the guards went to the chief priests and Pharisees,
who asked them, “Why did you not bring him?”
The guards answered,
“Never before has anyone spoken like this man.”
So the Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived?
Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him?
But this crowd, which does not know the law, is accursed.”
Nicodemus, one of their members who had come to him earlier, said to them,
“Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him
and finds out what he is doing?”
They answered and said to him,
“You are not from Galilee also, are you?
Look and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.”
Then each went to his own house.

The post The Division Provoked By The Trusting Lamb Led to the Slaughter, Saturday of the Fourth Week in Lent, March 16, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
March 16, 2024Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 16, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, B, Vigil
March 16, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.16.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege to join you again and ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the Fifth Sunday of Lent, on which in the Gospel some Greeks approach the Apostle Philip saying, “Sir, we wish to see Jesus.” Philip went to Andrew and Andrew went to tell Jesus. Jesus’ response to the Greeks’ desire to see him is not just surprising but outright shocking. He announced that they would see him glorified, but glorified not in the way everyone would have expected as an exalted civil leader, not like he was during the Transfiguration or as he will be at the end of time. No, Jesus said they would see him glorified when he would be lifted up from the earth on the Cross, when he would fall like a grain of wheat to the ground and die before being raised as the new Tree of Life. To see Jesus, like the Greeks, and to find him, we need to be prepared to behold him in humility on the Cross. And to see him enduringly, we must be prepared to follow him along the way of the Cross. Jesus tells us, “Whoever serves me must follow me and where I am there will my servant also be.” To find him we must follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, the path of losing our life so as to gain it. We must deny ourselves rather than affirm ourselves, die to ourselves on the Cross each day, and thereby follow him to real fruitful, unending life. This second point — about our exaltation — may seem equally shocking to us, just as shocking as Jesus’ glorification on the Cross.
Pope Benedict commented on Jesus’ words in Sunday’s Gospel back in 2006 in his first encyclical (Deus Caritas Est). He called Jesus’ path — which is supposed to become our own path in faith — the “essence of love and indeed of human life itself.” Listen to the deep words of our former Holy Father: “Love is… a journey, an ongoing exodus out of the closed inward-looking self towards its liberation through self-giving, and thus towards authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God: ‘Whoever seeks to gain his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life will preserve it,’ as Jesus says throughout the Gospels. In these words, Jesus portrays his own path, which leads through the Cross to the Resurrection: the path of the grain of wheat that falls to the ground and dies, and in this way bears much fruit. Starting from the depths of his own sacrifice and of the love that reaches fulfillment therein, he also portrays in these words the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.”
The new and eternal covenant that Jesus himself establishes, the new Passover on which Jesus wants to lead us, is, Pope Benedict says, an “exodus from the inward looking self to liberation through self-giving, authentic self-discovery and indeed the discovery of God.” We will only see God, we will only find our life, when we leave self-centeredness behind, when we stop trying to “preserve our life” in the rear-view mirror and rather learn to give our life as a grain of wheat, dying to ourselves in order to bear great fruit for God and others. This is the only path, Pope Benedict says, to the discovery of God and true self-discovery.
So the first application of this Sunday’s Gospel is to ourselves who wish to see Jesus and love him in this world and forever in the next. We need to make an exodus from saving our life to losing it, from looking at ourselves through spiritual navel gazing to looking toward God and others and giving ourselves in loving sacrifice. This needs to occur in our prayer, in which we “lose our lives” and our time with God in order to anticipate eternity. The exodus also needs to occur in our almsgiving, as we forsake our obsession with our own interests and begin to see Jesus in others, especially in those who are hungry, thirsty, strangers, naked, ill, in prison or otherwise in need. The exodus needs to occur in our moral life in general, as we pass over from saying, “My will be done” to “Thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.” And all parts of that exodus are made possible through our fasting, when we learn to say no to the inward looking self so that we may make the journey out of ourselves toward God and others. That’s the first great lesson we learn from our conversation with Jesus this Sunday.
The second application is about bringing others to Jesus. So many today, like the Greeks in the Gospel, still want to see Jesus. They look to Christians, to those in the Church, like the Greeks looked to Philip, to try to bring them to Jesus. And each of us needs to be ready not only to assist others in coming to Jesus but as a community, collectively, to help them find him. The Church must become great in bringing others to God, in facilitating the encounter with him. That means ultimately that we need to teach others how to pray. I’ve been very moved as the Catholic chaplain at Columbia to be approached this year by several students after various tragedies, like the death of a friend, humbly and honestly telling me that, while they were grateful for what the professionals at psychological and counseling services told them, they knew that they needed more. They knew that they needed God. The problem was that they didn’t know how to speak to him. So they came to me to ask me to pray for I told them I’d be happy to pray on their behalf, but I’d prefer to pray with them and help them to learn how to have a conversation with God themselves, a dialogue that could fill their whole life, in good times and in bad. Every student with whom I met looked at me as if I were offering them a billion dollars in gold. A couple of students fought back tears as they accepted my offer. Some of the students were baptized Catholics. Most weren’t. But they all know that they needed God. They all wanted, like the Greeks, to see him. We must all become catalysts for the many in their situation who have never been taught the most important of human activities, how to pray. And we’re all called to be able to help them learn how to come into the consequential conversation with God we call prayer.
The truth is that there are many who are longing for Jesus but they don’t find him where they should: they don’t find him in the lives of Catholics they know, or in the Catholic Churches they visit. They don’t find his truth and word, they don’t find his infectious love, they don’t find his joy, they don’t find his light, they don’t find his life.There was a custom in many of the ancient high pulpits in Churches and Cathedrals to put the words there, “Volumus Iesum videre!,” “We want to see Jesus!” It was a reminder to priests to preach Christ and him crucified, him exalted on the Cross, him glorified. There’s the famous saying of Mahatma Gandhi, the non-violent liberator of India. He was fascinated by Jesus, whom he said taught like no one else. He would quote the words of Christ, especially from the Sermon on the Mount, very often. Once a missionary, E. Stanley Jones, asked him, “Mr. Gandhi, though you quote the words of Christ often, why is it that you appear so adamantly to reject becoming his follower?” Gandhi replied, “Oh, I don’t reject Christ! I love Christ! It’s just that so many of you Christians are so unlike Christ. If Christians would really live according to the teaching of Christ, as found in the Bible, all of India would be Christian today.” These are stunning words. Friedrich Nietzsche, who coined the phrase “God is dead and if he weren’t we’d have to kill him,” and whose thoughts were one of the seeds of Nazism, said something even more severe than Gandhi: “I may have been able to believe in a Redeemer, if I had ever met someone redeemed!” The Fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in the Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World (Gaudium et Spes) pondered this point when it said, “Believers can have more than a little to do with the birth of atheism. To the extent that they neglect their own training in the faith, or teach erroneous doctrine, or are deficient in their religious, moral or social life, they must be said to conceal rather than reveal the authentic face of God and religion.” The point is that people are looking to see Jesus and expecting to find him in those who call themselves his followers, but often they search in vain. Jesus wants to change that. Jesus who wants us to contemplate him and discover who we are reflected in his eyes, Jesus who calls us to follow him along the path of the grain of wheat, along the way of the glory of the Crucifixion, wants people to be able to see him in the way we act, hear him in the way we speak, touch him in the way we care, taste him by tasting and seeing his goodness in our Christian communities, and smell him by the fragrance of our prayers that rise to him like incense and through the odor of true sanctity.
The greatest way of all we find Jesus in this world is in his real presence in the Holy Eucharist, and that’s what we’re preparing for this Sunday. As Pope Francis wrote in his 2022 Apostolic Letter on the Sacred Liturgy, Desiderio Desideravi, if people had “somehow arrived in Jerusalem after Pentecost and had felt the desire not only to have information about Jesus of Nazareth but rather the desire still to be able to meet him, [they] would have had no other possibility … of a true encounter with him” than coming to the celebration of the Mass with the early Christian community. That’s where we still see Jesus today. Hence Pope Francis says, “For this reason the Church has always protected as its most precious treasure the command of the Lord, ‘Do this in memory of me.’” It’s at Mass that we encounter Jesus as the grain of wheat who dies, but from that lifeless grain that fell along the way of the Cross has come forth the great multiplication of the Bread of Life that will endure until the end of time. It’s in the Eucharist that Jesus continues to be glorified in self-giving love. It’s in the Eucharist that those wishing to see Jesus not only find him but are transformed by him to be sent forth as grains of wheat to be planted fruitfully throughout the world. Our Eucharistic encounter is the means by which, we transformed by Christ’s loving gaze, are able become his face, his hands, his feet, his heart in the world, drawing everyone who still wishes to see Jesus onto his path, onto the exodus that leads to life eternal. This is, indeed, the essence of love and indeed of human life itself.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 12:20-33
Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast
came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee,
and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”
Philip went and told Andrew;
then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
Jesus answered them,
“The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.
Amen, amen, I say to you,
unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies,
it remains just a grain of wheat;
but if it dies, it produces much fruit.
Whoever loves his life loses it,
and whoever hates his life in this world
will preserve it for eternal life.
Whoever serves me must follow me,
and where I am, there also will my servant be.
The Father will honor whoever serves me.
“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say?
‘Father, save me from this hour’?
But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.
Father, glorify your name.”
Then a voice came from heaven,
“I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”
The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder;
but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.”
Jesus answered and said,
“This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.
Now is the time of judgment on this world;
now the ruler of this world will be driven out.
And when I am lifted up from the earth,
I will draw everyone to myself.”
He said this indicating the kind of death he would die.
The post Fifth Sunday of Lent (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, March 16, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
11 min
March 15, 2024Beseeching Rather Than Besetting the Just One, Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent, March 15, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent
March 15, 2024
Wis 2:1.12-22, Ps 34, Jn 7:1-2.10.25-30

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.15.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
The middle part of Lent is a concentrated part of the catechumenate preparing unbaptized adults for the commitment they will make at the saving font and helping all baptized Catholics to get ready for the renewal of their baptismal promises, not just in words but in their entire way of life, at Easter. We have been focusing explicitly on it for the last two weeks in the readings at daily Mass. Part of that preparation is to get us ready to suffer for the faith. For the first 250 years of Christianity, to participate in the catechumenate was to enter a school for martyrs. To be a Christian you needed to be ready to die for the faith, as so many Christians did in the first few centuries when to be a Christian was illegal and punishable by death. The catechumenate would sometimes take years until the person baptized was ready to make that commitment to be faithful to Christ until death, just as Christ was faithful to us until death. But sometimes the catechumenate was very short, when soldiers, for example, asked to be baptized upon seeing the joyful heroism of the martyrs, only to baptized in blood themselves soon after they were baptized by water and the Holy Spirit.
These considerations are important because today the Church begins a new series in the first reading of the prophecies about Jesus’ suffering. This is a bridge between the second phase of Lent on Baptism and the third phase on the prophecies of Jesus’ sufferings that would make the waters of baptism efficacious. We’re called during this part of our Lenten journey, therefore, not only to ponder what Jesus endured and how they fulfilled so many Old Testament prophecies, but also how we, too, like the early Christians, will suffer on account of his name. Our baptism, as we’ll hear in the epistle during the Easter Vigil, is an entrance into Christ’s death and resurrection. The Lenten journey of prayer, self-denial and self-giving are precisely meant to strengthen us through being faithful in these little things to be faithful in the supreme tests. We prayed in the Opening Collect of the Mass, “O God, who have prepared fitting helps for us in our weakness, grant, we pray, that we may receive their healing effects with joy and reflect them in a holy way of life.” Today is an opportunity for us to ponder how God prepares for us the fitting help of the Cross to strengthen us in our weakness and how he wants to help us receive the healing effects of the Cross joyfully and let the humble, cruciform love of the Cross to radiate in a holy life.
Today in the Gospel, St. John tells us straight out that “the Jews were seeking to kill” Jesus and that many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, when they saw him teaching in the temple precincts during the Feast of Tabernacles, asked aloud, “Is he not the one they are trying to kill?” Some of the Sanhedrin, chief priests, Sadducees, Pharisees and Scribes were seeking to kill him because they were convinced that he was an agent of the devil, working miracles not by the power of God but by the power of Beelzebul in order to destroy the Jewish religion by violating the Sabbath through works of charity, driving money changers out of the temple and speaking about the Temple’s destruction and rebuilding, befriending notorious sinners, pretending to forgive sins, and various other practices that conveyed that Jesus was not only acting with divine authority but was the actual Son of God. They had made an idol out of their own interpretations of the law, missing the spirit and literal meaning for the literalistic letter, focusing on human practices rather than the “weightier things” of what God was asking. They refused to accept anyone who challenged them beyond their convictions, no matter how many miracles he worked, how beautiful his teaching, or how many attestations to his divine authority he presented. Rather than filling them with joy when Jesus reconciled sinners, or made the lame walk, the blind see, the deaf hear, or the possessed be freed of their demons, they responded with envy, anger and unholy homicidal thoughts.
We get a window into that destructive envy in today’s first reading from the Book of Wisdom, which prophesied both what they would do to Jesus and why. It’s one of the most powerful psychological analyses in Sacred Scripture, one that is recapitulated continuously in history, even in the way kindergartners treat whoever becomes a teacher’s pet. “Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us,” the wicked say to themselves. We notice that the “wicked” being referred to are not those we might ordinarily think are wicked — people who are irreligious sinners, outwardly far from God, engaged in a life of corruption — but those who have been “trained,” as we’ll see later, those who in their pride resist anyone who challenges them to a higher standard than their own standard of smug pseudo-sanctity. They find those who are truly holy, like Jesus, the supreme Just One, obnoxious because “he sets himself against our doings, reproaches us for transgressions of the law and charges us with violations of our training.” Because of their pride in being so-called experts of the law, they couldn’t fathom anyone’s accusing them of not keeping the law. “He professes to have knowledge of God and styles himself a child of the Lord,” a charge they never investigated but just rejected because he was obnoxious to their comfortable spiritual status quo. But it wasn’t merely Jesus’ deeds or words that pierced them. It was his very presence. “To us he is the censure of our thoughts; merely to see him is a hardship for us, because his life is not like that of others and different are his ways. He judges us debased; he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure.” Then they get to the most offensive part of all. “He calls blest the destiny of the just and boasts that God is his Father.” They were like the older brother in the Parable of the Prodigal Son who related to his Father not as a dad but as a slave master whom he was called to obey and serve rather than love. They didn’t want anyone to talk about the love of the Father or especially anyone who called himself a Son of God.
So then, after that envy, they concocted a plan supposed to test him but really to eliminate him. “Let us see whether his words be true,” they said to themselves. “Let us find out what will happen to him. For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him and deliver him from the hand of his foes. With revilement and torture let us put him to the test that we may have proof of his gentleness and try his patience. Let us condemn him to a shameful death, for according to his own words, God will take care of him.” These thoughts, we can note, were the same thoughts that the devil expressed to Jesus in the desert, encouraging him to throw himself down because the angels would take charge of him lest he dash his foot against a stone. They would make the end justify the means of torture and killing the just man, to have God prove that he was truly just by intervening, much like God stopped Abraham from killing his son Isaac. But the Book of Wisdom tells us, “These were their thoughts, but they erred; for their wickedness blinded them, and they knew not the hidden counsels of God; neither did they count on a recompense of holiness nor discern the innocent souls’ reward.” Sin, especially envy, blinds us to God’s ways and often leads us to do evil thinking that we’re doing good. The scribes and the Pharisees thought that they were pleasing God by framing Jesus, conspiring with the Romans, lying and doing all types of other sins in order to have him executed, because sin can make us think black is white.
This prophecy about how Jesus, the just one, was beset by evildoers because he himself was a censure to their thoughts and how others wanted to test his goodness by treating him in the most vile way to see if they could reduce him to their own level is something that happens to all of us, at some point, if we really seek to identify ourselves totally with Jesus. Jesus told us quite emphatically that if they hated him, they’d hate us, too; that if they persecuted the prophets, they would persecute us, too; that if they thought they were glorifying God by killing God’s emissaries in times past, they likewise would feel justified in persecuting and maltreating us, dragging us between religious and civil jurisdictions and more; that in order to be his disciple, we needed to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross and follow him toward Crucifixion in him. This prophecy is fulfilled in every age. We still experience this type of hatred when we live our faith in a prophetic way. Many Christians are still being martyred. 13 Christians are killed on average in Nigeria every day. Pope Francis never ceases to say we’re living in an age of martyrs. Even in our country, our defense of the unborn makes us “obnoxious” to those who want to discard other human beings to preserve their own enslaved autonomy, our defense of marriage makes some call us bigots, our defense of migrants make some refer to us as unpatriotic. Many continue to find Jesus and even his mercy obnoxious. He was persecuted because of his deeds of mercy done on the Sabbath for the crippled, the possessed, the needy, as if God would take a vacation on the Sabbath day from loving his sons and daughters with crippled hands or who hadn’t walked for 38 years. He was persecuted because he welcomed sinners and ate with them. He was persecuted as a blasphemer because he dared forgive sins. Likewise that mercy lived by the Church, shared in by us, is still obnoxious to some in the world, including many who are religious. How many Catholics mock the Sacrament of Penance because they don’t want to admit that they’re sinners who need a Sacrament? How many others mock the Eucharist? How many mock the Church’s teachings on chastity, spiritual poverty and obedience? How many ridicule Jesus’ teaching to turn the other cheek? Jesus was a “sign of contradiction” and his Church will remain one until the end of time.
But the question for us is: Why does God allow all of this suffering and persecution by the envious of the “obnoxious” holiness of Jesus and those united to him? Why does God the Father allow the Just One and those made just in him to be beset in this way? We received our answer two weeks ago today, on the Second Friday of Lent, when we pondered the betrayal of Joseph the Patriarch by his brothers as a typological prophecy of the betrayal of Jesus. In both cases, God brought great good out of the great evil they suffered. God’s goodness triumphed over the worst of human wickedness. Joseph’s being sold for 20 pieces of silver, becoming a slave in Egypt and his ability to interpret dreams eventually brought him to the attention of Pharaoh and to the second position in the Kingdom, an office he was able to use not only to save millions of Egyptians lives during a time of famine but also father and his family. Likewise, Jesus’ being sold for 30 pieces of silver, taking on the appearance of a slave in order to serve us all and enduring the worst of nightmares led him to save not only millions of Egyptian lives and so many fellow Israelites but the entire human race, including those who had conspired to have him crucified. The Lord will use our sufferings and unjust persecutions in the same way, just like he used the martyrdom of so many of the first generations of Christians not only to help them share in Christ’s triumph but bring many others to the faith. Lent is to meant to help us to prepare to remain faithful under duress because we know that the Lord is with us and will bring good out of our suffering and life out of our death. He told us in the Beatitudes, “Blessed are you when people revile you, persecute you and utter all kinds of evil against you falsely because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven.” The Christian life is a way of the Cross, yes, but we know that that way of the Cross leads us through Calvary to the eternal Jerusalem. “When the just cry out, the Lord hears them,” we pray in the Responsorial Psalm today, “and from all their distress he rescues them.” He doesn’t rescue us necessarily in this world because our witness of faith under trial may be the supreme way we proclaim the Gospel and build his kingdom, but he does rescue us eternally.
As we prepare to receive Jesus the Just One here in Holy Communion, let us ask him for the grace to unite ourselves fully to him so that we will receive from him the strength not to fear those who can only harm the body or the reputation or the bank account but who cannot harm the soul. Let us thank him for the fitting helps he has prepared for us in our weakness and beseech him to help us receive them with joy and reflect them in a holy life. And let us ask him for the grace to pray with greater insistence for our persecutors who are persecuting Him in his Body and to love all those who out of envy have made themselves or will make themselves our enemies and enemies of Christ and his “obnoxious” mercy and holiness.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
WIS 2:1A, 12-22
The wicked said among themselves,
thinking not aright:
“Let us beset the just one, because he is obnoxious to us;
he sets himself against our doings,
Reproaches us for transgressions of the law
and charges us with violations of our training.
He professes to have knowledge of God
and styles himself a child of the LORD.
To us he is the censure of our thoughts;
merely to see him is a hardship for us,
Because his life is not like that of others,
and different are his ways.
He judges us debased;
he holds aloof from our paths as from things impure.
He calls blest the destiny of the just
and boasts that God is his Father.
Let us see whether his words be true;
let us find out what will happen to him.
For if the just one be the son of God, he will defend him
and deliver him from the hand of his foes.
With revilement and torture let us put him to the test
that we may have proof of his gentleness
and try his patience.
Let us condemn him to a shameful death;
for according to his own words, God will take care of him.”
These were their thoughts, but they erred;
for their wickedness blinded them,
and they knew not the hidden counsels of God;
neither did they count on a recompense of holiness
nor discern the innocent souls’ reward.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 34:17-18, 19-20, 21 AND 23
R. (19a) The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
The LORD confronts the evildoers,
to destroy remembrance of them from the earth.
When the just cry out, the LORD hears them,
and from all their distress he rescues them.
R. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
The LORD is close to the brokenhearted;
and those who are crushed in spirit he saves.
Many are the troubles of the just man,
but out of them all the LORD delivers him.
R. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
He watches over all his bones;
not one of them shall be broken.
The LORD redeems the lives of his servants;
no one incurs guilt who takes refuge in him.
R. The Lord is close to the brokenhearted.
Gospel
JN 7:1-2, 10, 25-30
Jesus moved about within Galilee;
he did not wish to travel in Judea,
because the Jews were trying to kill him.
But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near.
But when his brothers had gone up to the feast,
he himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret.
Some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem said,
“Is he not the one they are trying to kill?
And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him.
Could the authorities have realized that he is the Christ?
But we know where he is from.
When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.”
So Jesus cried out in the temple area as he was teaching and said,
“You know me and also know where I am from.
Yet I did not come on my own,
but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true.
I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”
So they tried to arrest him,
but no one laid a hand upon him,
because his hour had not yet come.
The post Beseeching Rather Than Besetting the Just One, Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent, March 15, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
18 min
March 14, 2024The Witnesses Who Help Us Grow in Faith in Christ, Thursday of the Fourth Week in Lent, March 14, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent
March 14, 2024
Ex 32:7-14, Ps 106, Jn 5:31-47

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.14.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the first reading we have a powerful witness of intercessory prayer. The Israelites had given in to idolatry and worshipped a golden calf and Moses begged God to forgive their sin. Like with Abraham’s prayer to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten just people were found there, so Moses’ intercession has always been considered a model of prayer.
Back in 2011, Pope Benedict, in his great catecheses on Christian prayer, spoke about the importance of Moses’ prayer of intercession: “Just as for the two cities in Abraham’s day, the punishment and destruction — in which God’s anger is expressed as the rejection of evil — demonstrate the gravity of the sin committed; at the same time, the request of the intercessor is intended to show the Lord’s desire for forgiveness. This is God’s salvation which involves mercy, but at the same time also the denunciation of the truth of the sin, of the evil that exists, so that the sinner, having recognized and rejected his sin, may let God forgive and transform him. In this way prayers of intercession make divine mercy active in the corrupt reality of sinful man. That mercy finds a voice in the entreaty of the person praying and is made present through him wherever there is a need for salvation. Moses’ supplication was wholly based on the Lord’s fidelity and grace. He referred first to the history of redemption which God began by bringing Israel out of Egypt and then recalled the ancient promise made to the Fathers. The Lord brought about salvation by freeing his people from slavery in Egypt; so ‘why,’ Moses asked, ‘should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’’ (Ex 32:12). Once the work of salvation has been begun it must be brought to completion; were God to let his people perish, this might be interpreted as a sign of God’s inability to bring the project of salvation to completion. God cannot allow this: he is the good Lord who saves, the guarantor of life, he is the God of mercy and forgiveness, of deliverance from sin that kills. Hence Moses appealed to God, to the interior life of God against the exterior judgement. But Moses then argued with the Lord, were his Chosen People to perish, even though guilty, God might appear incapable of overcoming sin. And this he could not accept. … The intercessor wanted the People of Israel to be saved because this people was the flock that had been entrusted to him, but also because it was in this salvation that the true reality of God was manifest. The prayer of intercession is permeated by love of the brethren and love of God, they are inseparable. Moses, the intercessor, is the man torn between two loves that overlap in prayer in a single desire for good. … The intercessor did not ask for his people to be excused of their sin, he did not list any presumed merits, either the people’s or his own, but appealed to God’s bounty: a free God, total love, who does not cease to seek out those who have fallen away, who is always faithful to himself, who offers the sinner a chance to return to him and, through forgiveness, to become righteous and capable of fidelity. Moses asked God to show himself more powerful than sin and death, and with his prayer elicited this divine revelation of himself. … With prayer, wanting what God wanted, the intercessor entered more and more deeply into knowledge of the Lord and of his mercy, and became capable of a love that extended even to the total gift of himself.”
Pope Benedict then applied these lessons to Jesus and to us. First to Jesus: “In Moses, on the summit of the mountain, face to face with God, who made himself an intercessor for his people and offered himself — ‘blot me out’ — the Fathers of the Church saw a prefiguration of Christ who from the very top of the Cross was truly before God, not only as a friend but as Son. And not only did he offer himself — ‘blot me out’ — but with his pierced heart he had himself blotted out, he himself became sin, as St Paul himself says, he took upon himself our sins to ensure our salvation. His intercession was not only solidarity but identification with us: he bears all of us in his Body. And thus his whole life as a man and as Son is a cry to God’s heart, it is forgiveness, but forgiveness that transforms and renews.” Then to us: “We should meditate upon this reality. Christ stands before God and is praying for me. His prayer on the Cross is contemporary with all human beings, contemporary with me. He prays for me, he suffered and suffers for me, he identified himself with me, taking our body and the human soul. And he asks us to enter this identity of his, making ourselves one body, one spirit with him because from the summit of the Cross he brought not new laws, tablets of stone, but himself, his Body and his Blood, as the New Covenant. Thus he brings us kinship with him, he makes us one body with him, identifies us with him. He invites us to enter into this identification, to be united with him in our wish to be one body, one spirit with him. Let us pray the Lord that this identification may transform and renew us, because forgiveness is renewal and transformation.”
We see the intercession of Christ in today’s Gospel. Like Moses with the stiff-necked Israelites, Jesus was trying to bring the hard-hearted Scribes and Pharisees to conversion so that they might be able to receive the mercy God wanted to bestow. It wasn’t easy. Today’s scene continues Jesus’ response to the Scribes and Pharisees who were opposing him as evil because he healed on the Sabbath day the man crippled for 38 years. They had imputed their own false ideas of the holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath day to God and then, because Jesus violated those false ideas, condemned him for the violation. They thought that the holiness God wanted was to avoid any work at all, including works of charity; what God had forbidden was in fact slavish work so that, instead of enslaving ourselves on the Sabbath, we would allow him to restore us to true freedom, a freedom that is meant to make it possible for us to love. The holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath was most of all that of loving Him and loving neighbor. God doesn’t take a weekly day off from loving us — as if a loving father or mother could take a hiatus from caring for their children — and never intended us to do the same. The Pharisees’ and Scribes’ misunderstanding of the Sabbath was at the root of their deep confusion of what God was asking of them in general, something of which Jesus wanted to cure them, if only their hearts were open.
In today’s passage Jesus discusses the whole question of the authority by which he was working these miracles, especially those done on the Sabbath. Since they didn’t believe he could possibly be working miracles on the Sabbath by God’s power — because God in their imagination went on vacation each Sabbath — he had to be doing so by some other authority. Elsewhere they explicitly accused him of working miracles on the Sabbath by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, basically to destroy the Jewish religion! So Jesus here takes up the question of authority and the question of the witnesses or testimony to his authority. He names five of them. It’s key for us to understand these five witnesses, so that we can grow in our knowledge of Jesus through these five different means of testimony. It’s also key so that in turn, because of his life growing within each of us and within the Christian communion, we can in turn become a “sixth witness,” like the members of the early Church were and as saints always are.
The first witness is John the Baptist, who had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God. Jesus said, “You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth. I do not accept human testimony, but I say this so that you may be saved.” John had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus would ask them explicitly, when they peppered him with questions to test him, whether they accepted the testimony of John, and they refused to say either way. The point is that, though they were fascinated by John, they didn’t accept John’s testimony and the offer of salvation that would be brought by the Lamb he indicated through the forgiveness of their sins.
The second witness were the works Jesus was doing. Jesus says, “But I have testimony greater than John’s” and then immediately describes that greater witness: “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.” He could only do what he was doing — healing the sick, casting out demons, raising the dead, multiplying loaves and fish, calming storms — by the power of God. But they didn’t want to accept the testimony of the works, works that the Messiah had been prophesied to accomplish and many more. Their hearts were hardened and there was just no way they were prepared to receive Jesus, no matter what he did. Even after he rose from the dead, they didn’t want to accept even that work, but instead paid off the guards to say, absurdly, that the disciples had stolen his body while they were asleep (when they could not possibly have known what happened to the body not to mention identify any thief). Because they were going to reject Jesus no matter what, they rejected the divine provenance of all of his works.
The third witness is Sacred Scripture. Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures, because you think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf. But you do not want to come to me to have life.” There are over 1,000 prophecies about the coming Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus by that point had been fulfilling almost everything on the Messianic job description except for the prophecies of his suffering, death and resurrection that were about to come. But as much as the scribes, Pharisees and chief priests affirmed themselves as experts in the Scriptures, they obstinately resisted the conclusion that any of them pointed to Jesus, despite the fact that he was fulfilling each of them.
The fourth witness Jesus mentions is Moses. Jesus says, “Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, because he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” All Moses accomplished was together one long prophecy about Jesus. Moses’ interceding for the Israelites before God on the mountain in today’s first reading was a prophecy of Jesus’ praying on the hill of Calvary for God the Father to forgive us because we didn’t know what we were doing. His going up on the Mt. Sinai and returning with the Ten Commandments pointed to how Jesus ascended the Mount of the Beatitudes and gave us the New Law. His leading the Jews in the Passover was a prophecy about what Jesus himself would do through his new and eternal Passover, leading us through the desert of life and death into the Eternal Promised Land. Moses had told the Jews, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him” (Deut 18:15). That prophecy was still very much awaiting fulfillment at the time of St. John the Baptist, who was asked by the crowds, “Are you the prophet?” (Jn 1:21). No, Jesus in fact was. But they didn’t want to accept that testimony. They didn’t want to listen to him. As Pope Benedict indicated above, Jesus was also the fulfillment of Moses’ action in today’s first reading, asking God to eliminate him rather than the people. That request would be, in essence, fulfilled in the Passion, when Jesus, the new Moses, would actually be killed as an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of the people. But they didn’t want to accept any of that fulfillment of Moses’ life either.
The fifth witness is the most important. It’s God the Father. “The Father who sent me has testified on my behalf,” Jesus said. “But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.” This witness was pointed to in all of the other four. It’s God the Father who called John the Baptist to prepare the way for his Son. It’s God the Father who was speaking and working through each of Jesus’ miracles. It’s God the Father who inspired Sacred Scripture by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s God the Father who called Moses at the burning bush, sent him to Pharaoh, worked the 10 plagues, separated the Red Sea, fed the Israelites with Manna and quail, quenched their thirst with water from the Rock, gave the Ten Commandments, accompanied them in a pillar of fire and so much more. But all of that testimony was, in a certain sense, indirect. God the Father gave direct testimony of Jesus at his baptism, saying from heaven, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.” God the Father gave direct testimony at the Transfiguration, witnessed by Peter, James and John, in which he said, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!” God the Father would later give witness to Jesus, not only speaking during the Last Supper that he had glorified Jesus’ name and would glorify it again, but most spectacularly by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. But they weren’t prepared to receive the testimony of God either.
Today, four weeks into the Lenten conversion God wants to work in us, we need to ask ourselves how docile we are to everything God has given us to strengthen our faith and help us to grow in our relationship with Jesus. Have we accepted the testimony of John the Baptist pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world by coming to that Lamb to have him take away our sins in the Sacrament of God’s mercy and get at them at the real roots? Have we accepted the witness of so many miracles — the miracles in the causes of saints, the daily miracles on the altar and the confessional, and so many others — to help increase our faith in the power of prayer by praying with perseverance for the miracles we and others need? Have we embraced the witness of Sacred Scripture by studying the Bible, all it reveals about Christ and about us, and putting its words into practice? Have we accepted the witness of Moses pointing to Christ and have we really begun to follow the New Moses, Jesus, up close or, like many of the Jews in the desert, have we sought to do our own thing? And have we heard the witness of God the Father and really begun to listen to Jesus and recognize through him that God wants us not only to be but behave always as his beloved and much-pleasing sons and daughters? It’s also a time to look at the power of intercessory prayer and to recognize that throughout the Lenten season, each of us individually, and the whole Church, turns to the Father and begs him, on account of the work of his Son, to have mercy on us and on the whole world.
The Eucharist is what all five of the witnesses Jesus describes point to. This is the fulfillment of the Manna given to Moses in the desert. This is the Lamb of God pointed out with the very words of John the Baptist at every Mass. This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Sacred Scripture contained in Isaiah that God will prepare for us a banquet of the choicest food and drink (Is 25). This is the greatest of all of Jesus’ signs of love, transforming simple bread and wine into his body and blood, soul and divinity, so that we can enter into a holy communion with him. And this is the greatest gift of all of the Father, who witnesses just how dear we are to him that he will give us the One who is most precious to Him so that we can by this reception of his body and blood enter into the inner life and love of the Trinity. Let us accept this witness and let us in turn become the “sixth” witnesses whose whole lives attest, not just on the Sabbath but on every day, to the truth of Jesus’ continuing saving presence and redemptive work. The Eucharist is the great prayer of intercession lifted up for the world, in which we enter live into Christ’s eternal prayer of intercession from the Upper Room and Calvary — and God’s response on Easter Sunday!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
EX 32:7-14
The LORD said to Moses,
“Go down at once to your people
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt,
for they have become depraved.
They have soon turned aside from the way I pointed out to them,
making for themselves a molten calf and worshiping it,
sacrificing to it and crying out,
‘This is your God, O Israel,
who brought you out of the land of Egypt!’
The Lord said to Moses,
“I see how stiff-necked this people is.
Let me alone, then,
that my wrath may blaze up against them to consume them.
Then I will make of you a great nation.”
But Moses implored the Lord, his God, saying,
“Why, O Lord, should your wrath blaze up against your own people,
whom you brought out of the land of Egypt
with such great power and with so strong a hand?
Why should the Egyptians say,
‘With evil intent he brought them out,
that he might kill them in the mountains
and exterminate them from the face of the earth’?
Let your blazing wrath die down;
relent in punishing your people.
Remember your servants Abraham, Isaac and Israel,
and how you swore to them by your own self, saying,
‘I will make your descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky;
and all this land that I promised,
I will give your descendants as their perpetual heritage.’“
So the Lord relented in the punishment
he had threatened to inflict on his people.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 106:19-20, 21-22, 23
R. (4a) Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
Our fathers made a calf in Horeb
and adored a molten image;
They exchanged their glory
for the image of a grass-eating bullock.
R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
They forgot the God who had saved them,
who had done great deeds in Egypt,
Wondrous deeds in the land of Ham,
terrible things at the Red Sea.
R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
Then he spoke of exterminating them,
but Moses, his chosen one,
Withstood him in the breach
to turn back his destructive wrath.
R. Remember us, O Lord, as you favor your people.
Gospel
JN 5:31-47
Jesus said to the Jews:
“If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true.
But there is another who testifies on my behalf,
and I know that the testimony he gives on my behalf is true.
You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth.
I do not accept human testimony,
but I say this so that you may be saved.
He was a burning and shining lamp,
and for a while you were content to rejoice in his light.
But I have testimony greater than John’s.
The works that the Father gave me to accomplish,
these works that I perform testify on my behalf
that the Father has sent me.
Moreover, the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.
But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form,
and you do not have his word remaining in you,
because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.
You search the Scriptures,
because you think you have eternal life through them;
even they testify on my behalf.
But you do not want to come to me to have life.
“I do not accept human praise;
moreover, I know that you do not have the love of God in you.
I came in the name of my Father,
but you do not accept me;
yet if another comes in his own name,
you will accept him.
How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another
and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God?
Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father:
the one who will accuse you is Moses,
in whom you have placed your hope.
For if you had believed Moses,
you would have believed me,
because he wrote about me.
But if you do not believe his writings,
how will you believe my words?”
The post The Witnesses Who Help Us Grow in Faith in Christ, Thursday of the Fourth Week in Lent, March 14, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
March 10, 2024Rejoicing at the Gift of God’s Loving Mercy, Fourth Sunday of Lent (B), March 10, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Fourth Sunday in Lent, Year B
March 10, 2024
2 Chron 36:14-17.19-23, Ps 137, Eph 2:4-10, Jn 3:14-21

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.10.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today, just past the midpoint of Lent, the Church celebratesLaetare Sunday, a title taken from the first word of today’s entrance antiphon in Latin: “Laetare, Ierusalem”: “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her. Be joyful, all who were in mourning: exult and be satisfied at her consoling breast.” That’s a paraphrase from what God had the Prophet Isaiah announce (Is 66:10-11) to the Jews who were captive in Babylon, where, as we hear in today’s Responsorial Psalm, those in exile used to sit by the streams and weep, where they had hung up their harps and were too saddened to sing because they were remembering all that they had squandered because of their sins. Today’s reading from the Second Book of Chronicles describes those sins, how everyone, from princes, to priests, to people had “added infidelity to infidelity,” imitating the abominations of pagan nations, polluting the Lord’s temple with their iniquities, mocking the prophets God had sent to them and refusing to hear God’s call to conversion. But God didn’t stop loving them. Out of love, he permitted the Babylonian captivity as the last chance to bring them to conversion, a redemption that, as we hear at the end of today’s first reading, God raised up Cyrus, king of Persia, to help bring about.
The liberation of the Jews from the Babylonians, which led Isaiah to prophecy “Rejoice, Jerusalem, and all who love her,” is just a small sign of the far greater liberation and joy that Jesus was going to bring into the world, a liberation from the exile and alienation caused by sin, and a freedom from the captivity to which sin leads, death. That’s a message that’s supposed to make not just Jerusalem rejoice, but New York, Calcutta and every city. That joy is because of the unfathomable love of God that would stop at nothing to redeem us. The Church has us ponder that love in today’s Gospel, when St. John tells us, “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.” St. John adds, “God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,” to render to us strict justice on account of our sins, “but so that the world might be saved through him.” When the human race was in a far worse situation than the Jews in Babylon, God himself sent someone greater than the King of Persia to set us free. He sent his own Son. St. Paul would write to the Romans that if God “did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how would he not also give us everything else besides?” That led St. Paul to conclude, “I am convinced that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor present things, nor future things, nor powers, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature will be able to separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.” When God the Father had a choice to allow us to die in eternal exile or allow his Son to take our place on death row and be brutally mocked and crucified, he loved us in some sense even more than his Son. He chose to save our life by allowing his Son to give his. This indescribable love is an incredible cause for joy! That love of God that would pull out all the stops in order to save us is the root of all Christian joy.
But it’s important for us not to hear this message in a softened and sentimentalized way. For us to enter into the joy that comes from Christ’s love, we need to grasp what it cost, and what response it demands.
Jesus describes for Nicodemus today in the Gospel passage both the price tag he needs to pay and we need to pay: “Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him might have eternal life.” That was an allusion first to the work of the ancient serpent, who got Adam and Eve in the Garden to distrust God, sin, and essentially choose death over life. But then it pointed to what God had allowed to happen to the Jews in the desert who were complaining about what they had to eat in the desert, distrusting anew in the One who had just saved them from Pharaoh. He allowed saraph serpents to slither among them and bite them with poisonous venom (Num 21). The antidote God prescribed to save them was to have Moses make a bronze serpent and mount it on a staff, and those who looked on that serpent — a reminder of the sins that had infected them with a fatal bodily and spiritual venom — they would be saved. Jesus said that he on the Cross would become like that elevated bronze serpent. He would suck the poison of sin out of our wounds and take it with him to Calvary. And we would need to look at him on the Cross to see, first, just what our sins had caused, your sins, mine everyone’s; second, the fact that we can’t save ourselves from our sins by our own efforts; and, third, the great love of God who would take on those sins and the death to which they inexorably lead in order to provide us the saving antitoxin.
But the type of glance we need to give to Jesus lifted up on the Cross must not remain merely visual. To be saved we need to look with the eyes of faith, a faith that has to become consequential in a way of life. That’s what St. John expresses immediately after the consoling words about the depth of God’s love. “Whoever believes” in Jesus, he tells us, “will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned.” He forcefully reminds us that just like those in Jerusalem prior to the exile refused to listen to the prophets, so we can refuse to listen to Jesus, to look upon him with the eyes of grateful faith, and to receive his free gift of salvation. “This is the verdict,” St. John continues, “that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light. … But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.” To look on Jesus lifted up on the Cross with the eyes of faith means to enter into the logic of the Cross. It means to heed his words to deny ourselves, pick up our Cross each day and follow him, leaving the darkness of sin behind and entering with him into the light.
To look at the Cross with the light of faith means to see in the Cross the realization that God’s love is merciful and that God’s merciful love isn’t cheap. Our salvation has been purchased with the price of Jesus’ own death when we were self-alienated from him. He didn’t die for us because we deserved it; we didn’t deserve it, but loved us with mercy and died for us anyway. St. Paul focuses on this truth in today’s second reading, telling us, “God, who is rich in mercy, because of the great love he had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ … [and] raised us up with him.”
Pope Francis commented on this merciful love of God seen on the Cross in an Angelus meditation several years ago in St. Peter’s Square. “Never forget this, [God] is rich in mercy.… The Cross of Christis the supreme proof of the Love of God for us: Jesus has loved us ‘until the end’ (Jn. 13:1), meaning not only at the final moment of his earthly life, but until the extreme limit of love. If in creation the Father has given us the proof of his great love by giving us life, in the passion of His Son He has given us the sum of all proofs: He has come to suffer and die for us. And this love that is so great is the mercy of God, because He loves us, He forgives us. With his mercy, God forgives all and God always forgives.”
The whole purpose of the Lenten season is to bring us to unite ourselves with Christ on the Cross, to allow God who is rich in mercy to make us rich in mercy, by bringing us to recognize how much we need that mercy, to come to receive it and then to lead us to share it lavishly with others. And doing all three is essential to our entering into the joy that God wants to give us. The ultimate source of our joy is God’s incredible love for us, and since God’s love is merciful, if we’re going to experience the fullness of Christian joy, it will happen only through receiving and sharing God’s mercy. “Heaven rejoices more over one sinner who repents,” Jesus told us, “than over 99 righteous people in no need of repentance.” Heaven’s greatest joy, God’s greatest joy, is saving us through his forgiveness; if we wish to enter into that greatest joy of all, we need to pass through the door of mercy — that’s why making a good confession each Lent is so important — and bring many others through that same door.
Jesus, who came so that his joy might be in us and our joy might be complete, sought to have us receive that merciful love and, like him, come to enflesh it. He gave us the parable of the Prodigal Son, he told us of the lost sheep and lost coin, he forgave the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s house, the paralyzed man on the stretcher, the woman caught in adultery, St. Peter, St. Paul and so many others. He told us that the path to happiness involves both receiving and giving this mercy, stressing in the beatitudes, “Blessed are the merciful, for they will receive mercy,” calling us to be “merciful as [his] Father in heaven is merciful” and reminding us on two different occasions that unless we forgive others their sins, neither will our heavenly Father forgive us ours. The reason the Father won’t forgive us is not because he would be punishing us out of anger but because if we’re not merciful to others, our heart would be impenetrably hardened to receive God’s mercy. We can’t enter into Jesus’ joy in this world or the next without this dual experience of God’s loving forgiveness, receiving it and paying it forward.
That has been the great message of Pope Francis since he was elected 11 years ago this Wednesday. He discerned his own priestly calling when he went to confession as a 16-year-old boy, that in the very act of God’s giving his mercy to him he was also calling him to be an instrument of that mercy to the world. His papal motto, Miserando atque Eligendo — taken from St. Bede’s description of Jesus’ calling of the sinful tax collector St. Matthew to be an apostle, a feast that is celebrated on the very day young Jorge Bergoglio received his vocation — he has always applied to himself, that he was called in the very experience of being forgiven. When Pope Francis was asked in the Sistine Chapel whether he would accept the election as the successor of St. Peter, he didn’t reply “Accepto” or “Non Accepto,” as the rite prescribes. Instead he replied, “Peccator sum, sed super misericordia et infinita patientia Domini nostri Jesu Christi confisus et in spiritu penitentiae accepto.” “I am a sinner, but I trust in the infinite mercy and patience of our Lord Jesus Christ, and in a spirit of penance I accept.” When he was asked in an interview, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?,” he responded, “I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner…[but] a sinner whom the Lord has looked upon” with love. He has sought throughout his papacy to get us to trust unceasingly in that merciful and restorative love of the Lord. In his first Angelus meditation after his election, he said, “The Lord never tires of forgiving: never! It is we who tire of asking his forgiveness. Let us ask for the grace not to tire of asking forgiveness, because he never tires of forgiving.” Friday and yesterday he led in Rome an initiative called 24 Hours for the Lord in which he and others have heard confessions for hours. It’s always a time in which he also goes to confession to one of the other priests hearing. As he likes to say, confession is a means by which we taste a little of the joy of heaven, which rejoices abundantly over every repentant sinner’s return. It’s there that we feel the depth of the love of God who doesn’t stop loving us when we sin, but whose love we often don’t experience in our sins because by our sins we voluntarily separate ourselves from that love. In the Sacrament of Mercy, we experience the joy of having our souls returned back to their baptismal beauty and to the resurrection that each reconciliation makes possible. As he said in his homily at the beginning of the 24 Hour for the Lord penance service on Friday, “Let us not refuse God’s forgiveness, the sacrament of Reconciliation: it is not a practice of devotion, but the foundation of Christian existence; it [involves] … recognizing ourselves as sinners and throwing ourselves into the arms of Jesus crucified to be freed; it is not a moralistic gesture, but the resurrection of the heart. The risen Lord resurrects us, all of us,” in which we say to him, “Jesus, renew me and I will walk again in a new life.”
God’s love for us, just like every other central act of our faith, finds its ultimate expression on the altar, in the person of Christ in the Holy Eucharist. He is mercy incarnate and gives us this sacrifice, as we pray at the consecration of the Precious Blood, for the forgiveness of sins. He makes it possible for us to enter into communion with his loving mercy. It’s here we behold him lifted up not as a bronze serpent but as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. God so loved the world so much that he not onlygave us his Son, but God the Father shows that love even more by giving us his Son every day on the altar and making his Son’s forgiveness available to us almost every day in the Sacrament of Penance. Let us look on Christ, lifted up on the Cross, lifted up in the host, and say, with Saint John and all the members of the Church, “We have come to know and to believe in the love God us for us!” (1 John 4:10). We have, indeed, come to trust in him and in his mercy! We have come to believe in and live in his light. Laetare, Jerusalem! Indeed, Rejoice, New York! God’s mercy is real and God loves us so much that he never ceases to share that gift with us!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading I
2 Chr 36:14-16, 19-23
In those days, all the princes of Judah, the priests, and the people
added infidelity to infidelity,
practicing all the abominations of the nations
and polluting the LORD’s temple
which he had consecrated in Jerusalem.
Early and often did the LORD, the God of their fathers,
send his messengers to them,
for he had compassion on his people and his dwelling place.
But they mocked the messengers of God,
despised his warnings, and scoffed at his prophets,
until the anger of the LORD against his people was so inflamed
that there was no remedy.
Their enemies burnt the house of God,
tore down the walls of Jerusalem,
set all its palaces afire,
and destroyed all its precious objects.
Those who escaped the sword were carried captive to Babylon,
where they became servants of the king of the Chaldeans and his sons
until the kingdom of the Persians came to power.
All this was to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah:
“Until the land has retrieved its lost sabbaths,
during all the time it lies waste it shall have rest
while seventy years are fulfilled.”
In the first year of Cyrus, king of Persia,
in order to fulfill the word of the LORD spoken by Jeremiah,
the LORD inspired King Cyrus of Persia
to issue this proclamation throughout his kingdom,
both by word of mouth and in writing:
“Thus says Cyrus, king of Persia:
All the kingdoms of the earth
the LORD, the God of heaven, has given to me,
and he has also charged me to build him a house
in Jerusalem, which is in Judah.
Whoever, therefore, among you belongs to any part of his people,
let him go up, and may his God be with him!”
Responsorial Psalm
137:1-2, 3, 4-5, 6
R. (6ab) Let my tongue be silenced, if I ever forget you!
By the streams of Babylon
we sat and wept
when we remembered Zion.
On the aspens of that land
we hung up our harps.
R. Let my tongue be silenced, if I ever forget you!
For there our captors asked of us
the lyrics of our songs,
And our despoilers urged us to be joyous:
“Sing for us the songs of Zion!”
R. Let my tongue be silenced, if I ever forget you!
How could we sing a song of the LORD
in a foreign land?
If I forget you, Jerusalem,
may my right hand be forgotten!
R. Let my tongue be silenced, if I ever forget you!
May my tongue cleave to my palate
if I remember you not,
If I place not Jerusalem
ahead of my joy.
R. Let my tongue be silenced, if I ever forget you!
Reading II
Eph 2:4-10
Brothers and sisters:
God, who is rich in mercy,
because of the great love he had for us,
even when we were dead in our transgressions,
brought us to life with Christ — by grace you have been saved —,
raised us up with him,
and seated us with him in the heavens in Christ Jesus,
that in the ages to come
He might show the immeasurable riches of his grace
in his kindness to us in Christ Jesus.
For by grace you have been saved through faith,
and this is not from you; it is the gift of God;
it is not from works, so no one may boast.
For we are his handiwork, created in Christ Jesus for the good works
that God has prepared in advance,
that we should live in them.
Verse Before the Gospel
Jn 3:16
God so loved the world that he gave his only Son,
so everyone who believes in him might have eternal life.
Gospel
Jn 3:14-21
Jesus said to Nicodemus:
“Just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert,
so must the Son of Man be lifted up,
so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”
For 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.
For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world,
but that the world might be saved through him.
Whoever believes in him will not be condemned,
but whoever does not believe has already been condemned,
because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
And this is the verdict,
that the light came into the world,
but people preferred darkness to light,
because their works were evil.
For everyone who does wicked things hates the light
and does not come toward the light,
so that his works might not be exposed.
But whoever lives the truth comes to the light,
so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.
The post Rejoicing at the Gift of God’s Loving Mercy, Fourth Sunday of Lent (B), March 10, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min

About Catholic Preaching

From the publisher's feed

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.