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February 10, 2024Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 10, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
February 10, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, when one of the most physically disgusting and repulsive human beings imaginable — a leper — came up to Jesus, knelt down and begged Jesus to cure him. Lepers, as you know, have a bacterial infection that eats away their flesh and bones and gives them a sickening odor. At the time of Jesus, leprosy was considered so contagious that those with it were quarantined for basically the rest of their life apart from the community. They had no one with whom to associate or to care for them — except other lepers. They were cut off from their family, from work, from the synagogue and temple, and basically from love and mercy. They were outcasts, ostracized from all things human. They had to wear ripped clothes and keep their hair messy so that others would be able to spot them easily from a distance. Whenever they needed to travel to obtain something, they were mandated by Mosaic law to shout out “Unclean!” “Unclean!” They were forbidden to come within a certain distance of others. Anyone who touched a leper became, in Jewish mentality, unclean.
That the man in today’s Gospel broke all convention to come close to Jesus was already a sign of his desperation. What was Jesus’ reaction to this miserable, nauseating creature on his knees before him? Most of those around Jesus likely ran away from him lest they catch the contagion. Jesus moved in the opposite direction. To the leper’s plea of faith, “If you wish, you can make me clean,” Jesus, filled with compassion, stretched out his hand and touched the leper. We can almost hear the shrieks of onlookers two thousand years later. It was probably the first time a non-leper had touched him in years. Then Jesus said the words that were the answer to the man’s prolonged prayers: “I do will it. Be made clean!” He was thoroughly and immediately made whole. Jesus gave him instructions to go see the priest and go through the rites of the Mosaic law for testimony of a cure of leprosy so that he, so long an outcast, could legitimately return to the human community.
This Gospel is a beautiful one to have three days before we begin the Holy Season of Lent. During Lent, each of us is called to approach Jesus with faith, with all our sins that are eating away our soul like Hansen’s disease destroys our flesh and bones, and say, “If you wish, you can make me clean.” And Jesus wants to say to each of us in return, “I do will it. Be made clean.” Lent is a time of such cleansing. The practice of prayer helps us to overcome the leprosy of egocentrism to put God first. The practice of almsgiving helps us to conquer the leprosy of selfishness and put others ahead of ourselves. The practice of fasting helps us to triumph against the leprosy of pleasure-seeking, of making our bellies our god, so that we can learn how to hunger for what God hungers. It’s a period of purification. Each of us needs to be humble enough, each of us needs to be smart enough, to recognize our state and come to God so that he, moved with compassion, can stretch out his hand and touch us.
This Sunday is also World Marriage Sunday, when we’re called to focus our attention on the blessing of marriage as the mutual committed love of husband and wife and to thank married couples for all the sacrifices they make to build loving families that are the building block of society and the cells of the Mystical Body of Christ the Church. While we celebrate the gift of marriage, it’s also a day to take note of the various threats to marriage. The same evil one who tried to sabotage the marriage of Adam and Eve at the beginning goes after every marriage. And there are various ways individual marriages, and those in marriages, can become leprotic. The great leprosy is lust, which turns love from mutual self-giving to reciprocal utilitarianism and harmonious hedonisms. Many with the vocations to marriage never make it because their heart has been eaten away by porn and various sexual sins. Others within marriage give in to sins against fidelity like adultery, or against indissolubility like easy divorce, or against fruitfulness like contraception. Even the very notion of marriage can be eaten away by culture and the courts, making marriage a husbandless, wifeless, or intentionally childless institution. In the context of all of these soul-eating bacteria, this weekend we go before Jesus the Divine Bridegroom and beg, “If you wish, you can make us clean, … you can purify our eyes and hearts and homes and marriages.” Jesus wants to give us the gift of chastity, of purity of heart, of reverence for his image and others, so that our love may be truly loving. We enter into prayerful conversation with him and ask for it!
But just like with the leper in the Gospel, Jesus doesn’t just say magic words, heal us, and then let us do whatever we please. He wants to lead us to greater faith. But we have to cooperate. We see what happened in the Gospel. As soon as the leper got what he wanted, he started to do his own thing. St. Mark tells us that Jesus wanted him to grow in trusting obedience and therefore commanded him to go to the levitical priests. He also warned him sternly, “See that you tell no one anything.” Jesus well knew that if news of the miracle became widespread, everyone would be coming to him first as a free medical doctor and secondly as the long-awaited Messiah whom they would interpret in political terms, as someone who would boot the Romans and reinstitute a Davidic temporal kingdom. Jesus wanted to avoid those misconceptions because he had come not as a new political candidate or as a new Hippocrates but as a Savior. The former leper’s response to Jesus’ stern warning not to tell anyone anything, was, however, to ignore it totally. St. Mark says, “The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter. He spread the report abroad so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly. He remained outside in deserted places, and people kept coming to him from everywhere,” exactly validating Jesus’ concerns that underlined his warning and command. While the man was cured of the leprosy of his skin and body parts, he wasn’t cured of the leprosy of a partially hardened heart. When he heard the voice of the Lord telling him not to do something, he blew him off. He likely thought he had justification for doing so: after all, Jesus had given him the greatest gift of his life and what would it hurt, he probably told himself, publicly to praise him for it? But the simple fact of the matter is that he blatantly disobeyed the Lord’s command.
The leprosy of a partially hardened heart — a heart that hears the Lord’s voice but responds selectively, according to our own desires, needs, and categories — can affect anyone, including us. We may listen attentively and put into practice Jesus’ words about praying always, but harden our heart to his words about confessing our sins to those whom he has sent with the power to forgive and retain sins in his name. We may seek to enflesh his words about crossing the road to help someone in need when we feel like it, but harden our hearts to Jesus’ word about welcoming strangers like immigrants as we would welcome him when we don’t feel like it. We may faithfully keep the commandment to honor our parents but violate his command to forgive our siblings 70 times 7 times. We may faithfully heed his word about the Mass, to eat his flesh and drink his blood, but totally ignore his commission to go to every creature we know and proclaim the Gospel. If God speaks to us a word we want to hear, then maybe we’ll do it; but if the Lord challenges us to do something we don’t want to do, often we’ll ignore God’s voice and listen to our own.
This challenge is quite relevant to us in the two applications we’ve considered. This Lent the Lord calls us to holiness through uniting ourselves to him in prayer, fasting and almsgiving. He’ll tell us on Wednesday, “When you fast, … when you give alms, … when you pray.” Will we heed his words or do our own thing? Likewise with regard to love, marriage, sex and family, do we do what he teaches us through his Church or do we do what Ru Paul and intellectual descendants of Hugh Hefner and Harvey Milk teach us through the media? Jesus wants to cleanse us but do we want to cooperate with that purifying work?
At the end of our consequential conversation with Jesus this Sunday, he won’t tell us, “See that you tell no one anything.” Rather, he will reiterate the great commission when he told us, “Go to the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” He wants us to pass on the Gospel with far greater enthusiasm that fans of the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers are going to be cheering their lungs out during the Super Bowl. Jesus wants us to share with others the same healing Gospel he gives us, the same truth that will set us free, the same words of eternal life that will help us rise from sin and death. He will reach out his hand to touch us and cleanse us — but he wants us not to let go of his hand, but to journey with him in holiness each day, in our love life and marriages, in Ordinary Time and Lent and beyond. May our encounter with him this Sunday have that type of life-changing impact. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Mk 1:40-45
A leper came to Jesus and kneeling down begged him and said,
“If you wish, you can make me clean.”
Moved with pity, he stretched out his hand,
touched him, and said to him,
“I do will it. Be made clean.”
The leprosy left him immediately, and he was made clean.
Then, warning him sternly, he dismissed him at once.
He said to him, “See that you tell no one anything,
but go, show yourself to the priest
and offer for your cleansing what Moses prescribed;
that will be proof for them.”
The man went away and began to publicize the whole matter.
He spread the report abroad
so that it was impossible for Jesus to enter a town openly.
He remained outside in deserted places,
and people kept coming to him from everywhere.
The post Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 10, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
February 09, 2024Using Our Ears and Mouths for God, Fifth Friday (II), February 9, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Corpus Christi Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
February 9, 2024
1 Kings 11:29-32.12:19, Ps 81, Mk 7:31-37

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
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The following points guided today’s homily:
In today’s Gospel we glimpse the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works as they were happening. By the scene we encounter today, Jesus had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude starting with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young girl from the dead. On the force of this reputation, several true friends brought a man who was deaf and mute to Jesus, begging him to lay hands on him. They were not to be let down. The Lord put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Be opened!” and the miracle was worked. Amazement seized them all. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t help themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
“He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the astonished residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a home run on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for us — in terms of our eternal salvation — and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant countless miracles through the intercession of saints. He continues to feed us with the sacrament of his body and blood. He has done, and continues to do, all things well.
This motto, which really is the characteristically-Christian attitude, is being challenged in many segments of our culture today. This is really nothing new. The first pagans and Jewish leaders thought Jesus was a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday. Little could they fathom what the small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies would be do in his name throughout the globe. Likewise people in every age continue to look at the existence of physical evil in the world — babies who are born with serious infirmities, people who are victims of natural disasters, others who are victims of moral evils — and try to argue that either God must not exist, or is not all powerful and all good, or simply doesn’t do all things well. Many others agree, treating the Lord and the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it.” But some Christians even believe this. If Jesus were here today and asked us whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? In general, of course, I think all of us, as his disciples, would want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing and does everything well; either He is God and does everything perfectly out of love for us, or he makes mistakes and is therefore cannot be God. But with regard to certainly controversial issues, I wonder sometimes whether many who call themselves Catholic today really believe that he has done all things well and are willing to praise him like the residents of the Decapolis. A few questions the Lord could ask: If you really believe that I have done all things well, do you believe that I did well in establishing the Church as I did, on sinful men? Do you believe that I did well in making marriage the indissoluble union between one man and one woman until death, calling you back to God’s plan for marriage in the beginning? Do you believe that I knew what I was doing when I ordained only men to be my apostles and priests? Do you come to me with trust in the Sacrament I established to forgive your sins? Do you believe, Catholics in public office who support abortion, that I did well in reaffirming the commandment not to kill, that whatever you do to the least of my brothers and sisters you do to me, and that whoever receives a little child in my name receives me? Questions like these are important ones for us to ask, because sometimes we can begin to allow the devil to sow seeds of doubt as to whether Jesus knows what he’s doing when he allows us or those we love to suffer, or when there are issues in our community, parish, Diocese or universal Church, or when someone in a position of religious authority makes a decision with which we don’t agree, etc. Such doubt can also sometimes impact our own sense of our Christian identity and vocation. But he has done all things well!
Focusing on the miracle the Lord works today, we can ponder something important in our life of faith to help us appreciate what the Lord seeks to do well through us but requires our cooperation. The Lord opens up the deaf-mute’s ears and tongue so that he could fully communicate. What a gift that is! The same Lord who did that for him — in a way that we might find a little gross, putting his fingers in his ear and spitting and touching his tongue, but was proto-sacramental — did it for us spiritually through a minister on the day of our baptism. He stuck his finger into our ear and touched our tongue and prayed, “The Lord Jesus made the deaf hear and the dumb speak. May he soon touch your ears to receive his word, and your mouth to proclaim his faith, to the praise and glory of God the Father.” This points to two great truths: the most important reason why we were given ears by God was so that we might hear his word; and the most fundamental reason we were given a mouth was so that we might proclaim our faith to his glory. God wants to speak to us and have us speak to him in prayer and speak to other of our faith in him. There are of course other purposes to these faculties, but these are the priorities. God wants us to hear his voice, to listen to Jesus as he said in the Transfiguration, and to obey (ob-audire), which means to listen attentively as words to be done. In today’s Responsorial Psalm, he says, “I am the Lord, your God. Hear my voice!” Often we think prayer is our talking to God, but God wants us to grasp that the first and most important part of prayer, the whole purpose of our outer and inner ears, is to say with sincerity, like young Samuel, “Speak, Lord, your servant is listening.” Similarly God has opened our tongues to do many things, including speaking to him audibly. But the fundamental purpose of our speech is so that we might proclaim our faith to his praise and glory. And so we need to ask ourselves today how assiduously we’re listening to the Lord’s voice and how ardently we’re speaking of him, how he does all things well, how he loves us, what he seeks to do in us.
In today’s reading we see the consequences that occur when we don’t listen to God well. Yesterday in the first reading, we heard about the fall of Solomon into corruption. At 18 he had pleased God by asking for “an understanding heart to judge your people and to distinguish right from wrong” and God was so pleased that he gave him, he said, “a heart so wise and understanding that there has never been anyone like you up to now, and after you there will come no one to equal you. In addition, I give you what you have not asked for, such riches and glory that among kings there is not your like.” But after he used those gifts for God’s glory, after he wrote so many great spiritual books, after he dazzled the Queen of Sheba and so many others, his wise and understanding heart because lustful, then corrupt, and finally idolatrous, building temples to, and adoring, the pagan gods of some of his 700 wives and 300 concubines. For this reason God said to him, as we heard yesterday, “Since… you have not kept my covenant and my statutes which I enjoined on you, I will deprive you of the kingdom and give it to your servant. I will not do this during your lifetime, however, for the sake of your father David; it is your son whom I will deprive. Nor will I take away the whole kingdom. I will leave your son one tribe for the sake of my servant David and of Jerusalem, which I have chosen.” And that is what is fulfilled in today’s reading. The prophet Ahijah from Shilo met Jeroboam, who was in charge of the enormous public works of Solomon and tore his new cloak, handing Jeroboam 10 of the 12 pieces, and saying, “Take ten pieces for yourself; the Lord, the God of Israel, says: ‘I will tear away the kingdom from Solomon’s grasp and will give you ten of the tribes. One tribe shall remain to him for the sake of David my servant, and of Jerusalem, the city I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel.’” Jeroboam became king of the north, Israel, whereas Rehoboam, Solomon’s son from a pagan Ammonite wife, ruled in Judah. Solomon had stopped listening to the Lord’s voice. He had stopped speaking about him with faith. And this is what happened as a direct result of giving into sin — which always divides — rather than following the Lord who seeks to unite us with him and with each other. Solomon’s fall is a reminder to us to listen to God ever more and to proclaim our faith with ever greater ardor.
Today as we celebrate this Mass, we ask the Lord to renew in us the graces of our baptism, hear and obey the saving word he proclaims to us in the Gospel, to hear it accurately, to treasure it, and to pass it on with great courage and holy pride as a lifeline to the whole world. Jesus has done all things well, and he wants to continue doing things well through us. And his greatest ongoing work is what we now do in his memory. May we imitate those in the Decapolis in not being able to restrain ourselves from speaking about what he does here.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 1 KGS 11:29-32; 12:19
Jeroboam left Jerusalem,
and the prophet Ahijah the Shilonite met him on the road.
The two were alone in the area,
and the prophet was wearing a new cloak.
Ahijah took off his new cloak,
tore it into twelve pieces, and said to Jeroboam:
“Take ten pieces for yourself;
the LORD, the God of Israel, says:
‘I will tear away the kingdom from Solomon’s grasp
and will give you ten of the tribes.
One tribe shall remain to him for the sake of David my servant,
and of Jerusalem,
the city I have chosen out of all the tribes of Israel.’”
Israel went into rebellion against David’s house to this day.
Responsorial Psalm PS 81:10-11AB, 12-13, 14-15
R. (11a and 9a) I am the Lord, your God: hear my voice.
“There shall be no strange god among you
nor shall you worship any alien god.
I, the LORD, am your God
who led you forth from the land of Egypt.”
R. I am the Lord, your God: hear my voice.
“My people heard not my voice,
and Israel obeyed me not;
So I gave them up to the hardness of their hearts;
they walked according to their own counsels.”
R. I am the Lord, your God: hear my voice.
“If only my people would hear me,
and Israel walk in my ways,
Quickly would I humble their enemies;
against their foes I would turn my hand.”
R. I am the Lord, your God: hear my voice.
Alleluia SEE ACTS 16:14B
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Open our hearts, O Lord,
to listen to the words of your Son.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MK 7:31-37
Jesus left the district of Tyre
and went by way of Sidon to the Sea of Galilee,
into the district of the Decapolis.
And people brought to him a deaf man who had a speech impediment
and begged him to lay his hand on him.
He took him off by himself away from the crowd.
He put his finger into the man’s ears
and, spitting, touched his tongue;
then he looked up to heaven and groaned, and said to him,
“Ephphatha!” (that is, “Be opened!”)
And immediately the man’s ears were opened,
his speech impediment was removed,
and he spoke plainly.
He ordered them not to tell anyone.
But the more he ordered them not to,
the more they proclaimed it.
They were exceedingly astonished and they said,
“He has done all things well.
He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.”
The post Using Our Ears and Mouths for God, Fifth Friday (II), February 9, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
15 min
February 07, 2024 Staying Strong in the Priestly Vocation and Strengthening Our Brethren, Napa Institute Shepherds’ Circle, February 7, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shepherds’ Circle National Conference
Meritage Report, Napa, California
February 7, 2024

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Staying Strong in the Priestly Vocation and Strengthening Our Brethren

The post Staying Strong in the Priestly Vocation and Strengthening Our Brethren, Napa Institute Shepherds’ Circle, February 7, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
51 min
February 05, 2024The Holy Woe to Preach the Gospel, Fifth Sunday (B), February 4, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
February 4, 2024
Job 7:1-4.6-7, Ps 147, 1 Cor 9:16-19.22-23, Mk 1:29-39
To listen to an audio recoding of today’s homily:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.4.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The text that guided tonight’s homily was:
Over the course of the last few weeks, as we have entered into Ordinary Time and pondered the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry in St. Mark’s Gospel, we have been hearing a great deal about the importance of the Word of God, hearing it, putting it into practice, and sharing it. Two weeks ago, the Church celebrated the Sunday of the Word of God in which we focused on Jonah’s successful preaching of conversion to the pagan Ninevites and on Jesus’ first homily, in which he proclaimed that since the long-awaited Kingdom of God was at hand, it was time to repent and believe in the Gospel. We saw how Peter, Andrew, James and John acted on those words of conversion and faith, left their boats, fish, families and homes to follow Jesus when he called, and began the preparation to be sent out by him as fishers of men. Last Sunday we met Jesus in the Capernaum synagogue where he amazed and astonished those present by the authority with which he preached, and we spoke about how each of us is meant to be just as amazed by Jesus’ words, to open our hearts to it, to love it, and to recognize how the devil seeks to prevent its growth in our life.
Tonight for the third week in a row, we encounter powerful words about the importance of the Word of God, and, especially, about sharing it. We do so in the midst of what might be called “an ordinary day in the public ministry of Jesus,” in which are able to observe Jesus curing the sick and possessed, praying, and then speaking about the importance of preaching. The Church has always sought to live her days filled with the same three actions. Each of us, as disciples of Jesus, are similarly supposed to be people of charity, who seek to love others as Christ has loved us; of prayer, both personal and liturgical; and of mission, going to the who world and sharing the Gospel with everyone God has created, teaching them to carry out everything he has taught. And so let us enter into today’s readings, focus a little on the first two crucially important aspects of the Christian life and then spend most of our time on the third, to which, as we see in the Gospel, Jesus gives clear priority.
Let’s begin with the loving care of the sick. In tonight’s first reading, Job is tossing and turning at night, complaining about the “months of misery and troubled nights.” By this point, he had lost most of the members of his family, all his livestock, even his own health, and as he lay with boils all over his skin, the emotional pain overwhelmed him. “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?,” he cried aloud. His nights were “filled with restlessness” and his days seemed to be coming “to an end without hope” and he believed he would “not see happiness again.” God would soon come to his aid, for as we sang in the Psalm, God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
When God came in the flesh, he showed how important it was for him to bind up the wounds of those whose hearts and bodies were broken. In today’s Gospel, we see that Simon Peter’s mother-in-law had a bad fever, and Jesus wasted no time in curing her. Then, after sundown, St. Mark informs us, the residents of Capernaum brought to Jesus “all who were ill or possessed by demons,” such that the “whole town was gathered around the door.” Jesus work of healing the sick and casting out demons was doubtless very grueling, because in no part of the Gospel did Jesus ever do “general healing services,” but cured the ill or the possessed one-by-one so that he could establish a personal relationship with each grateful recipient and hopefully bring them from a physical cure to a far more important spiritual one. If you’ve seen the series The Chosen, one of the most enduring lessons from the end of Season Two was after a day in which Jesus, played by Jonathan Roumie, cured the vast multitudes of the sick one-by-one. He returned thoroughly exhausted and needed to collapse. Because Jesus began only after Sunday, it was probably close to midnight by the time he finished.
Yet, despite his fatigue, he arose the next morning, “very early before dawn,” which in the Greek means likely about three or four in the morning, and went to a deserted place to pray. Here Jesus shows us about the importance of prayer. If he who was God prioritized prayer to his Father more than well-earned and much-needed sleep, what does that say about the priority you and I, who are not God, should give to prayer? Most days, of course, there does not need to be competition between getting enough sleep, making time for prayer, and then doing our studies and work. But Jesus shows that when there is a conflict between time for prayer and time for sleep, we should cut down on sleep and make time for God. Otherwise, if we were to treat sleep as more important than prayer, we would essentially be making sleep a god, and prioritizing the needs of the body over the greater needs of our soul. The truth is, as we get older, sometimes, on really busy days, the early morning might be the only time we have to pray. Many parents with young children find that the only time they have a chance to pray without interruption is before their kids get up. Many others — including students, priests, religious — have discovered that it is the most focused time to pray, before all of the hustle-and-bustle of daily life intervenes. Jesus, in today’s Gospel, shows that prayer is worth the sacrifice. If we’d get up to care for a crying infant, or to catch an early morning flight, or to study for an exam, then we can certainly get up out of love for God.
Mark tells us that, while Jesus was praying, Simon and the others were awakened, likely by hordes of the sick, the possessed, and their friends and family members arriving at dawn hoping for a sequel of what they had witnessed the night before, and went about looking for Jesus. When they found him, they said, “Everyone is looking for you.” We might have expected that Jesus’ response to be one of jubilation. After all, wouldn’t he later say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will refresh you” (Mt 11:28)? He wanted people coming to him with their burdens. He wanted to give them refreshment. Jesus, however, when told that everyone was trying to hunt him down, didn’t respond by saying, “Hallelujah!” Rather, much to their surprise, he stated,“Let us go on to the nearby villages, so that I may preach there also; for this purpose I have come.” Jesus had come above all to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. He probably realized in prayer that early morning how urgent it was for him to accomplish the mission the Father had given him. He probably grasped as well that many people were coming him not so much to receive what he wanted to give them, but to obtain from him what they themselves wanted to receive. Many in the crowds doubtless looked at him as a wonderworker, a powerful exorcist and an unbelievably effective and shockingly free physician. But Jesus had a different set of priorities than the crowds. He wanted them to accept him on his own terms, not theirs. He wanted them to come to him not principally as the doctor of their mortal bodies, but as the Savior of their immortal souls. He wanted them to hear, live and share the Gospel of the Kingdom.
We see a similar shifting of priorities by Jesus at work throughout the Gospel. After he had fed the 5,000 families with five loaves and two fish, the crowds walked several miles along the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee to be with him. Upon disembarking, when Jesus saw the crowds, he said to them with great candor: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.” (Jn 6:26). They were looking more for a baker giving out a free meal than a savior! It was far more important for Jesus to feed their soul than their stomachs. Jesus again showed what his real priorities were when friends brought him a paralyzed man and lowered him on top of his head after removing part of a house’s roof. They obviously wanted Jesus to cure their friend and help him walk anew. But when Jesus saw the faith of the friends, he turned to the paralyzed man and said, not, “I cure you. Stand up, take up your mat and go home,” but rather, “My son, your sins are forgiven” (Mk 2:5). It was far more important for Jesus to cure his soul than his paralysis. It was only to silence those were criticizing him for pretending to be God who alone can forgive sins that Jesus, to show his authority, healed the man’s paralysis.
What do we see? Jesus worked all of his miracles, not because he had come down from heaven to earth to establish an emergency room, but to give divine authentication to the words that he was teaching and to move from physical food and physical cures to the more important spiritual nutrition and healings he knew people needed far more urgently. The miracles were the dramatic exclamation points to everything he was teaching, and a demonstration that the kingdom he was proclaiming was real and among them. Pope Francis said in a homily early in his pontificate, “When Jesus healed a sick man, he was not only a healer. When he taught people … he was not only a catechist, a preacher of morals. When he remonstrated against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees, he was not a revolutionary who wanted to drive out the Romans. No, these things that Jesus did — healing, teaching and speaking out against hypocrisy — were only a sign of something greater that Jesus was doing: he was forgiving sins.” Reconciling the world in Christ in the name of the Father, Pope Francis continued, “this is Jesus’ mission. Everything else — healing, teaching, reprimands — are only signs of that deeper miracle which is the re-creation of the world. Thus, reconciliation is the re-creation of the world; and the most profound mission of Jesus is the redemption of all of us sinners.” Jesus had come to reconcile us to the Father through helping us repent and believe, through cleansing and feeding us, through helping us to live in his image and likeness and help us become co-redeemers helping others to learn how to live through, with and in him, too.
Tonight all of us have come to Mass, but it’s important for us to examine honestly why we’ve come. Have we come here hungering for whatJesus wants to give us or for what we want him to give us? Are we here trying to accord our priorities with His, or His with ours? It’s still common today that many Catholics, like those in today’s Gospel, come to the Lord mostly as a miracle worker, as a powerful friend who can pull strings to get us out of a jam. Jesus, however, wants more, and wants more because he loves us and wants us to experience the fullness of life. As he said in tonight’s Gospel, the reason he came from heaven to earth was to proclaim the message of the kingdom and to proclaim it in such a way that it wouldn’t fall on deaf ears and be ignored, but rather embraced, followed and lived with joy. He wants us to respond to his proclamation of the kingdom with the same type of life-changing faith that we see in Mary and the apostles. That’s his priority. That’s why he came into the world. That’s why he has called us to be Christians.
Many people today might accuse Jesus of having his priorities mixed up. After all, imagine how full our churches would be if Jesus, through his priests, or missionaries, lay people or students, were working tremendous miracles of healing. We could depopulate the local hospitals and bring everyone before the altar. People would come from all over the city, state, country and world to be cured. The dramatic exorcisms would bring national and international media attention. All those with cancer, or paralysis, or back-pain, or emotional scars would leave completely healed. Probably criminals and drug dealers, in seeing this incredible divine power working through human instruments, might be brought to mass conversion. But this is not the way Jesus has chosen for his Church to operate. Instead, he fundamentally sends us all to preach the Gospel of the kingdom. From Jesus’ own divine perspective, the greatest gift he can give any of us, whether we’re ill and suffering or healthy, is his holy word, and he wants us to share that same treasure with others. Jesus wants us who come into his presence most of all to listen to his preaching, to embrace his word, and in consuming the Word-made-flesh in the Eucharist, to become so one with the word that we become living commentaries of life in his kingdom. In doing so, he’s not ignoring all our ills and problems, but trying to address them at their root. All of these sufferings and difficulties are symptoms of the same essential cancer: the cancer of sin. Physical pain comes as a result of the first sin of our parents at the fall. Our emotional pain and many of our illnesses come the wounds that others’ sins and our sins have caused. Jesus isn’t ducking any of these hardships, but in his divine omniscience is trying to lead us to what is the definitive cure for them all.
We see Jesus’ priorities at work in the lives of his first apostles. They stressed that the proclamation of the kingdom was paramount. The first time Jesus sent them out, he gave them instructions first to preach that the kingdom is among them, and then to cure (Mt 10:7-8). In the early Church, the apostles recognized this precedence, stating clearly that their first duty was to “prayer” and the “ministry of the word,” imitating Jesus’ prayer and his proclamation in today’s Gospel. Since they no longer had the time for organized works of charity, which are always too essential to be neglected, the apostles ordained seven deacons to make sure they got done (Acts 6:3-4). St. Paul even gave up baptizing — which others could do — so that he could travel more to preach God’s saving word: “For Christ did not send me to baptize,” he said, “but to proclaim the Gospel” (1 Cor 1:17). Some may be surprised to discover that the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in their document on the priesthood, said that “it is the first duty of priests… to preach the Gospel of God to all men” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 4). Preaching is a more important duty than even the celebration of the sacraments because our receiving the graces of the sacraments is dependent upon having our faith in them aroused. Faith comes, as St. Paul said, “through hearing” (Rom 10:17) and others can hear only if there’s first someone to proclaim. That’s why it’s such a problem in some places when clergy preach poorly, with no passion, as if they’re coming up with something to say on the fly. That’s why it’s similarly a problem when, for example, at daily Mass, some priests don’t even give a homily or give one without any prayer or preparation. Pope Francis is clear that, in Mass, a homily is part of the offering given to God, and it’s super important for priests and faithful both to ponder the word of God if we’re going to make the transition from hearing Jesus speak to us in the Gospel to hearing him say, through the same priests, “This is my Body” and “This is the chalice of my blood.”
Paul, in today’s second reading, described the importance of preaching in his own life as a disciple and apostle of Jesus Christ. He cried out to the Christians in Corinth, “Woe to me if I do not preach the Gospel.” He felt an inner compulsion to share the Gospel he had received. Woe means misery, sorrow, distress, sadness, heartache, grief, anguish, affliction. He felt all of these things. Woe is the antonym of happiness and joy. He was saying that he couldn’t be happy unless he were sharing the Gospel. That’s what led him to spend his entire adult life after his conversion crisscrossing the then known world proclaiming it, despite enormous distances and dangerous pathways on foot and on seas, despite multiple imprisonments, beatings, scourgings, stoning, shipwrecks, imprisonments, betrayals, rejections and organized plots against his life (2 Cor 11:23-29). As he wrote today, he became all things to all people in order to save as many as he could and was willing to risk, spend and give his life to proclaim the Word of God, because he knew that the Gospel was the path of salvation and loved others enough to dedicate his life to sharing it.
Each of us has a great lesson to learn in this. As important as prayer is, something that Jesus got up on short rest to do very early in the morning, God wants more from us than just to pray. As crucial as loving our neighbor is and imitating Jesus as the Good Samaritan, Jesus wants more from us than merely to care for with love, and cure if possible through medicine or prayer, those who are ill. He also wants us, having heard the saving words of the Gospel, to spread them, to bring this good news of salvation to others. He wants us to be under than same inner compulsion as St. Paul was, because if we’re not, then we don’t really appreciate ourselves what the Gospel is.
Jesus’ as the purpose for Jesus’ coming was to proclaim the kingdom, so St. Paul’s great passion was to spread the faith. Do we feel the apostle’s inner desperation that led him to say, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel?” Is that the great yearning of our life, even now on campus? In his programmatic apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis tried to arouse in every Christian the yearning to share the faith. He asked, “If we have received the love that restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others? What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?” He said that we Christians are “convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. It is not the same thing to try to build the world with his Gospel as to try to do so by our own lights. We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize.” Because we are convinced of the incredible difference Jesus makes, we cannot but evangelize, we must go to those who haven’t yet heard or embrace this proclamation of the kingdom and propose it to them, we must feel that inner woe, that interior sense that we’re going to explode, unless we share the faith. That’s what impelled St. Paul to “become all things to all, to save at least some.” He did this — making himself “a slave to all to win over as many as possible” — for the “sake of the Gospel, so that I, too, may have a share in it.” He grasped that if he wasn’t sharing the faith, he wouldn’t really have a share in the Gospel. If we’ve really grasped what the Gospel is, we can’t keep it to ourselves. And if we’re not sharing it, then we are not living it.
I’ve long felt this inner woe. It’s one of the reasons that God used to reveal to me a vocation to serve him and you as a priest. It’s one of the reasons why I travel most Saturdays and during most of my vacations to preach retreats for priests, religious, seminarians, or parishes, and teach at conferences. It’s why I get up very early before dawn to write articles for the National Catholic Register and other publications. It’s one of the reasons why I preach each day rather long homilies. There’s an old quip about preachers that some have to say something and others have something to say. I believe I have something to say, namely, the Gospel of Jesus, the Gospel he himself proclaimed, the Gospel St. Paul proclaimed, and the Gospel the Church has been sharing since the foundation of the world. I hope that each of you, too, will feel that inner woe unless you share the same faith, the same hope, the same love, the same life, the same light.
Why have we come to Jesus tonight? Jesus knows that we have come with our various illnesses, needs and problems. He can cure us and he wants us to ask him with confidence to do so. But he doesn’t want these difficulties to distract us from an even more important gift he wants to give us today: his word. And what does Jesus want us to do with the gift of his word? Two-thousand years ago, Jesus left those who were seeking him in order to go to other villages to preach the Gospel of the kingdom. After his Ascension, he has changed his method of operation. He won’t leave us today early in the morning to go to other neighborhoods, campuses, boroughs or cities. Instead, he will stay here in the tabernacle praying and wants to send us to the other places, just like he eventually did his first disciples and apostles. He does this not so that he can have a well-earned vacation, but because he loves us, and realizes that the greatest gift he could give any of us is the vocation to share in his mission of the proclamation of the kingdom for the salvation of the world. This is why Jesus has come here today. Let’s ask for the grace to align our priorities to his.

Reading 1
Jb 7:1-4, 6-7
Job spoke, saying:
Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?
Are not his days those of hirelings?
He is a slave who longs for the shade,
a hireling who waits for his wages.
So I have been assigned months of misery,
and troubled nights have been allotted to me.
If in bed I say, “When shall I arise?”
then the night drags on;
I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle;
they come to an end without hope.
Remember that my life is like the wind;
I shall not see happiness again.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 147:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
R. (cf. 3a) Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise the LORD, for he is good;
sing praise to our God, for he is gracious;
it is fitting to praise him.
The LORD rebuilds Jerusalem;
the dispersed of Israel he gathers.
R. Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.
He tells the number of the stars;
he calls each by name.
R. Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
to his wisdom there is no limit.
The LORD sustains the lowly;
the wicked he casts to the ground.
R. Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2
1 Cor 9:16-19, 22-23
Brothers and sisters:
If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast,
for an obligation has been imposed on me,
and woe to me if I do not preach it!
If I do so willingly, I have a recompense,
but if unwillingly, then I have been entrusted with a stewardship.
What then is my recompense?
That, when I preach,
I offer the gospel free of charge
so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel.
Although I am free in regard to all,
I have made myself a slave to all
so as to win over as many as possible.
To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak.
I have become all things to all, to save at least some.
All this I do for the sake of the gospel,
so that I too may have a share in it.
Alleluia
Mt 8:17
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Christ took away our infirmities
and bore our diseases.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 1:29-39
On leaving the synagogue
Jesus entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.
Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever.
They immediately told him about her.
He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up.
Then the fever left her and she waited on them.
When it was evening, after sunset,
they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons.
The whole town was gathered at the door.
He cured many who were sick with various diseases,
and he drove out many demons,
not permitting them to speak because they knew him.
Rising very early before dawn, he left
and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.
Simon and those who were with him pursued him
and on finding him said, “Everyone is looking for you.”
He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages
that I may preach there also.
For this purpose have I come.”
So he went into their synagogues,
preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole of Galilee.
The post The Holy Woe to Preach the Gospel, Fifth Sunday (B), February 4, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
31 min
February 04, 2024Jesus’ and Paul’s Woe to Proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom, Fifth Sunday (B), February 4, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, New York
Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
February 4, 2024
Job 7:1-4.6-7, Ps 147, 1 Cor 9:16-19.22-23, Mk 1:29-39

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.4.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
In today’s readings, we encounter a lot of suffering. In the first reading, Job is tossing and turning at night, complaining about the “months of misery and troubled nights.” He has lost most of the members of his family, all his livestock, even his own health, and as he lay with boils all over his skin, the emotional pain overwhelmed him. “Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?,” he asked aloud. His nights were “filled with restlessness” and his days seemed to be coming “to an end without hope” and he believed he would “not see happiness again.” God would soon come to his aid, for as we sang in the Psalm, God “heals the brokenhearted and binds up their wounds.”
In the Gospel, we see that Simon Peter’s mother-in-law had a bad fever, which Jesus cured. Then, after sundown, they brought to Jesus “all who were ill or possessed by demons.” St. Mark tells us that the “whole town was gathered around the door.” Jesus cured the sick and cast out demons. It was likely very grueling work, because in no part of the Gospel did Jesus ever do “general healing services,” but cured the ill or the possessed one-by-one so that he could establish a personal relationship with each grateful recipient and hopefully bring them from a physical cure to a far more important spiritual one. It was probably close to midnight by the time he finished. He arose the next morning, “very early before dawn,” and went to a deserted place to pray. St. Mark tells us that Simon and his companions hunted for Jesus, and when they found him said, “Everyone is looking for you.” Without question the hordes had brought many other of the sick and the possessed from surrounding regions to Jesus and were hoping for a sequel for what they had witnessed the night before.
“Everyone is looking for you.” We might have expected that Jesus’ response to be one of jubilation. After all, he would later say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will refresh you” (Mt 11:28). He wanted people coming to him with their burdens. He wanted to give them refreshment. But Jesus, when told that everyone was looking for him, didn’t respond by saying, “Hallelujah!” Rather he said, much to their surprise, “Let us go on to the nearby villages, so that I may preach there also; for this purpose I have come.”Jesus had come to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. He probably realized in prayer that morning how urgent the task was for him to accomplish the mission the Father had given him. He probably grasped as well that the people were coming him not so much to receive what he wanted to give them, but to obtain from him what they themselves wanted to receive. The crowds looked at him as a wonderworker, as a powerful exorcist and an unbelievably effective and shockingly free physician. But Jesus had a different set of priorities than the crowds. He wanted them to accept him on his own terms, not theirs. He wanted them to hear the Gospel of the Kingdom. He wanted them to come to him not principally as the doctor of their mortal bodies, but as the Savior of their immortal souls.
We see these same priorities of Jesus at work throughout the Gospel. After he had fed the 5,000 families with five loaves and two fish, the crowds walked several miles along the northern edge of the Sea of Galilee to be with Jesus. Upon disembarking, when he saw the crowds, Jesus said to them with great candor: “Amen, amen, I say to you, you are looking for me not because you saw signs but because you ate the loaves and were filled.” (Jn 6:26). They were looking more for a baker giving out a free meal than a savior! Jesus again showed what his real priorities were when friends brought to him a paralyzed man and lowered him into his presence from a roof. They obviously wanted Jesus to cure their friend and help him walk anew. But when Jesus saw the faith of the friends, he turned to the paralyzed man and said, not, “I cure you. Stand up, take up your mat and go home,” but rather, “My son, your sins are forgiven” (Mk 2:5). The most important thing Jesus wanted to do was to cure him of his sins. It was only to silence those were criticizing him for pretending to be God who alone can forgive sins that Jesus, to show his authority, healed the man’s paralysis.
Jesus worked all of his miracles, not because he had come down from heaven to earth to establish an emergency room, but to give divine authentication to the words that he was teaching. The miracles were the dramatic exclamation points to the words of his teaching. And his proclamation of the Kingdom was meant to help us learn what we needed to do to enter into that kingdom not for a visit but forever. Pope Francis said in a homily early in his pontificate, “When Jesus healed a sick man, he was not only a healer. When he taught people … he was not only a catechist, a preacher of morals. When he remonstrated against the hypocrisy of the Pharisees and Sadducees, he was not a revolutionary who wanted to drive out the Romans. No, these things that Jesus did, healing, teaching and speaking out against hypocrisy, were only a sign of something greater that Jesus was doing: he was forgiving sins.” Reconciling the world in Christ in the name of the Father, Pope Francis continued, “this is Jesus’ mission. Everything else — healing, teaching, reprimands — are only signs of that deeper miracle which is the re-creation of the world. Thus, reconciliation is the re-creation of the world; and the most profound mission of Jesus is the redemption of all of us sinners.”
Today all of us have come to Mass, but it’s important for us to examine honestly why we’ve come. Have we come here hungering for whathe wants to give us or for what we want him to give us? Are we here trying to accord our priorities with His, or His with ours? It’s still common today that many Catholics, like those in today’s Gospel, come to the Lord mostly as a miracle worker, as a benefactor who can pull strings to get us out of a jam, as a powerful friend who can provide a quick fix to a problem we’re facing. Jesus, however, wants more. As he said in today’s Gospel, the reason he came from heaven to earth was to proclaim the message of the kingdom and to proclaim it in such a way that it won’t fall on deaf ears and be ignored, but rather embraced, followed and lived with joy. He wants us to respond to his proclamation of the kingdom with the same type of life-changing faith that we see in Mary and the apostles. That’s his priority.
Many people today might believe that Jesus has his priorities mixed up. After all, imagine how full our churches and chapels would be if Jesus, through his priests, or his missionaries of charity, or through lay parishioners, were working tremendous miracles of healing. We could depopulate the local hospitals and bring everyone before the altar. People would come from all over the city, state, country and world to be cured. The dramatic exorcisms would bring national and international media attention. All those with cancer, or paralysis, or back-pain, or emotional scars would leave completely healed. Probably criminals and drug dealers, in seeing this incredible divine power working through human instruments, might similarly be brought to conversion. But this is not the way Jesus has chosen for the Church to operate. Instead, he fundamentally sends priests, religious and lay people to preach the Gospel of the kingdom. From Jesus’ own divine perspective, the greatest gift he can give any of us, whether we’re ill and suffering or healthy, is his holy word! Jesus wants us here most to listen to his preaching, to embrace his word, and in consuming the Word-made-flesh in the Eucharist, to become so one with the word that we become living commentaries of life in the kingdom. In doing so, he’s not ignoring all our ills and problems, but trying to address them at their root. All of these sufferings and difficulties are symptoms of the same essential cancer: the cancer of sin. Physical pain comes as a result of the first sin of our parents at the fall. Our emotional pain and many of our illnesses come the wounds that our sins and others’ have caused. Jesus isn’t ducking any of these hardships, but in his divine omniscience is trying to lead us to what is the definitive cure for them all.
We see Jesus’ priorities at work in the lives of his first apostles. They stressed that the proclamation of the kingdom was paramount. The first time Jesus sent them out, he gave the instructions first to preach that the kingdom is among them, and then to cure (Mt 10:7-8). In the time of the early Church, the apostles recognized this precedence, because their first duty was to “prayer” and the “ministry of the word,” imitating Jesus’ prayer and his proclamation in today’s Gospel. Since they no longer had the time for other good works of charity, which are too essential to be neglected, they ordained seven deacons to make sure they got done (Acts 6:3-4). St. Paul even gave up baptizing — which others could do — so that he could travel more to preach God’s saving word: “For Christ did not send me to baptize,” he said, “but to proclaim the Gospel” (1 Cor 1:17). Some may be surprised to discover that the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in their document on the priesthood, said that “it is the first duty of priests… to preach the Gospel of God to all men” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 4). Preaching is a more important duty than even the celebration of the sacraments because our receiving the graces of the sacraments is dependent upon having our faith in them aroused.
In today’s second reading, St. Paul wrote, “Woe to me I do not preach the Gospel.” He felt an inner compulsion to share the Gospel he had received. That’s what led him to spend his entire adult life after his conversion crisscrossing the then known world proclaiming that Gospel, despite enormous distances and dangerous pathways on foot and on seas, despite great sufferings, rejection, imprisonment and eventually martyrdom. He became all things to all people, he said today, in order to save as many as he could. He did this because he knew that the Gospel was the path of salvation and loved others enough to dedicate his life to spreading it. Likewise, Jesus of course knew that it was the means of salvation and he regarded it as even more important than helping another day’s worth of ill and infirm people have their physical maladies cured.
Each of us has a great lesson to learn in this. As important as prayer is, something that Jesus got up on short rest to do very early in the morning, God wants more from us than just to pray. As crucial as loving our neighbor is and imitating Jesus as the Good Samaritan, Jesus wants more from us than merely to care for with love, and cure if possible, those who are ill. He also wants us, having heard the saving words of the Gospel, to spread them, to bring this good news of salvation to others. He wants us to be under than same inner compulsion as St. Paul was, because if we’re not, then we don’t really appreciate ourselves what the Gospel is.
Jesus’ as the purpose for Jesus’ coming was to proclaim the kingdom, so St. Paul’s great passion was to spread the faith. Do we feel the apostle’s inner desperation that led him to say, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel?” Is that the great yearning of our life? In his programmatic apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel, Pope Francis tried to help sharing the faith become the yearning for every Christian. “If we have received the love that restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others?,” he asked. “What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?” He said that we Christians are “convinced from personal experience that it is not the same thing to have known Jesus as not to have known him, not the same thing to walk with him as to walk blindly, not the same thing to hear his word as not to know it, and not the same thing to contemplate him, to worship him, to find our peace in him, as not to. It is not the same thing to try to build the world with his Gospel as to try to do so by our own lights. We know well that with Jesus life becomes richer and that with him it is easier to find meaning in everything. This is why we evangelize.” Because we are convinced of the incredible difference Jesus makes, we cannot but evangelize, we must go to those who haven’t yet heard or embrace this proclamation of the kingdom and propose it to them, we must feel that inner woe, that interior sense that we’re going to explode, unless we share the faith. That’s what impelled St. Paul to “become all things to all, to save at least some.” He did this — making himself “a slave to all to win over as many as possible” — for the “sake of the Gospel, so that I, too, may have a share in it.” He grasped that if he wasn’t sharing the faith, he wouldn’t really have a share in the Gospel. If we’ve really grasped what the Gospel is, we can’t keep it to ourselves. And if we’re not sharing it, then we are not living it.
So we need to ask: Why have we come to Jesus today? Jesus knows that we have come with our various illnesses, needs and problems. He can cure us and he wants us to ask him with confidence to do so. But he doesn’t want these difficulties to distract us from an even more important gift he wants to give us today: his word. And what does Jesus want us to do with the gift of his word? Two-thousand years ago, Jesus left those who were seeking him in order to go to other villages to preach the Gospel of the kingdom. After his Ascension, he has changed his method of operation. He won’t leave us today early in the morning to go to other neighborhoods, boroughs or cities. Instead, he will stay here and wants to send us to the other places, just like he eventually did his first disciples and apostles. He does this not so that he can have a well-earned eternal vacation, but because he loves us, and realizes that the greatest gift he could give any of us is the vocation to share in his mission of the proclamation of the kingdom for the salvation of the world. This is why Jesus has come here today. Let’s ask for the grace to align our priorities to his.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 JB 7:1-4, 6-7
Job spoke, saying:
Is not man’s life on earth a drudgery?
Are not his days those of hirelings?
He is a slave who longs for the shade,
a hireling who waits for his wages.
So I have been assigned months of misery,
and troubled nights have been allotted to me.
If in bed I say, “When shall I arise?”
then the night drags on;
I am filled with restlessness until the dawn.
My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle;
they come to an end without hope.
Remember that my life is like the wind;
I shall not see happiness again.
Responsorial Psalm PS 147:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
R. (cf. 3a) Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Praise the LORD, for he is good;
sing praise to our God, for he is gracious;
it is fitting to praise him.
The LORD rebuilds Jerusalem;
the dispersed of Israel he gathers.
R. Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
He heals the brokenhearted
and binds up their wounds.
He tells the number of the stars;
he calls each by name.
R. Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Great is our Lord and mighty in power;
to his wisdom there is no limit.
The LORD sustains the lowly;
the wicked he casts to the ground.
R. Praise the Lord, who heals the brokenhearted.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Reading 2 1 COR 9:16-19, 22-23
Brothers and sisters:
If I preach the gospel, this is no reason for me to boast,
for an obligation has been imposed on me,
and woe to me if I do not preach it!
If I do so willingly, I have a recompense,
but if unwillingly, then I have been entrusted with a stewardship.
What then is my recompense?
That, when I preach,
I offer the gospel free of charge
so as not to make full use of my right in the gospel.
Although I am free in regard to all,
I have made myself a slave to all
so as to win over as many as possible.
To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak.
I have become all things to all, to save at least some.
All this I do for the sake of the gospel,
so that I too may have a share in it.
Alleluia MT 8:17
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Christ took away our infirmities
and bore our diseases.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MK 1:29-39
On leaving the synagogue
Jesus entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.
Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever.
They immediately told him about her.
He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up.
Then the fever left her and she waited on them.
When it was evening, after sunset,
they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons.
The whole town was gathered at the door.
He cured many who were sick with various diseases,
and he drove out many demons,
not permitting them to speak because they knew him.
Rising very early before dawn, he left
and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.
Simon and those who were with him pursued him
and on finding him said, “Everyone is looking for you.”
He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages
that I may preach there also.
For this purpose have I come.”
So he went into their synagogues,
preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole of Galilee.
The post Jesus’ and Paul’s Woe to Proclaim the Gospel of the Kingdom, Fifth Sunday (B), February 4, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
February 03, 2024Letting Nothing Separate You From The Love of God, Nuptial Mass of Mene Ukueberuwa and Anna Wood, February 3, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Paul’s Roman Catholic Church, Princeton, New Jersey
Nuptial Mass of Mene Oluwadurotimi Ukueberuwa and Anna Marie Wood
February 3, 2024
Tob 8:4-8, Ps 128, Rom 8:31-39, Mt 5:1-12

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The following text guided the homily:
It’s fitting at this Church dedicated to St. Paul that we begin with the passage Anna and Mene chose for today’s epistle, in which that great apostle emphasized that nothing can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord, not anguish, distress, persecution, famine, poverty, peril, persecution, present things, future things, death or any created reality. These were not abstract concepts for the former Saul of Tarsus. We know that after his conversion he had himself suffered multiple imprisonments, beatings, scourgings, stoning, shipwrecks, imprisonments, betrayals, rejections and organized plots against his life (2 Cor 11:23-29). But he was able to write to the first Christians in Corinth, that he was “afflicted in every way, but not constrained; confused, but not driven to despair; persecuted, but not abandoned; struck down, but not destroyed” (2 Cor 4:8-9), because he knew not only that none of those hardships could separate him from God, but that in the midst of them, the presence of the risen Lord Jesus strengthening him in his weakness would shine out all the more (Phil 4:13).
This is a powerful truth to ponder on the day you, Anna and Mene, are about to make a sacred commitment to each other in good times and in bad, in sickness and in health, in poverty and prosperity for the rest of your life. You are making this public promise not just before God but also with and to God, who himself promises as he joins you to be with you in all the vicissitudes and victories that await. Nothing can separate you from his love, not illness, not death, not even sin — as St. Paul himself realized, who before his conversion persecuted the Church of God and presided over the murder of the innocent St. Stephen. Like the prodigal son, we can wander far away from the Father’s house, we can waste our gifts and act contrary to the dignity we’ve received, but God never stops loving. And today, on the cusp of your making in just minutes this beautiful covenant with each other and with God, the Lord through St. Paul reminds you of the depth of his love for you and says to you, “Love one another as I love you” (John 15:12). Let nothing separate you from the love of each other, whether anguish, distress, poverty, peril, quarrels, bad days, sleepless nights, or even suffering and death. God gives you his love so that, with that love that conquers even death, you can love each other.
This is the type of love we see between Tobias and Sarah whose witness you wanted to be proclaimed in today’s first reading. Sarah, afflicted by a curse, had already experienced the death of seven husbands. With great courage, trust in God and love for each other, however, she and Tobias made a lifetime commitment to each other, entrusting themselves to the merciful love of God. On their wedding night, as we heard, they knelt together, praised God for the gift of marriage, and called down his mercy, so that they might consecrate their love to a noble purpose and take each other not out of lust but out of the total self-giving, faithful, fruitful, reverential love we find in God’s love for us. It’s moving to me that since last May, the two of you have made and kept a commitment to pray together like Sarah and Tobias, normally each evening, preferably in person but sometimes on the phone. You’ve prayed the Rosary, novenas, and litanies, first for Begho after his shocking death, then for your family and friends, for your own relationship, and for many other intentions. Such prayer is indeed the best means by which to remember, and open yourselves to, the love of God in your life and in your relationship. You told me, Anna, that you’re convinced that such nightly prayer, arising out of tragedy, is what has ultimately brought the two of you much closer to each other and to God. Nothing can separate you from the love of God — and everything, including the hardest of human experiences, can be a means by which we can enter more deeply into the gift and mystery of divine love.
That’s what the Gospel you selected for your nuptial Mass emphasizes, in which Jesus overturns earthly expectations and reveals to us the path to receive, and imitate, the love of God. In a thanatophobic age struggling to understand the relationship of death to life, Jesus promises that those who love enough to mourn will indeed experience great comfort through the truths of faith and the fact of his own triumph. In a world that seeks after money, that places its faith, hope and love in material positions and in things that can be bought, Jesus tells us that the truly blessed are those who are poor in spirit, who treasure his kingdom above all. In an epoch that relies on force, when people and leaders often bully their way to power, Jesus tells us that real happiness comes from being meek, from making peace, from being merciful. In a world addicted to the lust of the flesh, leading to so many broken hearts, lives and families, Jesus proclaims the importance of purity of heart, which sees God in others, reverences and loves him. At a time in which a globalized indifference to others has gone viral, Jesus says that the path to happiness is compassion, through hungering and thirsting for justice and through the perfection of charity that is holiness. In an era when people crave publicity, idolize celebrities, and yearn for social media likes, influence and popularity, Jesus says we will be blessed, rather, when we’re insulted, persecuted and calumniated because of our love for him. These are not easy words. The reality to which they point is likewise difficult to live. But they are the path Jesus himself lived, the way he calls you and us to follow, and the life that will ultimately unite us to the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord.
We rejoice that the lessons of today’s readings are not just discarnate theological truths for you, but something you have already discovered in your relationship and hope with God’s help to continue to mature in over the course of your married life. The very fact that you are here today, you believe, is not a fruit of random occurrences, but of the love of God at work over the course of your years.
Several of us know the story. Anna and Mene first met at an Easter party in 2013, Mene recalls, but it made no lasting impression whatsoever on Anna. Three years later they met at a lecture on the theory of art composition at NYU’s Catholic Center, where during the cocktail reception Mene made a strong impression on Anna, but Mene has no recollection at all of that meeting. God, however, didn’t stop trying to bring the two of them together in fulfillment of their vocation. He providentially arranged for both of them to start going to Sunday Mass at St. Michael’s Church in Manhattan, where Mene was a parishioner and volunteer living next door, and, Anna, ten years ago last month, was welcomed into the Catholic Church, received the Sacrament of Confirmation, and was subsequently hired as a cantor. They used to see each other regularly during the coffee hour in the parish hall after Mass, talking about music, art and life. Anna even wondered if Mene was interested. But they were destined to become living witnesses of how love, to take the first adjective St. Paul uses to describe love — both divine and human — is “patient” (1 Cor 13:4). In 2017, they started to co-host “Fish Friday” dinners every week during Lent, where Anna complemented Mene’s bachelor-level cooking with her feminine touch and harmonized his tenor with her soprano during sung Evening Prayer. In 2019, Mene asked Anna to go to the Metropolitan Opera “as a friend” on, of all days during the year, Valentine’s Day, but after a beautiful rendition of Tchaikovsky’sIolanta and Bartok’s Bluebeard’s Castle, friends they remained.
Finally, in October 2022, when Anna was back in New York from Texas to attend the wedding in Tarrytown, New York of her friend Katherine Doe to Michael Marsh, she needed a plus-one, someone who could get along with her musician friends, be a good conversationalist, like to dance and whom she wouldn’t feel awkward asking. Mene, and Mene alone, came to mind. She asked and Mene accepted. They went. And what happened next is one of the greatest signs that God was done waiting and wanted to start actualizing his plan of love in their lives. Waiting in line during the cocktail hour, after small talk, the celebrant of the wedding, Reverend Gareth Evans, pastor of St. Barnabas Episcopal Church in Irvington, asked, “So are you two dating?” Episcopal clergy are not normally renowned for either boldness or indiscretion. After Mene and Anna somewhat awkwardly mumbled that they were just friends, Father Evans, rather than changing the subject, boldly doubled down, a confirmation that God was indeed at work, some might say even miraculously considering the context. He asked, “So why aren’t the two of you dating?” It’s was clearly a question from above, perhaps eleven years waiting to be made explicit. Mene seized the opening to ask, “Yeah, Anna, why aren’t we dating?” Anna told him that she thought he knew the answer to that question — that he hadn’t yet asked — and hoped he would take the hint. At the end of the night, he did. After their Uber dropped her off at her friend’s place, Mene said that he would love to take her out when she was back in New York. Anna, as her mother Judy noted, “got back really quickly after that.” Within days, she found a new job and an apartment. Three weeks later, on October 29, they had their first official date for brunch on the Hoboken waterfront. Exactly one year after God, it seems, through Father Evans, asked them why they weren’t dating, Mene proposed in the catacombs of the Basilica of Old St. Patrick’s. Nothing, including faulty memories, multiple unrealized encounters at Church, and missed signals even on Valentine’s Day, could ultimately separate them from the love of God at work in their life. For that we all give thanks!
And, conscious as St. Paul affirms, that everything works out for the good for those who love God (Rom 8:28), we likewise thank God for what he’s done in the intervening eleven years to get both of them ready for this day. You told me during marriage preparation, Anna, that, by the time you started dating Mene, you had sensed that he was the “answer to years of praying for a devout husband” and that you felt not only peace but a great “sense of relief” in being able to “trust someone who I had known so long to be a solid and steady friend.” You knew him to be a man of character, honor, constancy and gentleness with whom you could “bring up anything that needed to be said and discussed,” knowing he wouldn’t be defensive or angry. You told me that “he truly has a heart of gold,” he’s simple in needs, intelligent, a wonderful interlocutor, interested and interesting, focused on what matters, disciplined, courageous, adventurous, hard-working, thoughtful, consistent, calm, peaceful, empathetic, encouraging, joyful, trustworthy, vivacious, driven to excellence, appreciative, sacrificial, and loving of his family. You stated, “With Mene, I feel so acutely aware of God’s goodness and gifts.” He’s reminded you, in short, of the divine Giver and so many of God’s attributes.
Mene, in marriage preparation you told me that, looking over the course the last many years, you’re convinced that “God has brought us together.” There were, you added, “certain moments when God pushed us toward each other while we were friends and created opportunities for us to grow closer gradually. A lot of that took place under his roof, at St. Michael’s. Worshiping God together has provided the main structure of our relationship. God has given both of us the graces we’ve needed in order to give each other our best.” Over the course of time, you said you’ve come to “love Anna’s faith more than anything” and noted how “praying regularly comes naturally to her and she’s woven it deeply into her daily routine.” You said that you now pray much more with Anna than you prayed before on your own, appreciate how she’s helped you grow in knowledge and love of the saints, and believe your prayer with her has overflowed into your personal prayer. You also described that you love how energetic she is, how much time she spends thinking about her family and friends, about how they’re doing and what they need. You love her passion for music and education; how intentional she is and how bold, taking a leap to move to New Jersey so that you could be closer. You said you also love how much she respects you as an individual, interiorizes what you discuss and has always made the effort to get to know the real you. The way she has treated you has, in short, reminded you of how you know God loves you, how he searches you and knows you, as Psalm 139 beautifully attests.
And so today, after, as Mene understatedly says, “we took our time and discerned marriage,” you have come to the day on which God, who has begun this good work in you, seeks to bring your relationship closer to perfection (Phil 1:6). You are both conscious of what is really happening today. Anna, you eloquently told me that marriage is a “sacrament, an indissoluble life-long covenant between a man and a woman that is a lived metaphor of Christ’s love for the Church, an honorable and joyful calling that is meant to lead both spouses closer to holiness and therefore to God and to collaborate with God in his creativity through bringing children into the world.” It’s a summons, you said, to “die to our old selves and be remade into his likeness so that we can love each other with that love and so that that love might extend outward to our children and the world.” You added, Mene, that “marriage is God’s way of uniting and improving men and women, letting us share in his generative work, and bringing spouses and children closer to him. The relationship between husband and wife represents the union of God and men” and leads to “taking on a new nature in God’s eyes, becoming permanently united to each other and jointly united to God in a new way [with] a new vocation in the Church.”
During this Mass, you’ve asked to add two elements that signify your faith and the help you’re asking of God so that you may live up to your vocation as Christian spouses through the Sacrament of Matrimony. Toward the end of Mass, you will process together as husband and wife to the Altar of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Daughter of Zion who teaches us how to be faithful disciples of her Son, the woman God the Father chose to be the mother of his Son and Jesus himself from the Cross chose to be our Mother, the loving Lady who interceded with her Son for the couple in Cana of Galilee for his first miracle and who doubtless is interceding for you now. You will present her flowers, asking for her prayers that the divine grace her Son bestows will truly flourish in your marriage. You will also entrust yourself to her maternal intercession with a prayer of consecration you both have composed. We join you in those heartfelt, filial prayers.
The second element you wanted to incorporate is that when you profess your vows, you will be holding in your hands a crucifix. This is a tradition common to Christians in the Eastern rites that you witnessed at a recent wedding in Bosnia-Herzegovina. You will use a crucifix Mene treasures from his years living at St. Michael’s. Making your vows embracing Christ on the Cross will be a public witness that, as you enter into the covenant of marriage, you do so strengthened by Christ’s cruciform love for you, as you beg him to help you love each other by that same measure. St. Paul, the patron of this parish Church, called all Christian husbands to love their wives “as Christ loved the Church and handed himself over for her to sanctify her” (Eph 5:25), to seek in marriage to say to each other, “This is my body given for you,” making your married life a commentary on the words of consecration. It’s a challenge of course to commit oneself until death not just for better, richer and healthier but for worse, poorer and sicker. It requires great faith in God, in each other, and in God’s capacity to draw good, even love, from difficulties, economic hardships, suffering and even death. But as you hold the Cross, you recognize that God the Father drew the greatest good of all time — his Son’s resurrection and our salvation — from the evil of Jesus’ crucifixion and that he, similarly, will make all things work out for the good for those who love him (Rom 8:28). As you make those vows to each other and to and before God, we pray that you will model your married life on the mystery of the Lord’s Cross and see in the cross the deepest expression of the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord from which we cannot be separated.
At every Mass, we Catholics believe that we not only hold onto the Cross but enter liturgically in time into the eternal events of Jesus’ once-and-for-all sacrifice from the Upper Room and Calvary. This is where we believe we receive his love for us and are strengthened from within to love each other by that same standard. This is where we seek to unite ourselves to Christ who is the face of the Beatitudes and who helps us, in turn, to become truly blessed men and women through living them. This is where Christians, even in the midst of persecution and distress, anguish and famine across the centuries, have risked their lives to come to worship the Lord and receive him with love. This is where the early Christians used to build canopies over altars to symbolize that the altar is the marriage bed where the union between Christ and his Bride the Church is consummated, when the Bride of Christ receives within herself the Body and Blood of Christ the Bridegroom, and is capacitated to live filled with the spousal love of God. The altar is indeed the marriage bed where generations of Catholic couples, in imitation of Tobias and Sarah, have prayed not just on their wedding day but throughout their marriage, that the Lord may pour out his mercy upon them, deliver them from every evil, and strengthen them in the noble purpose of Christian marriage for the rest of their life. It’s where they say together “Amen, Amen!,” that beautiful Hebrew verb for “uphold” or “support,” professing publicly that they will make Christ and his divine mercy given for us in the Eucharist, the efficacious sign of his inseparable love, the true foundation of their life. Today, around this marriage bed, we all join you in praying, that God, who has waited for this day not just for eleven years but since the foundation of the world, will bless you with every spiritual blessing in the heavens, and through you, and the love of God you radiate, bless us all.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
A Reading from the Book of Tobit
When the girl’s parents left the bedroom and closed the door behind them, Tobiah arose from bed and said to his wife, “My love, get up. Let us pray and beg our Lord to have mercy on us and to grant us deliverance.” She got up, and they started to pray and beg that deliverance might be theirs. He began with these words: “Blessed are you, O God of our fathers; praised be your name forever and ever. Let the heavens and all your creation praise you forever. You made Adam and you gave him his wife Eve to be his help and support; and from these two the human race descended. You said, ‘It is not good for the man to be alone; let us make him a partner like himself.’ Now, Lord, you know that I take this wife of mine not because of lust, but for a noble purpose. Call down your mercy on me and on her, and allow us to live together to a happy old age.” They said together, “Amen, amen,”
Gradual
Happy are all who fear the LORD, who walk in the ways of God. What your hands provide you will enjoy; you will be happy and prosper: Like a fruitful vine your wife within your home, Like olive plants your children around your table. Just so will they be blessed who fear the LORD. May the LORD bless you from Zion, all the days of your life That you may share Jerusalem’s joy and live to see your children’s children. Peace upon Israel!
A Reading from the Letter of St. Paul to the Romans
What then shall we say to this? If God is for us, who can be against us? He who did not spare his own Son but handed him over for us all, how will he not also give us everything else along with him? Who will bring a charge against God’s chosen ones? It is God who acquits us. Who will condemn? It is Christ [Jesus] who died, rather, was raised, who also is at the right hand of God, who indeed intercedes for us. What will separate us from the love of Christ? Will anguish, or distress, or persecution, or famine, or nakedness, or peril, or the sword? As it is written: “For your sake we are being slain all the day; we are looked upon as sheep to be slaughtered.” No, in all these things we conquer overwhelmingly through him who loved us. For 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.
A Reading from the Holy Gospel According to Matthew
When he saw the crowds, he went up the mountain, and after he had sat down, his disciples came to him. He began to teach them, saying: “Blessed are the poor in spirit, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are they who mourn, for they will be comforted. Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the land. Blessed are they who hunger and thirst for righteousness, for they will be satisfied. Blessed are the merciful, for they will be shown mercy. Blessed are the clean of heart, for they will see God. Blessed are the peacemakers, for they will be called children of God. Blessed are they who are persecuted for the sake of righteousness, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. Blessed are you when they insult you and persecute you and utter every kind of evil against you [falsely] because of me. Rejoice and be glad, for your reward will be great in heaven. Thus they persecuted the prophets who were before you.

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23 min
February 03, 2024Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 3, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
February 3, 2024

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The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday when we will have an opportunity to examine the beginnings of Jesus’ public ministry and get a glimpse of an ordinary day in his life. His priorities can help us examine our own, both with regard to how we’re receiving his work in our life as well as how we’re continuing his work.
Jesus began his day by preaching for a long time in the synagogue on the Sabbath, which as any priest will tell you after a Sunday morning, must have been somewhat exhausting all-day work since people would return home normally only at sunset. Then he went to Simon’s house where he healed his mother-in-law.
Then, since it was after sundown and the Sabbath was over, the people of Capernaum brought to Jesus “all who were ill or possessed by demons.” St. Mark tells us that the “whole town was gathered around the door.” Jesus cured the sick and cast out demons. It was likely very grueling work, because in no part of the Gospel did Jesus ever do “general healing services,” but cured the ill or the possessed one-by-one so that he could establish a personal relationship with each grateful recipient and hopefully bring them from a physical cure to a far more important spiritual one. It was probably quite late by the time he finished. He arose the next morning, St. Mark tells us, “very early before dawn,” and went to a deserted place to pray, showing that prayer was more important to him than sleep and setting for us an example not to make excuses that we have no time to pray. The evangelist tells us that Simon and his companions, when they didn’t find Jesus, went out to hunt him down. When they finally found him, they said, “Everyone is looking for you.” Without question the hordes had brought many other of the sick and the possessed from surrounding regions to Jesus and were hoping for a sequel to what they had witnessed the night before.
“Everyone is looking for you.” We might have expected that Jesus’ response would have been one of jubilation. After all, he would later say, “Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will refresh you” (Mt 11:28). He wanted people coming to him with their burdens. He wanted to give them refreshment. But Jesus, when told that everyone was looking for him, didn’t respond by saying, “Hallelujah!” Rather, much to their surprise, he stated, “Let us go on to the nearby villages, so that I may preach there also; for this purpose I have come.” Jesus had come to announce the Gospel of the Kingdom of God. He probably realized in prayer that morning how urgent the task was for him to accomplish the mission the Father had given him. He probably grasped as well that the people were coming him not so much to receive what he most wanted to give them, but to obtain from him what they themselves wanted. The crowds looked at him as a wonder-worker, as a powerful exorcist and a shockingly inexpensive and unbelievably effective physician. But Jesus had a different set of priorities than the crowds. He wanted them to accept him on his own terms, not theirs. He wanted them to come to him not principally as the doctor of their mortal bodies, but as the Savior of their immortal souls.
Jesus’ priorities get us to focus, first, on ours with regard to him. Do we hunger for what he wants to give us or for what we want him to give us? Do we seek to accord our priorities with His, or His with ours? It’s still common today that many people, like those in today’s Gospel, come to the Lord mostly as a miracle worker, as a benefactor who can pull strings to get us out of a jam, as a powerful friend who can provide a quick fix to a problem we’re facing. Jesus, however, wants more. As he said in the Gospel, the reason he came from heaven to earth was to proclaim the message of the kingdom and to proclaim it in such a way that it won’t fall on deaf ears, that it won’t be ignored, but embraced, followed and lived with joy. He wants us to respond to his proclamation of the kingdom with the same type of life-changing faith that we see in Mary and the apostles. That’s his priority.
Many of us, let’s be honest, might believe that Jesus has his priorities mixed up. After all, imagine how full our Churches would be if Jesus, through parish priests or through one of the parishioners, was working tremendous miracles of healing. The dramatic exorcisms would bring national and international media attention. All those with cancer, or paralysis, or back-pain, or emotional scars could come to the Church and leave completely healed. Probably it would also bring some of the criminals and drug dealers who, in seeing this incredible divine power working through human instruments, might be brought to conversion. But that’s not the way Jesus chooses to do it. Instead, he fundamentally sends priests ordained in his person and the whole Church with them to preach the Gospel of the kingdom. From Jesus’ own divine perspective, the greatest gift he can give any of us, whether we’re ill and suffering or healthy, is his holy word! Jesus wants us most to listen to his preaching, to embrace his word, and in consuming the Word-made-flesh in the Eucharist, to become so one with the word that we become living commentaries of life in the kingdom. In doing so, he’s not ignoring all our ills and problems, but trying to address them at their root. All of these sufferings and difficulties are symptoms of the same essential cancer: the cancer of sin. Physical pain comes as a result of the first sin of our parents at the fall. Our emotional pain and many of our illnesses come from the wounds that our sins and others’ have caused. Jesus isn’t ducking any of these difficulties, but in his divine omniscience is trying to lead us to what is the ultimate cure for them all.
We see Jesus’ priorities at work in the lives of his first apostles. The first time Jesus sent them out, he gave them instructions first to preach that the kingdom is among them, and then to cure (Mt 10:7-8). In the time of the early Church, the apostles recognized that, because their first duty was to “prayer” and the “ministry of the word,” imitating Jesus’ prayer and his proclamation in Sunday’s Gospel. Since they no longer had the time for other good works of charity, which are too essential to be neglected, they ordained seven deacons (Acts 6:3-4). St. Paul even gave up baptizing — which others could do — so that he could travel more to preach: “For Christ did not send me to baptize,” he said, “ but to proclaim the gospel” (1 Cor 1:17). In this Sunday’s second reading, he’ll say, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!” You may be surprised to discover that the fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in their document on the priesthood, said that “it is the first duty of priests… to preach the Gospel of God to all men” (Presbyterorum Ordinis, 4). Preaching is a more important duty than even the celebration of the sacraments because our practice of the sacraments is dependent upon having our faith in them aroused by the word of God.
Each of us has a great lesson to learn in this. God wants more from us than just to pray, as Jesus did very early in the morning. He wants more from us than merely to care for those who are ill, loving them and trying to help them according to our capacities, just like Jesus did according to his. He also wants us, having heard the saving words of the Gospel, to spread them, to bring this good news of salvation to others. Pope Francis asked in his exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel, “If we have received the love that restores meaning to our lives, how can we fail to share that love with others? …What kind of love would not feel the need to speak of the beloved, to point him out, to make him known?” Because we are convinced of the difference Jesus makes, we must evangelize, we must go to those who haven’t yet heard or embraced this proclamation of the kingdom and propose it to them. We know how our culture much needs this proclamation. We know how much various family members and friends do.
Two-thousand years ago, at the end of the day in his life that we observe in this Sunday’s scene in the Gospel, Jesus left those who were seeking him in order to go to other villages to preach the Gospel of the kingdom. After his Ascension, he has changed his method of operation. He no longer leaves to go to other neighborhoods or cities, but instead stays in the tabernacle and wants to send us, like his first followers, to the other villages. He does this not so that he can have a well-earned eternal vacation, but because he loves us, and he realizes that the greatest gift he could give any of us is the vocation to share in his mission of the proclamation of the kingdom for the salvation of the world. So let us go to the nearby houses, streets and villages. Everyone is still looking for Jesus, even if they don’t really know it. Let’s do what we can to bring Jesus to them and them to Jesus. For this reason he came. For this reason he has sent us the Holy Spirit on Pentecost and at our Confirmation. For this reason he ultimately created us.

The Gospel on which the brief homily was based was:
Gospel
Mk 1:29-39
On leaving the synagogue
Jesus entered the house of Simon and Andrew with James and John.
Simon’s mother-in-law lay sick with a fever.
They immediately told him about her.
He approached, grasped her hand, and helped her up.
Then the fever left her and she waited on them.
When it was evening, after sunset,
they brought to him all who were ill or possessed by demons.
The whole town was gathered at the door.
He cured many who were sick with various diseases,
and he drove out many demons,
not permitting them to speak because they knew him.
Rising very early before dawn, he left
and went off to a deserted place, where he prayed.
Simon and those who were with him pursued him
and on finding him said, “Everyone is looking for you.”
He told them, “Let us go on to the nearby villages
that I may preach there also.
For this purpose have I come.”
So he went into their synagogues,
preaching and driving out demons throughout the whole of Galilee.
The post Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 3, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min
February 02, 2024Encountering the Lord with Burning Love, Feast of the Presentation, February 2, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Feast of the Presentation of the Lord
February 2, 2024
Mal 3:1-4, Ps 24, Heb 2:14-18, Lk 2:22-40

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.2.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we celebrate a great feast, one so central that we meditate upon it at least two times a week in the fourth Joyful Mystery. The point of the feast is summarized in the first reading and in the beautiful instructions and prayers that we pray at the beginning of Mass just before the procession, which describe the Presentation fundamentally as an encounter. The Prophet Malachi tells us, “And suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek.” The Lord comes to meet us. We emphasize this in the instruction as Mass begins before the procession of light. “Today is the blessed day when Jesus was presented in the Temple by Mary and Joseph. Outwardly he was fulfilling the Law, but in reality he was coming to meet his believing people.” After describing how Simeon and Anna met him in the Temple, we continue, praying, “So let us also, gathered together by the Holy Spirit, proceed to the house of God to encounter Christ. There we shall find him and recognize him in the breaking of the Bread until he comes again, revealed in glory.” The awareness of the Presentation as an encounter with Christ continues throughout the Mass. In the Eucharistic Preface, we will pray that “we, too, [will] go forth rejoicing to encounter your salvation.” In the Collect, we implore that “by your grace, we may be presented to you with minds made pure.” At the end of Mass we will ask the Lord that “we, going forth to meet the Lord, [may] obtain the gift of eternal life.” All of these prayers convey that Jesus is constantly being presented to us and we are supposed to be constantly presenting ourselves to him. The Christian life is meant to be a continuous mutual presentation, a lifetime encounter of love and life. The candles we bless today are supposed to symbolize our burning love for him. We ask God the Father to bless them precisely “so that, treading the path of virtue, we may reach that light that never fails.” Our encounter with the Lord here on this feast day and then throughout the mutual encounter of Christian life is meant to lead to an eternal encounter in the heavenly Temple.
So that’s what celebrating the Feast of the Presentation well intends to bring about in us. Concretely, however, this celebration also contains many practical applications to help us keep that continuous encounter throughout our life. I’d like to focus on five elements we can learn from this feast about that encounter with the Lord and how it’s meant to change us.
The first thing we can ponder is the nature of consecration, which can help us live our own baptismal consecration. St. Luke quotes the Mosaic Law in today’s Gospel, saying, “Every male who opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord.” The Lord told the Israelites through Moses “Every first-born son you must redeem,” adding, “If your son should ask you later on, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall tell him, ‘With a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, that place of slavery. … That is why I sacrifice to the Lord everything of the male sex that opens the womb, and why I redeem every first-born of my sons.’” (Ex 13:13-15). This right of “redemption” of the first-born Son was a way to relive the Passover, to make it present, to allow every generation to enter into God’s saving action. How much more beautiful still is it that in the Presentation Christ the Redeemer, the New and Eternal Passover Incarnate, was himself being redeemed! He had come into our world precisely to lead us all through the true Passover in his blood from death to life, from sin to holiness, from this world to the new and eternal Jerusalem. In today’s first reading, the Prophet Malachi tells us, “And suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek. … He is like the refiner’s fire or like the fuller’s lye. … He will purify the sons of Levi, refining them like gold or like silver that they may offer due sacrifice to the Lord.” Christ comes to purify us so that we might offer fitting sacrifice to the Lord. Today’s Feast is traditionally referred to as well as the Purification of the Blessed Virgin Mary according to the ancient purification rites on the 40th day after a woman had given birth, but we know a deeper significance to this feast: She had already been purified at the first moment of her existence in St. Anne’s womb by the graces of the One whom she would later gestate and give to the world. And that same Refiner wants to purify us, by incorporating us into his redemptive self-offering to the Father in the new and eternal Passover. This is the way we offer our logike latreia, the only sacrifice that makes sense, offering ourselves whole and entire to God as a holy and acceptable sacrifice (Rom 12:1-2). We enter into his priesthood, what the Letter to the Hebrews in today’s second reading describes as the work of the “merciful and faithful high priest before God to expiate the sins of the people.” That expiatory offering for us takes place first in the consecration of our baptism, when we are presented in the Temple by our parents and godparents or, if we’re baptized later in life, by the whole Church community. To be consecrated means to be totally given to the Lord, to belong to God, to transfer the title of ownership of one’s life over to God, to be cut off (sacer) from worldly things to be with (con) God. Jesus is the supreme consecrated one. He would say during the Last Supper that he consecrates himself for us so that we might be consecrated in truth (Jn 17:19). This is what happens to us on the day of our presentation in the Sacrament of Baptism. This reality of Jesus’ consecration and ours that we mark on this day is the reason why, since 1997, the Church has observed on this feast the World Day of Prayer for Consecrated Life. St. John Paul II decided to have this world day of prayer for religious men and women, for consecrated hermits, virgins and widows, for members of secular institutes and societies of apostolic life and other forms of living publicly by the evangelical counsels on the Feast of the Lord’s Presentation because, he said, “the Presentation of Jesus in the Temple is an eloquent icon of the total offering of one’s life,” something we see in those who lived in the consecrated state. St. John Paul II wrote in Vita Consecrata that the consecrated life “is not something isolated and marginal, but a reality that affects the whole Church.” Rather, “The consecrated life is at the very heart of the Church as a decisive element for her mission, since it manifests the inner nature of the Christian calling and the striving of the whole Church as Bride towards union with her one Spouse.” The whole Church is able to learn through greater focus on consecrated men and women about the inner nature of our Christian vocation, how to live out our baptismal consecration, and how to strive for the eternal wedding banquet. Today we give God thanks for those great graces and we ask him to bless in a special way all those across the world who likewise seek to live out this special form of belonging, that we may truly be consecrated in the truth of God’s word and work.
The second aspect of today’s feast on which we can meditate is the whole meaning of light. The Feast of the Presentation is often called Candlemas. We begin Mass with a procession with lit and blessed candles. This is a quasi-sacramental manifestation of what Simeon says about the 40-day old baby Jesus in today’s Gospel, that he is a “light of revelation to the Gentiles.” We receive that light from him and are meant to burn with it. On the day of our baptismal consecration, our Godfather went to the Paschal (Easter) Candle and lit from it our baptismal candle; the priest instructed us to receive the Light of Christ; and our parents and godparents were commanded to help us to keep that flame of faith alive in our hearts so that when Christ comes we may go out to meet him with all the saints in his heavenly kingdom. That was an image of Jesus’ parable about the five wise bridesmaids (Mt 25:1-13) who had plenty of oil in their lamp to keep their flame ignited for the Bridegroom’s return. So on this day we ask for the gift to burn for Christ and with Christ’s own light.
The third characteristic of the Feast of the Presentation is what we can glimpse in this great mystery in the temple about the evangelical counsels that distinguish the consecrated life and the life of the baptized. We see all three evangelical counsels on display. We see poverty in Mary’s and Joseph’s presenting a pair of pigeons. Normally if a family were of means, it would redeem a newborn male with a lamb, but Joseph and Mary were too poor to purchase a Lamb with which to redeem or “buy back” the infant Lamb of God. We also clearly see featured Joseph’s and Mary’s holy obedience. Three times St. Luke describes it, that they were dutifully and lovingly obeying what “is written in the law of the Lord,” doing so “in accordance with the dictate in the law of the Lord,” and seeking to “fulfill all the prescriptions of the law of the Lord.” This was the fulfillment of a lifetime in which Mary consistently said, “Let it be done to me according to your Word” and Joseph was so docile that he would promptly obey what the Lord said even in dreams. We also see a beautiful witness of chastity not just in the lives of the “Virgin Castissima” and in her “most chaste spouse” but in the example of Anna who, since she was widowed very early in life — probably in her very early 20s, since Jewish women normally married in their young teens — spent the next five or six decades, until we meet her at 84, never leaving the temple but worshipping God day and night with fasting and prayer. After the death of her husband, God became the focus of all her love, and she served him more faithfully than any wife a man. In professing the evangelical counsels of poverty, chastity and obedience, consecrated men and women show the world what true wealth, true freedom and true love are all about, and encourage us all, no matter our state of life, to imitate Mary and Joseph, Simeon and Anna.
The fourth aspect of today’s Feast concerns Simeon’s prophecy that Jesus was “destined for the fall and rise of many in Israel, and to be a sign that will be contradicted … so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.” Jesus would be a cause literally of “ruin” or “resurrection” for many, provoking by his own life and words the manifestation of what was truly in their hearts. Even though Jesus came as Light, many preferred darkness; even though he came as Savior, many didn’t wish to be rescued; even though he came as the refulgence of God’s glory, many preferred to seek their own glory. And the great sign of Jesus’ contradiction is the Cross, where the vertical bar of divine worship contradicted the horizontal bar of worldliness. Every Christian is meant to be a contradiction of the things of the world, to proclaim something radically different from the world’s values, namely Christ’s values.
The final aspect we learn from today’s readings is about how this encounter with the Lord is meant to be dynamic, to transform us, ultimately to guide us. Pope Francis preached several years ago that the Blessed Mother “enters the Temple holding the Child in her arms. The Mother walks, yet it is the Child who goes before her. She carries him, yet he is leading her along the path of the God who comes to us so that we might go to him.” Later about Simeon, he states, “As with Mary, the elderly man holds the Child, but in fact it is the Child who guides the elderly man. The liturgy of First Vespers of today’s feast puts this clearly and beautifully: ‘senex puerum portabat, puer autem senectem regebat.’ Mary, the young mother, and Simeon, the kindly old man, hold the Child in their arms, yet it is the Child himself who guides them both.” And he concluded, “Today we, too, like Mary and Simeon, want to take Jesus into our arms, to bring him to his people. Surely we will be able to do so if we enter into the mystery in which Jesus himself is our guide. Let us bring others to Jesus, but let us also allow ourselves to be led by him. This is what we should be: guides who themselves are guided.” That’s the essence of the Christian life and the consecrated life flowing from baptism: allowing ourselves to be guided by him who is the Way, by the Good Shepherd who leads us even in the valleys, by the Holy Spirit he sends to be our helper and guide, showing us the path into all truth and helping us to walk by the Spirit.
Today as we come to this temple to present ourselves anew to God on the Feast of the Presentation, we consecrate ourselves to him once again within the Lord’s own consecration during the Last Supper made present for us on the holy altar. We ask him to fill us with his holy light as we prepare to receive him in Holy Communion so that we may take the warmth of his love and the light of his truth out to illumine those who walk in darkness and the shadow of death. We ask him to help us always to recognize in him in the Eucharist our treasure, our liberating truth, our great love, and the help we need to proclaim his Gospel in and out of season, especially in those areas in which it calls the world to conversion. The same Jesus whom Simeon held in us arms we’re about to receive within. As we do, we thank the Lord for the gift of the consecrated life and we pray for all our consecrated brothers and sisters, that on this World Day of Prayer and beyond, they may continue to grow to belong more and more to the Poor, Chaste and Obedient Consecrated One, the purifying fire, our faithful and merciful high priest, the light of revelation to the gentiles, the glory of his people Israel, our Savior. And we ask him to let us, his servants, depart in his peace and bring that peace to the world!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 MAL 3:1-4
Thus says the Lord God:
Lo, I am sending my messenger
to prepare the way before me;
And suddenly there will come to the temple
the LORD whom you seek,
And the messenger of the covenant whom you desire.
Yes, he is coming, says the LORD of hosts.
But who will endure the day of his coming?
And who can stand when he appears?
For he is like the refiner’s fire,
or like the fuller’s lye.
He will sit refining and purifying silver,
and he will purify the sons of Levi,
Refining them like gold or like silver
that they may offer due sacrifice to the LORD.
Then the sacrifice of Judah and Jerusalem
will please the LORD,
as in the days of old, as in years gone by.
Responsorial Psalm PS 24:7, 8, 9, 10
R. (8) Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord!
Lift up, O gates, your lintels;
reach up, you ancient portals,
that the king of glory may come in!
R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord!
Who is this king of glory?
The LORD, strong and mighty,
the LORD, mighty in battle.
R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord!
Lift up, O gates, your lintels;
reach up, you ancient portals,
that the king of glory may come in!
R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord!
Who is this king of glory?
The LORD of hosts; he is the king of glory.
R. Who is this king of glory? It is the Lord!
Reading 2 HEB 2:14-18
Since the children share in blood and flesh,
Jesus likewise shared in them,
that through death he might destroy the one
who has the power of death, that is, the Devil,
and free those who through fear of death
had been subject to slavery all their life.
Surely he did not help angels
but rather the descendants of Abraham;
therefore, he had to become like his brothers and sisters
in every way,
that he might be a merciful and faithful high priest before God
to expiate the sins of the people.
Because he himself was tested through what he suffered,
he is able to help those who are being tested.
Alleluia LK 2:32
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
A light of revelation to the Gentiles,
and glory for your people Israel.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel LK 2:22-40
When the days were completed for their purification
according to the law of Moses,
Mary and Joseph took Jesus up to Jerusalem
to present him to the Lord,
just as it is written in the law of the Lord,
Every male that opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord,
and to offer the sacrifice of
a pair of turtledoves or two young pigeons,
in accordance with the dictate in the law of the Lord.
Now there was a man in Jerusalem whose name was Simeon.
This man was righteous and devout,
awaiting the consolation of Israel,
and the Holy Spirit was upon him.
It had been revealed to him by the Holy Spirit
that he should not see death
before he had seen the Christ of the Lord.
He came in the Spirit into the temple;
and when the parents brought in the child Jesus
to perform the custom of the law in regard to him,
he took him into his arms and blessed God, saying:
“Now, Master, you may let your servant go
in peace, according to your word,
for my eyes have seen your salvation,
which you prepared in the sight of all the peoples:
a light for revelation to the Gentiles,
and glory for your people Israel.”
The child’s father and mother were amazed at what was said about him;
and Simeon blessed them and said to Mary his mother,
“Behold, this child is destined
for the fall and rise of many in Israel,
and to be a sign that will be contradicted
—and you yourself a sword will pierce—
so that the thoughts of many hearts may be revealed.”
There was also a prophetess, Anna,
the daughter of Phanuel, of the tribe of Asher.
She was advanced in years,
having lived seven years with her husband after her marriage,
and then as a widow until she was eighty-four.
She never left the temple,
but worshiped night and day with fasting and prayer.
And coming forward at that very time,
she gave thanks to God and spoke about the child
to all who were awaiting the redemption of Jerusalem.
When they had fulfilled all the prescriptions
of the law of the Lord,
they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth.
The child grew and became strong, filled with wisdom;
and the favor of God was upon him.
The post Encountering the Lord with Burning Love, Feast of the Presentation, February 2, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
February 01, 2024Proclaiming the Gospel in Life and in Death, Fourth Thursday (II), February 1, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, New York
Thursday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Brigid of Kildare
February 1, 2024
1 Kings 2:1-4.10-12, 1 Chr 29:10-12, Mk 6:7-13

To listen to today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.1.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today Jesus gives instructions to the Twelve as he was preparing to send them out to preach the Gospel of the Kingdom. Normally, when we go on a trip, especially if we’re not accustomed to traveling, we prepare a list of the things we need to pack in our suitcase so that we don’t forget anything. Jesus likewise prepares a list for the apostles, but it’s precisely a list of things not to take. He tells them to take nothing except a walking stick (something that would give them greater stamina for the mission), no food, no sack of clothes and toiletries, no money. Why? Because he knew that they needed to preach the Gospel not principally by their words but by their witness, by who they were. If they were going to be preaching that God cares for us more than he cares for the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, then they needed to manifest that trust in his divine Providence. If they were going to be indicating to others the path to happiness, they needed to be living the first beatitude, “Blessed are the poor, for theirs is the kingdom of heaven.” If they were going to be proclaiming love of neighbor, of forgiving 70 times 7 times, then they really couldn’t go out alone, but rather with at least one other whom they would need to love and forgive. If the essence of the Gospel is to receive Jesus and in receiving him, to receive the Father who sent him, they themselves needed to be willing to be received and not be on the lookout for better offers; hence Jesus’ instruction to remain where they’re welcomed and embraced. If they were going to be proclaiming the call not just to believe in Jesus and enter his kingdom but also to announce it, then they themselves needed to manifest the apostolic dimension of our faith. Jesus sends them out with his words, his authority over demons, his power to heal, to proclaim repentance and conversion, so that people not just hear the message but see it, not just in what the six missionary pairings did but who they were. The same Lord Jesus who sent them out to manifest the Gospel they were proclaiming chooses and sends us out.
This summons to announce Christ and his Kingdom is supposed to happen not just in the way we live but in the way we die. One of the most important ways we preach is through our valedictory, through our last words, our last will and testament. This is an opportunity to show others, as we’re approaching likely death, what we truly value and what they wisely should value. Many times when we hear that expression “last will and testament,” we think fundamentally about the disposition of our money and goods, but that just shows the materialism of our age. Our last will should manifest our will to do the Lord’s will and our hope and prayer that others do the Lord’s will. Our last testament should be about the testament or covenant God made with us and we’ve sought to keep with him. Our last will and testament should be an exclamation point on the way we’ve truly tried to live with the Lord, suffer with the Lord, die with the Lord, and even give witness to the Lord after he has called us to Himself.
That’s what David shows us how to do in today’s first reading. As the time of his death was approaching, he called his 18 year-old son Solomon to him and gave him these instructions, not only as father to son but also as king to successor. “I am going the way of all flesh,” he said. Everyone — whether a prince or a pauper — dies, and everyone needs to prepare well for death so that he or she may die well. The first instruction he gave was, “Take courage and be a man.” This means two things: first, be brave; and second, be responsible and mature. It takes courage to be an adult, to assume our responsibilities rather than make excuses, to confront difficulties rather than run away from them, to prioritize wisely and let go of perhaps fun, but ultimately unimportant, things. David was calling Solomon, at 18, to act like a grown-up, to act with wisdom, something Solomon clearly did when he was young in life but then didn’t do later in life, as we’ll see in upcoming days. Then David described for Solomon the path of spiritual maturity: “Keep the mandate of the Lord, your God, following his ways and observing his statutes, commands, ordinances, and decrees as they are written in the law of Moses, that you may succeed in whatever you do, wherever you turn.” In his last will and testament, David was asking Solomon to observe the Lord’s will and his covenant, which is the same word as testament.
We see similar sentiments throughout history from saints who in their last words sought to preach the faith. We can focus on a few:
St. Louis IX, King of France, touchingly wrote to his son and successor, 25 year old Philip III, in 1270, “My dearest son, my first instruction is that you should love the Lord your God with all your heart and all your strength. Without this there is no salvation. Keep yourself, my son, from everything that you know displeases God, that is to say, from every mortal sin. You should permit yourself to be tormented by every kind of martyrdom before you would allow yourself to commit a mortal sin. If the Lord has permitted you to have some trial, bear it willingly and with gratitude, considering that it has happened for your good and that perhaps you well deserved it. If the Lord bestows upon you any kind of prosperity, thank him humbly and see that you become no worse for it, either through vain pride or anything else, because you ought not to oppose God or offend him in the matter of his gifts. … Be kindhearted to the poor, the unfortunate and the afflicted. Give them as much help and consolation as you can.… Always side with the poor rather than with the rich, until you are certain of the truth. … Be devout and obedient to our mother the Church of Rome and the Supreme Pontiff as your spiritual father. Work to remove all sin from your land, particularly blasphemies and heresies. … In conclusion, dearest son, I give you every blessing that a loving father can give a son. May the three Persons of the Holy Trinity and all the saints protect you from every evil. And may the Lord give you the grace to do his will so that he may be served and honored through you, that in the next life we may together come to see him, love him and praise him unceasingly.” What an incredible witness, that the blessing he really wanted for his son, the greatest inheritance he was giving to him as his heir, was the blessing of the Trinity and the prayer to do God’s will.
I’m always moved on June 21 to read the letter of St. Aloysius Gonzaga to his mother as he was preparing to meet the Lord at the age of 23. He gave witness to his faith. “May the comfort and grace of the Holy Spirit be yours for ever, most honoured lady. Your letter found me lingering still in this region of the dead, but now I must rouse myself to make my way on to heaven at last and to praise God for ever in the land of the living; indeed I had hoped that before this time my journey there would have been over. If charity, as Saint Paul says, means to weep with those who weep and rejoice with those who are glad, then, dearest mother, you shall rejoice exceedingly that God in his grace and his love for you is showing me the path to true happiness, and assuring me that I shall never lose him. … Take care above all things, most honoured lady, not to insult God’s boundless loving kindness; you would certainly do this if you mourned as dead one living face to face with God, one whose prayers can bring you in your troubles more powerful aid than they ever could on earth. And our parting will not be for long; we shall see each other again in heaven; we shall be united with our Saviour; there we shall praise him with heart and soul, sing of his mercies for ever, and enjoy eternal happiness. When he takes away what he once lent us, his purpose is to store our treasure elsewhere more safely and bestow on us those very blessings that we ourselves would most choose to have. I write all this with the one desire that you and all my family may consider my departure a joy and favour and that you especially may speed with a mother’s blessing my passage across the waters till I reach the shore to which all hopes belong. I write the more willingly because I have no clearer way of expressing the love and respect I owe you as your son.”
Perhaps the most moving of all for me are the thoughts expressed by the 48 Seminarian Martyrs of Barbastro, Spain, in 1936, which I’ve had the privilege to visit twice. While these Claretian seminarians were awaiting their deaths, they wrote to their families, fellow Claretians, murderers and the whole Church on any writing materials they could find — on the bottoms of piano benches, on wrapping paper for chocolates, on the insides of walls — hoping that these last testaments would be discovered after their death.One of the seminarians wrote in Latin a phrase that indicated their bravery, that they saw themselves as the successors of the valiant gladiators of old: “Christe, Morituri te salutant,” “O Christ, those who are about to die, salute You!” But their overall message was one of comfort to their families of origin and in religious life, telling them not to be sad, but to rejoice, because they were about to be martyred and would pray for them from Heaven. They wrote that even though they would not have the chance to preach the Gospel from pulpits, they would preach it even more powerfully by their witness and, like St. Therese, spend their eternity doing good upon the earth. Finally they wrote that they forgave their assassins, begging God to accept the shedding of their blood as a prayer that He not hold their sins against them.
Finally, we can mention St. Brigid of Kildare, whom the Church remembers today as we begin preparations for the 1500th anniversary of her death one year from today. Her great legacy was the Monastery of Kildare, which for centuries helped nuns, and through them many others throughout Ireland, learn how to follow David’s instructions to Solomon, to keep the mandate, ways, statutes, commands, ordinances, decrees and covenant of the Lord.
These thoughts from saints and martyrs are meant to be a preparation for our own last will and testament. I always encourage all Catholics, old and young, including priests and religious, to write one, even if we may have few or no material things to bequeath. Insofar as we never know the day or the hour, as Jesus warns us, we should write one sooner rather than later, giving witness to what we value the most. I always encourage lay people to make sure that the most important and lengthy part of their will should be a description of their faith, which is by far the most important inheritance they have sought to leave their children. They should help their children and grandchildren to see that far more important than a house, or money, or wedding rings and the like is the fact that they tried to help them to seek to dwell in the house of the Lord, to be rich in his kingdom, and to enter with joy into the eternal wedding banquet. All the more a last will and testament for a religious should give witness to faith. In this kairos of mercy, our last will and testament should be like a Psalm 136 that shows how the Lord’s mercy endures forever and has been the great subtext of our life and vocation. It should be a Magnificat in which our soul can magnify the Lord and our spirit can rejoice in God our savior through our words even after the Lord comes for us. Likewise, I encourage people — all Catholics — to write a letter to the priest who will celebrate their funeral, whoever it may be, that can be given to him as he prepares, so that he will be able to know what was really in the heart of the person and be able to incorporate into his homily the person’s faithful love for God, so that the priest can in a sense echo the person’s holy valedictory. The more we prepare to pass on this inheritance to others when we die, the more we will lavishly share it in life.
In the Mass, we enter into Jesus’ last will and testament, when on the night before he died, he went so far beyond what his 28th generation grandfather David said and did in his son Solomon’s presence. “This is my Body,” he said. “This is the chalice of my blood, the blood of the new and eternal Covenant,” the blood of the new and everlasting Testament. This is the food that will make us take courage and be a mature man or woman to the full stature of Christ. This is the nourishment that will make us the richest people on the planet. This is the means by which we will be strengthened to go out to the world united with Christ so that we can announce him credibly and help everyone else to grasp that they are heirs of this same Covenant of God’s everlasting love. This is ultimately the greatest gift that we seek to impart to those who come after us, in life, in death and even after!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 KGS 2:1-4, 10-12
When the time of David’s death drew near,
he gave these instructions to his son Solomon:
“I am going the way of all flesh.
Take courage and be a man.
Keep the mandate of the LORD, your God, following his ways
and observing his statutes, commands, ordinances, and decrees
as they are written in the law of Moses,
that you may succeed in whatever you do,
wherever you turn, and the LORD may fulfill
the promise he made on my behalf when he said,
‘If your sons so conduct themselves
that they remain faithful to me with their whole heart
and with their whole soul,
you shall always have someone of your line
on the throne of Israel.’”
David rested with his ancestors and was buried in the City of David.
The length of David’s reign over Israel was forty years:
he reigned seven years in Hebron
and thirty-three years in Jerusalem.
Solomon was seated on the throne of his father David,
with his sovereignty firmly established.
Responsorial Psalm
1 CHR 29:10, 11AB, 11D-12A, 12BCD
R. (12b) Lord, you are exalted over all.
“Blessed may you be, O LORD,
God of Israel our father,
from eternity to eternity.”
R. Lord, you are exalted over all.
“Yours, O LORD, are grandeur and power,
majesty, splendor, and glory.”
R. Lord, you are exalted over all.
“LORD, you are exalted over all.
Yours, O LORD, is the sovereignty;
you are exalted as head over all.
Riches and honor are from you.”
R. Lord, you are exalted over all.
“In your hand are power and might;
it is yours to give grandeur and strength to all.”
R. Lord, you are exalted over all.
Gospel
MK 6:7-13
Jesus summoned the Twelve and began to send them out two by two
and gave them authority over unclean spirits.
He instructed them to take nothing for the journey but a walking stick
–no food, no sack, no money in their belts.
They were, however, to wear sandals but not a second tunic.
He said to them,
“Wherever you enter a house, stay there until you leave from there.
Whatever place does not welcome you or listen to you,
leave there and shake the dust off your feet
in testimony against them.”
So they went off and preached repentance.
The Twelve drove out many demons,
and they anointed with oil many who were sick and cured them.
The post Proclaiming the Gospel in Life and in Death, Fourth Thursday (II), February 1, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
January 31, 2024Do We Amaze Jesus By Our Faith or Lack of It?, Fourth Wednesday (II), January 31, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. John Bosco
January 31, 2024
2 Sam 24:2.9-17, Ps 32, Mk 6:1-6

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click here:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.31.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
At the end of today’s Gospel we have an amazing declaration by St. Mark. He says that Jesus was “amazed at their lack of faith.” We’ve seen him elsewhere be amazed at the faith of the Centurion about whom he said that he had found no one with such faith in Israel, or about the Syro-Phoenician woman in Tyre to whom he said, “Woman, great if your faith.” But today Jesus had the opposite reaction. He was amazed that his fellow Jews from Nazareth, present at the Synagogue during the Sabbath, lacked faith. This expression means, I think, not that they needed to grow in faith, but more that they had none. Jesus was amazed that they had no faith. In many other circumstances he found some faith and said that even if someone had faith the size of a mustard seed you could move mountains into the sea. He didn’t even find a mustard seed’s worth of faith in his hometown. Let’s enter into the scene to find out why.
Returning to his hometown synagogue where he for more than two decades had worshipped every Saturday, Jesus already had earned an almost unbelievable reputation for the miracles he had done elsewhere in Galilee. When he began to preach — St. Luke tells us it was on Isaiah 61, that the Spirit of the Lord was upon him, the prophecy about the traits of the coming Messiah, a Scripture passage Jesus said was fulfilled as they were listening to him — they were all initially amazed, just like so many others were astonished when Jesus taught. But unlike the others who would normally begin to glorify God, those in Nazareth took offense. “Is this not the carpenter, the son of Mary?,” they asked. They probably remember his playing with some of their kids when he was younger. They probably had some chairs or tables or beds he had made in their house. They thought they knew him. They had him boxed into their own categories and were unwilling to have those categories changed or expanded. In St. Luke’s version, they tell him, “Do for us here what we heard you do in Capernaum.” They wanted him to put on a show. In a sense, they thought they deserved one. They thought that because he was a fellow Nazarene they had rights over him. Eventually when he would tell them that no prophet is accepted in his native place, when he would remind them that God doesn’t play the game of geographical nepotism but rewards his favors to those with faith like the widow of Zarephath or Naaman the Syrian, in a rage they sought to murder him by throwing him off the precipice on which Nazareth had been built. They not only believed they had the right to play him like a genie but also believed they had the right to dispose of his life. They believed they owned him. They wanted to control him, not follow him. They had no faith in what God was doing in him and that lack of faith led them, on the Sabbath, to try to kill him.
We see a similar dynamism in today’s first reading and the census David ordered to be taken of Israel and Judah. Because we’re used to censuses being taken every ten years in the USA and because we know how God used the census of Caesar Augustus to bring about Jesus’ birth in Bethlehem according to prophecy, it’s initially hard for us to grasp why taking a census would be considered a sin at all by King David and why the punishment for doing so would seem so severe. But there were two reasons. The first reason is because David stopped looking at the people as a gift of God, but he wanted to know how many there were and where they were, because he had begun to think of them as their own and could begin to tax them, he could begin to control them. The second reason, which is clear in the passage is because he wanted to know how many soldiers he would have. They reported back to him 800,000 in Israel and 500,000 in Judah. Prior to this, from the time he fought Goliath to the time his troops defeated his son Absalom’s insurrection, David was always certain that the battle belonged to the Lord. He was convinced he would defeat Goliath not because of his slingshot and five smooth pebbles, but because he was going into battle not with armor but in the name of the Lord. When Absalom was hunting him, he had entrusted himself to God as well. To take a census was to take a totally different approach. It was to begin to count on human resources rather than on the Lord. It wasn’t a total lack of faith, but it clearly was not living and thinking by faith. God’s punishment was medicinal, meant to help him and all of his people — because his people wanted an earthly king even though God had warned them about the abuses that would follow, including using their sons as pawns in war (1 Sam 8) — to learn anew how to entrust themselves totally to the Lord, which is the essence of faith. Either three years of famine, or three months of persecution, or three days of pestilence, all of which would occasion everyone’s turning anew to the Lord. David, as we see, chose the latter, but when he appealed to God, God relented, because the medicine had worked. David’s words at the end “It is I who have sinned; it is I, the shepherd, who have done wrong. But these are sheep; what have they done? Punish me and my kindred” would likewise be fulfilled when David’s kindred, his 28th generation grandson would be punished for his sin and for the sins of the whole world. David needed to learn how to entrust himself to God again, rather than seek to control every situation with human means. He needed to learn once again to be faithful.
There’s a similar risk for us, of course. We’re susceptible to the same spiritual cancer as the Nazarenes and the same presumption as David. Like those in Nazareth, most of us have grown up with Jesus since our earliest days when we were baptized. We’ve heard his words. We have his pictures and statues throughout our house. We’re “familiar” with him, being real members of his spiritual family. But sometimes that can lead us to take him for granted, to try to domesticate him, to try to control him. We can stop being filled with awe at him and reverence for everything he asks. And we can even choose to kill him within ourselves, which is what happens when we commit serious or “mortal” sin. Just like with the Nazarenes, our familiarity with Jesus, rather than making us more like Jesus, rather than leading to an increase in faith, can often make us take him for granted, try to control him for our own interests, even take offense at him rather than allow him to take away our offenses. We can try to eliminate him from our life in particular choices rather than die to ourselves so that he can truly live within us. Like the Nazarenes, who had the routine of the practice of their faith each Sabbath at the Synagogue, at the Temple, at home, we, too, can start going through the motions of faith and living practically like those without faith live.
There’s another way and that’s what we celebrate today on the feast of St. John Bosco, the patron saint of school children, young people, street kids and juvenile delinquents. His faith continues to amaze. In 1815, he was born in a small village of Becchi close to Turin in northern Italy. When he was just two, his father died leaving his mother Margherita to care for the three young boys as a peasant farmer during a time of great drought and social unrest. She was a woman who passed on to her boys her great faith. In other areas, Margherita did all she could, but even at a young age he needed to be apprenticed to an uncle. And he was one of the lucky ones that he had an uncle to whom he could be sent when his mother no longer could feed him. When he was nine, he had a dream that changed his life. In it, he was surrounded by a group of children who were fighting, swearing and blaspheming. He tried to calm them down, first by reasoning, then with force, but to no avail. Finally a lady appeared to him — whom he later concluded was the Blessed Mother — and said, “Softly, softly, if you wish to win them! Take your shepherd’s staff and lead them to pasture.” As he gently invited and encouraged them to follow him, he saw them transformed from wild beasts into lambs. When he awoke, he knew that his duty was to help poor boys, beginning with those in his own village, to undergo such a transformation. He first sought the kids who were hanging out and causing trouble in the city squares. He did his best to teach them the catechism and invite them to Church, but there were initially few takers. He noticed how much they were fascinated, however, by the various jugglers, magicians and gymnasts who would come through town seeking their adulation and money. So he began to learn those arts — and master them. Soon he was challenging the other jugglers, conjurers and acrobats to competition and beating them. His prize was the attention of the young ruffians, whom he promised to teach them his newfound skills after they had a catechism lesson or came to Church. But he readily saw that there were limits to what he could give them as a poor and poorly-educated shepherd boy. He desired to become a priest. Eventually a priest, too, recognized in him signs of a priestly vocation. He was taught how to read so that he would be able to go to school and seminary. His upkeep and his clothes were provided by charity, the mayor paid for his hat, the pastor his coat, one parishioner his cassock another a pair of shoes. During Seminary he would continue to go out on Sundays to draw the boys to Mass and make sure these waifs would be taken care of. It was during his seminary years that St. Joseph Cafasso, the seminary rector just a few years his senior, recognized his vocation to give his entire life to the care of these abandoned, lost sheep, seeking to love them with the love of Christ and bring them to live by faith truly Christian lives. St. John Bosco organized activities on Sundays but very few people wanted hundreds of street kids around them, and so he struggled to find a permanent place. Eventually he got a big barn and began to build it up. He founded schools to train them as shoemakers, tailors and printers. He began to give them accommodations so they weren’t sleeping on the streets and entrusted their care to his mother Margherita who came to live with them. His orphanage would grow to house more than 800 boys for whom he would beg for food. Some of the bright boys he would eventually begin training to be priests to serve young people like these in the Salesian order God would lead him to found. And the work of Salesians continues to this day. It’s a work of Good Samaritans, sacrificing one’s whole life to improve the life of those who would otherwise be lost and abandoned. It’s a work geared toward helping people learn how to love God with all they’ve got and to love others with their energy, their work, their time and all God has given them. It’s a work geared toward helping people live by faith and receive Jesus into their hopes. On May 30, 1862, when he was 46 years old, he told all the orphans he was housing a dream he had had a few nights before in which he had seen a huge naval battle in which a big ship guided by the Pope with a flotilla of other boats led by bishops, was being attached by so many opposing forces, who were trying to ram and sink the barque of Peter. The winds and the ferocious waves were against the papal fleet. But then he saw two huge pillars coming out of the sea. At the top of one stood Mary, Help of Christians, and at the top of the other was a huge Host underneath which was the inscription “Salvation of the Faithful.” Don Bosco saw in his dream that the Pope and the boats in his flotilla labored to anchor themselves to these two pillars and once they did, the opposing ships were scattered and broken to pieces. St. John Bosco interpreted the dream as an indication of the types of attacks, the opposing winds and seas, the salvos of enemies that would try to sink the Church, but he also saw the remedy: anchoring oneself to Jesus in the Eucharist and to the Mother who gave us that blessed Fruit of her womb and shows us how to relate to him in faith. And he would preach about the Eucharist and Mary often. He would tell the boys, “I want you to make use of two spiritual wings – devotion to the Blessed Sacrament and devotion to the Blessed Virgin. These two wings, these two devotions, you may be sure, will soon help you raise yourselves toward heaven.” These were the ways to grow in amazing faith, by relating to our Lady who breastfeeds us on her own faith to help us allow our own life to develop according to the Lord’s word like her who was praised by St. Elizabeth for her faith that the Lord’s word to her would be fulfilled. The second means was to relate to Jesus in the Eucharist with faith. In the Eucharist we encounter the same Jesus who visited the Synagogue of Nazareth. Don Bosco would encourage the orphans he had brought from the streets, taught trades and sought to inspire toward holiness, that “there is no greater happiness in this world than that which comes from a communion well received.” He would add, “My dear boys, love Jesus in the Blessed Sacrament and you shall be truly happy.” And he would help them to overcome spiritual blindness and keep their eyes fixed on Jesus and the treasure of himself he gives us. “If a well-known and trustworthy person,” he said to them, “were to go to a public square and tell all the idlers loitering there that on a certain hill they would find a gold mine and could take all they wanted, do you think anyone would shrug his shoulders and say he did not care? They’d be dashing there as fast as they could! Well, now, doesn’t the tabernacle hold the most precious treasure ever to be found on earth or in heaven? Unfortunately, there are many who cannot see it because they are [spiritually] blind. Yet our faith unerringly tells us that endless riches are to be found there. People sweat and toil to make money, and yet, in the tabernacle dwells the Lord of the universe. He will grant you what you ask, if you really need it!”
And to help them receive Holy Communion with proper reverence, devotion and faith, he would help them to look at the Eucharist from a Marian perspective: “Imagine,” he said, “that it is no longer the priest but the most holy Madonna herself who comes to give you the Holy Host.” Once we are able to see the Blessed Virgin we would grasp far more easily that what we’re receiving is the same Son she gestated for nine months and gave to the world. She would help us to understand that at Mass we are receiving Jesus! And once we really take seriously that in the Eucharist we encounter Jesus Christ, then everything else becomes so much simpler, because we all readily grasp that there is nothing more important in the whole world than coming to be with Jesus, through whom all things were made, who made us, who died for us, who rose for us, who is here for us, who accompanies us through life, and who wants us to experience in this world forever all that God the Father sent him into the world to accomplish in us.
Today we ask the Lord, through St. John Bosco’s intercession, to help us entrust ourselves in faith to Jesus in the Eucharist in a similar way. To remain always astonished by his teaching. To never take offense at him and his teachings. To count on his support in good times and in bad. And to give courageous witness to him as we receive from this altar the same food that filled him with intrepid faith and holy audacity!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 SM 24:2, 9-17
King David said to Joab and the leaders of the army who were with him,
“Tour all the tribes in Israel from Dan to Beer-sheba
and register the people, that I may know their number.”
Joab then reported to the king the number of people registered:
in Israel, eight hundred thousand men fit for military service;
in Judah, five hundred thousand.
Afterward, however, David regretted having numbered the people,
and said to the LORD:
“I have sinned grievously in what I have done.
But now, LORD, forgive the guilt of your servant,
for I have been very foolish.”
When David rose in the morning,
the LORD had spoken to the prophet Gad, David’s seer, saying:
“Go and say to David, ‘This is what the LORD says:
I offer you three alternatives;
choose one of them, and I will inflict it on you.’”
Gad then went to David to inform him.
He asked: “Do you want a three years’ famine to come upon your land,
or to flee from your enemy three months while he pursues you,
or to have a three days’ pestilence in your land?
Now consider and decide what I must reply to him who sent me.”
David answered Gad: “I am in very serious difficulty.
Let us fall by the hand of God, for he is most merciful;
but let me not fall by the hand of man.”
Thus David chose the pestilence.
Now it was the time of the wheat harvest
when the plague broke out among the people.
The LORD then sent a pestilence over Israel
from morning until the time appointed,
and seventy thousand of the people from Dan to Beer-sheba died.
But when the angel stretched forth his hand toward Jerusalem to destroy it,
the LORD regretted the calamity
and said to the angel causing the destruction among the people,
“Enough now! Stay your hand.”
The angel of the LORD was then standing
at the threshing floor of Araunah the Jebusite.
When David saw the angel who was striking the people,
he said to the LORD: “It is I who have sinned;
it is I, the shepherd, who have done wrong.
But these are sheep; what have they done?
Punish me and my kindred.”
Responsorial Psalm
PS 32:1-2, 5, 6, 7
R. (see 5c) Lord, forgive the wrong I have done.
Blessed is he whose fault is taken away,
whose sin is covered.
Blessed the man to whom the LORD imputes not guilt,
in whose spirit there is no guile.
R. Lord, forgive the wrong I have done.
Then I acknowledged my sin to you,
my guilt I covered not.
I said, “I confess my faults to the LORD,”
and you took away the guilt of my sin.
R. Lord, forgive the wrong I have done.
For this shall every faithful man pray to you
in time of stress.
Though deep waters overflow,
they shall not reach him.
R. Lord, forgive the wrong I have done.
You are my shelter; from distress you will preserve me;
with glad cries of freedom you will ring me round.
R. Lord, forgive the wrong I have done.
Gospel
MK 6:1-6
Jesus departed from there and came to his native place,
accompanied by his disciples.
When the sabbath came he began to teach in the synagogue,
and many who heard him were astonished.
They said, “Where did this man get all this?
What kind of wisdom has been given him?
What mighty deeds are wrought by his hands!
Is he not the carpenter, the son of Mary,
and the brother of James and Joseph and Judas and Simon?
And are not his sisters here with us?”
And they took offense at him.
Jesus said to them,
“A prophet is not without honor except in his native place
and among his own kin and in his own house.”
So he was not able to perform any mighty deed there,
apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.
He was amazed at their lack of faith.
The post Do We Amaze Jesus By Our Faith or Lack of It?, Fourth Wednesday (II), January 31, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min

About Catholic Preaching

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

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