Catholic Preaching

By Father Roger LandryReligion & Spirituality Christianity

Catholic Preaching episodes

January 30, 2024 The Eucharistic Revival of the Catholic Family, Mater Salvatoris, Stamford, CT, January 30, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Mater Salvatoris College Prep School
Stamford, Connecticut
January 30, 2024

To view the PDFs of the slides of the presentation to sixth-, seventh- and eighth-grade students (not recorded) on “Taking the Highway to Heaven: Following the Eucharistic Jesus to the Summit of Life and Love,” please click below.
Taking the Highway to Heaven

To listen to an audio recording of the talk to parents entitled, “The Eucharistic Revival of the Catholic Family,” please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.30.24_The_Eucharistic_Revival_o_the_Catholic_Family_1.mp3

To view the PDFs of the slides of the presentation to parents entitled, “The Eucharistic Revival of the Catholic Family,” please click below:
The Eucharistic Revival of the Catholic Family

The post The Eucharistic Revival of the Catholic Family, Mater Salvatoris, Stamford, CT, January 30, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
1 hr 31 min
January 30, 2024Fatherly Love, Fourth Tuesday (II), January 30, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
January 30, 2024
2 Sam 18:9-10.14.24-25.30-19:3, Ps 86, Mk 5:21-43

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.30.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we encounter several instances of paternal love that can help us to appreciate the love God has for us and the type of love we’re called to have for others.
In the Gospel, we meet Jairus, the synagogue official who comes to Jesus to beg him to come quickly to heal his 12-year-old daughter who was at the point of death. By this point, Jesus was already persona non grata at the synagogue because he dared to do good and heal on the Lord’s day. For a synagogue official to approach him under any circumstances would have been viewed by many in the synagogue as an act of betrayal, almost consorting with an enemy. Yet Jairus didn’t just approach Jesus, but fell down at his feet and begged him to come to lay his hands on his daughter. So great was the love this dad had for his little girl that he was willing to humiliate himself, if that’s what it took, to try to save his girl’s life. That love was stronger than his protection of his reputation, than his desire to maintain his position, than everything other thing he valued.
We see a similar love in the first reading. When David saw the Cushite messenger running alone, he anticipated that it would be good news. The news he wanted was that Absalom’s troops had been defeated but that Absalom was safe. He had instructed his army, “Be gentle with young Absalom for my sake.” When the messenger arrived, however, and told him, “Let my lord the king receive the good news that this day the Lord has taken your part, freeing you from the grasp of all who rebelled against you,” David immediately asked, “Is young Absalom safe?” That was far more important than the details of a victory on the battlefield. When the emissary indicated that he was dead, the King went away from the crowd to weep, crying out, “My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son!” The victory was turned into mourning for everyone as the army saw how much the king was grieving for his son. Why did David mourn so much his son who had been attempting parricide? Because, I believe, he wanted to show him mercy, he wanted to reveal to him the real meaning of paternal love after he had been captured and restored. He never got that chance and Absalom died outside of that relationship.
Both of these episodes show us what paternal love is and give us an indication of the type of love, the type of weeping, the type of lengths to which God with even greater love acts and weeps for us. David cried out, “If only I had died instead of you, my son!,” and God, through David’s 28th generation grandson according to the flesh, actually did. God so loved the world, he so loved each of us, that he sent his only Son [to die for us] so that we might not perish but might have eternal life. He went so much further than Jairus and David. He gave his Son up to be brutally murdered — yes, he raised him from the dead, but this shouldn’t lessen the sacrifice made — so that we might live. God the Father loves us like the Father of the Prodigal Son; even after we’ve squandered half of his goods, even if we have turned on him like Absalom against David, he wants to show us that he loves us so much more than those goods.
We see one other example of this fatherhood in the middle of the Gospel. So many of the early great theologians in the Church — especially Saint Melito of Sardis — pondered the paternity of Jesus, the one who learned the essence of fatherhood from God the Father and became the incarnate image of the invisible God the Father. Jesus is a father, they taught, insofar as he is the one who gives life by the power of his resurrection in the Sacrament of Baptism. He wants to enter into that type of relationship with us, which we see in the healing of the woman with a hemorrhage for a dozen years. As Jesus was hastily going with the crowd to Jairus’ house, jostling with all the people on the way as always happens in the Middle East where “personal space” doesn’t really exist, someone touched him differently than the way everyone else was bumping into him. And Jesus stopped to ask who touched him. The people with him must have thought he was losing perspective. It would be like an ambulance on the way to the emergency room with a patient about to die stopped to investigate a paper cup on the road it had just run over. Someone was about to die and Jesus seemed more interested in who had touched him. But that person wasn’t just a stranger! When the woman finally came up, with “fear and trembling,” and fell down before Jesus to tell him the whole truth, he said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you. Go in peace and be cured!” Daughter! Notice the word. Jesus stopped for his own little girl on the way to cure Jairus’ little girl. And Jesus loved the woman with the hemorrhage even more than Jairus loved his daughter.
That’s the love that Jesus has for us. That’s the love that God the Father has for us. There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for us. He’ll suffer any inconvenience. He’ll pause for us even in the midst of a true emergency. Our response to this love is meant to be two-fold. First, we need to let God love us in this way. Second, we need to learn from his love a similar love for others, a love like David’s for Absalom, a love like Jairus’ for his daughter, something that far exceeds normal paternal affection but is a real spiritual participation in God’s love for his beloved sons and daughters whom God has entrusted to an earthly mom’s or dad’s particular care.
And the greatest example of that love for God for us, a love that transforms us, happens here at Mass, where we, Jesus’ beloved sons and daughters, have the privilege to do far more than touch the outermost part of his garment. We do far more than touch his actual body on the outside. We touch him and are touched by him on the inside. And not only does a hemorrhage of death dry up, but a font of life is renewed. Jesus’ words to Jairus’ daughter are highly significant. He grasped her by the hand and said, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!” That word “arise” is actually the word for the resurrection. Holding her hand, Jesus told her, “Be risen from the dead” And that’s what Jesus says to us as we come into communion with his risen body and blood. Holding far more than our hands, but holding our whole body and soul on the inside, he says to us “Little girl, little son, be raised from the dead!” That’s how his paternal love comes to its fulfillment! That’s the way that his paternal tears are dried and his tears — and ours — are turned into joy!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 SM 18:9-10, 14B, 24-25A, 30-19:3
Absalom unexpectedly came up against David’s servants.
He was mounted on a mule,
and, as the mule passed under the branches of a large terebinth,
his hair caught fast in the tree.
He hung between heaven and earth
while the mule he had been riding ran off.
Someone saw this and reported to Joab
that he had seen Absalom hanging from a terebinth.
And taking three pikes in hand,
he thrust for the heart of Absalom,
still hanging from the tree alive.
Now David was sitting between the two gates,
and a lookout went up to the roof of the gate above the city wall,
where he looked about and saw a man running all alone.
The lookout shouted to inform the king, who said,
“If he is alone, he has good news to report.”
The king said, “Step aside and remain in attendance here.”
So he stepped aside and remained there.
When the Cushite messenger came in, he said,
“Let my lord the king receive the good news
that this day the LORD has taken your part,
freeing you from the grasp of all who rebelled against you.”
But the king asked the Cushite,
“Is young Absalom safe?”
The Cushite replied,
“May the enemies of my lord the king
and all who rebel against you with evil intent
be as that young man!”The king was shaken,
and went up to the room over the city gate to weep.
He said as he wept,
“My son Absalom! My son, my son Absalom!
If only I had died instead of you,
Absalom, my son, my son!”
Joab was told that the king was weeping and mourning for Absalom;
and that day’s victory was turned into mourning for the whole army
when they heard that the king was grieving for his son.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 86:1-2, 3-4, 5-6
R. (1a) Listen, Lord, and answer me.
Incline your ear, O LORD; answer me,
for I am afflicted and poor.
Keep my life, for I am devoted to you;
save your servant who trusts in you.
You are my God.
R. Listen, Lord, and answer me.
Have mercy on me, O Lord,
for to you I call all the day.
Gladden the soul of your servant,
for to you, O Lord, I lift up my soul.
R. Listen, Lord, and answer me.
For you, O Lord, are good and forgiving,
abounding in kindness to all who call upon you.
Hearken, O LORD, to my prayer
and attend to the sound of my pleading.
R. Listen, Lord, and answer me.
Gospel
MK 5:21-43
When Jesus had crossed again in the boat
to the other side,
a large crowd gathered around him, and he stayed close to the sea.
One of the synagogue officials, named Jairus, came forward.
Seeing him he fell at his feet and pleaded earnestly with him, saying,
“My daughter is at the point of death.
Please, come lay your hands on her
that she may get well and live.”
He went off with him
and a large crowd followed him.
There was a woman afflicted with hemorrhages for twelve years.
She had suffered greatly at the hands of many doctors
and had spent all that she had.
Yet she was not helped but only grew worse.
She had heard about Jesus and came up behind him in the crowd
and touched his cloak.
She said, “If I but touch his clothes, I shall be cured.”
Immediately her flow of blood dried up.
She felt in her body that she was healed of her affliction.
Jesus, aware at once that power had gone out from him,
turned around in the crowd and asked,
“Who has touched my clothes?”
But his disciples said to him,
“You see how the crowd is pressing upon you,
and yet you ask, Who touched me?”
And he looked around to see who had done it.
The woman, realizing what had happened to her,
approached in fear and trembling.
She fell down before Jesus and told him the whole truth.
He said to her, “Daughter, your faith has saved you.
Go in peace and be cured of your affliction.”
While he was still speaking,
people from the synagogue official’s house arrived and said,
“Your daughter has died; why trouble the teacher any longer?”
Disregarding the message that was reported,
Jesus said to the synagogue official,
“Do not be afraid; just have faith.”
He did not allow anyone to accompany him inside
except Peter, James, and John, the brother of James.
When they arrived at the house of the synagogue official,
he caught sight of a commotion,
people weeping and wailing loudly.
So he went in and said to them,
“Why this commotion and weeping?
The child is not dead but asleep.”
And they ridiculed him.
Then he put them all out.
He took along the child’s father and mother
and those who were with him
and entered the room where the child was.
He took the child by the hand and said to her, “Talitha koum,”
which means, “Little girl, I say to you, arise!”
The girl, a child of twelve, arose immediately and walked around.
At that they were utterly astounded.
He gave strict orders that no one should know this
and said that she should be given something to eat.
The post Fatherly Love, Fourth Tuesday (II), January 30, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
21 min
January 29, 2024Prioritizing People Over Pigs and Even Kingdoms, Fourth Monday (II), January 29, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Fourth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
January 29, 2024
2 Sam 15:13-14.30;16:6-13, Ps 3, Mk 5:1-20

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.29.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today’s Gospel is about more than one more dramatic exorcism from Jesus. It points to something that needs to be exorcised from all of us in every age. After Jesus frees this man from a legion of demons — and a legion in the Roman army was 600 troops — by casting them into a herd of 2,000 pigs who, now possessed, ran off a cliff and drowned in the Sea of Galilee, the people of that pagan region of the Gerasenes didn’t rejoice at the liberation of the man who used to gouge himself with stones, break chains that attempted to bind him, and terrorize the people of the region; they didn’t come to Jesus to ask him likewise to free the other possessed people in the region, or to cure their sick or to teach them; instead, they asked him to leave their region. Jesus was bad for business. They perhaps worried that if he stayed he might next endanger their sheep, too, or their grain, or other aspects of their livelihood. They essentially cared more for the swine they had lost than the brother they had gained.
This is not a problem just for ancients. Still today, people can give possessions primacy over people, allowing people to be disturbed, even possessed, as long as their possessions are left undisturbed. Pope Francis wrote about this in his apostolic exhortation Evangelii Gaudium: “How can it be that it is not a news item,” he asks, “when an elderly homeless person dies of exposure, but it is news when the stock market loses two points?” For many people, the stock market is more important than people dying through neglect. And this is one of the greatest ways the devil seeks to possess multitudes, through the concupiscence of the eyes or materialism. We remember the way he tried to tempt Jesus in the desert to set his sights on material bread, by turning stones into bread, to become a baker instead of a savior, to focus on his stomach more than his soul, on himself more than God. But Jesus refused, saying we live on more than bread, but by every word that comes from God’s mouth. This is what uniting ourselves to Jesus’ spiritual poverty through the profession of the evangelical counsel of poverty makes possible.
People are more important than things and we must remember this and live by it. We’re in a culture today in which if a human being is still very much alive but in a persistent vegetative state, many think that we need to let the person die in order to save more money for the care of others. What this really means is to make profits for some by allowing people to die. It’s to put things before love, possessions before people. And when possessions become dominant, we ask Jesus to leave just like the Gerasenes did, because Jesus is constantly telling us to treat the poor the way we would treat him. And if we would ignore a man’s dying of exposure or resent rather than rejoice at a possessed man’s liberation, what we’re essentially saying is we don’t care if Jesus were to die of exposure or if Jesus were to be gashing himself with stones — attitudes that already show that we don’t want to have room for Jesus, we really don’t want him to stay.
We see a similar objective and subjective dehumanization at work in what’s pointed to by today’s first reading. On Saturday, we heard God through Nathan tell King David that the sword would never depart from his house. Today we see how David’s son Absalom, many years after David’s quadruple sin of lust, adultery, deception and murder, raised the sword to try to take his father’s kingdom. It would have been very easy for King David to have responded to the betrayal of his son with anger and pride. He could have said, “I have killed people by the tens of thousands and defeated Goliath. I am the greatest warrior and general in the history of this people and have forgotten ten times more than Absalom and his partisans will ever learn about warfare. I’ll teach my son and every other insurrectionist a lesson they’ll never forget.” But he didn’t do this. His son was more important than his kingdom. He also realized that if he put up resistance in Jerusalem, many innocent citizens would end up losing their lives, and he recognized that their lives were more important than his kingdom. He grasped that Absalom’s betrayal was a penance for his own betrayal of God many years earlier. He entrusted himself to God and left the city in penitential fashion, with his head covered and his feet exposed. Even when Shimei started to curse and stone David along the path out of the city and Abishai asked David for the permission to “lop off his head,” David refused, because Shimei’s life was more important than David’s possibly injured pride. David simply entrusted himself and his fate to God. How much civil rulers need to learn from this example! Over the course of history and still today, people have been repeatedly used as pawns in their ruler’s disputes. When rulers’ pride or possessions are threatened, they have declared war on each other, not even knowing the names of the soldiers who would die defending their honor, not knowing the mothers who would weep for their sons, the wives who would weep for their husbands, the children who would mourn their slain fathers.
Today the same Jesus who cast the demons out of the swine comes to cast himself into us. When we ask, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?,” he replies that he hasn’t come here to destroy us but rather to sanctify us. He has come not to torment us but to teach and spiritually strengthen us. He will not tell us to be quiet but to rather to proclaim from the rooftops his Gospel. He wants to cast himself into us that we will all rush out and not drown in the Sea of Galilee but bring others to bathe themselves in the graces flowing from baptism and in the Living Water coming from his pierced side. We beg him not to depart from us but to remain with us and to give us the grace to announce not just to our family but to all those he wants as members of his family what the Lord in his mercy has done for us and what he in his love wants to do for them.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 SM 15:13-14, 30; 16:5-13
An informant came to David with the report,
“The children of Israel have transferred their loyalty to Absalom.”
At this, David said to all his servants
who were with him in Jerusalem:
“Up! Let us take flight, or none of us will escape from Absalom.
Leave quickly, lest he hurry and overtake us,
then visit disaster upon us and put the city to the sword.”
As David went up the Mount of Olives, he wept without ceasing.
His head was covered, and he was walking barefoot.
All those who were with him also had their heads covered
and were weeping as they went.As David was approaching Bahurim,
a man named Shimei, the son of Gera
of the same clan as Saul’s family,
was coming out of the place, cursing as he came.
He threw stones at David and at all the king’s officers,
even though all the soldiers, including the royal guard,
were on David’s right and on his left.
Shimei was saying as he cursed:
“Away, away, you murderous and wicked man!
The LORD has requited you for all the bloodshed in the family of Saul,
in whose stead you became king,
and the LORD has given over the kingdom to your son Absalom.
And now you suffer ruin because you are a murderer.”
Abishai, son of Zeruiah, said to the king:
“Why should this dead dog curse my lord the king?
Let me go over, please, and lop off his head.”
But the king replied: “What business is it of mine or of yours,
sons of Zeruiah, that he curses?
Suppose the LORD has told him to curse David;
who then will dare to say, ‘Why are you doing this?’”
Then the king said to Abishai and to all his servants:
“If my own son, who came forth from my loins, is seeking my life,
how much more might this Benjaminite do so?
Let him alone and let him curse, for the LORD has told him to.
Perhaps the LORD will look upon my affliction
and make it up to me with benefits
for the curses he is uttering this day.”
David and his men continued on the road,
while Shimei kept abreast of them on the hillside,
all the while cursing and throwing stones and dirt as he went.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 3:2-3, 4-5, 6-7
R. (8a) Lord, rise up and save me.
O LORD, how many are my adversaries!
Many rise up against me!
Many are saying of me,
“There is no salvation for him in God.”
R. Lord, rise up and save me.
But you, O LORD, are my shield;
my glory, you lift up my head!
When I call out to the LORD,
he answers me from his holy mountain.
R. Lord, rise up and save me.
When I lie down in sleep,
I wake again, for the LORD sustains me.
I fear not the myriads of people
arrayed against me on every side.
R. Lord, rise up and save me.
Gospel
MK 5:1-20
Jesus and his disciples came to the other side of the sea,
to the territory of the Gerasenes.
When he got out of the boat,
at once a man from the tombs who had an unclean spirit met him.
The man had been dwelling among the tombs,
and no one could restrain him any longer, even with a chain.
In fact, he had frequently been bound with shackles and chains,
but the chains had been pulled apart by him and the shackles smashed,
and no one was strong enough to subdue him.
Night and day among the tombs and on the hillsides
he was always crying out and bruising himself with stones.
Catching sight of Jesus from a distance,
he ran up and prostrated himself before him,
crying out in a loud voice,
“What have you to do with me, Jesus, Son of the Most High God?
I adjure you by God, do not torment me!”
(He had been saying to him, “Unclean spirit, come out of the man!”)
He asked him, “What is your name?”
He replied, “Legion is my name. There are many of us.”
And he pleaded earnestly with him
not to drive them away from that territory.
Now a large herd of swine was feeding there on the hillside.
And they pleaded with him,
“Send us into the swine. Let us enter them.”
And he let them, and the unclean spirits came out and entered the swine.
The herd of about two thousand rushed down a steep bank into the sea,
where they were drowned.
The swineherds ran away and reported the incident in the town
and throughout the countryside.
And people came out to see what had happened.
As they approached Jesus,
they caught sight of the man who had been possessed by Legion,
sitting there clothed and in his right mind.
And they were seized with fear.
Those who witnessed the incident explained to them what had happened
to the possessed man and to the swine.
Then they began to beg him to leave their district.
As he was getting into the boat,
the man who had been possessed pleaded to remain with him.
But Jesus would not permit him but told him instead,
“Go home to your family and announce to them
all that the Lord in his pity has done for you.”
Then the man went off and began to proclaim in the Decapolis
what Jesus had done for him; and all were amazed.
The post Prioritizing People Over Pigs and Even Kingdoms, Fourth Monday (II), January 29, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
January 28, 2024Disciples of Our Astonishing, Amazing and Authoritative Teacher, Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 28, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 28, 2024
Deut 18:15-20, Ps 95, 1 Cor 7:32-35, Mk 1:21-28

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.28.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
In today’s Gospel, we see that on the Sabbath, Jesus entered the synagogue and taught. All those who listened to him, St. Mark tells us, were “astounded at his teaching, for he taught with authority and not like the scribes.” He then showed the tremendous power of his authoritative words by silencing and casting out from a possessed man a demon. That amazed the crowd even further. They asked, “What is this? A new teaching, with authority! He commands even the unclean spirits, and they obey him.”
The same Jesus who entered the Capernaum synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath enters Notre Dame Church tonight on the Christian Sabbath. And here he teaches with the same authority he wielded two thousand years ago. He has just spoken to us in the word of God and later he who created the heavens and the earth with his word, who called fishermen and tax collectors to follow him so powerfully that at his word they immediately got up and did so, will do something far more amazing than cast out a devil or silence a stormy sea. He will change bread and wine into God, into his Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity and cast himself into us. If we recognize what is really going on, if we awaken to the power of his words, we ought to be far more amazed than Jesus’ contemporaries two millennia ago.
The Jews in the Synagogue had been prophetically prepared by Moses to await the one who would come to teach with astonishing authority. We see that in today’s first reading. The Book of Deuteronomy is, essentially, one long valedictory address of Moses to the Jews as he was preparing to die and leave them, after having been God’s instrument to free them from slavery to Pharoah in Egypt and lead them through the promised land. They obviously did not want to lose him. He told them not to worry but to wait because someone greater was coming. “A prophet like me,” he declared, “will the Lord, your God, raise up for you from among your own kin.” From among the Jews, he was saying, God was going to raise up someone with even greater authority than Moses. “To him,” the greater Jewish liberator continued, “shall you listen.” To him, he said, rather than to me. He then told them plainly what the Lord had revealed to him. Moses, of course, had spoken to the Lord on Mount Sinai for 40 days, and regularly consulted him in the meeting tent, and had the reputation for being the only one who had spoken to the Lord face-to-face and lived. Moses said that the Lord had told him, “I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kin and will put my words into his mouth; he shall tell them all that I command him.” This new Moses, this greater than Moses, would not just speak on behalf of God but would speak God’s very words. Jesus would in fact be the very Word-of-the-Father-made-flesh and would declare, “I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me” (Jn 8:28) and “I did not speak on my own, but the Father who sent me commanded me what to say and to speak” (Jn 12:49).” That’s why Jesus was able to speak about the accountability to which Moses alluded at the end of these prophetic words. God told Moses, “Whoever will not listen to my words that he speaks in my name, I myself will make him answer for it,” and so Jesus would declare, simply, “The one who rejects me rejects the One who sent me” (Lk 10:16). Therefore when Jesus was teaching in the synagogue, part of their amazement and astonishment was Jesus’ listeners were beginning to recognize that they were hearing the greater-than-Moses, the one in whom Scripture is fulfilled, speak to them live.
It’s important for us to recognize what Jesus’ first hearers did: that Jesus teaches unlike any other teacher who has ever come, before or after. His contemporaries said he “taught with authority, unlike the scribes.” The scribes, the ancient Biblical scholars, always used to cite Sacred Scripture or Jewish tradition, to base their teachings on the authority of the word of God or the wisdom of the rabbis. Such references were obviously an appropriate way for them to teach, quoting Sacred Scripture and Biblical luminaries rather than present merely their own opinions. But Jesus didn’t need to cite the word of God, because he is — not just was, be is — the word of God. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, Jesus showed he was the fulfillment of Moses’ prophecy by contrasting himself to what Moses, their greatest teacher about the ways of God up until then, had said to them on behalf of God in the desert: “You have heard that it was said,” — in other words, Moses said to you — “‘you shall not kill…’ ‘you shall not commit adultery… ,’ ‘an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth…,’ but I say to you, you shall not even be angry with a brother, … or look on a woman with lust in your heart, … or if anyone strikes you on the right cheek, turn and offer him the other as well” (Mt 5:20-45). By his miraculous deeds, Jesus demonstrated he was indeed capable of saying, “But I say to you,” in contrast to what the greatest Biblical figure until then had said.
Authority comes from the Latin word auctor for “author,” and Jesus spoke with authority because he is the author, the creator, of man, woman and the world. St. Mark uses the Greek word exousia to express Jesus’ authority. It literally means “from his own substance.” Jesus spoke with authority because he, as God, is the ground of all reality. To capture just a little of what it must have been like to listen to Jesus talk about God, about the world, about man, and about faith and about morality, it would be far greater than listening to the Wright Brothers talk about airplanes, Henry Ford about cars, Thomas Edison about electricity, Steve Jobs about iPhones, or John McCarthy about artificial intelligence. They could all speak with stunning authority because they were the “authors,” the inventors, of life-changing advances that we now take for granted. But that’s just a small glimpse of what it would have been like to be in that Capernaum Synagogue listening to Jesus, who is the author of the world, the one through whom we and all things were made.
The truth is, though, that even if we can’t go back in a time machine to the Capernaum Synagogue, we can have that experience of amazement and astonishment. We should have that experience. The reason is because Jesus continues to teach us, here and now, with the same amazing authority.
Jesus does so, first, at Mass. The fathers of the Second Vatican Council, in their Constitution on the Sacred Liturgy, emphatically reminded us that “when the holy scriptures are read in Church, it is Christ himself who speaks” (Sacrosanctum Concilium, 7). That’s why we stand when the Gospel is proclaimed, because we rise out of reverence and respect for Christ who himself is proclaiming the words of the Gospel live through his minister.
Jesus speaks with authority through prayer, both whispering to us directly and especially when we meditate on his holy words, the authority and astonishing quality of which have no expiration date.
Christ also speaks with exousia to us through the teaching of the Church, to whom he gave his own amazing authority to continue his saving work. Before ascending into heaven, Jesus said to his apostles: “Full authority [— his total, astonishing and amazing authority —] in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Therefore, go and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit, and teaching them to obey everything that I have commanded you” (Mt 28:18-20). The Church has been given, we in the Church have been given, Jesus’ astonishing and amazing authority with which to proclaim his words to others. And so we need to hear and heed what Christ teaches through the Church.
Jesus gave his amazing authority in a special way to the visible head of the Church he founded. He told Peter that he was the rock on whom he was going to build his Church and then gave him the authority even to open and lock the way to heaven: “I will give you the keys of the kingdom of heaven,” he said, “and whatever you bind on earth will be bound in heaven, and whatever you loose on earth will be loosed in heaven” (Mt 16:19). The Church firmly believes that that authority was passed down to St. Peter’s successors — all the way down to John Paul II, Benedict XVI and Pope Francis — when the Pope teaches in a definitive way about the faith binding for all Christians everywhere and in every generation. And so we should respond with rapt attention, gratitude and holy and fully free obedience.
Jesus also gave his authority to the apostles as a whole (and their successors, the bishops). Before Jesus sent out the apostles and disciples he had commissioned to proclaim the kingdom, he told them, “Whoever hears you hears me, and whoever rejects you rejects me” (Lk 10:16). That’s why we listen to the bishops with reverence, for, when they teach in communion with Christ, they share not just their opinions, but his words of eternal life.
Jesus continues to teach with staggering power in each of these ways. The first question for us today, therefore, is: How do I respond to the Lord’s teaching? Am I amazed and astonished by it? Am I grateful for it? If we genuinely are, then we will do what people normally do when they’re amazed: we’ll behave as if we can’t possibly get enough of his teaching. We’ll devour the Gospels. We’ll seek to enter much more deeply into his words through Bible Studies, prayerful lectio divina, podcasts like Fr. Mike Schmitz’s Bible in a Year, resources from the Augustine Institute, Word on Fire, Ascension Press, the St. Paul Center and more. We’ll long to meet those who can open up the Word of God to us and help us to experience anew Jesus’ amazing and astonishing authority. There are some Catholics who live this way. Their fingerprints are all over their Bibles. They can’t read, listen and watch enough commentaries, books and programs to help them to understand better what God is saying. They can’t keep themselves from sharing all they’re learning. They behave about God and the love letters he has given us in the Bible with even more enthusiasm than the fans of the Kansas City Chiefs, Baltimore Ravens, San Francisco 49ers and Detroit Lions are all cheering for their teams to win the Super Bowl. None of us, after all, is a “spiritual genius” with all of God’s wisdom infused so that we need to make no effort. We have to meditate on what Jesus teaches us with amazing authority in Sacred Scripture and the other means by which he teaches us. We need to overcome the spiritual immaturity that believes we learned everything we need to know about the faith by the time we were confirmed. There’s so much to learn — and this truth that we will learn will set us free. Everything, however, begins with an astonishment and amazement toward God and what he teaches. Today, January 28, is the normal feast day of St. Thomas Aquinas, doctor of the Church and patron of universities and university students. After Jesus, he’s probably the greatest teacher in the history of the Church, but he never lost his amazement at Jesus’ teaching, because of his love for Jesus. That’s why he studied so hard. That’s why he worked so hard to pass along that wonder to others, writing 50 thick volumes of theology before he died at the age of 50. He’s interceding for us now that we will have that same love for Christ that will make us zealous to learn and live his teaching in all the ways that it comes to us.
We need to ask: Why and how does it happen that so many Catholics don’t approach God, his holy word, and his authoritative teaching, with hunger rather than boredom or disinterest? Why do so many say the words, “Thanks be to God!,” and “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ!” at the end of the liturgical recitation of Scripture, with a ritualistic yawn rather than an enthusiastic exclamation? There are a few important answers from today’s readings.
The first we learn today’s Responsorial Psalm. We prayed four times the words of Psalm 95, “If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.” Notice we didn’t say, “If today you hear [God’s] voice, harden not your minds” or your “ears.” Lack of astonishment is not a function of a hardened head or clogged ears but a stony heart. It’s not a thing of insufficient intelligence, or physical or spiritual deafness, but inadequate love. Those who love God are astonished and amazed by him and what he says and does. We all know what it’s like when people are in love. Enamored of each other, they’ll often talk to each other for hours, because their hearts lead them to be mesmerized at what the other person says and who the other is. We’re supposed to love God even more. The Psalm tells us today that many of the Israelites had hardened hearts “even though they had seen [God’s] works.” God had worked so many stupendous miracles for them — the ten plagues in Egypt, the crossing of the Red Sea, the daily manna and quails, the cloud of fire, the water from the rock, the theophanies on Mount Sinai — but many still had a spiritually fatal hardening of their arteries. Yet God has done far greater works for us than he did for the Jews in Egypt and the desert, with what Jesus gives us, for example, in the Gospel and in the Sacraments. Sometimes, however, just like our spiritual ancestors, our hearts harden through sin, through self-centeredness, through distraction and through lack of love such that we fail to have a passionate amazement for God and for the gifts he gives us.
The second thing we learn in the epistle, taken from St. Paul’s First Letter to the Christians in Corinth. There are multiple applications of what St. Paul says that shed light on the vocations to marriage and to chaste celibacy for the sake of the kingdom of heaven in the priesthood, religious and consecrated life. But what I’d like to focus on is the priority he gives to be “anxious,” preoccupied, concerned, solicitous, and focused on the things of the Lord, not the things of the world. In Corinth at the time, because there were so few Christians, Christians who married normally had to marry pagans and they were divided between trying faithfully to love God and love their spouse and their family. In that context, St. Paul praised chaste celibacy so that one could be undivided in the love of the Lord. Soon, as we see in St. Paul’s later letter to the Ephesians, Christians were marrying Christian spouses and they were able to live as a sacramental sign of the love that is meant to exist between Christ and his Church (Eph 5:21-33). But the main point is that we’re not supposed to be divided, but to incorporate everything, at every stage of life, into a communion of life with God. If we try to serve two Masters — God and someone or something else — we will end up not responding to the Word of God the way we ought. It’s a simple rule of life. The other persons or other things, as Jesus teaches us in the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, can be “thorns” — worldly cares and anxieties — that can choke the growth of his amazing and astonishing word and work in us.
The third thing that prevents us from benefitting from the awesome gift of Jesus’ teaching — in his word, in prayer, in the teaching of the Church, the Popes and Bishops — we find in the Gospel. The devil is present actively trying to undermine what Jesus is doing. When Jesus was speaking the Word with amazing authority, the evil one tried to interrupt Jesus’ words. He cried out from within the possessed man, alleging that Jesus had come to destroy, not to save. Despite himself, he couldn’t help but underline Jesus’ authority, calling him “the” — not “one of,” but the principal, even sole — “Holy One of God.” But so much did the “father of lies” fear Jesus’ authoritatively teaching the truth that he tried to hijack the whole synagogue service. We shouldn’t be surprised that the devil always seeks to snatch away the seed of the Word of God before the seed can bear fruit. The evil one is at work right now to try to get each of us not to take the Word of God today seriously. Just like he tried to distract those in the synagogue, he wants to distract us. Even if he doesn’t possess us because we won’t give him that opening, he still wants to thwart the plans of the Holy One of God for our salvation. Pope Francis mentioned the devil’s work in his Angelus this morning in the Vatican, stating that the devil wants one way or the other to possess us and “enchain our souls,” to suffocate our free response to God. He does so, the Holy Father says, through addictions, impossible perfectionisms, consumerism, hedonism, lack of self-esteem, fear, pessimism, dissatisfaction, the idolatry of power and thought manipulation. The devil is, indeed, the one who really wants to destroy us and, if he can’t prevent our coming to Church to be with God, he at least wants to get us to get as little out of it as possible. He wants us to go through the motions rather than to convert and make concrete resolutions to live by what Jesus teaches us. We live in an anti-authoritarian age dominated by the devil’s ancient “non serviam,” his “I will not serve.” So many have been impacted by an exaggerated individualism that contradicts love. So many are, like the devil, suspicious, even sometimes paranoid, of any authority outside their own, whether parental, governmental, religious, or, after the COVID pandemic smashed the ideology of scientism, scientific authority, too. Like he succeeded with Adam and Eve in the beginning, so the devil wants to convince us to be suspicious of God and to resent his authority as if all he wishes to do is to destroy us, to stifle and suffocate our freedom. So we need to be on guard of what the devil is doing, even right now, right here. And the greatest way we defeat the devil is doing what he refused to do: to obey God with faith and love, to listen to him speak with authority and put his words into practice.
Today is an opportunity for us to stoke our amazement and astonishment at the great gift of Jesus’ authoritative teaching, in all the ways that he conveys to us the truth. Jesus teaches us tonight, just like he did during his own day, because he loves us and knows that we need to know and live by what he teaches. He speaks to us day-by-day, subject-by-subject, through prayer, through the Word of God, through the school of the Church and other means, to help us overcome our ignorance. The more spiritually mature we are, the more we recognize how little we know, how much we need to learn, and how grateful we are for the education in faith and life Christ provides us through his Bride and Body the Church. The real litmus test as to whether our heart is hardened or astonished and amazed is how we respond to this gift of God’s teaching. Today is a time to make resolutions to live astounded by Jesus’ teaching, by listening to the Word of God at Mass differently, by studying Sacred Scripture on our own, by bringing Jesus’ words to prayer, by coming to Bible Studies, by listening to Pope Francis, to Cardinal Dolan, and to those God sends us to teach authoritatively in his name, and by attending the doctrinal courses available at the Merton Institute or in so many online sources. And to do so with the ears of a grateful, awestruck heart.
One of my favorite Catholics hymns, one that I had sung at my first Masses and regularly sing or say to God in prayer, is “Word of God Come Down on Earth.” It’s number 513 in the Worship hymnal. The lyrics summarize the type of amazement we’re supposed to have to God’s word. We pray, “Word of God, come down on earth, living rain from heaven descending; touch our hearts and bring to birth faith and hope and love unending. Word almighty we revere you; Word made flesh, we long to hear you.” We’re called to long for God’s word more than a parched man longs for water and to desire to be touched and pierced by it in the heart. The second verse continues, “Word eternal, ‘throned on high, Word that brought to life creation, Word that came from heaven to die, crucified for our salvation. Saving Word, the world restoring, speak to us, your love outpouring.” We need to remember that when God speaks to us, he is pouring out his love, not gushing forth arbitrary and soul-crushing demands! The third verse focuses on the power of God’s word, a power that is meant to be at work in all those who believe: “Word that caused blind eyes to see, speak and heal our mortal blindness; deaf we are: our healer be; loose our tongues to tell your kindness; Be our Word in pity spoken; heal the world, by our sin broken.” Tonight we ask him by that power to defeat the ways that the devil wants us not to take the Word of God seriously. And the final verse turns to the union between the “two tables” at Mass, the table of God’s word and the table of the Eucharist. We sing, “Word that speaks your Father’s love, one with him beyond all telling, Word that sends us from above God the Spirit, with us dwelling, Word of truth, to all truth lead us, Word of life, with one Bread feed us.” Jesus is that Word of God that seeks not only to lead us to all truth but to feed us with himself, the Truth incarnate. Today we turn to him and ask him to touch us in such a way as to make us burn for him with longing and amazement, softening whatever hardness there is in our hearts, so that, led to all truth and fed and strengthened by him, we may become focused about his affairs and echoes of his astonishing and amazing Word among all our families and friends in this world and, one day, among the choirs of saints and angels in eternal awe around the heavenly throne. As we prepare to hear from the one whom Moses foretold the most astonishing words in human life, “This is my Body!,” “This is the chalice of my blood!,” we ask him for the grace to be able to cry out with love at the elevations and as we approach the altar what the devil couldn’t help but confess, “I know who you are, the Holy One of God!” And he amazingly and astonishing comes here for us!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Dt 18:15-20
Moses spoke to all the people, saying:
“A prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you
from among your own kin;
to him you shall listen.
This is exactly what you requested of the LORD, your God, at Horeb
on the day of the assembly, when you said,
‘Let us not again hear the voice of the LORD, our God,
nor see this great fire any more, lest we die.’
And the LORD said to me, ‘This was well said.
I will raise up for them a prophet like you from among their kin,
and will put my words into his mouth;
he shall tell them all that I command him.
Whoever will not listen to my words which he speaks in my name,
I myself will make him answer for it.
But if a prophet presumes to speak in my name
an oracle that I have not commanded him to speak,
or speaks in the name of other gods, he shall die.'”
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 95:1-2, 6-7, 7-9
R. (8) If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Come, let us sing joyfully to the LORD;
let us acclaim the rock of our salvation.
Let us come into his presence with thanksgiving;
let us joyfully sing psalms to him.
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Come, let us bow down in worship;
let us kneel before the LORD who made us.
For he is our God,
and we are the people he shepherds, the flock he guides.
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Oh, that today you would hear his voice:
“Harden not your hearts as at Meribah,
as in the day of Massah in the desert,
Where your fathers tempted me;
they tested me though they had seen my works.”
R. If today you hear his voice, harden not your hearts.
Reading 2
1 Cor 7:32-35
Brothers and sisters:
I should like you to be free of anxieties.
An unmarried man is anxious about the things of the Lord,
how he may please the Lord.
But a married man is anxious about the things of the world,
how he may please his wife, and he is divided.
An unmarried woman or a virgin is anxious about the things of the Lord,
so that she may be holy in both body and spirit.
A married woman, on the other hand,
is anxious about the things of the world,
how she may please her husband.
I am telling you this for your own benefit,
not to impose a restraint upon you,
but for the sake of propriety
and adherence to the Lord without distraction.
Alleluia
Mt 4:16
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The people who sit in darkness have seen a great light;
on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death,
light has arisen.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 1:21-28
Then they came to Capernaum,
and on the sabbath Jesus entered the synagogue and taught.
The people were astonished at his teaching,
for he taught them as one having authority and not as the scribes.
In their synagogue was a man with an unclean spirit;
he cried out, “What have you to do with us, Jesus of Nazareth?
Have you come to destroy us?
I know who you are—the Holy One of God!”
Jesus rebuked him and said,
“Quiet! Come out of him!”
The unclean spirit convulsed him and with a loud cry came out of him.
All were amazed and asked one another,
“What is this?
A new teaching with authority.
He commands even the unclean spirits and they obey him.”
His fame spread everywhere throughout the whole region of Galilee.
The post Disciples of Our Astonishing, Amazing and Authoritative Teacher, Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 28, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
34 min
January 27, 2024 Living as Catholic Disciples Today, Our Lady of Grace Church, Indian Land, SC, January 26, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Our Lady of Grace Church, Indian Land, South Carolina
January 26, 2024

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Living as Disciples of the Lord, Our Lady of Grace, Indian Land, SC
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58 min
January 25, 2024Saul’s Death and Resurrection in Damascus, Conversion of St. Paul, January 25, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Feast of the Conversion of St. Paul
January 25, 2024
Acts 9:1-22, Ps 117, Mt 16:15-18

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The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today on this feast of the conversion of Saul of Tarsus — one of the most important events in the history of the world because of the impact this one man had, post-conversion, in spreading the Gospel all over the known world at the time and whose writings have deeply influenced all of Christian theology — it is important to understand what led to his conversion, what his conversion truly was, and what it means for our conversion.
St. Paul’s shocking conversion was, at least partially, the miraculous result of St. Stephen’s prayers. When the first Christian martyr (after we could say John the Baptist and Jesus himself) was being stoned to death outside the Jerusalem Gate that now bears his name, the stone-throwing assassins were all laying their cloaks at the feet of Saul, showing that he was presiding over the execution. St. Stephen prayed, “Lord, do not hold this sin against them,” as he was asking Jesus to receive his spirit, echoing Jesus’ own words from the Cross, “Father, forgive them for they know not what they do.” These prayers — Stephen’s and Jesus’ — were heard. God didn’t hold this sin against Saul. And Jesus Christ met him on the road to Damascus to give him by means of that forgiveness the gift of conversion.
His shocking conversion was not principally the superficial change from being a persecutor of Christians to a proclaimer of Christ, from a murderer to a maker of the faithful. It wasn’t from an immoral life far from God to a moral one. As Pope Benedict XVI stressed, it was from a false notion of a holy life to a true notion. Paul had been from his young days a zealous follower of God. He had come down from Turkey to Jerusalem to study at the feet of the greatest rabbi of the age, Gamaliel. As a young man, he had such zeal to keep the community of Israel together that he made it his mission to try to stomp out the heretical sect that was dividing Judaism and blasphemously claiming that a carpenter from Nazareth not only was the Messiah but the Son of God, one who said he would destroy the holy Temple. That’s why he was terrorizing Christians. In the persecution of the Church, he was the furthest thing, for example, from Herod, who hunted down the baby Jesus in order to preserve his own privileges. Paul’s conversion was, rather, from an erroneous notion that we are saved by our external adhesion to all the prescriptions of the Mosaic Law, to the true one that we are saved by grace through faith in Jesus Christ. We are saved by Christ’s work, not our own. We can also say, on the heels of the Sunday of the Word of God, that Saul, despite his scholarship, had a defective notion of what was contained in the Word of God and where it was leading. He was “kicking against the goad” (Acts 26:14), as Jesus said to him, which meant that he was rebelling like cattle against the stick used to drive them, because he was not following where the “goad” of the Word of God was ultimately leading him.
But those aspects of his conversion still do not lead us to the deepest essence of what happened to him and what is meant to happen to us. His conversion was a death and resurrection. After St. Paul met the Lord 137 miles north of Jerusalem in Damascus where the Christian community was strong, after he was blinded and needed to walk by faith, he was baptized by Ananias and the scales fell from his eyes, a sign not just of a capacity to see things in the new light of Christ that had previous blinded him, but a sign of death and resurrection. He would later write to the Romans, with words we hear every Easter Vigil, “Are you unaware that we who were baptized into Christ Jesus were baptized into his death? We were indeed buried with him through baptism into death, so that, just as Christ was raised from the dead by the glory of the Father, we too might live in newness of life” (Rom 6:3-4). To convert means to die to the old Adam in us so that the new Adam might rise. That is not just a one-time sacramental act, but a lifetime moral one. St. Paul would himself testify to this when he would later write in his letter to the Christians in Galatia, “I have been crucified with Christ and the life I now live I live by faith in the Son of God who loved me and gave himself up for me” (Gal 2:20). The metanoia, the revolution in the way we look at the world and live, the true conversion God is asking of any of us, and the deepest meaning of holiness is to die to ourselves so that the Risen Christ truly can live within us, reign within us, sanctify and save us and make us his instruments to co-redeem the world. Holiness is union with God. Since we are saved by grace, and grace is not a thing but a participation as a creature in the life of the Creator, Christian conversion must be ongoing, because it’s based on a continuous encounter with the Lord, as he seeks in us to form us more and more in his image with our free fiat. It’s a death and resurrection. It’s a new life. It’s Christ crucified and risen living in us. Pope Benedict preached, “Paul never once interprets this moment as an event of conversion. … It was … rather a death and a resurrection for Paul himself. One existence died and another, new one was born with the Risen Christ. … This powerful encounter with Christ is the key to understanding what had happened: death and resurrection, renewal on the part of the One who had shown himself and had spoken to him. … In this deeper sense we can and we must speak of conversion. This encounter is a real renewal that changed all his parameters. Now he could say that what had been essential and fundamental for him earlier had become ‘refuse’ for him; it was no longer ‘gain’ but loss, because henceforth the only thing that counted for him was life in Christ.”
St. Paul’s conversion brings us to consider our own. Many of us can have simplistic, superficial notions of conversion, in which we think it means basically just a minor course correction in our life, like the elimination of a bad habit. Others of us can think conversion is something we acquire through our own efforts of good deeds. Some others can think the goal of it is mainly to be a “good person.” But the ultimate meaning of conversion is to “turn with” Christ in every way, to adopt a new life, to live full-time in communion with him, loving as he loves, being willing to suffer and die with him and rise. The feast of St. Paul’s conversion is a day on which we’re called to enter more deeply into Christ’s death and live a new life. It’s a day on which we learn how to live far more deeply by faith in the son of God who loves us and gives his life for us. It’s a day on which we pray for the conversion of those who are caught up in sins for which he was crucified, those who persecute Christ without even knowing what they’re doing, those who are persecuting his body and making martyrs across the globe. It’s a day on which we pray for the grace, like St. Paul, to be so thoroughly converted by the Gospel that we will say, “’Woe to me’ if we do not share this gift!” and go out to all the world telling the Good News, proclaiming the Gospel to every creature, baptizing and helping them to carry out everything Christ has commanded us.
The great strength of Paul came from his encounter with Jesus Christ not merely on the road to Damascus but every time he, with the early Church, and in his own words, “took bread, and, after he had given thanks, broke it and said, ‘This is my body that is for you. Do this in remembrance of me.’” The same Lord who met him at the city gates of that Syrian capital comes here to meet us at the altar today!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
ACTS 9:1-22
Saul, still breathing murderous threats against the disciples of the Lord,
went to the high priest and asked him
for letters to the synagogues in Damascus, that,
if he should find any men or women who belonged to the Way,
he might bring them back to Jerusalem in chains.
On his journey, as he was nearing Damascus,
a light from the sky suddenly flashed around him.
He fell to the ground and heard a voice saying to him,
“Saul, Saul, why are you persecuting me?”
He said, “Who are you, sir?”
The reply came, “I am Jesus, whom you are persecuting.
Now get up and go into the city and you will be told what you must do.”
The men who were traveling with him stood speechless,
for they heard the voice but could see no one.
Saul got up from the ground,
but when he opened his eyes he could see nothing;
so they led him by the hand and brought him to Damascus.
For three days he was unable to see, and he neither ate nor drank.
There was a disciple in Damascus named Ananias,
and the Lord said to him in a vision, “Ananias.”
He answered, “Here I am, Lord.”
The Lord said to him, “Get up and go to the street called Straight
and ask at the house of Judas for a man from Tarsus named Saul.
He is there praying,
and in a vision he has seen a man named Ananias
come in and lay his hands on him,
that he may regain his sight.”
But Ananias replied,
“Lord, I have heard from many sources about this man,
what evil things he has done to your holy ones in Jerusalem.
And here he has authority from the chief priests
to imprison all who call upon your name.”
But the Lord said to him,
“Go, for this man is a chosen instrument of mine
to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and children of Israel,
and I will show him what he will have to suffer for my name.”
So Ananias went and entered the house;
laying his hands on him, he said,
“Saul, my brother, the Lord has sent me,
Jesus who appeared to you on the way by which you came,
that you may regain your sight and be filled with the Holy Spirit.”
Immediately things like scales fell from his eyes
and he regained his sight.
He got up and was baptized,
and when he had eaten, he recovered his strength.
He stayed some days with the disciples in Damascus,
and he began at once to proclaim Jesus in the synagogues,
that he is the Son of God.
All who heard him were astounded and said,
“Is not this the man who in Jerusalem
ravaged those who call upon this name,
and came here expressly to take them back in chains
to the chief priests?”
But Saul grew all the stronger
and confounded the Jews who lived in Damascus,
proving that this is the Christ.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 117:1BC, 2
R. (Mark 16:15) Go out to all the world and tell the Good News.
Praise the LORD, all you nations;
glorify him, all you peoples!
R. Go out to all the world, and tell the Good News.
For steadfast is his kindness toward us,
and the fidelity of the LORD endures forever.
R. Go out to all the world, and tell the Good News.
Gospel MK 16:15-18
Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them:
“Go into the whole world
and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.
Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved;
whoever does not believe will be condemned.
These signs will accompany those who believe:
in my name they will drive out demons,
they will speak new languages.
They will pick up serpents with their hands,
and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them.
They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”
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16 min
January 24, 2024The Lord’s Building Project, Third Wednesday (II), January 24, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Francis de Sales, Bishop and Doctor
January 24, 2024
2 Sam 7:4-17, Ps 89, Mk 4:1-20

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The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the first reading we encounter not only something important in the history of the people of Israel but also a spiritual truth with consequences for our prayer and entire life. Yesterday we saw David dancing before the Ark of the Covenant, a sign of God’s presence, as it was brought into Jerusalem. David wanted to build a worthy temple to house the ark, something far better that where David himself was dwelling. He asked Nathan’s opinion and Nathan basically replied “Go for it.” But later God came to Nathan and sent him back to David saying that he would not build a house for God, but that God wanted to build a house for him — something that would be fulfilled, obviously, in the Temple Jesus himself became, which according to his humanity descended from David’s “house” or line. God essentially wants to do the same thing for us. He wants to build a house for us, to make us a tabernacle for him to dwell within us and for us to abide in and with him, a building project that begins in baptism. This is a gratuitous gift of God’s part; our efforts are fundamentally receptive, an active passivity. This is the principle for our prayer and for our whole life. God wants to build in us and through us. The fundamental Christian response is co-operation.
God continues that building project through the grace of his word. At the end of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus said that the one who hears his words and acts on them is like a wise man who built his house on rock. Three days after celebrating the Sunday of the Word of God, Jesus today teaches us about how his word is supposed to help us grow. Jesus describes himself as a sower who seeks to sow himself as the fruitful fallen grain of wheat (Jn 12:24) into the soil of our lives. The measure of our life is our fiat, our “let it be done.” God sows through his words, which are like the wood and the nails and the hammer of his construction project. He wants us to receive the seed of his word on good soil and bear great fruit. He describes four types of soil or receptivity to his building project.
The first type of soil is the hardened soil by the way side. The seed of Jesus’ teaching can’t penetrate because one has a closed heart, either because one thinks he already has all the answers he needs, or because she’s too stubbornly set in her ways and refuses to put in the effort to change. We find this soil regularly with inveterate sinners who resist any call to conversion. But we also find it regularly in daily communicants who have heard the word of God so many times that they know the end of the story and cease to listen in a way so as to change. Sometimes we also find this soil in the elderly, those who say, “You can’t teach old dogs new tricks.” I always say that if this is the case, then we may end up finding a lot of old dogs in hell! Jesus is always calling us to change, to deepen, to follow him the Master more closely. He’s going to be teaching us and calling us to change for as long as we have life. And we have to be open to that process. Otherwise, we will bear no fruit from his teaching.
The second type of soil is superficial or rocky soil. In many parts of the Holy Land, there is a thick layer of limestone three to five inches under the soil. That means that when a seed hits there, the roots can establish very quickly in the warm soil that retains all the water in five inches, but eventually when the hot Middle Eastern sun arises, it scorches because the roots aren’t deep, it can’t continue to get nourishment from the soil, and the water that would be safe several inches under the soil ends up evaporating. This image refers to people, Jesus tells us, who respond with joy to the word, who “like” it, but who don’t allow the world to drill deep down in their life to change them. There are many people who approach the word of God to be entertained rather than to be changed. They would much rather listen to a good storyteller who keeps them laughing and smiling than to someone who calls them to examine their consciences, their actions, aspirations and lives in the light of God’s word. This is the second type of soil. Jesus’ teaching bears no fruit in this type of student.
The third type of soil he describes is thorny. The soil would otherwise be good but thorns choke the growth of the seed. Jesus defines the thorns “as worldly anxiety, the lure of riches, and the craving for other things.” We know this is true. If we come here to listen to Jesus with anxious hearts — for example, because a loved one is in the hospital with a terminal diagnosis, or because we don’t know how we’re going to pay this month’s rent — it’s going to be very hard to hear God’s word, even if it’s about trusting in God’s providential care. Likewise, if someone comes to Jesus’ class craving money and material possessions, or vanity, or power, or pleasure, or a big lunch, it’s going to choke their receptivity and responsiveness to his Word, because their hearts will be elsewhere. Our hearts are where our treasure is. This is something every student of Jesus needs to ponder deeply. One of the reasons why we don’t bear nearly as much fruit as we could is because our heart isn’t fully into bearing fruit for the Lord. Rather our hearts are set on earthly concerns. It’s kind of like a high school student whose biggest goal in life is becoming an NBA basketball player; this student in English and Physics class is thinking about basketball, and rather than studying as much as he should, he’s out practicing his free throws. We can do the same thing spiritually when we’re seeking an earthly hall of fame rather than heaven.
The fourth type of soil, the one Jesus calls “good,” produces fruit thirty, sixty or one hundredfold. It produces not just a little fruit but abundant fruit. A good disciple of Jesus, hearing his word, is changed thirty, sixty or 100 ways or more. That’s the way we should ponder the word, to look not just for one application to our life, but one after another. That’s obviously the way Mary heard the word in her contemplative heart and sought to have her whole life develop in accordance with it. Jesus wants us to have this type of receptivity to his building project.
Why does Jesus teach us this truth in a parable? Why does he often teach us in this way? St. Mark tells us, “Jesus began to teach by the sea … a very large crowd … and he taught them at length in parables.” St. Matthew would tell us, “He spoke to them only in parables, to fulfill what had been said through the prophet: ‘I will open my mouth in parables, I will announce what has lain hidden from the foundation [of the world].’” Why in parables? There are a couple of obvious reasons why Jesus teaches in parables. First is that any teacher begins from what people know to take them to what they don’t know and so Jesus used various images from daily life to teach about the spiritual life. They can make what might seem abstract concrete. Second, stories, images and other illustrations can help listeners both understand and retain the meaning, especially when someone is teaching at length. All that is true, but the reason Jesus gives for using parables is something totally else and quite challenging. Quoting Isaiah, he says that the reason he teaches in this way is that “they may look and see but not perceive, and hear and listen but not understand, in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.” It almost seems as if he uses parables deliberately to confuse rather than to clarify, to prevent conversion rather than to facilitate it. But that’s clearly not why he’s doing it. Rather, it’s to engage the freedom of the hearer, to test the listener’s willingness to hear the word and ponder it, to examine his or her hunger for the truth and desire to know the deepest meanings of what God is teaching. If someone hears a parable with no desire to meditate on what is being indicated, it shows how hard-hearted someone is. But if someone desires the truth, the parable can provide a prism for the examination of one’s life. Parables can get through to people who would not be able to be reached with direct speech. We see that in the parable that the prophet Nathan gave to David later in 2 Samuel — which we’ll hear on Saturday — about the evil of stealing and slaughtering a neighbor’s single beloved ewe lamb for a feast when someone has a hold flock; that’s what allowed David to see how evil was his decision to take Bathsheba adulterously and have Uriah her husband killed. For people who might not initially be open to conversion, parables often will prove to be the most effective way to convict them. That’s Jesus’ style. Is it enough to move us today?
Today we celebrate a saint whose whole life was a commentary on today’s readings, who received God’s graces on abundantly fruitful soil and allowed the Lord to have a free hand in building him to be more and more like the Lord. St. Francis de Sales came from a noble family in southeastern France. His father had given him a tremendous education and he graduated with his doctorate in law at the age of 20. By the time he returned home his father had already arranged for him to marry an heiress and become a senator. When Francis told him he had made a promise of chastity and wanted to become a priest, the Father was outraged thinking his son had lost his mind. A difficult struggle ensued, with Francis trusting in God to find a solution. Eventually the Bishop of Geneva, at the intercession of one of Francis’ maternal uncles who was a priest, obtained for Francis upon ordination the appointment as second-in-charge (vicar general) of the Diocese of Geneva, which placated Francis’ father’s sense of pride. Francis was ordained a priest and took up his duties. In addition to the administrative tasks for which he was responsible, he quickly became a much sought confessor and friend of the poor. The diocese of Geneva, however, was in shambles. Decades of scandals among the clergy had made it very easy for Calvinism to spread throughout the region of the Chablais. The people were so poorly catechized that they were not able to respond to Calvinist arguments. They were, moreover, so angry at the hypocrisy of their local churchmen that they were easily incited to turn on the Catholic faith, run their priests out of town and take up a form of Christianity that at least seemed to be moral. The bishop of Geneva even had to flee the see city and take up residence in Annecy. Some reports said that there were only about 20 Catholics left in the vast region. Nine months after Francis’ ordination, the bishop held a meeting with all his priests, seeking volunteers to send to the region to try to win the people back. He didn’t hide the dangers or the difficulties. The people were not only ill-disposed but hostile: the first priest who had been sent had been attacked and driven from the region. None of the clergy at the meeting stepped forward for what minimally was a tough assignment, but could be a fatal one. Finally, Francis stood up and said, “If you think I am capable of undertaking the mission, tell me to go. I am ready to obey and should be happy to be chosen.” The bishop accepted the proposal, over the fierce objections of Francis’ father, who thought his son was signing up for a suicide assignment — and according to worldly logic, his father was right. At 27 years old, Francis, traveling by foot, set out to try to win back the vast geographic area. The work was rough and dangerous. For his protection, he was ordered to sleep at night in a military garrison. On two occasions, assassins ambushed him along the way, but both times, seemingly miraculously, he survived. On another occasion, he was attacked by wolves and had to spend a glacial night in a tree. But he labored on, despite having little to show for all his effort. He wrote in a letter to a friend, “We are but making a beginning. I shall go on in good courage, and I hope in God against all human hope.” Through meekness, forgiveness and the publication of many tracts, he patiently set forth Catholic teaching, charitably explaining the errors of Calvinism, and tackling head on controversial issues. To those who still harbored anger toward the clerics who committed “spiritual murder” through scandalous behavior, Francis plainly acknowledged the evil and harm done, but warned his readers not to commit “spiritual suicide,” by using those scandals as a means to cut themselves off from the sacraments and the Church. Within the span of five years, the holy “Apostle of the Chablais” had reconciled and evangelized almost the entire region. He helped them all to return from soil hardened by Calvinist rigidity to the rich soil that bears fruit. Calvinism was particularly opposed to what the Lord is teaching today. Because of a mistaken understanding of God’s eternal omniscience, they thought it was incompatible with human freedom: if God knows what we’ll do in the future, then somehow he must control it, they thought. That means those who are saved or condemned were ultimately predetermined or predestined by God. Today’s focus on human soil reveals to us the importance of our free response to what God wants to build in everyone, not just in some. St. Francis de Sales, with the honey of meekness and attractive holiness rather than the vinegar of condemnation, brought helped many to be able to see this and come back to the fullness of the faith. We ask him to intercede for us that we might respond as fruitfully to God’s action in our life as he did. The secret to spiritual fruitfulness is here, as branches we enter into a life-changing holy communion with the Vine.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 SM 7:4-17
That night the LORD spoke to Nathan and said:
“Go, tell my servant David, ‘Thus says the LORD:
Should you build me a house to dwell in?
I have not dwelt in a house
from the day on which I led the children of Israel
out of Egypt to the present,
but I have been going about in a tent under cloth.
In all my wanderings everywhere among the children of Israel,
did I ever utter a word to any one of the judges
whom I charged to tend my people Israel, to ask:
Why have you not built me a house of cedar?’
“Now then, speak thus to my servant David,
‘The LORD of hosts has this to say:
It was I who took you from the pasture
and from the care of the flock
to be commander of my people Israel.
I have been with you wherever you went,
and I have destroyed all your enemies before you.
And I will make you famous like the great ones of the earth.
I will fix a place for my people Israel;
I will plant them so that they may dwell in their place
without further disturbance.
Neither shall the wicked continue to afflict them as they did of old,
since the time I first appointed judges over my people Israel.
I will give you rest from all your enemies.
The LORD also reveals to you that he will establish a house for you.
And when your time comes and you rest with your ancestors,
I will raise up your heir after you, sprung from your loins,
and I will make his Kingdom firm.
It is he who shall build a house for my name.
And I will make his royal throne firm forever.
I will be a father to him,
and he shall be a son to me.
And if he does wrong,
I will correct him with the rod of men
and with human chastisements;
but I will not withdraw my favor from him
as I withdrew it from your predecessor Saul,
whom I removed from my presence.
Your house and your kingdom shall endure forever before me;
your throne shall stand firm forever.’”
Nathan reported all these words and this entire vision to David.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 89:4-5, 27-28, 29-30
R. (29a) For ever I will maintain my love for my servant.
“I have made a covenant with my chosen one;
I have sworn to David my servant:
I will make your dynasty stand forever
and establish your throne through all ages.”
R. For ever I will maintain my love for my servant.
“He shall cry to me, ‘You are my father,
my God, the Rock that brings me victory!’
I myself make him firstborn,
Most High over the kings of the earth.”
R. For ever I will maintain my love for my servant.
“Forever I will maintain my love for him;
my covenant with him stands firm.
I will establish his dynasty forever,
his throne as the days of the heavens.”
R. For ever I will maintain my love for my servant.
Gospel
MK 4:1-20
On another occasion, Jesus began to teach by the sea.
A very large crowd gathered around him
so that he got into a boat on the sea and sat down.
And the whole crowd was beside the sea on land.
And he taught them at length in parables,
and in the course of his instruction he said to them,
“Hear this! A sower went out to sow.
And as he sowed, some seed fell on the path,
and the birds came and ate it up.
Other seed fell on rocky ground where it had little soil.
It sprang up at once because the soil was not deep.
And when the sun rose, it was scorched and it withered for lack of roots.
Some seed fell among thorns, and the thorns grew up and choked it
and it produced no grain.
And some seed fell on rich soil and produced fruit.
It came up and grew and yielded thirty, sixty, and a hundredfold.”
He added, “Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear.”And when he was alone,
those present along with the Twelve
questioned him about the parables.
He answered them,
“The mystery of the Kingdom of God has been granted to you.
But to those outside everything comes in parables, so that
they may look and see but not perceive,
and hear and listen but not understand,
in order that they may not be converted and be forgiven.”
Jesus said to them, “Do you not understand this parable?
Then how will you understand any of the parables?
The sower sows the word.
These are the ones on the path where the word is sown.
As soon as they hear, Satan comes at once
and takes away the word sown in them.
And these are the ones sown on rocky ground who,
when they hear the word, receive it at once with joy.
But they have no roots; they last only for a time.
Then when tribulation or persecution comes because of the word,
they quickly fall away.
Those sown among thorns are another sort.
They are the people who hear the word,
but worldly anxiety, the lure of riches,
and the craving for other things intrude and choke the word,
and it bears no fruit.
But those sown on rich soil are the ones who hear the word and accept it
and bear fruit thirty and sixty and a hundredfold.”
The post The Lord’s Building Project, Third Wednesday (II), January 24, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
January 23, 2024Doing God’s Will With Joy, Third Tuesday (II), January 23, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Marianne Cope
January 23, 2024
2 Sam 6:12-15.17-19, Ps 24, Mk 3:31-35

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.23.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today in the Gospel Jesus teaches us about what constitutes true familiarity with him. It’s not blood or genes, like Mary or his male and female cousins in today’s Gospel shared with him. We would say it’s also not merely his own blood flowing through us through our becoming one body with Him in Baptism. He says that his mother and brothers and sisters are “anyone who does the will of God.” This is, of course, what characterized the Blessed Mother above all, someone who par excellence heard the Word of God and let her entire life become a fiat in response to that word. It’s also what is supposed to characterize us. Jesus said that those who do his Father’s will will not merely be his spiritual siblings but also his spiritual mother. He doesn’t say “Father” because that is the principle of generation and he has one Father in eternity, something not altered in the least when he assumed human nature. But motherhood — in the mentality of Jesus’ day when it was believed that life came totally from the father and the mother just nursed the new life the dad inseminated within — was what nurtured, and Jesus was saying that we could nurture the life of Jesus by our own doing the will of the Father. We could clearly do so for others, helping, as St. Paul did among so many early Christians, to bring Christ to birth in them. We could also mysteriously do so for Christ within us, conceiving him through our ears by faith, becoming “impregnated” with him, letting him grow so much within that we eventually must give him to the light, as the Spanish and Portuguese idiomatically say, and share him with others. This is what St. Ambrose used to teach about how all of us can become mothers of Jesus according to the faith.
Doing the Father’s will can sometimes be arduous and against the grain. Jesus himself experienced this in the Garden of Gethsemane when he asked three times for the chalice of suffering to be taken away from him but prayed, “Not my will, but yours (Father) be done.” For us marked by original sin, the contrast between God’s will and ours can sometimes be excruciating. Even and especially when it’s hard, it’s obviously right and just that we do it. But over the course of time, we hope to do so with enthusiasm and vigor. We see an expression of that in today’s first reading when David is bringing the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence, into Jerusalem. He danced before the ark “with abandon.” Even though his wife Mychal, the daughter of Saul, would mock him for doing so, even though doubtless many others were too prim and proper to love the Lord with the abandon of David, he danced before the ark. He was rejoicing to do the Lord’s will and bring him into the Lord’s city. His witness should help us to overcome any hesitation or shame in doing the Lord’s will. Many times we are dutiful, but not joyful in the faith, because it’s possible to fulfill our duties without real love for God and for those we’re serving. It’s good to fulfill our responsibilities, but God wants to make that light and sweet. He wants us to put love into it. We remember that the last time we met Jesus’ relatives was Saturday, when they thought he was out of his mind. Today, as Jesus tells those same relatives, his mother and all of us, that his will is that we do his Father’s will, and we should not hesitate to be crazy in acting on those words! That holy abandon will lead us to joy in doing it.
Today we celebrate the life of someone who was crazy in this way, someone who did not just do the Lord’s will in following her vocation, but did so with abandon: St. Marianne Cope, one of our fellow New Yorkers. She was born in Germany but when she was one emigrated to Utica, NY with her parents, who would have in the states nine younger children. She felt the strong yearnings of a vocation to religious life, but left school after eighth grade to work in a factory to support the family, which was reeling because her father was suffering dementia. After her father was called home by God and the younger siblings were old enough to be cared for by their mother, she was able to enter religious life, as a late vocation to the Sisters of the Third Order of St. Francis at age 24. She made up for the education she had missed, went to college and eventually became both a teacher and a principal. Her talent as an administrator became known and she helped to build two hospitals in the Syracuse area, serving as both a nurse and as an administrator. She was often criticized for her craziness and personal abandon in caring for “outcast” patients, like alcoholics, that no other hospitals would take. When she was 45 and Superior General of her Congregation, she received a letter from a Catholic priest asking for help managing hospitals and schools in Hawaii, and to help out with leprosy patients. Fifty other Congregations had gotten a similar letter and had said no. But the letter touched her heart. And, crazily, she herself wanted to be the first to go. “I am hungry for the work,” she said, “and I wish with all my heart to be one of the chosen ones, whose privilege it will be to sacrifice themselves for the salvation of the souls of the poor Islanders…. I am not afraid of any disease, hence, it would be my greatest delight even to minister to the abandoned ‘lepers.’” She would prove to be a good daughter of St. Francis whose own care for a leper led to his conversion. She and six other sisters went to Honolulu, receiving those diagnosed with leprosy. Four years after her arrival, when Fr. Damien was approaching death on the island of Molokai, she responded to his plea for help, saying she “cheerfully” would accept the responsibility of the continuation of his work, which she did for 35 years until she died in 1918.
As we prepare now to “do this in memory of” Christ, to obey the Lord and do his will, let us ask through the Blessed Mother’s and St. Marianne’s intercession that we might do so with interior abandon and with hearts dancing with joy.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 SM 6:12B-15, 17-19
David went to bring up the ark of God from the house of Obed-edom
into the City of David amid festivities.
As soon as the bearers of the ark of the LORD had advanced six steps,
he sacrificed an ox and a fatling.
Then David, girt with a linen apron,
came dancing before the LORD with abandon,
as he and all the house of Israel were bringing up the ark of the LORD
with shouts of joy and to the sound of the horn.
The ark of the LORD was brought in and set in its place
within the tent David had pitched for it.
Then David offered burnt offerings and peace offerings before the LORD.
When he finished making these offerings,
he blessed the people in the name of the LORD of hosts.
He then distributed among all the people,
to each man and each woman in the entire multitude of Israel,
a loaf of bread, a cut of roast meat, and a raisin cake.
With this, all the people left for their homes.
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!
Gospel
MK 3:31-35
The mother of Jesus and his brothers arrived at the house.
Standing outside, they sent word to Jesus and called him.
A crowd seated around him told him,
“Your mother and your brothers and your sisters
are outside asking for you.”
But he said to them in reply,
“Who are my mother and my brothers?”
And looking around at those seated in the circle he said,
“Here are my mother and my brothers.
For whoever does the will of God
is my brother and sister and mother.”
The post Doing God’s Will With Joy, Third Tuesday (II), January 23, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
January 22, 2024Beelzebul Versus Christ, Lies Versus Truth, the Culture of Death Versus Life, Third Monday (II), January 22, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dam Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Third Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children
Votive Mass of Thanksgiving for the Gift of Human Life
January 22, 2024
2 Sam 5:1-7.10, Ps 89, Mk 3:22-30

To listen to an audio recording of this homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.22.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today the Church in the United States marks the annual Day of Prayer for the Legal Protection of Unborn Children, a day of prayer and fasting, since, as Jesus said in the Gospel, some demons are expunged only by prayer and fasting. The day was chosen because 51 years ago today the Supreme Court handed down its disgraceful Roe v. Wade decision that made possible the slaughter of close to 65 million children in the womb in our country since. While those who support the dignity and life of unborn children rejoice that Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Dobbs v. Jackson decision in June 2022, the fact is that abortion is still legal in many states in our country, including New York, and the number of abortions every year has actually gone up, not down, since Dobbs. The Biden Administration has announced steps to try to force hospitals to perform certain abortions nationwide, including in states that have restricted or banned abortion, and announced that Vice-President Kamala Harris will now be crisscrossing the country to promote abortion. Various states have abortion-related referenda on the ballots this year. It’s a time for prayer and fasting and the Catholic Church in the United States together convenes to pray. Today’s readings help us to gain an important perspective with regard to the evil of abortion and what’s needed in response to it.
In the Gospel, Jesus is accused of exorcising demons by the power of Beelzebul, the Prince of Demons. The scribes who had come from Jerusalem on foot to Galilee, witnessing Jesus’ exorcisms, couldn’t deny that the exorcisms were occurring, that possessed people were being liberated, that the demons themselves were hailing Jesus as the “Holy One of God.” They couldn’t deny the facts. But they could try to change their interpretation. Because they had already prejudged Jesus not to be the type of Messiah they were looking for, because he didn’t follow their own man-made prescriptions with regard to the Sabbath, to fasting and to other parts of the fence they had drawn around the Mosaic law, they concluded that since they couldn’t fathom he could be of God, then he had to be of the devil. That’s why they said that Jesus himself was “possessed by Beelzebul” and exorcised not by God’s power but by the power of the “prince of demons.” It was an absurd accusation and Jesus pointed how ridiculous it was in some brief metaphors. “How can Satan drive out Satan?,” he said. “If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand; that is the end of him. But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property unless he first ties up the strong man. Then he can plunder his house.” In other words, the only way he could plunder Satan’s house (the only way he could remove a possessed man from Satan’s dominion) and drive him out of that house is if he had bound up Satan first. If a possessed man — as they were claiming Jesus to be — were battling against the prince of demons and casting demons out from those whom the demons had occupied, then Satan’s kingdom would be defeated.
We learn a few things here relevant to the effort to protect, defend, reverence and welcome every human life.
First we can recognize the work of the devil, who very much exists, in the whole industry of abortion. We can see the “father of lies” underneath all the lies, deception and mendacious talking points we witness from the abortion industry and its defenders. We can see how the devil wants to use those euphemisms — like “My Body, My Choice,” like “Freedom to Decide” — not only to end individual lives of those made in God’s image and likeness who are smaller, weaker, more vulnerable and more dependent, but also to continue to corrupt those involved in making abortions happen as well as to divide families, our country, and even the Church. President Abraham Lincoln would famously cite Jesus’ words to keep the United States united during the time leading up to the Civil War because of the tolerance for the evil of slavery. Tolerance for the evil of abortion polarizes our country today similar to the way slavery did in the 19th century. How can there be union when some citizens think it’s fine to kill other human beings and others are trying to save their lives? How can there be union when the pro-abortion movement pits mothers against their own children? How can there be respect for others when those who are bigger, stronger, and more politically connected can make the decision to end the lives of those smaller, weaker and totally vulnerable? As St. Teresa of Calcutta said at Harvard back in 1982, when there is no inalienable right to life then all other rights are built on sand. There can be no national unity when there is a division so great.
The second thing we see in today’s Gospel is about forgiveness. Jesus talks about the unforgivable sin. “Amen, I say to you,” he said, using the formula for a solemn oath: “all sins and all blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them. But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.” Jesus, here, is not talking about the sin of abortion. As horrible as it is, it can certainly be forgiven. I have been privileged as a priest to be able to see God’s mercy at work healing such sins many times over. The sin of abortion can be forgiven and the Church encourages and summons those who have sinned in this way to come with repentance and trust to receive God’s mercy. But what is the sin that cannot be forgiven? What is blasphemy against the Holy Spirit and why can’t it be forgiven? Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit, in general, is impenitence, but it begins with calling something evil good or good evil. The Holy Spirit is the Spirit of Truth and one blasphemes against him whenever one deliberately or with vincible ignorance calls a lie a truth or a truth a lie. Jesus reminded the scribes of this sin because they were saying, “He has an unclean spirit,” claiming he was possessed as he was doing God’s work. The Catechism of the Catholic Church teaches, “There are no limits to the mercy of God, but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit. Such hardness of heart can lead to final impenitence and eternal loss” (CCC 1864). The reason why blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is unforgivable is not because God doesn’t want to forgive but because the sinner won’t open up to receive mercy, either because he doesn’t believe he needs it, or because she doesn’t believe God will forgive, or because he doesn’t want to come to receive it in the way God has intended. When someone is convinced that evil is good and a lie is true, the person will not think he or she is in need of forgiveness. When someone is calling Jesus evil and possessed, that person is generally not going to come to ask Jesus for mercy. When someone has convinced himself that abortion is a beautiful act of freedom that should be celebrated, they’re not at the same time going to repent of it. Blasphemy against the Holy Spirit is not a curse against the third Person of the Trinity but a hard-hearted refusal to be opened by him to the truth of things and to come to receive the forgiveness that “God the Father of mercies through the death and resurrection of his Son has … poured out the Holy Spirit” to accomplish. And part of this day of prayer and fasting is to pray in reparation for those who are hardened against God’s mercy, who want to pretend as if abortion, rather than being one of the greatest sins, is actually quasi-sacramental and a beautiful expression of woman’s freedom and human rights; praying for those who recognize that they and our culture have blood on their hands but refuse to come to be reconciled, praying for those who think that because they’ve committed an abortion, not even God can forgive them.
The third thing we learn from the Gospel today is that just as Jesus was calumniated as an agent of the devil, so, too, we will be falsely accused of being against women’s rights, or against progress, or haters, or other calumnies. Jesus tells us in the Beatitudes that blessed are we when we’re persecuted, hated and spoken of falsely because of him because our reward in heaven will be great. The suffering we experience in defending and promoting the right to life, for doing good and speaking up and working for women and their children, is part of the prayer we can offer in reparation for this great sin and crime that cries out to heaven.
In the first reading and the psalm we find reasons for hope and courage and light for the path ahead.
In the Psalm, we see how God spoke to David, his anointed one, in anticipation of so many battles he would fight. In prayer, he called him a champion, placed a crown on him, and anointed him as a sign that he was with him with his faithfulness and mercy, making him strong. The same Lord is with us. The Lord who strengthened David and gave him the courage to battle against Goliath when Saul and all the Israelites were afraid will be with us. That fills us with confidence. We are not alone.
And in the first reading, we see in David the importance of leadership and particularly a leadership that unites. The elders of the tribes of Israel come to David in Hebron, where he was King of Judah, and asked him to shepherd the children of Israel, too. (Judah is the southern part of the Holy Land, Israel the northern, and they were inhabited by different tribes from among the descendants of Jacob). David, who was a uniter rather than a divider, agreed and ruled over both kingdoms for the next 33 years. It’s an image of what’s supposed to happen with the “son of David,” Christ, who came so that we might all be one, as he and the Father are one, something we continue to pray for on this fifth day of the Octave of Prayer for Christian unity. The pro-life movement needs leaders, and not just politicians and judges, who can bring people together to work to ensure that every human life is protected in law and welcomed with love. It needs cultural leaders, leaders on the front lines, compassionate and courageous women and men who care for vulnerable women and help them choose life. The Lord wants us all, in some way, to be among those leaders, leaders who don’t “divide and conquer” but “unite to conquer,” and today we pray and fast for such leaders to step forward.
The most important part of this day of prayer and fasting is the Mass, which is the ultimate prayer and the goal of our Eucharistic fast. It’s here we come to ask the same Lord who strengthened David to strengthen us with his outstretched hand and arm. Jesus is indeed the “Stronger man” who has defeated the devil and divided his spoils. He is the leader who seeks to unite us. He is the one who by his life, death and resurrection took away the sins of the world, including the sins of abortion and the sins that lead to it. He is the one who sends the Holy Spirit to guide us into all truth, to help us put to death life according to the flesh that leads to the culture of death and to live according to the Spirit, which produces the fruit of the culture of life. As we prepare to receive him, we give him thanks for having defeated the devil, and we ask him to embolden us to persevere in that victory and announce it to others, conscious that his mercy and his faithfulness shall be with us always.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
2 SM 5:1-7, 10
All the tribes of Israel came to David in Hebron and said:
“Here we are, your bone and your flesh.
In days past, when Saul was our king,
it was you who led the children of Israel out and brought them back.
And the LORD said to you,
‘You shall shepherd my people Israel
and shall be commander of Israel.’”
When all the elders of Israel came to David in Hebron,
King David made an agreement with them there before the LORD,
and they anointed him king of Israel.
David was thirty years old when he became king,
and he reigned for forty years:
seven years and six months in Hebron over Judah,
and thirty-three years in Jerusalem
over all Israel and Judah.
Then the king and his men set out for Jerusalem
against the Jebusites who inhabited the region.
David was told, “You cannot enter here:
the blind and the lame will drive you away!”
which was their way of saying, “David cannot enter here.”
But David did take the stronghold of Zion, which is the City of David.
David grew steadily more powerful,
for the LORD of hosts was with him.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 89:20, 21-22, 25-26
R. (25a) My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.
Once you spoke in a vision,
and to your faithful ones you said:
“On a champion I have placed a crown;
over the people I have set a youth.”
R. My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.
“I have found David, my servant;
with my holy oil I have anointed him,
That my hand may be always with him,
and that my arm may make him strong.”
R. My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.
“My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him,
and through my name shall his horn be exalted.
I will set his hand upon the sea,
his right hand upon the rivers.”
R. My faithfulness and my mercy shall be with him.
Gospel
MK 3:22-30
The scribes who had come from Jerusalem said of Jesus,
“He is possessed by Beelzebul,” and
“By the prince of demons he drives out demons.”
Summoning them, he began to speak to them in parables,
“How can Satan drive out Satan?
If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand.
And if a house is divided against itself,
that house will not be able to stand.
And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided,
he cannot stand;
that is the end of him.
But no one can enter a strong man’s house to plunder his property
unless he first ties up the strong man.
Then he can plunder his house.
Amen, I say to you, all sins and all blasphemies
that people utter will be forgiven them.
But whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit
will never have forgiveness,
but is guilty of an everlasting sin.”
For they had said, “He has an unclean spirit.”
The post Beelzebul Versus Christ, Lies Versus Truth, the Culture of Death Versus Life, Third Monday (II), January 22, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
22 min
January 21, 2024Hearing the Word of God Decisively, Third Sunday (B), January 21, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 21, 2024
Jonah 3:1-5.10, Ps 25, 1 Cor 7:29-31, Mk 1:14-20

To listen to an audio recording of today’s Gospel, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.21.24_Homily.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today is a special day in the life of the Church. For the fifth time, the Church marks the Sunday of the Word of God, an annual observance instituted in 2019 by Pope Francis to spur the Christian people to “grow in religious and intimate familiarity with the sacred Scriptures,” “appreciate the inexhaustible riches contained in that constant dialogue between the Lord and his people,” “experience anew how the risen Lord opens up for us the treasury of his word and enables us to proclaim its unfathomable riches before the world,” and “grow in love and faithful witness.” In the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke, Jesus gives us the Parable of the Sower and the Seed, to describe our receptivity and response to the seed of his Word in our life. He relates that many receive that gift on hardened, rocky and thorny soil, referring, respectively, to stubborn, superficial and distracted souls. Jesus wants us to receive what he says to us, rather, on what he calls “good” and “rich” soil, which bears fruit 30-, 60-, or one-hundred-fold fruit. The Sunday of the Word of God is blessed occasion to examine what difference God’s word is making in our life, how we are in fact listening to and acting when God speaks.
In his homily this morning at St. Peter’s Basilica in the Vatican, Pope Francis focused on the good soil found in so many saints. “If we look at the friends of God, the witnesses to the Gospel throughout history and the saints,” he said, “we see that the word was decisive for each of them. We think of the first monk, Saint Anthony [whose feast we celebrated four days ago], who, struck by a passage of the Gospel while at Mass, left everything for the Lord. We think of Saint Augustine, whose life took a decisive turn when God’s word brought healing to his heart [as students at Columbia learn when they study the Confessions]. We think of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, who discovered her vocation [to be love in the heart of the Church] by reading the letters of Saint Paul. … We think too of the saint whose name I bear, Francis of Assisi, who, after praying, read in the Gospel that Jesus sent his disciples to preach and exclaimed: ‘That is what I want; that is what I ask, that is what I desire to do with all my heart!’” What happened in each of their lives, Pope Francis stated, is meant to happen in ours. “Their lives were changed,” he said, “by the word of life, by the word of the Lord.” The Word of God has that power. It has that power still!
But the Pope then asked a poignant question. “How is it,” he said, “that, for many of us, the same thing does not happen? We hear the word of God many times, yet it enters into one ear and goes out the other. Why? Perhaps because … we need to stop being ‘deaf’ to God’s word. This is a risk for all of us: overwhelmed by a barrage of words, we let the word of God glide by us: we hear it, yet we fail to listen to it; we listen to it, yet we don’t keep it; we keep it, yet we don’t let it provoke us to change. More than anything, we read it, but we don’t pray with it.” Many of us don’t really listen to the Word of God, he suggested, with good and fruitful soil. We do not allow our encounter with the Word of God — at Mass, in private prayer, or in Bible studies — to be a true encounter with the Lord who speaks to us live through his word and invites us through it to a life-altering dialogue of life. We don’t prioritize the Word of God, recognizing that God’s words to us are the most important words ever spoken.
The type of impact that the Word of God is supposed to have in our life was illustrated for me in an indelible way back in 2008, during the Synod on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church held in the Vatican. There was a bishop from Jelgava, Latvia, Bishop Anton Justs, who gave a simple five-minute speech that brought his fellow prelates not only to their feet but to tears. It never ceases to do the same for me. He described the importance the Latvians gave to the Word of God during the communist invasion of their country and give to it still. In simple, straightforward English, he said, “I would like to talk about the martyrs of the twentieth century and in particular those in my country Latvia. These are the priests, men and women who died for proclaiming the Word of God. I remember one Latvian priest, [Father] Viktors, who during the Soviet regime in Latvia was arrested for possessing the Holy Bible. In the eyes of the Soviet agents, the Holy Scriptures were an anti-revolutionary book. The agents threw the Holy Scriptures on the floor and ordered the priest to step on it. The priest refused and, instead, knelt down and kissed the book. For this gesture the priest was condemned to ten years of hard labor in Siberia. Ten years later, when the priest returned to his parish and celebrated the Holy Mass, he read the Gospel. Then he lifted up the lectionary and said: ‘The Word of God!’ The people cried and thanked God.” The Word of God, they knew, was a treasure worth suffering for, even the tortures of a decade in a brutal Siberian labor camp. It was worth getting down on one’s knees to kiss. It contained within the open secrets of a true and definitive revolution. Fr. Viktors clearly knew the value of the Word of God and became a living witness to its inestimable value. He knew it contained the words of eternal life because they were revealed and spoken by God. Fr. Viktors, however, was not alone in this testimony. Bishop Justs continued, “In Latvia, during the Soviet era, no religious books, no Holy Scriptures, no catechisms were allowed to be printed. The reasoning was: if there is no printed Word of God, there will be no religion. So our Latvian people did what the first century Christians did: they learned the passages of the Holy Scriptures by heart. Still today in Latvia there is an oral tradition alive. We stand on the shoulders of our martyrs to proclaim the Word of God. Our grandchildren remember their grandfathers and grandmothers, who died for their faith; they want to be, in their turn, heroes of faith. In Latvia we proclaim the living Word of God! We go in the processions and on the pilgrimages, we sing songs and we pray and say: ‘This is the Word of God,’ for which our grandparents died.” A people learning Sacred Scripture by heart, taking the Bible on Pilgrimages, proudly proclaiming the Word of God, and seeking to be heroes in witness to it — this is what the Catholic Church is meant to be.
For us Catholics here at Columbia, what does it mean? As Pope Francis said this morning, the Word of God is meant to be decisive in our life. We need to recognize it as a gift, to thank God for it, to grow in our knowledge of it, and to try to share it. In today’s Psalm, we made our own the prayer of faithful Jews throughout the centuries in gratitude for the gift of God’s word. “Teach me your ways, O Lord,” we sang five times. We continued, “Your ways, O Lord, make known to me. Teach me your paths. Guide me in your truth and teach me, for you are God my savior.” That’s precisely what God does for us in Sacred Scripture. But do we hunger for every word that comes from the mouth of God? Do we listen to Sacred Scripture as it is proclaimed at Mass as words coming from God himself to teach us his ways and guide us in his truth? Do we pray with Sacred Scripture, using for example, resources like the Word Among Us, given out for free through Columbia Catholic Ministry? Do we study Sacred Scripture, recognizing that knowing what it contains is more important than anything we could learn in any of our classes at Columbia? Do we take advantage of opportunities like the FOCUS Bible studies to get to know Sacred Scripture better, supporting and supported by others? Do we avail ourselves of great resources like the Bible in a Year podcast by Fr. Mike Schmitz, which can help us to get to know the whole of Scripture so that we can better understand its component parts. Sacred Scripture is meant, as the Holy Father says, to play a decisive role in our life, but we have to respond to it like the saints did, rather than letting the Word of God pass through the other ear and fall by the way side or on rocky or thorny ground.
We see the decisiveness of the Word of God in the readings the Church gives us today, which help us to examine our receptivity and response to God’s Word. In the first reading, we meet the reluctant prophet Jonah, who became, in some ways, the most successful prophet of all time. The first time he heard the Word of God summoning him to be a prophet to the Ninevites, he tried to run from it and sail to Tarshish, the-then most western place known on earth. But after the famous storm, his being tossed overboard, and then being rescued by a whale, when “the word of God came to Jonah a second time,” Jonah set out for Nineveh and announced that in 40 days Nineveh would be destroyed. The pagan Ninevites didn’t wait until Jonah continued the countdown. They heard and responded immediately to the summons to conversion God was communicating to them through his messenger. We read, “They turned from their evil ways.” They fasted, and “everyone, great and small,” even down to their pets, put on sackcloth. And they began to live by faith: as we see at the end of today’s passage, “The people of Nineveh believed in God.” That’s the type of response to the Word of God the Lord hopes to see in each of us — an urgent response of conversion and faith, not putting off until tomorrow what God is asking of us today.
In the epistle, we pondered St. Paul’s words to the Christians in Corinth. He spoke to them about the urgency of responding to God’s word, because, he said, “the time is running out” and “the world in its present form is passing away.” Time is always running out. We never know the day or the hour when the form of life in this world will expire for us or for everyone. But what will not pass away? Jesus tells us very clearly in his eschatological discourses at the end of the Gospels of synoptic Gospels. “Heaven and earth will pass away,” he said, “but my words will not pass away” (Mt 24:35; Mk 13:31; Lk 21:33). Paul is asking us to build our whole life on the word of God, just like he sought to do as a Pharisee before his conversion and did much more after Christ called him to conversion and faith outside the gates of Damascus. After all other words pass, God’s Word will remain into eternity. As St. Peter confessed to Jesus at the end of the Bread of Life discourse, “You have the words of eternal life.”
Those images from Nineveh and Corinth about the immediacy and decisiveness of responding to God’s word prepare us very well for the Gospel in which we prayerfully contemplate Jesus’ words and actions at the beginning of his public ministry. In his inaugural 18-word homily — 16 words in St. Mark’s Greek — and in his conversations with his first followers after, we see four different commands that Jesus gives them and his followers in every age. Jesus had spent nearly three decades in his hidden life on earth waiting to announce this summons. It’s also what he, as God, had been waiting since the Fall to establish. How we live these four commands is a good litmus test for us to determine how we listen to the Word of God as a whole. Jesus proclaims, “The time is fulfilled, and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the Gospel!”
The Lord first announces two essential facts: The first is, “The time is fulfilled.” Like St. Paul later, Jesus proclaims an urgency: the time of waiting is over; the time to act is now. The second fact is, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus declares that God’s kingdom is here because God himself is here. Therefore, the time to enter his kingdom, to share in his reign, is now. Both of these truths point to the objective reality, which is the context in which they, we and every successive generation likewise abide: literally, now is the time we’ve always been waiting for! Jesus would say elsewhere, “Many prophets and kings desire to see what you see but did not see it, and to hear what you hear but did not hear it.”
After Jesus announces these two astounding realities, he turns to four ways he calls us to respond to those truths and, even more, to him. These are the four conditions for entering and living in his kingdom. These are the four ways we won’t waste the time God has given us but make the most of it. These are the four actions on which we can evaluate whether we have been responding to God’s word on good and faithful soil.
The first command is “repent.” In Greek, this word ismetanoete, which etymologically means a total revolution of our mind, of the way we look at things. It’s a call to conversion, to think no longer as everyone else thinks, to do no longer as everyone else does, but to put on the mind of God, to align our heart and our actions to him. It means to compare ourselves to God rather than to everyone else and to recognize we’re not yet living enough as the image and likeness of God. For some people this will mean a 180-degree turn. For others it might mean a 50-degree turn or a 10-degree turn. But all of us need this conversion. And we will always need it. The Christian life is one of continual conversion, in which we literally learn how fully to “turn with” Jesus (con-vert) in all parts of our life. As he turns in prayer to the Father, we turn with him; as he turns with charity to our neighbor, we likewise pivot; as he turns with mercy to a family member who has sinned against him and against us, we, too mercifully rotate. This call to continual metanoia means that we’re incessantly seeking to change for the better, to become more and more like the Lord who calls us to this penance and renewal. The type of conversion to which we’re called is what we witness among the pagan Ninevites in today’s first reading. The Lord will give us the grace of responding to his summons as decisively as they did, but we have to act on that grace.
The second command is “believe.” To believe means not just to accept something as true. It means totally to submit oneself to a reality on the basis of a trust in the one testifying to the reality. To believe involves entrusting ourselves completely to Jesus and on that foundation grounding our lives on what he says. The Christian life should be marked with this type of faith. Because of our trust in Jesus, we believe in what he tells us about the path of happiness in the Beatitudes and we seek to align our whole lives to what he says. Because of our trust in him, we believe in what he reveals to us about God the Father and we ground our existence on that Father’s love and call. Because of our faith in Christ, we believe in what he says about his presence in the Eucharist, about his sending out the apostles and their successors for the forgiveness of sins in Confession, about what he says about caring for others as if we were caring for him, about praying for our persecutors and even loving our enemies. To believe in Jesus, to believe in the Gospel he enunciates and enfleshes, means truly to seek to grow in both our intellectual knowledge of the Gospel and our putting it into practice. It means sincerely to say to the Lord, “Teach me your ways, O Lord,” and then to walk in the Lord’s truth. That’s what believing involves. He will give us the grace to live by faith, but, again, we have to choose to correspond to that grace.
The third imperative is “follow me” or “Come after me.” Jesus says those words to Peter, Andrew, James and John in the Gospel and they immediately left their nets, their boats, their fish, their employees and their families to follow him. They were open to the type of revolution in the way they looked at their life that is contained in Jesus’ word metanoeteand they believed in Jesus already enough to leave everything behind on a dime to base their entire life on his word calling them to follow him. Similarly for us, it’s not enough to repent and to believe, because the Lord Jesus always calls us in faith to follow him, turning toward and with him and turning our back on other things. The Christian life features this type of discipleship, in which we learn from the Lord and seek to walk in his paths. And this following is meant to continue our whole life, following the Good Shepherd into dark valleys and up steep mountains, following him up close on the Way of the Cross all the way to heaven. The Lord who calls us to this type of joint journey of faith in response to his Word will give us all the help he knows we need to achieve it, but, once more, we have to correspond.
And the fourth word is “fish.” Jesus says in the Gospel that, if we follow him, he will make us “fishers of men.” He will form us to be apostles and then send us to spread the faith, to make us missionaries drawing others to him with the same message he announced to us: that the time is now, that the door to the Kingdom of God is open, and to enter it we need take seriously our call to repentance, faith, discipleship and apostolate. Some embrace this reality of the type of Christian growth that flourishes in apostolate quite readily, like Peter, Andrew, James and John. Others respond with initial fear and reluctance, like Jonah. But just like a seed germinates, forms a tree and bears fruit that contains other seeds that fall on soil and eventually bear fruit, too, so a faith that is real is always contagiously shared. The Word of God is a saving word! It is a rock on which to build life securely against the storms and floods. It’s the owner’s manual given to us by the Creator to how everything works: how he works, how we work, how the world ultimately works and what everything means. The same Jesus who made Peter, Andrew, James and John fishers of men wants us to go out, too. To put out into the deep water, like they did, and lower our nets, cast our line, for a catch. Spreading the Gospel is not an optional part of the Catholic faith, but an essential one. If faith is alive, then it is life-giving, and spreads, just as surely as the living cells in our body replicate. And so one great test of how we’re hearing and living the Word of God is our zeal to help others open up and live this treasure. At the beginning of this semester, I’d like to ask each one of us: When was the last time you invited someone to come to hear the Word of God, to pray to to worship God with you? Can you invite one person to join you here with us? Imagine what would happen if each of us, with God’s grace and the help of the other person’s guardian angel, were able to bring at least one person here on Sundays. How our worship would be enhanced! How everything we do would grow! Then imagine we made another commitment each to try to find and invite another. And so on. Our task here at Columbia is far less daunting than one Jonah faced, Peter, Andrew James and John faced, or Paul faced. I’d urge you to think about inviting those Catholics you know who go elsewhere and might be choosing to live the faith individualistically rather than in communion with their spiritual siblings on campus. I’d urge you to consider in a special way those Catholics you know who have stopped practicing the faith and to invite them with particular tenderness, patience and zeal. On this day on which we’ve begun a new cohort of the OCIA program, I’d similarly urge you to think about your non-Catholic friends who might be open to the gifts with which God has lavishly blessed us in the Church. There’s room for all of them. As Jesus tells us, “Come after me and I will make you fishers of men,” he sends us out to where the fish are with his divine assistance. So please don’t waste any time. Now is the time of fulfillment. Think about one person you can invite. Pray for that person during the prayers of the faithful in a few minutes. Mention that person silently to Jesus when he is lifted up for us in the Holy Eucharist. And then reach out, with courage and charity. It may turn out to be the greatest gift that will ever happen in that person’s life.
The Mass is the most privileged place of all to hear the Word of God and to respond, the setting where the Word of God takes on flesh anew under the appearances of bread and wine and seeks to dwell within us. It’s where Jesus summons us to conversion and to faith. It’s where he teaches us his ways. It’s where we commit anew to following him. It’s from here he sends us to announce the Gospel to everyone he has created. It’s where through the Word of God, decisively heard and lived, he seeks to make us saints. Today as we hear the Word of God, let’s together respond to God’s grace to seize the gift of the fullness of time and the reality of Christ’s kingdom, turn away from worldliness to live by faith, and then, as devout disciples and ardent apostles of Jesus, bear fruit 30, 60, 100 ways and more.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
Jon 3:1-5, 10
The word of the LORD came to Jonah, saying:
“Set out for the great city of Nineveh,
and announce to it the message that I will tell you.”
So Jonah made ready and went to Nineveh,
according to the LORD’S bidding.
Now Nineveh was an enormously large city;
it took three days to go through it.
Jonah began his journey through the city,
and had gone but a single day’s walk announcing,
“Forty days more and Nineveh shall be destroyed, ”
when the people of Nineveh believed God;
they proclaimed a fast
and all of them, great and small, put on sackcloth.
When God saw by their actions how they turned from their evil way,
he repented of the evil that he had threatened to do to them;
he did not carry it out.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 25:4-5, 6-7, 8-9
R. (4a) Teach me your ways, O Lord.
Your ways, O LORD, make known to me;
teach me your paths,
Guide me in your truth and teach me,
for you are God my savior.
R. Teach me your ways, O Lord.
Remember that your compassion, O LORD,
and your love are from of old.
In your kindness remember me,
because of your goodness, O LORD.
R. Teach me your ways, O Lord.
Good and upright is the LORD;
thus he shows sinners the way.
He guides the humble to justice
and teaches the humble his way.
R. Teach me your ways, O Lord.
Reading 2
1 Cor 7:29-31
I tell you, brothers and sisters, the time is running out.
From now on, let those having wives act as not having them,
those weeping as not weeping,
those rejoicing as not rejoicing,
those buying as not owning,
those using the world as not using it fully.
For the world in its present form is passing away.
Alleluia
Mk 1:15
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent and believe in the Gospel.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Mk 1:14-20
After John had been arrested,
Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the gospel of God:
“This is the time of fulfillment.
The kingdom of God is at hand.
Repent, and believe in the gospel.”
As he passed by the Sea of Galilee,
he saw Simon and his brother Andrew casting their nets into the sea;
they were fishermen.
Jesus said to them,
“Come after me, and I will make you fishers of men.”
Then they abandoned their nets and followed him.
He walked along a little farther
and saw James, the son of Zebedee, and his brother John.
They too were in a boat mending their nets.
Then he called them.
So they left their father Zebedee in the boat
along with the hired men and followed him.
The post Hearing the Word of God Decisively, Third Sunday (B), January 21, 2024 appeared first on 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.