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January 21, 2024Responding to the Lord’s Life-Changing Word, Third Sunday (B), January 21, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity Convent, Bronx
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 homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.21.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
Today the Church marks for the fifth time the Sunday of the Word of God, an annual observance instituted by Pope Francis to help the Christian people focus on how they respond to the treasure of God’s speaking to us through Sacred Scripture. In the three synoptic Gospels 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 inveterate, superficial and distracted souls. Jesus wants us to receive what he says to us on what he calls “good” and “rich” soil, which bears fruit 30-, 60-, or one-hundred fold fruit, big Biblical numbers. Today is an excellent occasion to examine how we listen to and act on the Word of God.
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. He said, “If we look at the friends of God, the witnesses to the Gospel throughout history and the saints, 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. We think of Saint Therese of the Child Jesus, who discovered her vocation 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!’” We can think of the power of God’s word in the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta and how she gave her whole life in response to Jesus’ words, “I thirst,” and “Whatever you do to the least of my brotehrs and sisters, you do to me,” as she sought, like our Lady, to make her whole life a fiat, a “let it be done to me according to your word.” Pope Francis says about the saints, “Their lives were changed by the word of life, by the word of the Lord.” The Word of God is meant to change our lives, too, each time we hear it. It has that power!
But the Pope poignantly asked, “How is it 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.” 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-changing dialogue.
Today’s readings are very fitting to help us examine our receptivity and response to God’s Word, to see whether we’re embracing it on good and fruitful soil allowing it to change our life in 30, 60 or 100 ways or more. 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 and sail away to Tarshish, the-then farthest known place on the earth. But when “the word of God came to Jonah a second time,” he 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 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 — urgent conversion and faith, not putting off until tomorrow what God is asking of us today.
In the 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.” Praising the Lord who gives us this guidance, we exclaimed, “Good and upright is the Lord; he shows sinners the way. He guides the humble to justice and teaches the humble his way.” We seek to receive the word of God with humility and a hunger to know the Lord’s paths so that we can walk in them.
In the epistle, we pondered St. Paul’s words to the Christians in Corinth, as he wrote to them about the urgency of responding to the word of God, “because 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 Matthew, Mark and Luke: “Heaven and earth will pass away, 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.
All three of these readings prepare us for the Gospel in which we prayerfully ponder Jesus’ words and actions at the very 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. “The time is fulfilled,” he said, “and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the Gospel!”
Jesus announces first two essential facts: The first is, “The time is fulfilled.” Like St. Paul afterward, 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. The time to enter his kingdom, to share in his reign, is now. Both of these truths point to the objective reality that is the context in which they, we and every successive generation likewise abide. Literally, now is the time we’ve always been waiting for. 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 verb is “Repent.” The second is “Believe.” The third is “Follow.” And the fourth is “Fish.” Let’s examine each of these realities in turn and ponder, and perhaps recalibrate, our response to them.
The first command is “repent.” In Greek, this word ismetanoete, which, as we’ve discussed before several times, 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. This is the type of metanoia to which the Lord calls us and calls our society. Within this Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, we repent not just individually but communally of all sins against what Jesus prayed for during the Last Supper, that we may be one as he and the Father are one by the Holy Spirit. Two days after the March for Life and in anticipation of the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade tomorrow, we repent of all the sins of the culture of death. The Lord who calls us to this metanoia will give us all the help he knows we need to achieve it, but we have to correspond.
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.
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. Likewise for us, it’s not enough to repent and to believe, because the Lord Jesus always calls us in faith to follow him in faith, turning toward and with him and turning our back on other things. The Christian life features this type of discipleship, in which we follow the Lord Jesus and 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. When Jesus says, “Come after me,” it’s important that we grasp why, because, like Peter in Caesarea Philippe, often we seek to lead the Lord rather than to follow him. 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 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, to 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 they’ll enter it through repentance, faith, discipleship and apostolate. Some embrace this reality of the type of Christian growth that flourishes in apostolate quite readily. Unlike Jonah initially, when Jesus called Peter and Andrew, John and James, they “immediately” left their boats, their businesses, even their families behind and followed him. It was an urgent call from the king himself, and they didn’t hesitate. They turned away from everything and, in faith, embraced him who is everything, who created everything. And before they knew it, they were being sent out by him to announce Christ’s kingdom. Our zeal for sharing the Word of God with others is directly dependent on the way we receive it, not just as a word to be heard but to be done.
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 to following him and helping others to follow him. Today as we hear the Word of God, let’s together respond to 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 Responding to the Lord’s Life-Changing Word, Third Sunday (B), January 21, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
20 min
January 20, 2024Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 20, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
January 20, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.20.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, when we will enter into the dramatic scene of what he said and did at the beginning of his public ministry. He preached his first homily — just 18 words in English, 16 words in St. Mark’s Greek original — and then entered into a short, but life-altering conversation on the shore of the Sea of Galilee with two sets of brothers who would become key collaborators in how he would change the world. In these words and interactions, Jesus sets forth for believers in every age the various consequences he hopes for in his personal interaction with us.
Let’s enter the scene, beginning with Jesus’ homily — what he, as God, had been waiting since the Fall to announce. In his first public words, Jesus, the Word-made-flesh declared, “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand: repent and believe in the Gospel!”
Jesus first announces two essential facts: The first is, “The time is fulfilled.” Jesus says that the time of waiting is over. The fullness of time has come. Therefore, now, not later, is the time to act. Now, as St. Paul would later say, is the day of salvation. The second fact is, “The kingdom of God is at hand.” Jesus declares that the long-awaited kingdom of God has arrived. God’s presence is erupting, and the time to enter his kingdom, to share in his reign, is today. Much like he would do in his hometown synagogue of Nazareth after reading the messianic prophecy of Isaiah when he proclaimed. “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing,” so in his first homily at the Galilean Sea, Jesus could say his words about the fulfillment of time and the coming of God’s kingdom were coming to fruition in him.
After these two table-setting facts, Jesus turns to four ways we’re supposed to respond to this awesome reality. These are the four conditions for entering and living in his kingdom. These are the four action verbs we need to do in order not to waste the time God has given us but make the most of it. The first action is “Repent.” The second is “Believe.” The third is “Follow.” And the fourth is “Fish.” Now’s the time, he was saying, to do all four. Let’s examine each of these realities in turn and ask ourselves whether we’ve been heeding Jesus message.
The first verb 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 head, heart and actions to his. It is a summons 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 call 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 “con-vert” or “turn with” Jesus in all parts of our life. As Jesus turns in prayer to the Father, we turn with him; as he turns with charity to our neighbor, we turn with him; as he turns with mercy to a family member who has sinned against him and against us, we, too, turn with mercy. 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 that penance and renewal. That’s the first consequence of the encounter with Jesus in the fullness of time.
The second verb is “believe.” To believe means not just to accept something as true. To believe means totally to submit oneself to a reality on the basis of a trust in the one testifying to the reality. To believe in Jesus means to entrust ourselves completely to him and on that foundation ground our lives fully on what he says. Our Christian life is meant to be marked by 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, what he reveals to us about God the Father, what he says about his presence in the Eucharist, what he did when he sent out the apostles and their successors for the forgiveness of sins in confession. We believe in 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 him, 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. This Sunday is the Sunday of the Word of God, a new observance created in 2020 by Pope Francis, to help us all “grow in … intimate familiarity with the sacred Scriptures,” “appreciate the inexhaustible riches contained in that constant dialogue between the Lord and his people,” and “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.” Faith comes through hearing and we grow in faith through the gift of the word of God. And so on this Sunday of the Word of God, we seek to live with faith off every word that comes from Jesus’ mouth, because we believe, as St. Peter confessed, that Jesus has the words of eternal life.
The third verb is “follow me” or “Come after me.” Jesus says those words to Simon Peter, Andrew, James and John in the Gospel and they immediately leave 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 repent and they believed in Jesus already enough to leave all they had and knew behind to base their entire life on his word calling them to follow him. Likewise for us it’s not enough to repent and to believe, because the Lord Jesus always calls us to follow him in faith, turning back on other things. The Christian life features this type of discipleship, in which we focus on following the Lord Jesus, rather than leading him and calling the shots. It means following him into dark valleys and up steep mountains, retracing his steps up close on the Way of the Cross all the way to heaven. To be Jesus’ disciple means to become, with Jesus’ help, more and more like him. That’s the third consequence of our encounter with him as we seek to enter and remain in his kingdom.
And the fourth verb is “fish.” Jesus says in the Gospel that if we follow him, “I will make you fishers of men.” He wanted to form Peter, Andrew, James and John to be apostles, to share the Gospel, to spread the faith, to draw others to him with his words, with his deeds of healing and exorcism, ultimately with his very presence in the sacraments. When we repent and believe, when he become Jesus’ true followers rather than fans, then we have a burning desire to go to others, like Andrew did last week to Simon, and say “We’ve found the Messiah! The time is fulfilled. The door of the kingdom of heaven is open. Now a new life with God-with-us is possible. Come, experience that new life!” And we show them how to enter into that new life through repentance, faith, discipleship and apostolate.
When Peter, Andrew, James, John heard Jesus’ words and received his personal call, their whole life changed. It was a truly consequential conversation. This Sunday Jesus wants to have a similarly momentous dialogue with us. In the fullness of time, right now, the Lord is summoning us to conversion and faith and has chosen us to be his followers and fishers-of-men today. In the midst of a broken country that needs the light of the Gospel now as much as ever, in the midst of a Church in which there’s a need for repentance, greater faith, more loyal discipleship and more ardent apostolate, you and I are part of Jesus’ response. He is summoning us to live and announce the reality that Christ the King and his kingdom are at hand, that he’s calling us to a new life, and showing us the way. Let us seize the gift of the kingdom and, like the apostles before us, dedicate ourselves to helping others to do so, too.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was:
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 Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 20, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
9 min
January 19, 2024The Vocation to Reverence and Mercy in Living the Gospel of Life, Second Friday (II), January 19, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Patrick’s Church, Washington, DC
Friday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Votive Mass of Thanksgiving for the Gift of Human Life
January 19, 2024
1 Sam 24:3-21, Ps 57, Mk 3:13-19

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.19.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today, as we celebrate this Votive Mass of Thanksgiving to God for the Gift of Human Life after having participated in the March for Life, the readings of this Mass help us to focus powerfully on our vocation to be apostles proclaiming and living the Gospel of Life. In the Gospel passage we just heard, we ponder the calling of the apostles by name. Jesus, we know from St. Luke’s account, had prayed all night before, asking his Father for light on who should be chosen and then, the following day, called the twelve by name. Jesus has likewise prayed about and for us before calling us by name. It was not we who chose him but he who chose us and appointed us to bear fruit that will last. Today we thank God for the gift of our Christian vocation, our vocation to life, our vocation to protect and enhance the sacredness of every human life, our vocation to holiness, and whatever calling within those callings he has given us, the vocation to marriage, priesthood, religious life, or whatever ecclesial vocation he has given us.
But it’s not enough to be called. Jesus wants to form us to live out our vocation to the full. In today’s Gospel we see an essential description of the formation Jesus gave the apostles and wants to give each of us. Jesus called Simon, James, John, Andrew, Philip, the others, and each of us to be “with him” and so that “he might send [us] forth to preach and to have authority to drive out demons.” The first criterion is that we are supposed to be with him. Our first priority tis to spend time with him. This points obviously to our prayer, to the need to set aside the necessary time to be with the Lord, to converse with him, to listen to him, to pour out our needs and the needs of those we serve, our thanks, our praise and our sorrow. This call to be “with Jesus,” however, goes well beyond prayer. We need to develop a living awareness that, thanks to our baptism, we have become ontologically united with Christ: that who we are, and everything we do, is in mysterious and wondrous communion with him, something that is enhanced and intensified by our Eucharistic communion. No matter how many activities we engage in over the course of a day, year or lifetime, they are all meant to be part of our Christian vocation to be together with Christ, to be yoked to him in daily life, to act as an instrument in essential communion with him. The second essential aspect of our formation is that he wants to send us out — united with him — to preach and drive out demons. Every vocation contains a mission and the mission is to continue Jesus’ mission. One essential aspect of our vocation to live in the kingdom is its exorcistic dimension, to reject Satan, his evil works and empty promises, as we seek together with the Church to expel Satan and his stranglehold on ourselves, on others, and on the culture.
Today, as together with hundreds of thousands of others we march for life here in Washington, DC, we ponder just how much we need to be with Jesus and to go forth as salt, light and leaven to overturn the diabolical culture of death and destruction, that permits those made in God’s image and likeness to be rejected and eliminated at the earliest days of life, that refuses love to women in need, that preaches pride rather than repentance and mercy for abortions had.
In today’s first reading, Saul was for the second time trying to kill David and David was presented with a chance to take Saul’s life before Saul would take his. But David refused to lay a hand on the “Lord’s anointed.” So great was his reverence for God that he would never seriously countenance doing anything against someone in an intimate relationship with God, regardless of that person’s sins against God or against him. That’s part of the message we preach and love: doing no harm, in fact loving, those in intimate relationship with God — loving children, their mothers, their fathers, even those who make themselves the enemies of the unborn. If we are with Christ as he sends us out, we will.
And we will seek to love them with the mercy Christ brought into the world. In today’s Psalm, we cried out repeatedly, “Have mercy, O God, have mercy.” We proclaimed that we have taken refuge in him who is merciful and faithful and we rejoiced that his mercy towers to the heavens and his faithfulness to the skies. Many times in the Gospel, the evangelists mention that Jesus’ “heart was moved with pity” for the crowds — literally his innards were bursting with compassion, he was sick to his stomach at their situation. In response, they mention five actions Jesus did. Each of the five is highly relevant to forming a culture of mercy in advance of the culture of life.
The first thing Jesus did was teach. Likewise, united with and sent out by him, we need to pass on the truth with charity. The truth about the humanity and dignity of the child. The truth about the real good of women. The truth about what is really happening. The abortion industry is full of lies and euphemisms: “choice,” “freedom,” “women’s rights” “women’s health” “blob of tissue” “better for the fetus” etc. This culture of the lie, coming from the father of lies, needs to be opposed by passing on with love what God has revealed and what human reason can see.
The second thing Jesus did was to heal. Similarly, we need to bring that healing. How important it is for women who have had abortions to experience hope and healing! For seven years I served as chaplain to the Sisters of Life in Manhattan and one of their essential apostolates is “hope and healing” for those women who have suffered abortion. The healing isn’t quick or easy, but it can and does happen, with patient accompaniment, prayer, and the grace of the sacraments. We need to offer that to all people however wounded by the culture of death.
The third thing Jesus did was to feed. Likewise, there are often so many material needs that can conduce a vulnerable woman toward abortion. With mercy we need to try to help meet those needs for food, clothing, housing, work, legal help.
The fourth work of mercy Jesus did was to forgive. The Church must carry on this crucial work of forgiveness. The first way is to help those who have chosen, facilitated, promoted or tolerated abortion to experience the forgiveness of Christ in the way Christ himself established. Their consciences, once they begin to function appropriately, lead them to recognize the gravity of what they’ve done, but often they are like Lady MacBeth, trying to wash the stain away, not realizing that there’s no detergent in the world powerful enough; only God can do that, and he does in the Sacrament of his Mercy. Part of living the Gospel of Life is to be like friends of the paralyzed man bringing those we know, who might be emotionally crippled, to God working through his priests so that they might receive the mercy Jesus sent the apostles, their successors and their priest collaborators to bring to the world. It’s also necessary for all of us to be merciful and forgive those who have made themselves the enemies of the pro-life movement and done harm at various levels to us and other pro-lifers.
The fifth form of mercy relates to today’s Gospel. In St. Matthew’s version of the scene, Jesus, looking with compassion on the mangled and abandoned shepherd-less sheep, asks everyone to pray for laborers to take in the harvest that is already ripe. And after they have prayed, Jesus immediately calls 12, the 12 we encounter in today’s Gospel from St. Mark. Out of mercy, Jesus gets us to pray for more laborers and then calls us to continue his mission by becoming those laborers. We’re all Christians because of 2,000 years of prayers to the Harvest Master, and we’re allied diligently to go to the world to seek to perpetuate Jesus’ work. We also need to be praying and calling others to join us in the fields. How beautiful and hopeful it is to see how young the March for Life is, because the Church has been praying for these young people to join us in the fight and we’re happy that they’re responding, in some way, to that call.
Today as we thank God for the gift of human life, as we remember our personal summons to be his disciple and apostle, we we pray for a greater sense of reverence for every human being, we pray, “Have mercy on me, O God, have mercy!,” We ask God to “send his mercy and his faithfulness” and he responds by sending his Son, the true Anointed One, the Messiah, the Christ, who revealed himself to St. Faustina as “Mercy Incarnate.” He is the one who calls us to be with him here at Mass. He is the one who, at the end of Mass, sends us out to preach and oppose the devil. He is the one who teaches us how to treat, and form others to treat, those with whom he is in relationship from the womb with reverence, not only never laying a hand on them to do harm, but embracing them with love.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 1 Sm 24:3-21
Saul took three thousand picked men from all Israel
and went in search of David and his men
in the direction of the wild goat crags.
When he came to the sheepfolds along the way, he found a cave,
which he entered to relieve himself.
David and his men were occupying the inmost recesses of the cave.
David’s servants said to him,
“This is the day of which the LORD said to you,
‘I will deliver your enemy into your grasp;
do with him as you see fit.’”
So David moved up and stealthily cut off an end of Saul’s mantle.
Afterward, however, David regretted that he had cut off
an end of Saul’s mantle.
He said to his men,
“The LORD forbid that I should do such a thing to my master,
the LORD’s anointed, as to lay a hand on him,
for he is the LORD’s anointed.”
With these words David restrained his men
and would not permit them to attack Saul.
Saul then left the cave and went on his way.
David also stepped out of the cave, calling to Saul,
“My lord the king!”
When Saul looked back,
David bowed to the ground in homage and asked Saul:
“Why do you listen to those who say,
‘David is trying to harm you’?
You see for yourself today that the LORD just now delivered you
into my grasp in the cave.
I had some thought of killing you, but I took pity on you instead.
I decided, ‘I will not raise a hand against my lord,
for he is the LORD’s anointed and a father to me.’
Look here at this end of your mantle which I hold.
Since I cut off an end of your mantle and did not kill you,
see and be convinced that I plan no harm and no rebellion.
I have done you no wrong,
though you are hunting me down to take my life.
The LORD will judge between me and you,
and the LORD will exact justice from you in my case.
I shall not touch you.
The old proverb says, ‘From the wicked comes forth wickedness.’
So I will take no action against you.
Against whom are you on campaign, O king of Israel?
Whom are you pursuing? A dead dog, or a single flea!
The LORD will be the judge; he will decide between me and you.
May he see this, and take my part,
and grant me justice beyond your reach!”
When David finished saying these things to Saul, Saul answered,
“Is that your voice, my son David?”
And Saul wept aloud.
Saul then said to David: “You are in the right rather than I;
you have treated me generously, while I have done you harm.
Great is the generosity you showed me today,
when the LORD delivered me into your grasp
and you did not kill me.
For if a man meets his enemy, does he send him away unharmed?
May the LORD reward you generously for what you have done this day.
And now, I know that you shall surely be king
and that sovereignty over Israel shall come into your possession.”
Responsorial Psalm PS 57:2, 3-4, 6 and 11
R. (2a) Have mercy on me, God, have mercy.
Have mercy on me, O God; have mercy on me,
for in you I take refuge.
In the shadow of your wings I take refuge,
till harm pass by.
R. Have mercy on me, God, have mercy.
I call to God the Most High,
to God, my benefactor.
May he send from heaven and save me;
may he make those a reproach who trample upon me;
may God send his mercy and his faithfulness.
R. Have mercy on me, God, have mercy.
Be exalted above the heavens, O God;
above all the earth be your glory!
For your mercy towers to the heavens,
and your faithfulness to the skies.
R. Have mercy on me, God, have mercy.
Alleluia 2 Cor 5:19
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
God was reconciling the world to himself in Christ,
and entrusting to us the message of reconciliation.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel Mk 3:13-19
Jesus went up the mountain and summoned those whom he wanted
and they came to him.
He appointed Twelve, whom he also named Apostles,
that they might be with him
and he might send them forth to preach
and to have authority to drive out demons:
He appointed the Twelve:
Simon, whom he named Peter;
James, son of Zebedee,
and John the brother of James, whom he named Boanerges,
that is, sons of thunder;
Andrew, Philip, Bartholomew,
Matthew, Thomas, James the son of Alphaeus;
Thaddeus, Simon the Cananean,
and Judas Iscariot who betrayed him.

The post The Vocation to Reverence and Mercy in Living the Gospel of Life, Second Friday (II), January 19, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
25 min
January 18, 2024The Envy That Undermines Christian Unity, Second Thursday (II), January 18, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Thursday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Beginning of the Octave of Christian Unity
January 18, 2024
1 Sam 18:6-9.19:1-7, Ps 56, Mk 3:7-12

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.18.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today as we begin the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, we encounter explicitly in today’s first reading, and between the lines of today’s Gospel, what is perhaps the greatest destroyer of unity. It’s the sin of envy, the deep sadness over someone else’s success, the anger over someone else’s goodness. As the Book of Wisdom reminds us, “By the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who are in his possession experience it” (Wis 2:24). Envy is a sign that the devil to some degree possesses us, because the devil is defined by envy. It led Cain to kill Abel. It led to the devil’s fall and his desire to destroy us, because Christ took on our nature instead of the angelic nature. It has led to the destruction of friendships, of families, of societies, and done enormous harm to the Church. Envy, in short, kills. Today is a chance for us to focus on it and learn from it the virtues we need not only not to let the devil possess us through it but, on the contrary, to rebuild the unity that envy destroys.
We see the destructive power of envy in today’s first reading. The Israelites, led by Saul, had triumphed in battle. Everyone was rejoicing. The women came out to meet the returning soldiers with an ancient ticker-tape parade, singing and dancing, with tambourines, sistrums and joyful songs. They began singing, “Saul has slain his thousands.” Think about that. Saul had triumphed over thousands of people. He was not just a king but a hero. And all the women were fawning over him. He should have been exultant, but his joy at his battlefield prowess was short-lived. In the second verse, they sang, “and David his ten thousands.” And that filled Saul with bitterness. Remember, David was slaying tens of thousands of people for the Israelites, for the nation Saul was leading. It would be like cheerleaders on a basketball team that has just won a championship, chanting “our point guard has scored 30 points, but our center has scored 40,” and having the point guard be more upset that he was upstaged by a teammate striving for the same team goal than he would be happy at winning a championship. It was ugly. It was petty. And it was destructive. Rather than rejoicing that God had obviously anointed David with special blessing — otherwise how could the harpist-shepherd have really taken down so many? — and had blessed Saul and his armies with that gift, he said to himself, “All that remains for him is the kingship.” The victory turned into a defeat in his heart and he sought revenge against the one who helped him triumph. Like King Herod out of envy would eventually try to strike down David’s 28th generation grandson, so Saul put David in his royal crosshairs. Rather than fighting alongside each other, rather than working together for the good, rather than rejoicing in their victory, Saul decided to go and destroy his greatest military asset. And even after he calmed down at the end of today’s passage, we would see that this cancer of envy would return over and again and Saul would seek to destroy David several times anew, despite David’s goodness to Saul.
The future Pope Francis, in a book containing 48 spiritual conferences from his time as Archbishop of Buenos Aires, pondered what happened in Saul during this scene. “Saul’s envy of David,” he wrote, “betrayed a serious obtuseness on his part. Instead of joining with the people and benefitting from the unification of the whole nation around David, Saul preferred to go on his own way, stubbornly refusing to recognize this man anointed by God. Envy always errs in its object and frustrates the struggle. When people desire something good but do so with envy, they end up losing what is truly good, and, in the case of Saul, it was the common project, the corporate institution. When Saul’s isolated, disobedient conscience separated him from the Lord, he dragged the whole people down with him.” Cardinal Bergoglio makes a very profound point. When envy exists in a heart, it really can’t rejoice in a common victory because one can’t tolerate sharing the credit. Envy is a destructive selfishness that makes true solidarity disintegrate, because one is sad rather than joyful at the success or blessing of a teammate or a brother. Jealousy and envy are two different things. Jealously is basically, “I like your shirt and I hope to have one just like it one day.” Envy is, “I like your shirt, and because I don’t have one, I don’t want you to have yours either.” It ultimately desires the death of others and it leads to terrible atrocities.
We see this truth about the homicidal hearts of the envious between the lines of today’s Gospel. The lines themselves show us the great attractiveness of the Lord Jesus on display. St. Mark tells us that such a large crowd of people was following Jesus that he needed to have a boat ready to push a little bit away from the shore so that the people wouldn’t crush him. They were coming from Galilee, Judea, Jerusalem, Idumea, the Transjordan, Tyre and Sidon. For those who don’t know the geography of the Holy Land very well, those locations might just be names. But Galilee was in the north and Judea in the South of the Holy Land. Idumea was even further to the South. The Transjordan were pagan inhabited regions on the eastern side of the Jordan and Sea of Galilee opposite where Jesus would carry out most of his public ministry. Tyre and Sidon were pagan cities way to the north along the Mediterranean. To get a sense of the message St. Mark was communicating it would be as if Jesus were here in Manhattan and that people were walking to see him from Maine, New Jersey and as far away as North Carolina, from Detroit and the outer reaches of Long Island, and it wasn’t just Catholics coming but also atheists, secularists, and those of other religions. They were all pressing upon Jesus, who was curing and teaching. Even the demons couldn’t help, in a sense, but praise him, blurting out against themselves that he was far more than the Jews’ long-awaited Messiah, but something far more significant, “You are the Son of God.”
At the same time, however, we see in this scene that not everyone was attracted to Jesus. Amidst the joy of so many miraculous healings, so many exorcisms, so many blind people seeing for the first time, so many deaf and mute people communicating normally, so many lame people leaving their mats and with exultation ripping off their bandages, not everyone was happy. In fact there were some people who — as we saw at the end of yesterday’s Gospel — at this time were plotting to have him murdered, because he actually had the gall to love people with deeds on the Lord’s day. These were people who resented what he was doing, and resented other people’s happiness, because of their own miserable approach to God, others and themselves. They were a society of older brothers from the Parable of the Prodigal Son who practiced religion like slaves not sons, who, when their brothers received any blessing, couldn’t celebrate because their hearts were lived in resentment. They would rather have their brothers suffer, remain lost, remain crippled, and even die than to celebrate their healing, rediscovery and spiritual resurrection. That is the evil that envy wreaks. And that envy would lead ultimately to Jesus’ death.
Because of how evil and destructive envy is, we need to battle against it perseveringly in our own hearts. How do we do so? What is the remedy for envy? I can propose a few ways:
The first is that we need constantly to be wishing each other well, in our thoughts, in our words and with our deeds. Becoming the president of their fan club. Really wanting the best for them. Listing their good qualities in our own mind and heart. Praying for them to get ahead. This is the first antidote to envy that can invade communities of believers.
The second is authentic humility. I’ve always loved Cardinal Merry del Val’s Litany of Humility. Praying the words sometimes takes heroism, because it goes so much against the way our fallen human nature can operate. We pray, “That others may be esteemed more than I … That, in the opinion of the world,  others may increase and I may decrease … That others may be chosen and I set aside … That others may be praised and I unnoticed … That others may be preferred to me in everything… That others may become holier than I, provided that I may become as holy as I should.” This is a prayer that makes us happier when a brother is chosen than when we’re chosen and is a real expression of genuine love for our brother. The more we cultivate that prayer, the less we’ll be eaten alive by envy.
The third is to cultivate authentic fraternity. We see in contrast to Saul’s envy Jonathan’s fraternal love. If anyone should have been jealous over David’s success it should have been he, because he was presumptively Saul’s heir, but instead of being filled with envy, he intervened to save David’s life. He was filled with fraternity, friendship and love. No wonder why he’s always been a model of a true friend.
Last is to be truly grateful for what God has given us. Envy and jealousy both flow from thinking we need something or someone else other than God in order to be happy. They ultimately flow from a deep insecurity about how loved we are by God in our own unique way, and when we can live in that love by God then we can more easily rejoice in the way God loves others, even if he loves them differently than the way he loves us. The Lord is our Shepherd and with him we lack for nothing (Ps 23:1).
Today as we celebrate this Mass at the beginning of this Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, we rejoice at the blessings that God has given our Christian brothers and sisters, those who pray better than we do, who love the Word of God better than we do, who serve better than we do, who are more merciful, who are more patient, who are more enthusiastic, who sing better than we do, who do just about everything better than we do. We rejoice that they are in our Christian family, on our team and are doing so much good for the Lord in helping him save the world. We thank him for loving us so much that he has drafted us by name onto that same championship team. And we ask the Lord with whom we are about to enter into holy communion to bring us into greater loving communion with each other.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 SM 18:6-9;19:1-7
When David and Saul approached
(on David’s return after slaying the Philistine),
women came out from each of the cities of Israel to meet King Saul,
singing and dancing, with tambourines, joyful songs, and sistrums.
The women played and sang:
“Saul has slain his thousands,
and David his ten thousands.”
Saul was very angry and resentful of the song, for he thought:
“They give David ten thousands, but only thousands to me.
All that remains for him is the kingship.”
And from that day on, Saul was jealous of David.
Saul discussed his intention of killing David
with his son Jonathan and with all his servants.
But Saul’s son Jonathan, who was very fond of David, told him:
“My father Saul is trying to kill you.
Therefore, please be on your guard tomorrow morning;
get out of sight and remain in hiding.
I, however, will go out and stand beside my father
in the countryside where you are, and will speak to him about you.
If I learn anything, I will let you know.”
Jonathan then spoke well of David to his father Saul, saying to him:
“Let not your majesty sin against his servant David,
for he has committed no offense against you,
but has helped you very much by his deeds.
When he took his life in his hands and slew the Philistine,
and the LORD brought about a great victory
for all Israel through him,
you were glad to see it.
Why, then, should you become guilty of shedding innocent blood
by killing David without cause?”
Saul heeded Jonathan’s plea and swore,
“As the LORD lives, he shall not be killed.”
So Jonathan summoned David and repeated the whole conversation to him.
Jonathan then brought David to Saul, and David served him as before.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 56:2-3, 9-10A, 10B-11, 12-13
R. (5b) In God I trust; I shall not fear.
Have mercy on me, O God, for men trample upon me;
all the day they press their attack against me.
My adversaries trample upon me all the day;
yes, many fight against me.
R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
My wanderings you have counted;
my tears are stored in your flask;
are they not recorded in your book?
Then do my enemies turn back,
when I call upon you.
R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
Now I know that God is with me.
In God, in whose promise I glory,
in God I trust without fear;
what can flesh do against me?
R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
I am bound, O God, by vows to you;
your thank offerings I will fulfill.
For you have rescued me from death,
my feet, too, from stumbling;
that I may walk before God in the light of the living.
R. In God I trust; I shall not fear.
Gospel
MK 3:7-12
Jesus withdrew toward the sea with his disciples.
A large number of people followed from Galilee and from Judea.
Hearing what he was doing,
a large number of people came to him also from Jerusalem,
from Idumea, from beyond the Jordan,
and from the neighborhood of Tyre and Sidon.
He told his disciples to have a boat ready for him because of the crowd,
so that they would not crush him.
He had cured many and, as a result, those who had diseases
were pressing upon him to touch him.
And whenever unclean spirits saw him they would fall down before him
and shout, “You are the Son of God.”
He warned them sternly not to make him known.
The post The Envy That Undermines Christian Unity, Second Thursday (II), January 18, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
January 17, 2024The Courage of David, Jesus and Anthony, Second Wednesday (II), January 17, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Anthony of the Desert
January 17, 2024
1 Sam 17:32-33.37.40-51, Ps 144, Mk 3:1-6

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.17.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted:
One of the most urgent virtues needed today is courage and today’s readings and the saint we celebrate today all give us extraordinary examples of courage and the virtues that lead to it and strengthen it.
In the first reading, we see one of the most famous examples of courage not just in the Bible but in history. For 40 days Goliath had been calling on someone from the Israelite Camp to come out and fight him, one-on-one, to determine the outcome of the battle between the Israelites and the Philistines. But none of those on the Israelite side, including Saul, were willing to take him up on the challenge. Everyone was too cowardly. The text tells us that they were all “dismayed and terror-stricken.” David, however, was not. He was a young boy, a harpist — not exactly a form of music associated with warriors! — who had with him a simple slingshot that he would use to get the attention of the sheep he would watch. He heard Goliath’s challenge on the 40th day as he was bringing food to his older brothers in Saul’s army. He volunteered. He was not afraid of going head to head — more like head to waist! – against the 6’9” warrior with all the latest gear, a heavy, long sword, a javelin with an iron head weighing 15 pounds and bronze scimitar, a bronze helmet on his head, and a bronze corselet of scale armor weighing 125 pounds. David didn’t even bother taking up the offer of Saul’s armor. He was satisfied with his sling and five stones he got from a Wadi because he knew he would be acting “in the name of the Lord.” He said, “Not by sword or spear that the Lord saves, for the battle is the Lord’s!” And we know how the story ends.
In today’s Gospel, we see an example of Jesus’ courage. We’re not normally accustomed to look at Jesus’ courage except perhaps on Good Friday, but today we see it on full display. Jesus was risking his life contradicting the Scribes and the Pharisees with regard to their misunderstanding of the Sabbath. It was because of Jesus’ words about and works of charity on the Sabbath that they would plot to kill him. Jesus met in the synagogue a man with a withered hand and immediately responded with compassion. The Greek word used to describe the man’s hand strongly suggests it was withered through an injury, not because of a malady from birth. And Jesus wanted to cure his hand and allow him to use it to work and build up a life for himself. But the Pharisees present didn’t look at the injured man in the same way. They were indifferent to his plight. The text suggests that they may have even planted him there as a pawn to try to entrap Jesus, to see if he would try to cure him on the Sabbath. Hence Jesus asked if it were against God’s law and will to do good and save life. They didn’t reply. St. Mark tells us that Jesus looked at them with anger at their malevolence and was grieved at their hardness of heart, which prevented them not only from seeing the place of charity in the law of God but also from looking on this man with love. Jesus’ question, “Is it lawful to do good … rather than evil, to save life rather than to destroy it?,” is still very relevant today. Jesus had the courage to do good, even when it would cost him. Jesus was essentially asking if it was possible to love someone in deeds on the Lord’s day, if it was possible to save or redeem. Jesus’ opponents didn’t respond because they knew how ridiculous their response would seem. After Jesus was gone, however, the Pharisees went out on the Sabbath, on the Lord’s day, and began to conspire with the Herodians (with whom they would ordinarily not interact at all, because of the Herodians’ licentiousness and relations with the Romans) about how to put Jesus to death. Despite their idolatry of the Sabbath, they hypocritically thought nothing was wrong in using the sabbath to “do evil” and to “destroy” life. Jesus had come to do good, but they were plotting evil; he was seeking to enhance the injured man’s life, and they were seeking grounds to end Jesus’. But Jesus was courageous enough to look them in the face, to look death in the face, and help this man whom he had come to save.
What are the motivations of courage? We can see three of them in today’s readings.
The first is faith, like we see in David, who believed in the power of God. A slingshot and five stones were nothing compared to Goliath; but a slingshot, five stones and God were plenty.
The second is charity. Jesus had compassion on the man and it led him courageously to act in his favor. Love can make even a petite woman a mamma bear to defend her children.
The third is righteous indignation. Jesus was angry at the hardness of heart of those who didn’t care about the man in the synagogue. Likewise our holy anger can get us to stand up against the victims of injustice and act.
We have a great illustration of different forms of courage in the great saint we celebrated today, St. Anthony of the Desert. When he was 18, both of his parents died and he was left with all of their rich lands. He went to Church one day when the story of the Rich Young Man was being proclaimed in the Gospel. Upon hearing the words of Jesus, “If you wish to be perfect, go, sell what you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven. Then come, follow me,” he courageously took them literally and responded wholeheartedly. He did what the Rich Young Man was too afraid to do. He sold all that he had, giving some money to relatives, paying for his sister to enter with a community of faithful women and gave the rest to the poor. Then he even more courageously left civilization behind and went out into the desert for the next 86 years, where he famously was tempted by the devil in all types of ways. What he endured would have terrorized most soldiers, but he knew that the Lord was there with him in the desert to strengthen him to pass those tests, just as Jesus passed the tests in the Judean desert. Eventually all types of people came to him to receive spiritual guidance and he helped them grow in faith, love and courage, in the midst of anti-Christian persecution or in the midst of the battles being fought against the true faith. And his example has inspired over the centuries so many saints, Saint Athanasius and Saint Augustine at the forefront, to fight the good fight with courage as well.
In today’s Psalm, we prayed, “Blessed be the Lord, my rock, who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.” We called him our refuge, fortress, stronghold, deliverer, and shield. Every Mass is a boot camp where he trains our hands for battle by joining them in prayer and in communion. Let us ask him today as we receive him to fill us with the faith, charity and holy anger to lead us to fight the good fight of faith like David did, like Anthony of the Desert did, like Jesus himself did!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 SM 17:32-33, 37, 40-51
David spoke to Saul:
“Let your majesty not lose courage.
I am at your service to go and fight this Philistine.”
But Saul answered David,
“You cannot go up against this Philistine and fight with him,
for you are only a youth, while he has been a warrior from his youth.”
David continued:
“The LORD, who delivered me from the claws of the lion and the bear,
will also keep me safe from the clutches of this Philistine.”
Saul answered David, “Go! the LORD will be with you.”
Then, staff in hand, David selected five smooth stones from the wadi
and put them in the pocket of his shepherd’s bag.
With his sling also ready to hand, he approached the Philistine.
With his shield bearer marching before him,
the Philistine also advanced closer and closer to David.
When he had sized David up,
and seen that he was youthful, and ruddy, and handsome in appearance,
the Philistine held David in contempt.
The Philistine said to David,
“Am I a dog that you come against me with a staff?”
Then the Philistine cursed David by his gods
and said to him, “Come here to me,
and I will leave your flesh for the birds of the air
and the beasts of the field.”
David answered him:
“You come against me with sword and spear and scimitar,
but I come against you in the name of the LORD of hosts,
the God of the armies of Israel that you have insulted.
Today the LORD shall deliver you into my hand;
I will strike you down and cut off your head.
This very day I will leave your corpse
and the corpses of the Philistine army for the birds of the air
and the beasts of the field;
thus the whole land shall learn that Israel has a God.
All this multitude, too,
shall learn that it is not by sword or spear that the LORD saves.
For the battle is the LORD’s and he shall deliver you into our hands.”
The Philistine then moved to meet David at close quarters,
while David ran quickly toward the battle line
in the direction of the Philistine.
David put his hand into the bag and took out a stone,
hurled it with the sling,
and struck the Philistine on the forehead.
The stone embedded itself in his brow,
and he fell prostrate on the ground.
Thus David overcame the Philistine with sling and stone;
he struck the Philistine mortally, and did it without a sword.
Then David ran and stood over him;
with the Philistine’s own sword which he drew from its sheath
he dispatched him and cut off his head.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 144:1B, 2, 9-10
R. (1) Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
Blessed be the LORD, my rock,
who trains my hands for battle, my fingers for war.
R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
My refuge and my fortress,
my stronghold, my deliverer,
My shield, in whom I trust,
who subdues my people under me.
R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
O God, I will sing a new song to you;
with a ten-stringed lyre I will chant your praise,
You who give victory to kings,
and deliver David, your servant from the evil sword.
R. Blessed be the Lord, my Rock!
Gospel
MK 3:1-6
Jesus entered the synagogue.
There was a man there who had a withered hand.
They watched Jesus closely
to see if he would cure him on the sabbath
so that they might accuse him.
He said to the man with the withered hand,
“Come up here before us.”
Then he said to the Pharisees,
“Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath rather than to do evil,
to save life rather than to destroy it?”
But they remained silent.
Looking around at them with anger
and grieved at their hardness of heart,
Jesus said to the man, “Stretch out your hand.”
He stretched it out and his hand was restored.
The Pharisees went out and immediately took counsel
with the Herodians against him to put him to death.
The post The Courage of David, Jesus and Anthony, Second Wednesday (II), January 17, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
17 min
January 16, 2024David’s Heart, Christ’s and Ours, Second Tuesday (II), January 16, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Tuesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
January 16, 2024
1 Sam 16:1-13, Ps 89, Mk 2:23-28

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.16.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
Today we have the opportunity to deepen our understanding of the meaning of vocation, which can nourish both our baptismal vocation to be holy and faithfully love God and others as God loves, as well as whatever vocation within a vocation we have in the Church.
In the first reading, we have the vocation story of David. God sent the prophet Samuel to Jesse’s house to anoint the one whom God would indicate he had chosen to be his king after he rejected Saul for his infidelity. Samuel had long served the Lord but he still looked too much with human eyes than God’s vision. When Samuel first saw Jesse’s eldest son Eliab, he thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is here before him.” But the Lord said to him, “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature.” That’s precisely what had been done with Saul, who we heard on Saturday “was a handsome young man. There was no other child of Israel more handsome than Saul; he stood head and shoulders above the people.” But God as we know ultimately rejected Saul for stubborn infidelity. The Lord told Samuel, “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.” And so the presentations happened of the next six sons, but none was chosen by God. Finally, Samuel asked if there were any other boys and Jesse replied that the youngest was still tending the sheep. After he was sent for, this ruddy, youthful, handsome boy approached and the Lord said, “There. Anoint him, for this is he!” And Samuel did anoint him, so that well before he would supplant Saul as the acknowledged leader of God’s people, he would be getting prepared by “the Spirit of the Lord [who had] rushed upon him.”
The Lord normally chooses those superficially unlikely, because he sees what we often miss. The Blessed Mother would say in her famous Magnificat, “The Lord has looked with favor on the lowliness of his handmaid.” St. Paul would declare in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.”
The Lord sees the heart, but we need to ask: What was it in David’s heart that God saw? What was it in our heart that God saw?
In David’s heart he saw the capacity for passionate fidelity not counting on human respect. David wasn’t embarrassed to dance in front of the ark of the Lord even when his loved ones taunted him for it.
In David’s heart he saw great courage, the courage that would lead him to go against the fearsome Goliath armed just with a slingshot and the name of the Lord.
In David’s heart he saw sincerity and the capacity to receive his mercy. After Samuel told Saul he had sinned, like we saw yesterday, Saul made excuses. After Nathan told David he had sinned, David immediately repented.
In David’s heart he saw humility and a capacity for forgiveness. David forgave Saul who was trying to kill him. He forgave his Son Absalom who tried to steal his kingdom. He forgave Shimei, who was cursing him as he was fleeing.
In David’s heart he saw a capacity for shepherding after his own heart. David was a young shepherd, capable of risking and giving his life for his sheep, capable of risking and giving his life for God. In him God the Father ultimately saw an image of the heart of his 28th generation grandson, the Son of David who would become the Good Shepherd.
Jesus mentions an illustration of that shepherdly wisdom after God’s own heart in today’s Gospel. Jesus reminds his critics among the Pharisees that when David and his soldiers were fighting for the Lord and were starving, they entered the shrine where Abiathar was high priest and ate the “bread of offering,” the showbread that would normally remain there for a week as an offering of the best of grains before being replaced and consumed by the priests. David had a heart capable of prioritizing according to God’s will, seeing that the Lord isn’t glorified by his sons — not to mention his soldiers — starving, that the good of the practice of the bread of offering in the temple isn’t absolute, and higher goods need to be remembered. Jesus’ heart was similar. When his apostles were starving on the Sabbath, they plucked off the heads of grain, meshed them in their hands, and ate, even though according to the Scribes and Pharisees — and not according to God — they were violating the Sabbath. The Scribes and Pharisees, to prevent the people of Israel from ever getting close to breaking the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath Day, created a whole series of regulations with regard to work. We see this throughout the Gospel. They preferred that people starve rather than mesh grain a little in their hands, as if going hungry glorified the God who gives us each day our daily bread. David’s heart saw God’s will more clearly than the Scribes and Pharisees did, and it was one of the reasons why he was chosen.
God in his eternal vision likewise saw something in our hearts that led him to call us. He probably saw a similar capacity for passionate fidelity even though many of our contemporaries would think that we’re crazy for prioritizing Christ over the things of the world and coming to Mass during the week simply because we want to, rather than because we have to. God saw in us the courage to do what others were persuading us not to do, and the courage to persevere. God saw in us the capacity of humbly receiving his mercy, letting our life be defined by it, and forgiving others, including those who have really hurt us. He saw in us a capacity for shepherding others through spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, for nurturing and for our willingness to lay down our lives for the sake of those entrusted to us, however small and vulnerable. He saw in us ultimately something that reminded him of the love of the heart of his Son. He chose us and anointed us from early in life so that we might correspond to our Christian vocation. And he sent the Holy Spirit upon us, as he did upon David, to help us to attune our hearts ever more to his wisdom.
Today we are preparing not to sacrifice a heifer but ourselves together with the Lord. In the great miracle of Lanciano, when 1300 years ago the host took on the accidents of human heart wall, something confirmed in anatomical and histological tests in the 1970s, we can get a glimpse that in every Mass, the Lord seeks to give us a heart transplant, to give us his own heart together with his entire Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so that our hearts may become increasingly pure and see and revere him in everything; so that our hearts may beat in synchrony with his and continue loving as he loves us first, so that God the Father in seeing our hearts might more and more see a reflection of his Son’s. Today, in gratitude for our vocations and the way the Lord called us like he called David, we turn to God and we ask him for the grace ultimately to be faithful to our calling!

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 SM 16:1-13
The LORD said to Samuel:
“How long will you grieve for Saul,
whom I have rejected as king of Israel?
Fill your horn with oil, and be on your way.
I am sending you to Jesse of Bethlehem,
for I have chosen my king from among his sons.”
But Samuel replied:
“How can I go?
Saul will hear of it and kill me.”
To this the LORD answered:
“Take a heifer along and say,
‘I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.’
Invite Jesse to the sacrifice, and I myself will tell you what to do;
you are to anoint for me the one I point out to you.”
Samuel did as the LORD had commanded him.
When he entered Bethlehem,
the elders of the city came trembling to meet him and inquired,
“Is your visit peaceful, O seer?”
He replied:
“Yes! I have come to sacrifice to the LORD.
So cleanse yourselves and join me today for the banquet.”
He also had Jesse and his sons cleanse themselves
and invited them to the sacrifice.
As they came, he looked at Eliab and thought,
“Surely the LORD’s anointed is here before him.”
But the LORD said to Samuel:
“Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature,
because I have rejected him.
Not as man sees does God see,
because he sees the appearance
but the LORD looks into the heart.”
Then Jesse called Abinadab and presented him before Samuel,
who said, “The LORD has not chosen him.”
Next Jesse presented Shammah, but Samuel said,
“The LORD has not chosen this one either.”
In the same way Jesse presented seven sons before Samuel,
but Samuel said to Jesse,
“The LORD has not chosen any one of these.”
Then Samuel asked Jesse,
“Are these all the sons you have?”
Jesse replied,
“There is still the youngest, who is tending the sheep.”
Samuel said to Jesse,
“Send for him;
we will not begin the sacrificial banquet until he arrives here.”
Jesse sent and had the young man brought to them.
He was ruddy, a youth handsome to behold
and making a splendid appearance.
The LORD said,
“There–anoint him, for this is he!”
Then Samuel, with the horn of oil in hand,
anointed him in the midst of his brothers;
and from that day on, the Spirit of the LORD rushed upon David.
When Samuel took his leave, he went to Ramah.
Responsorial Psalm
PS 89:20, 21-22, 27-28
R. (21a) I have found David, my servant.
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. I have found David, my servant.
“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. I have found David, my servant.
“He shall say of me, ‘You are my father,
my God, the Rock, my savior.’
And I will make him the first-born,
highest of the kings of the earth.”
R. I have found David, my servant.
Gospel
MK 2:23-28
As Jesus was passing through a field of grain on the sabbath,
his disciples began to make a path while picking the heads of grain.
At this the Pharisees said to him,
“Look, why are they doing what is unlawful on the sabbath?”
He said to them,
“Have you never read what David did
when he was in need and he and his companions were hungry?
How he went into the house of God when Abiathar was high priest
and ate the bread of offering that only the priests could lawfully eat,
and shared it with his companions?”
Then he said to them,
“The sabbath was made for man, not man for the sabbath.
That is why the Son of Man is lord even of the sabbath.”
The post David’s Heart, Christ’s and Ours, Second Tuesday (II), January 16, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
January 15, 2024New Wineskins for True and Trusting Obedience, Second Monday (II), January 15, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Monday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
January 15, 2024
1 Sam 15:16-23, Ps 50, Mk 2:18-22

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.15.24_Homily_1.mp3

The following points were attempted in the homily:
On Saturday morning, in the scene immediately before today’s Gospel, we confronted the scandal Jesus caused for the Scribes and Pharisees over his mercy toward sinners, particularly for Matthew and all of his friends. Jesus ate with them and would soon become known as a “friend of sinners,” reminding everyone that God desires mercy, not sacrifice, and that only those who recognize they’re sick need a physician and his medicine. Today, we have a different type of scandal. The disciples of John the Baptist and the Pharisees approached Jesus and objected, “Why do the disciples of John and of the Pharisees fast, but your disciples do not?” It seemed that Jesus was thought a laxist not just toward sinners but also toward the Mosaic Law. It seemed that Jesus not only was encouraging a lack of discipline but that he himself was guilty of it. Jesus used the scene to teach a few very important lessons, lessons that are still ever valid for us today.
The first is about the principal way we relate to God. The Pharisees of Jesus’ day were fasting out of religious duty and discipline, seeking to draw God’s attention to the prayers they were making with their body. In the Old Covenant, people fasted for three reasons: first, in penance for their sins and reparation for others’; second, in supplication for an intention, praying with their body; third, basically out of routine because it’s in the law without much attention to the why behind the what of what they were doing. Jesus wanted to teach them a whole different source of motivation and give them a much deeper way of relating to God. He asked them whether the groomsmen (“friends of the bridal chamber”) at a wedding can fast while the Bridegroom is with them. This pointed to the fact that Jesus was the long-prophesied Groom of his people Israel and they were called to relate to God fundamentally out of joyful love. Fasting is good, he was indicating, but there’s an even higher good at stake, which is recognizing and celebrating the presence of God in their midst. Just as there would be something awry if at a wedding reception we refused to eat the wedding cake or drink a toast in order to keep a fast — especially if we were the bride! — so, as good as fasting is, it would be inappropriate to fast rather than celebrate in the presence of Jesus. The joy of his presence should trump the good of spiritual ascesis. His presence transforms at its root our discipline, our motivation and our whole life. The Church maintains this distinction during Lenten fasting and penances, for example. From the time of St. Augustine, we have said that the celebratory character of the Lord’s Day is more important than the penitential aspect of the entire season. That’s why we don’t even number the Sundays of Lent among the 40 days and that’s why we don’t break our fasts or penance when on the Lord’s Day we have desserts or wine or other things we’ve given up for Lent.
The second lesson Jesus gives today is about the purpose of fasting. He said that while the Bridegroom is with us, we shouldn’t fast, but when he is ripped away from our presence, then we should and will. The verb that he uses points to how the Bridegroom was ripped away by the armed guards of the chief priests in the Garden of Gethsemane and manhandled by the soldiers of Pontius Pilate. When he is ripped away, we fast, not principally as a penance in reparation, but out of a hunger to be reunited with him. This principle remains today. After his Resurrection and before his Ascension, the Bridegroom promised to remain with us until the end of time, as he is really with us in the Blessed Sacrament in the tabernacle. But the truth is that we’re not fully with him. Our desires aren’t all for his kingdom, his glory, his will. Most of us aren’t striving consciously, full-time, to be his saintly disciple. That’s why we fast, to grow in that hunger for him. That’s the purpose behind the Eucharistic fast and the Lenten fast before Easter, so that we may hunger more and more for a life changing communion with him every Mass, so that we may live a new life with him because of his Resurrection.
Perhaps the biggest lesson of all Jesus gave in response to the Pharisee’s and John’s disciples’ objection was to indicate that he had come not just to put a “new patch” on the old garment of Judaism, as if all that was needed was a little fix to Jewish practices and mentality, but that he was coming to renew it totally from the inside. Just like a new patch of unshrunken cloth on an old garment would tear the old garment once the stronger, new patch shrunk after being washed, so Jesus was communicating that unless they let him replace their clothing entirely with the new baptismal garment he was bringing into the world, they would never be able to assimilate the new with the old. They needed new wineskins to be able to receive — and not be overwhelmed — by the novelty of the new wine. Just as new wine that hasn’t fully fermented would burst the taut old wineskins, so we can’t really receive what Jesus wants to do in us with hardened old skins. We need constantly to be asking of him the grace of new wineskins to receive what he wishes to give us. We need that openness to what he wants to do.
King Saul, whom we encounter in the first reading, didn’t have the type of loving, trusting obedience that Jesus was trying to form in his disciples. He was approaching everything from his old categories of being in charge, rather than the new reality of being a servant and steward of the Lord. Saul had been anointed by Samuel king of Israel and had been sent out to battle the Amalekites, with the instructions to put under a ban and destroy what was conquered, both the Amalekites as well as “oxen and sheep, camels and asses.” The point was to train the Israelites not to seek to profit personally from fighting for the Lord. But Saul and the Israelites disobeyed. They spared “Agag, king of Amalek … and the best of the fat sheep and oxen, and the lambs. They refused to carry out the doom on anything that was worthwhile, dooming only what was worthless and of no account.” So God sent Samuel to Saul to ask, “Why have you disobeyed the Lord? You have pounced on the spoil.” Saul’s response was not to ask for God’s mercy. His response to was proudly to defend himself and then to lie. “I did indeed obey the Lord and fulfill the mission on which the Lord sent me,” Saul said. “From the spoil the men took sheep and oxen, the best of what had been banned, to sacrifice to the Lord their God in Gilgal.” Not only was that not what God had explicitly commanded, but it was a total fabrication. They had kept the sheep and oxen for themselves. He was adding sin to sin. Samuel clarified for him that “obedience is better than sacrifice and submitting than the fat of rams.” He called Saul’s rebellion “a sin like divination” and his presumption like “the crime of idolatry.” He had made his own will a god and by his disobedience he was invoking some other god than the one who had commanded him to put everything under the ban.
Often we have a similar unholy stubbornness like Saul. We structure our relationship with the Lord according to our categories rather than God’s, our preferences rather than his imperatives. We can miss the whole point of obedience, like Saul and later the Pharisees once did. Our obedience isn’t to a bunch of rules, or laws, or arbitrary divine dictates. It’s fundamentally to a Ruler, to a Legislator, to a Living Lord, who constantly is asking us to follow him in the present. Obedience, as I mention often, comes from the Latin word ob-audire, which means to listen so attentively as to eavesdrop. With new wineskins, we’re called to listen, to discern, each day and to obey with loving adhesion as things around us change.
Samuel concluded his words to Saul by saying, “Because you have rejected the command of the Lord, he, too, has rejected you as ruler.” When we hear this, it sounds like a punishment, but it’s not really a penalty. It’s rather a factual admission that if one rejects the Lord, one will not and cannot receive his help as a ruler. If one doesn’t have the proper wineskins, if one is simply going to do his own will rather than the Lord’s, he or she can’t receive the wine of divine assistance. The new wineskin of our obedience means not doing our “own thing,” not second guessing what God says, not changing his commands to suit our preferences, but uniting ourselves to the way Jesus listens to the the Father and puts into action what he says. This type of obedience is worth more than all other sacrifices, because it is the sacrifice of one’s own will as a beautiful and pleasing offering to God the Father with Jesus, as a fragrant and salvific, “Not my will, but yours, be done.”
Today as we celebrate this Mass, we can recall that Jesus seeks to give us the wineskins to receive what he is pouring into us today. We rejoice that the Bridegroom comes to be with us each day, to fill us with himself, and to have our wineskins overflow with his joy and obedience and love for God and others. The upright will see, as we prayed in the Psalm, the saving power of God. We ask the Lord to strengthen us to be more and more upright, so that we will see his salvation and help others to stand up to embrace it as well.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 1 SM 15:16-23
Samuel said to Saul:
“Stop! Let me tell you what the LORD said to me last night.”
Saul replied, “Speak!”
Samuel then said: “Though little in your own esteem,
are you not leader of the tribes of Israel?
The LORD anointed you king of Israel and sent you on a mission, saying,
‘Go and put the sinful Amalekites under a ban of destruction.
Fight against them until you have exterminated them.’
Why then have you disobeyed the LORD?
You have pounced on the spoil, thus displeasing the LORD.”
Saul answered Samuel: “I did indeed obey the LORD
and fulfill the mission on which the LORD sent me.
I have brought back Agag, and I have destroyed Amalek under the ban.
But from the spoil the men took sheep and oxen,
the best of what had been banned,
to sacrifice to the LORD their God in Gilgal.”
But Samuel said:
“Does the LORD so delight in burnt offerings and sacrifices
as in obedience to the command of the LORD?
Obedience is better than sacrifice,
and submission than the fat of rams.
For a sin like divination is rebellion,
and presumption is the crime of idolatry.
Because you have rejected the command of the LORD,
he, too, has rejected you as ruler.”
Responsorial Psalm PS 50:8-9, 16BC-17, 21 AND 23
R. (23b) To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
“Not for your sacrifices do I rebuke you,
for your burnt offerings are before me always.
I take from your house no bullock,
no goats out of your fold.”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
“Why do you recite my statutes,
and profess my covenant with your mouth,
Though you hate discipline
and cast my words behind you?”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
“When you do these things, shall I be deaf to it?
Or do you think that I am like yourself?
I will correct you by drawing them up before your eyes.
He that offers praise as a sacrifice glorifies me;
and to him that goes the right way I will show the salvation of God.”
R. To the upright I will show the saving power of God.
Responsorial Psalm HEB 4:12
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
The word of God is living and effective,
able to discern reflections and thoughts of the heart.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MK 2:18-22
The disciples of John and of the Pharisees were accustomed to fast.
People came to Jesus and objected,
“Why do the disciples of John and the disciples of the Pharisees fast,
but your disciples do not fast?”
Jesus answered them,
“Can the wedding guests fast while the bridegroom is with them?
As long as they have the bridegroom with them they cannot fast.
But the days will come when the bridegroom is taken away from them,
and then they will fast on that day.
No one sews a piece of unshrunken cloth on an old cloak.
If he does, its fullness pulls away,
the new from the old, and the tear gets worse.
Likewise, no one pours new wine into old wineskins.
Otherwise, the wine will burst the skins,
and both the wine and the skins are ruined.
Rather, new wine is poured into fresh wineskins.”
The post New Wineskins for True and Trusting Obedience, Second Monday (II), January 15, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
19 min
January 14, 2024Responding to the Lord in Prayer and In Life, Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 14, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 14, 2024
1 Sam 3:3-10.19, Ps 40, 1 Cor 6:13-15.17-20, Jn 1:35-42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.14.24_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
As we begin this new semester, after having finished the Christmas Season and entered into the period of so-called “Ordinary Time,” the Church has us focus on the extraordinary, mind-blowing truth that God wants to enter into a deep, intimate, personal relationship with each of us. He wants us to do more than know about him and believe in his existence. He wants us to know him personally, to enter into friendship, to receive and reciprocate his love, and then, in that bond, to recognize who we really are, not only created in his image and likeness but summoned to flourish by living up to that origin and destiny. As we marked thorughout the Christmas season, prayed for specifically in the Liturgy of Christmas morning, and reiterate every Mass as the chalice is prepared, Christ took on our humanity so that we might enter into his divinity. But this is accomplished not just by his birth, life, passion, death and resurrection, but through a loving personal bond; not just through his agape [his total self-giving love] but through mutual agape, philia [love of friendship] and even eros [our attraction not just to others to the good, true and beautiful]. Today’s readings all help us to focus on this astounding reality, gift and task.
In today’s first reading, we see God’s desire for a personal relationship with each of us. We meet the young Samuel. Samuel, we remember, was conceived after God heard his mother Hannah’s fervent prayers and tears in the Temple of Shiloh finally to be able to have a child. After he was born and weaned, Hannah with faith, courage and gratitude brought up to the Temple so that he might be dedicated fully to, and trained for, the Lord’s service. So he grew up in the Temple throughout his childhood up to his adolescence, which is where he meet him today. Despite his being full-time in the temple housing the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence and accompaniment through the desert and into the Holy Land, the text tells us he was still “not familiar with the Lord.” He was there serving the Lord but didn’t know him. That wasn’t his fault, nor was it just because “the Lord had not revealed anything to him as yet.” It was because Eli and his sons who should have known the Lord and trained him to enter into personal relationship with him were “sleeping” in the Temple rather than vigilant and awake in God’s sanctuary. The Lord, however, was about to change all of that.
Three successive times in the night, God called out to the young soon-to-be prophet by name, “Samuel, Samuel.” That very moniker already prophetically indicated the personal relationship God desired with him. “Shem” in Hebrew means “name.” The verb “Shema” means “to hear.” “El” refers to God. And so Shemu’el in Hebrew means both “name of God” and “God has heard.” It’s an indication that the Lord wants us to invoke his name in prayer and that he also wants to hear, and has in fact already anticipated, our invocations. Samuel was destined, we could say, to be a personification of prayer, of the Lord’s desire to enter into a life-changing and life-sustaining dialogue with him. We see in the scene that each time the Lord called Samuel, the boy promptly ran to Eli, who was characteristically sleeping, rather than praying, in the house of the Lord. The first two times, Eli just told Samuel to imitate his own priorities and go back to bed. But the third time God called Samuel and the boy awakened Eli, the priest finally snapped out of his storper, recognized that the Lord must be the one calling the boy, and helpfully told him to reply the next time, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” That’s what Samuel did and that’s when the Lord began to speak to him. In the dialogue of prayer that immediately followed, God revealed to this kid the evil that would come to Eli’s house as a result of their corruption. Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phineas, out of gluttony had been extorting and confiscating the meat sacrifices people would bring to offer to God and had also been using their offices to sexually abuse the women who were trying to serve God at the entrance of the Temple. Yet Eli, who had been repeatedly informed of their sins and hypocrisy, merely told them they should stop but did do anything to stop them. God told Samuel that Eli’s family would be punished for what he called their “blaspheming God”: rather than praising God in his holy place, they were desecrating it, themselves and the women they were exploiting. The young prophet was reluctant to share the contents of his conversation with Eli the following morning, but when Eli insisted, he held nothing back. That was the first of a lifetime of conversations God would have with Samuel so that through him God might enter into dialogue, guide and help his people. God would reveal to Samuel to anoint Saul, then to reprove Saul for his infidelity, then to go to Jesse’s house and anoint the young, ruddy David, and so much more.
Just as much as God called Samuel by name to prayerful conversation, so he calls us. But for that to occur, we need help. Many of us are not trained to listen, to tune into God’s frequency, even when we are in God’s presence. We need someone to teach us that prayer is not principally, “Be quiet, Lord, here is the list of things I want you to do for me,” but “Speak, Lord, I am listening and want to be your servant.” We need those who can help us us learn how to be still and silent before God, how to perceive his voice, how to converse with him, how to develop through prayer that intimate friendship, that truly familiar and familial bond, that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — who calls us by name — wants to have with us. And once we have learned through divine grace and good habit the art of prayer, God wants us to assist others to learn how to open up to the existential heart-to-heart dialogue God wants to have with them, too. This is one of the most urgent things we have to do in the Church, because secularism, living as if God does not exist, is the biggest problem facing humanity. The Church is meant to be a school of prayer, but in many places, we’re a failing school. So many young people drift away from the practice of the faith because, even though they have come to Church, had religious education classes, and came from practicing homes, they have never been helped to become “familiar with God,” to learn how to encounter him and enter into a personal conversation and relationship with him. They listen to Sacred Scripture but don’t recognize that through it God is speaking. They come to Mass, even receive Holy Communion, but think that they’re just receiving a thing, perhaps a holy thing, but just a thing, not Someone. They go to confession but believe that they’re just confessing their sins to a priest rather than through the priest confessing their sins to God who through the same priest will forgive them. More than anything, they may learn to “say their prayers,” but often don’t grasp through them that they are talking to God the Father when the prayer the Our Father, speaking directly to Jesus when they say, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” making Mary blush when they pray the Hail Mary and more. It’s not their fault that they came to Church but didn’t find God, or said their prayers and didn’t encounter him. They were never taught how to relate to the Lord one-on-one. I’ve been very moved this year by conversations with some students I’ve met under very difficult circumstances. After three different tragic deaths of Columbia students since September, I’ve been approached by some students who reached out for help. Some were Catholic. Others were not. They told me that in response to the sudden death of their friend they knew that they somehow needed to pray — that that was both an objective and subjective need — but they just didn’t know how to pray. They humbly came hoping I could first pray for them, and with them, and help them to learn how to pray on their own. On another occasion a student approached whose brother had a very dangerous brain tumor. One of her parents is Catholic and she was baptized, but her family had not practiced the faith as she grew up. But faced with her brother’s situation, out of love for him she wanted to help him by praying for him, but she meekly said she doesn’t know what to do. I’m so happy she and the others came. Teaching people how to pray is the most important thing the Church does, but it’s something we all have to get better at. This spring I’ll be doing a four-session mini-course on the Art of Prayer at the Merton Institute. I hope you’ll enroll. In the FOCUS Bible studies, we don’t just study Sacred Scripture, but learn how to pray with Sacred Scripture. I’d urge you to think about joining one. Likewise I’d urge you to take advantage of the other opportunities we give to learn how to pray, like daily Mass, adoration, our retreats and days of recollection, praying the Rosary throughout October, the Stations of the Cross during Lent and much more. My hope for each of you, during your time at Columbia and beyond, is that you will become proficient, indeed expert, at prayer in such a way that God can work as powerfully in your life as he worked in the life of Samuel, and so that you can help many other people learn how to pray, too.
In the Gospel, we see how St. John the Baptist played the role of Eli in the life of two of John’s disciples. When he saw Jesus walk by, he immediately pointed out, “Behold the Lamb of God.” He drew their attention to Jesus. He stoked their curiosity and wonder. And out of their trust in John, these two disciples — Andrew and almost certainly John the Evangelist, the author of the account — began to tail Jesus, observing him at a distance. But Jesus obviously desired something far more intimate. He turned to these two fishermen, who would have made terrible private investigators, and said, “What are you looking for?” He was asking, “What do you seek?,” “What do you really want?” He wanted them to examine their own desires. Whether their answer was simply small talk, a question as to how far they’d need to journey if they were to keep stalking him, it was nevertheless profound and pointed to an important spiritual reality. They replied, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” They knew they didn’t just want to say “Hi” to Jesus or to exchange the ancient equivalent of business cards. They wanted to stay with him. They hoped to get to know him. Jesus, who had come for far more than small talk, who had taken on our nature precisely to enter into relationship with us and remain with us until the end of time and beyond, invited them, “Come and you will see.” He invited them to come spend time with him and that’s what they did. St. John notes, “It was about four in the afternoon,” which is not just a sign that he remembered the exact moment he met Jesus for the first time. As many Scripture scholars have taught based on different indications in St. John’s Gospel, it was an indication of how long they spent with him. The text says, “They stayed with him that day,” which means far more than they hung around until midnight; rather, the Biblical scholars teach us, it was almost certainly 4 pm on the sixth day of the Jewish week, or just about sundown on Friday, which meant that the Sabbath was about to begin and travel would therefore be forbidden. So when they went and saw where Jesus was staying and “stayed with him that day,” St. John means that they spent the whole Sabbath with Jesus. They did an entire Day of Recollection. They rested with the same Lord who rested at the end of creation and who created the Sabbath so that we might be restored in our relationship with him. That’s when their intense, life-changing friendship with Jesus began. That’s when he taught them the naturalness of prayer. It had such an immediate impact on them that, as soon as the sabbath was over and they were once again able to journey, Andrew ran to get his brother Simon to introduce him to Jesus, saying, “We have found the Messiah!” They had been able in that first retreat day to recognize all their desires had been fulfilled, that the long-awaited One had finally come, and that he desired to be with them. And when Andrew introduced Simon to Jesus, the Lord showed yet again how he wishes to have an I-Thou relationship with each of us. He changed Simon’s name, the name by which he would call him, to Cephas — meaning “rock” or “Peter” — giving Simon Peter the vocation and responsibility in the Church his Bride and Body that his personal, prayerful relationship with Jesus would make possible. In a similar way, after we have met the Lord, after we have entered into intimate friendship with him, we are impelled from within to introduce those we know and love and care about, in fact everyone, to a similar relationship with him. We never know what the Lord will do once we make the introduction, just as John the Baptist didn’t know, just as Andrew didn’t know. But the greatest gift we can give to others is to introduce them to Jesus, to point him out, to help them to learn how to converse with him, to be and stay with him, to follow him, to discover in him the fulfillment of their longings, and to be transformed by him. At the beginning of this new semester, we can ask ourselves: whom have I brought to meet Jesus? Whom have I helped to learn to pray? Whom have I accompanied to Mass to be able to say, to Jesus on the altar what John the Baptist said at the Jordan, “Behold the Lamb of God”? There are so many people on campus living without God, or just going through the motions of what they learned as kids, whom God desires to meet at a much more profound level. We all know them. We all know many of them. Whom can we invite and accompany like Andrew and Simon?
The other readings today show two consequences of the personal encounter with God to which we’re called in prayer and in life. In the Psalm, which flowed from the prayer of King David whom God had had Samuel anoint, we see what’s supposed to happen from our perspective in our prayer and friendship with God. In prayer, as we sung, we wait for the Lord and he stoops down to hear our cries whenever we are in need. He gives us ears open to obedience, docile to his will, and places his law into our hearts. He puts a new song, a new hymn to God, in our heart and mouth and we are spurred to sing that hymn, to follow his will, to live by his law. The refrain teaches us three central aspects of prayer. We prayed, “Here I am, Lord.” The first thing we need to do is to show up. Second, we need to make it personal, calling on the Lord by name just as he speaks to us one-on-one. And then we prayed, “I come to do your will.” In prayer, we seek God, find God, come to know God, come to love God, and in loving him, we begin to love what he loves and therefore seek to do what he wills. So we first make ourselves present, “Behold, I come.” Then we call upon him, speaking to him directly. “To do your will, O Lord, is my delight.” Then we seek to do that will we have discerned, and because of the love that flows in our relationship with God, we find delight in doing his will. The result of the entire process, as we pray at the end of the Psalm, is that we’re moved to give God praise and glory not just privately but publicly. We announce his justice, his goodness, his holiness before the multitudes. Our whole life begins to point people to him. Our whole existence becomes an extension of our prayer, a part of our prayer, and a means by which we draw people to meet the same source of justice, goodness and holiness.
That leads us to the second consequence of prayer that we find in the readings: that we seek to live our whole life in communion with God, conscious that the earth is the Lord’s and that no matter where we are, we are in his presence and can and should say, in words and body language, “Here I am, Lord. I have come to do your will.” In today’s epistle, St. Paul reminds us that the place of the conversation with God is not just supposed to be a Temple in Shiloh, or later in Jerusalem, or even here on 114th and Morningside. The place of our dialogue is not even meant to be merely in Jesus himself, the eternal Word of God who tabernacled himself among us, the Temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt on the third day. Through the sacraments, God seeks to make each of us his dwelling place where he desires to carry out a living dialogue. St. Paul asks with a certain pained astonishment to the Christians in Corinth, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” Our body, which, as St. John Paul II told us, is the sacrament of the human person, body and soul, is meant to be the temple of God’s holy presence. That theological and sacramental fact is supposed to lead to a moral response, which St. Paul makes it clear: “Therefore, glorify God in your body.” Our whole existence, who we are body and soul, is supposed to be a house of prayer, a loving, intimate friendship with God, in which we glorify him, praise him, thank him, ask for his mercy and his help for others and ourselves. We’re supposed to live in full-time communion with God. Whether we’re in Church, or in a prayer corner in our dorm room, or in a classroom on in Times Square, we’re called to be in communion with God. That’s why St. Paul tells the Corinthians that it’s such a contradiction when we begin to live in the body like the vicious, promiscuous and abusive sons of Eli did in the temple precincts of Shiloh. “The body is not for immorality,” he says, “but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” Our body is meant to be the dwelling place of God, not a den of thieves or immorality. St. Paul was addressing specifically the sexual sins for which the Corinthians were sadly infamous. The word translated “immorality” is actually “porneia,” which means sexual sins and lust. The English word “pornography” means “written sexual sin.” When we give in to sexual sins — like pornography, or masturbation, or sexual sins with others — rather than glorifying God in the body, like Eli’s sons, we’re “blaspheming God” in the body. Of course, this is not the way those in the world treat such behavior. They’ll think that if we come to Church on Sunday but engage in immorality the rest of the week, we should still be up for canonization. But God loves us too much to let us think that way. The Lord has given us our body and soul to glorify him, to enter into and remain in communion with Christ, to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, to live not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. We have indeed been purchased at a great price — Christ’s own death on Calvary — and the Holy Spirit wants to help us to live according to that incredible value and dignity. We are the Lord’s, St. Paul reminds us, and are meant to live always for, with, and in the Lord, just as in Jesus, God is for us; and, as St. Paul would tell the Romans, if God is for us, who can be against us? The Lord Jesus asks us anew today, “What are you looking for?” “What do you seek?” And if we’re seeking him, let’s not seek him by halves. Let’s be all in and seek to glorify him not just in his holy temple here in Church, but in the holy temple he has made each of us through Baptism and renews every time we receive him in Holy Communion. Just as we would never commit sexual or other sins here in Church because we know it’s sacred, let’s be just as resolved never to commit sins against our body as the temple of God. Rather, let’s receive the help he wants to give us through prayer and the Sacraments, especially the Sacrament of Penance, to live in such a way that, with chastity, purity and piety, we will glorify him always in the temple of our body and contagiously, joyfully and maturely show others that this type of life of friendship and full-time communion with God is possible for them, too.
The greatest prayer and divine conversation of all happens at Mass, when God gives us ears open to obedience so that we may hear God’s word and live it. It’s where he calls each of us by name not just to come and see where he dwells but takes up his dwelling within us. It’s where we behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and where he illustrates for us just how much the Lord is for the body, as Jesus says to each of us, “This is my body given for you.” It’s where we say, “Behold, I come” and are strengthened to glorify him in our body and soul and to announce his justice to others, indeed to the whole world. It’s here where we find the Messiah and Son of God who wants us to spend not just a day with him but the whole of our life into eternity. As we prepare to receive him, we ask the help of the Holy Spirit, so that in our prayer, in our words, and in all of our actions, we may glorify God in the body, live and show that we are for the Lord, and draw many others to join us in this liturgy of life so that in heaven, we may sing the new love song, the hymn to our God he has placed within our hearts, in the vast assembly of all the angels and saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 Sm 3:3b-10, 19
Samuel was sleeping in the temple of the LORD
where the ark of God was.
The LORD called to Samuel, who answered, “Here I am.”
Samuel ran to Eli and said, “Here I am. You called me.”
“I did not call you, ” Eli said. “Go back to sleep.”
So he went back to sleep.
Again the LORD called Samuel, who rose and went to Eli.
“Here I am, ” he said. “You called me.”
But Eli answered, “I did not call you, my son. Go back to sleep.”
At that time Samuel was not familiar with the LORD,
because the LORD had not revealed anything to him as yet.
The LORD called Samuel again, for the third time.
Getting up and going to Eli, he said, “Here I am. You called me.”
Then Eli understood that the LORD was calling the youth.
So he said to Samuel, “Go to sleep, and if you are called, reply,
Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”
When Samuel went to sleep in his place,
the LORD came and revealed his presence,
calling out as before, “Samuel, Samuel!”
Samuel answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
Samuel grew up, and the LORD was with him,
not permitting any word of his to be without effect.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 40:2, 4, 7-8, 8-9, 10
R. (8a and 9a) Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
I have waited, waited for the LORD,
and he stooped toward me and heard my cry.
And he put a new song into my mouth,
a hymn to our God.
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
Sacrifice or offering you wished not,
but ears open to obedience you gave me.
Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not;
then said I, “Behold I come.”
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
“In the written scroll it is prescribed for me,
to do your will, O my God, is my delight,
and your law is within my heart!”
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
I announced your justice in the vast assembly;
I did not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know.
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
Reading II
1 Cor 6:13c-15a, 17-20
Brothers and sisters:
The body is not for immorality, but for the Lord,
and the Lord is for the body;
God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?
But whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him.
Avoid immorality.
Every other sin a person commits is outside the body,
but the immoral person sins against his own body.
Do you not know that your body
is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you,
whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?
For you have been purchased at a price.
Therefore glorify God in your body.
Alleluia
Jn 1:41, 17b
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
We have found the Messiah:
Jesus Christ, who brings us truth and grace.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 1:35-42
John was standing with two of his disciples,
and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God.”
The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus.
Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them,
“What are you looking for?”
They said to him, “Rabbi” — which translated means Teacher —,
“where are you staying?”
He said to them, “Come, and you will see.”
So they went and saw where Jesus was staying,
and they stayed with him that day.
It was about four in the afternoon.
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter,
was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus.
He first found his own brother Simon and told him,
“We have found the Messiah” — which is translated Christ —.
Then he brought him to Jesus.
Jesus looked at him and said,
“You are Simon the son of John;
you will be called Cephas” — which is translated Peter.
The post Responding to the Lord in Prayer and In Life, Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 14, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
31 min
January 14, 2024Entering By Name into the Personal Relationship God Wants To Have With Each of Us, Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 14, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 14, 2024
1 Sam 3:3-10.19, Ps 40, 1 Cor 6:13-15.17-20, Jn 1:35-42

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.14.24_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

The following text guided the homily:
After having finished the Christmas Season and entered into the period of so-called “Ordinary Time,” the Church has us focus on the extraordinary, mind-blowing truth that God wants to enter into a deep, intimate, personal relationship with each of us. He wants us to do more than know about him and believe in his existence. He wants us to know him personally, to enter into friendship, to receive and reciprocate his love, and then in that bond to recognize who we really are, not only created in his image and likeness but summoned to flourish by living up to that origin and destiny. As we marked thorughout the Christmas season, prayed for specifically on Christmas morning, and reiterate every Mass as the chalice is prepared, Christ took on our humanity so that we might enter into his divinity. But this is accomplished not just by his birth, life, passion, death and resurrection, but through a loving personal bond, not just through his agape but through mutual agape, philia and even eros. Today’s readings all help us to focus on this astounding reality, gift and task.
In today’s first reading, we see God’s desire for a personal relationship with each of us. We meet the young Samuel. Samuel, we remember, was conceived after God heard Hannah’s fervent prayers and tears in the Temple of Shiloh. After he was weaned, Hannah with faith brought up to the Temple so that he might be dedicated to the Lord’s service. He grew up in the Temple through his childhood up through his adolescence. Despite his being in the presence of the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s holy accompaniment of Israel through the desert and into the Holy Land, the text tells us he was still “not familiar with the Lord.” He was there serving the Lord but didn’t know him. That wasn’t his fault and it wasn’t just because “the Lord had not revealed anything to him as yet,” but because Eli and his sons who should have known the Lord and trained him to enter into personal relationship with him were “sleeping” in the Temple rather than vigilant and awake in God’s presence. The Lord, however, was about to change all of that.
Three successive times, God called out to young soon-to-be prophet by name, “Samuel, Samuel.” That very moniker already indicates the personal relationship God desired of him. “Shem” means name. The verb “Shema” means “to hear.” “El” refers to God. And so Shemu’el in Hebrew means both “name of God” and “God has heard.” It’s an indication that the Lord wants us to invoke his name in prayer and that he wants to hear our invocations. Samuel was destined, we could say, to become the personification of prayer, of the Lord’s desire to enter into a life-changing and life-sustaining dialogue with him. So during the night, each time the Lord called out to the boy, Samuel promptly ran to Eli, who was sleeping, rather than praying, in the house of the Lord. The first two times, Eli just told Samuel to imitate his priorities and go back to bed. But the third time God called Samuel and the boy awakened Eli, the priest finally snapped out of his storper, recognized that the Lord had to be the one calling the boy, and helpfully told him to reply the next time, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” That’s what Samuel did and that’s when the Lord began to speak to him. In the dialogue of prayer that immediately followed, God revealed to Samuel the evil that would come to Eli’s house as a result of their corruption. Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phineas, out of gluttony had been extorting and confiscating the sacrifices people would bring to God and had also been using their offices to sexually abuse the women who were trying to serve God at the entrance of the Temple. Yet Eli, who had been repeatedly informed of their sins and hypocrisy, merely told them they should stop but did nothing more. God’s first conversation with Samuel was this difficult one in which he told him that Eli’s family would be punished for what he called their “blaspheming God”: rather than praising God in his holy place, they were desecrating it, themselves and the women they were exploiting. The young prophet was reluctant to share the contents of his conversation with Eli the following morning, but when Eli insisted, he held nothing back. That was the first of a lifetime of conversations God would have with Samuel so that through him God might enter into dialogue, guide and help his people. God would reveal to Samuel to anoint Saul, then to reprove him for his infidelity, then to go to Jesse’s house and anoint David, and so much more. Just as much as God called Samuel by name to prayerful conversation, so he calls us. But for that to occur, we need help. Many of us are not trained to listen, to tune into God’s frequency, even when we are in God’s presence. We need someone to teach us that prayer is not principally, “Be quiet, Lord, here is the list of things I want to ask you,” but “Speak, Lord, I am listening and want to be your servant.” We need those who can help us us learn how to be still and silent before God, how to perceive his voice, how to converse with him, how to develop through prayer that intimate friendship, that truly familiar and familial bond that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — who calls us by name — wants to have with us. And once we have learned through divine grace and good habit the art of prayer, we are all called to assist others to learn how to open up to the existential heart-to-heart dialogue God wants to have with them, too.
In the Gospel, we see how St. John the Baptist played the role of Eli in the life of two of John’s disciples. When he saw Jesus walk by, he immediately pointed out, “Behold the Lamb of God.” Out of their trust in John, these two disciples — Andrew and almost certainly John the Evangelist, the author of the account — followed Jesus. They were tailing him at a distance, observing him. But God desires something far more intimate. Jesus turned to these two fishermen (who would never have made good private investigators!) and said, “What are you looking for?” “What do you seek?” “What do you really want?” Whether their answer was small talk or a question as to how far they’d need to journey if they were to keep stalking him, they replied, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” Then Jesus, who had come for more than small talk, who had taken on our nature to enter into relationship with us, invited them, “Come and you will see.” That’s what they did. St. John notes, “It was about four in the afternoon,” which is not just a sign that he remembered the exact moment he met Jesus for the first time, but also, as many Scripture scholars attest based on the Gospel account, an indication of how long they spent with him. The text says, “They stayed with him that day,” which means not just that they hung around, for example, until midnight; rather, as various scholars of St. John’s Gospel teaches us through various indications at the beginning of his Gospel, it was almost certainly 4 pm on the sixth day of the Jewish week, or about sundown on Friday, which meant that the Sabbath was about to begin and therefore travel would be impossible. So when they went and saw where Jesus was staying and “stayed with him that day,” St. John means that they stayed the whole Sabbath with Jesus. They did an entire Retreat Day or Day of Recollection. They rested with the same Lord who rested at the end of creation and who created the Sabbath so that we might be restored in our relationship with him. That’s when their intense, life-changing friendship with Jesus began. It had such an immediate impact on them that, as soon as the sabbath was over and they were once again able to travel, Andrew ran to get his brother Simon to introduce him to Jesus, saying, “We have found the Messiah!” They had been able in that day of prayer to recognize all their desires had been fulfilled and that the long-awaited One had finally come. And when Jesus met Simon, he showed how he wishes to have an I-Thou relationship with each of us, changing Simon’s name to Cephas — “rock” or “Peter” — giving him the vocation and responsibility in the Church his Bride and Body that his personal, prayerful relationship with Jesus would make possible. In a similar way, after we have met the Lord, after we have entered into intimate friendship with him, we are impelled within to introduce those we know and love and care about, in fact everyone, to a similar relationship with him. We never know what the Lord will do once we make the introduction, just as John the Baptist didn’t know, just as Andrew didn’t know. But the greatest gift we can give to others is to introduce them to Jesus, to point him out, to help them to learn how to converse with him, to be and stay with him, to follow him, to discover in him the fulfillment of their longings, and to be transformed by him.
The other readings today show two consequences of the personal encounter with God to which we’re called in prayer and in life. In the Psalm, which flowed from the prayer of King David whom God had had Samuel anoint, we see what’s supposed to happen from our perspective in our prayer and friendship with God. In prayer, we wait for the Lord and he stoops down to hear our cries whenever we are in need. He gives us ears open to obedience, docile to his will, and places his law into our hearts. He puts a new song, a new hymn to God, in our heart and mouth and we are spurred to sing that hymn, to follow his will, to live by his law. The refrain teaches us three central aspects of prayer. “Here I am, Lord.” The first thing we need to do is to show up. Second, we need to make it personal, calling on the Lord by name just as he speaks to us one-on-one. And then we pray in order fundamentally to do his will. In prayer, we seek God, find God, come to know God, come to love God, and in loving him, we love what he loves and therefore seek to do what he wills. So we first make ourselves present, “Behold I come.” Then we call upon him, speaking to him directly. “To do your will, O Lord, is my delight.” Then we seek to do that will we have discerned, and because of the love that flows in our relationship with God, we find delight in doing his will. The result of the entire process, as we pray at the end of the Psalm, is that we’re moved to give God praise and glory not just privately but publicly. We announce his justice, his goodness, his holiness before the multitudes. Our whole life begins to point people to him. Our whole existence becomes an extension of our prayer, a part of our prayer, and a means by which we draw people to meet the same source of justice, goodness and holiness.
That leads us to the second consequence of prayer that we find in the readings: that we seek to live our whole life in communion with God, conscious that the earth is the Lord’s and that no matter where we are, we are in his presence and are meant to say, in words and body language, “Here I am, Lord. I have come to do your will.” In today’s epistle, St. Paul reminds us that the place of the conversation with God is not just supposed to be a Temple in Shiloh, or later in Jerusalem, or even here in the Bronx. The place of our dialogue is not merely meant to be in Jesus himself, the Word of God who tabernacled himself among us, the temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt on the third day. Through the sacraments, God seeks to make each of us his dwelling place, where he desires to carry out a living dialogue. St. Paul asks with a certain pained astonishment to the Christians in Corinth, “Do you not know that your body” — the body that, as St. John Paul II told us, is the sacrament of the human person, body and soul — “is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” Our body is meant to be the temple of God’s holy presence. That theological and sacramental fact is meant to lead to a moral response, and St. Paul makes it clear: “Therefore, glorify God in your body.” Our whole existence is supposed to be a house of prayer, a loving, intimate friendship with God, in which we glorify him, praise him, thank him, ask for his mercy and his help for others and ourselves. We’re supposed to be in communion with God, in other words, not just when we go to pray — whether in a Church, a chapel, or even the corner of our room — but full-time, wherever we are. That’s why St. Paul tells the Corinthians that it’s such a contradiction when we begin to live in the body like the sons of Eli did in the temple precincts of Shiloh. “The body is not for immorality,” he says, “but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” Our body is meant to be the dwelling place of God, not a den of thieves or immorality. St. Paul was addressing specifically the sexual sins for which the Corinthians were sadly infamous, but his words are indeed broader. The Lord has given us our body and soul to glorify him, to enter into and remain in communion with Christ, to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, to live not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. We have indeed been purchased at a great price and the Holy Spirit wants to help us to live according to that value and dignity. We are the Lord’s, St. Paul reminds us, and are meant to live always for, with, and in the Lord, just as in Jesus, God is for us; and if God is for us, who can be against us?
The greatest divine conversation of all that happens in human life is at Mass, when God gives us ears open to obedience so that we may hear God’s word and live it. It’s where he calls each of us by name not just to come and see where he dwells but takes up his dwelling within us. It’s where we behold the Lamb of God and he illustrates for us just how much the Lord is for the body as Jesus says, “This is my body given for you.” It’s where we say, “Behold, I come” and are strengthened to announce his justice to others, indeed to go out and announce the Gospel to the whole world. It’s here where we find the Messiah and Son of God who wants us to spend not just a day with him but the whole of our life all the way into eternity. As we prepare to receive him, we ask the help of the Holy Spirit, so that in our prayer, in our words, and in all of our actions, we may glorify God in the body, live and show that we are for the Lord, and draw many others to join us in this liturgy of life so that in heaven, we may sing the new love song, the hymn to our God he has placed within us, in the vast assembly of all the angels and saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1
1 Sm 3:3b-10, 19
Samuel was sleeping in the temple of the LORD
where the ark of God was.
The LORD called to Samuel, who answered, “Here I am.”
Samuel ran to Eli and said, “Here I am. You called me.”
“I did not call you, ” Eli said. “Go back to sleep.”
So he went back to sleep.
Again the LORD called Samuel, who rose and went to Eli.
“Here I am, ” he said. “You called me.”
But Eli answered, “I did not call you, my son. Go back to sleep.”
At that time Samuel was not familiar with the LORD,
because the LORD had not revealed anything to him as yet.
The LORD called Samuel again, for the third time.
Getting up and going to Eli, he said, “Here I am. You called me.”
Then Eli understood that the LORD was calling the youth.
So he said to Samuel, “Go to sleep, and if you are called, reply,
Speak, LORD, for your servant is listening.”
When Samuel went to sleep in his place,
the LORD came and revealed his presence,
calling out as before, “Samuel, Samuel!”
Samuel answered, “Speak, for your servant is listening.”
Samuel grew up, and the LORD was with him,
not permitting any word of his to be without effect.
Responsorial Psalm
Ps 40:2, 4, 7-8, 8-9, 10
R. (8a and 9a) Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
I have waited, waited for the LORD,
and he stooped toward me and heard my cry.
And he put a new song into my mouth,
a hymn to our God.
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
Sacrifice or offering you wished not,
but ears open to obedience you gave me.
Holocausts or sin-offerings you sought not;
then said I, “Behold I come.”
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
“In the written scroll it is prescribed for me,
to do your will, O my God, is my delight,
and your law is within my heart!”
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
I announced your justice in the vast assembly;
I did not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know.
R. Here am I, Lord; I come to do your will.
Reading II
1 Cor 6:13c-15a, 17-20
Brothers and sisters:
The body is not for immorality, but for the Lord,
and the Lord is for the body;
God raised the Lord and will also raise us by his power.
Do you not know that your bodies are members of Christ?
But whoever is joined to the Lord becomes one Spirit with him.
Avoid immorality.
Every other sin a person commits is outside the body,
but the immoral person sins against his own body.
Do you not know that your body
is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you,
whom you have from God, and that you are not your own?
For you have been purchased at a price.
Therefore glorify God in your body.
Alleluia
Jn 1:41, 17b
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
We have found the Messiah:
Jesus Christ, who brings us truth and grace.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel
Jn 1:35-42
John was standing with two of his disciples,
and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God.”
The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus.
Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them,
“What are you looking for?”
They said to him, “Rabbi” — which translated means Teacher —,
“where are you staying?”
He said to them, “Come, and you will see.”
So they went and saw where Jesus was staying,
and they stayed with him that day.
It was about four in the afternoon.
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter,
was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus.
He first found his own brother Simon and told him,
“We have found the Messiah” — which is translated Christ —.
Then he brought him to Jesus.
Jesus looked at him and said,
“You are Simon the son of John;
you will be called Cephas” — which is translated Peter.
The post Entering By Name into the Personal Relationship God Wants To Have With Each of Us, Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 14, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
21 min
January 13, 2024Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 13, 2024
Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
January 13, 2024

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
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The following text guided the homily:
This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, in which he wants to help us enter more deeply into the inner nature of our Christian calling. Just as he engaged two of his first followers then, so he wants to guide us now into the three main stages of growth in any Christian vocation. At this time of so much instability, confusion and anxiety, as we mark this week the 51st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, as we begin in earnest the presidential election season with the Iowa caucuses, as we continue to pray for a just end to the wars raging in Ukraine, the Holy Land and elsewhere, the world, our country, the Church, society, and our families need us to be the fully mature believers who can deliver Christ’s light, love and peace. So let’s enter into a life-changing conversation with Jesus as seeks to help us to come to full stature.
The first stage of this consequential conversation is a true, deep encounter with Jesus. When St. John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!,” two of those who had been following and helping the Baptist — Andrew, and “another disciple” who almost certainly was John the Evangelist — were obviously intrigued. As good Jews, they knew the significance of the Paschal Lamb from the Passover rite to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt from reenacting it each year. When John pointed out Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” they couldn’t help but be curious and full of wonder and so they tried to find out more. Enquiring minds want to know. They began to follow Jesus, but, being fishermen, they were not particularly adept as private investigators. Jesus, aware that they were on his tail, turned around and asked, “What are you looking for?” Caught off guard, they asked, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Jesus didn’t respond with a direct answer to their small talk, because he did not want to meet them at the level of curiosity. So he responded by trying to bring them from curiosity to something higher: “Come and see!,” he said. He invited them to follow him more closely and to spend time with him. This was the first stage of their Christian life: a true encounter with Jesus.
That leads us to the second stage of the growth in vocation: once we encounter Jesus, we’re summoned to change and invited to become his disciple. “Disciple” is the Greek word for “student.” We recognize Jesus is the Master and we begin to learn from him. We learn not just facts or other information that we might ignore or forget, but mainly we come to learn him and from him how to live, how to die, and how to live forever. We learn a new way of life. At Jesus’ invitation, Andrew and John came and saw Jesus’ homeless mansion, where he didn’t have a place to lay his head. St. John gives us a very interesting detail (which is one of the reasons why he was almost certainly the “other disciple” he names, because it would have been hard for him to know it otherwise): “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” This detail shows us first how much of an impression the encounter with Jesus had in his life that he would never forget the precise time he met Jesus for the first time and decided to follow him. It also shows us that this meeting wasn’t brief. Scholars convincingly have shown, based on the text of St. John, that it was probably a Friday when this encounter happened, and once Jews reached about 4:00 pm, the Sabbath would begin and travel would be prohibited. So it’s likely that Andrew and John got to spend not just an hour or two with Jesus but a little more than a full day with Jesus, peppering him with questions, answering his queries to them, laughing, praying, just being with him. Whatever happened over that length of time, they were changed and converted. They were no longer curious hangers-on; they were believers. They were prepared out of that faith to follow him faithfully the rest of their lives on earth, and when he would later visit them on the Sea of Galilee and call them from their boats, nets, fish, families and homes, they responded immediately.
But, because they really believed in him, they were not content to remain merely at the level of discipleship. Andrew, as soon as the Sabbath was over, quickly moved to the third stage: the apostolate. Once he was able to travel, he ran to find his brother Simon, to announce to him the news any Jew would have longed for centuries to hear: “We have found the Messiah!” He could not restrain from sharing with the brother he loved that they had won the jackpot of jackpots. Then he did something more: he brought his brother to meet Jesus, so that Simon could share the same joy. Little did Andrew know what the Lord would do with his brother, that Jesus would change his brother’s name to “Cephas” (Peter) meaning “rock,” and later say, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). All Andrew did was announce the good news to his brother and bring him to Jesus, and Jesus did the rest. Little do we know what will happen when we announce Jesus to others and try to bring them to encounter him and choose to follow him. That’s something we don’t need to know. Once we’ve really encountered Christ, once we have begun to learn from him and follow him, we’re impelled interiorly to share him with others so that he can work the same wonders in them as he has worked in us.
Jesus wants every one of us to engage each of us in just as consequential a conversation, so that we, like them, might pass through these three vocational stages. There are many people who remain, even into adulthood, at the level of fascination with Jesus. They’re admirers but have never really encountered him at the life-changing depth Jesus desires. Even Catholics who have received all the sacraments of initiation can still not have taken this first step on the ladder of faith. They know a lot about Jesus. He is clearly too famous to forget and his claims about heaven and hell and the importance of our choices on earth are too important easily to dismiss. So they encounter Jesus at a safe distance, as an important historical figure, and behave as if they are followers of Jesus because they try to live by some of the things he said. But they mainly go through the religious motions, hedging their bets. They may come to Mass, they may receive holy communion, they may say some prayers, but they won’t really center their lives around listening to the Lord speaking to us in prayer and calling us to change. They’ll be good to their neighbor, and perhaps support the Church, but without really putting their hearts into it. To the many people at this vocational stage, Jesus says full of tenderness, “What are you looking for?” He invites us to “come and see,” to enter into his life more deeply. He tells us, “I am the way, the truth and the life!,” and beckons us to follow. Jesus eagerly wants all those who are at this stage to encounter him at a personal level and from there be upgraded to the status of true disciples on the inside and outside both.
Discipleship is the second stage. Like with Saints Andrew and John, this means not just meeting Jesus but staying with him and following him wherever he wants to lead. It means treating him not just as someone who’s important in our life, but as God, as the single most important reality of our existence, for whom we’ll sacrifice everything else if necessary. A true disciple of the Lord will live a life of deep prayer, will make Mass the “source and the summit” of his or her existence, will seek to be a good student, sitting at the feet of the Master and pondering his words in Sacred Scripture and trying to act on them, will love those who the Lord loves and has called into his family the Church. Are we at this stage of discipleship? Is our relationship with Jesus the most defining reality of our life? If he were to call us today to follow him more intimately, to make a major change in our life, are we prepared because of that relationship to leave everything else behind to follow in his footsteps? Jesus wishes to give us the grace all need to live at this level.
But as important as this is, it’s not enough. Once we recognize the beauty of the life of true discipleship with Jesus, we naturally want to share that reality with all those we love. Like St. Andrew, true disciples cannot stop themselves from bursting out to all those around them, “We have won the lottery! We have found the Messiah! We have encountered God and his salvation!” If we love Jesus, we will naturally want to spread love of him. We will also want to bring others to him so that they can experience the same joy we have found. Jesus, of course, could have stayed on earth until the end of time and proclaimed the Gospel himself to every man and woman. But he loved us enough, and trusted us enough, that he wanted us to share in his mission of the salvation of the world. Today the Lord wants to stoke in us a desire for the full flourishing of Christian vocation in us to come to him and to be sent by him, to be a holy disciple and an ardent apostle.
This Sunday, Jesus wants us to follow him to his house on earth, the place where he stays, where he speaks to us, feeds us, and renews us. He will turn to us and ask, “What are you looking for?,” and wants to help us to seek him, to find him, to love him, to share his life and to bring others into communion with him. As we prepare on Sunday to behold and to receive the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, we ask for his help to become like Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Andrew so that at the end of the celebration of the Christian Sabbath, filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit, we will go to find those we love and bring them Jesus, the great news personified. We have indeed found the Messiah and more than the Messiah! At a time when our world, Church, society and families need him more than ever, let us make it our top priority to bring Jesus to others and others to him!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was:
Gospel
Jn 1:35-42
John was standing with two of his disciples,
and as he watched Jesus walk by, he said,
“Behold, the Lamb of God.”
The two disciples heard what he said and followed Jesus.
Jesus turned and saw them following him and said to them,
“What are you looking for?”
They said to him, “Rabbi” — which translated means Teacher —,
“where are you staying?”
He said to them, “Come, and you will see.”
So they went and saw where Jesus was staying,
and they stayed with him that day.
It was about four in the afternoon.
Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter,
was one of the two who heard John and followed Jesus.
He first found his own brother Simon and told him,
“We have found the Messiah” — which is translated Christ —.
Then he brought him to Jesus.
Jesus looked at him and said,
“You are Simon the son of John;
you will be called Cephas” — which is translated Peter.
The post Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 13, 2024 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.
10 min

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