Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of Easter Week

April 12, 2023

Acts 3:1-10, Ps 105, Lk 24:13-35

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.12.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In these readings of Easter Week, the Church helps us to ponder the dramatic transformation that Jesus’ Resurrection is supposed to have in our life. We have seen over the course of the last two days the stunning metamorphosis in Mary Magdalene and the 3,000 people listening to St. Peter on Pentecost Sunday. Today we see the massive change wrought in the crippled man at the Beautiful Gate and the astonishment and amazement of all those who were accustomed to seeing him at the gate. We also see the transformation in the disciples on the road to Emmaus.

* It’s important for us to resist the temptation for Easter to become routine, seen in the biggest change in us resulting from the liturgical remembrance of Jesus’ resurrection being that now we can consume the food and beverages we gave up for Lent. The celebration of Easter is supposed to lead us to the newness of life St. Paul described at the Easter vigil, helping us to be dead to sin and alive for God in Christ Jesus. The power of Easter is meant to bring about in us the long litany of effects the Church sang about in the Exsultet on Saturday night. The whole Church — Peter, John, their successors and the entire Mystical Body — says during the Easter season to us and through us to others, “Arise and walk,” be raised and start journeying, freely, following the footsteps of the Risen Lord knowing that he accompanies you along the way. The power of Easter is meant to do something in us far greater than what happened in this crippled man in Jerusalem. But for that to take place we need to participate in this transition.

* Let’s examine the change that’s supposed to occur by entering into the experience of the disciples on the Road to Emmaus in today’s Gospel. We could describe the change as a heart transplant. In the seventh Old Testament reading at the Easter Vigil, Ezekiel prophesies that the redemption Christ will bring will involve God’s sprinkling clean water upon us — our Baptism — removing from us our “stony hearts” and replacing them with “hearts of flesh,” full of his own spirit within us. We could rephrase that heart transplant in the words of today’s Gospel as a transition from “slowness of heart” to a “burning heart.” When Jesus anonymously and gently upbraids the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, he didn’t say, “How slow of head or how dull of mind you are not to believe all that Moses and the prophets taught,” but, “How slow of heart.” Their hearts were literally retarded because they were unwilling to let go of some of their previously conceived notions. Eventually, after Jesus takes them on an interior journey as he spoke to them along the way, their hearts began to race and burn. That pilgrimage retraced the steps of salvation history showing how all of it pointed to how the Messiah needed to suffer to help the two disciples — who had been leaving Jerusalem and symbolically the place of God, and who had been heading into the sunset instead of the rising sun — see that Jesus’ crucifixion and death were not a contradiction of the Jews’ Messianic hopes but a confirmation. Jesus helped them to grasp that what happened to him was the fulfillment of the killing of the just man Abel, the sacrifice of Isaac, the Passover lamb led to the slaughter, the just man beset, the Suffering Servant, Psalms 22 and 69 and so many others. That spiritual pilgrimage on which the anonymous Wayfarer led the two disciples during their seven mile downhill walk i...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Easter Tuesday

April 11, 2023

Acts 2:36-41, Ps 33, Jn 20:11-18

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.11.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today the Church continues to teach us in the readings of this Easter Octave how to respond to the reality of Jesus Resurrection so that it might change us similarly to the way it changed forever the lives of Jesus’ first followers.

* In today’s Gospel, we see Mary Magdalene weeping copiously at Jesus’ empty tomb. She was bent over, basically heaving as she wept. She had probably been weeping like this from Good Friday, as Jesus was led to Calvary. Her tears at his Crucifixion, her sadness at his death, were blinding her to what was happening all around her. Two angels in white were sitting there at Jesus’ tomb, something that should have startled her as the appearance of angels always startles, but their dazzling brilliance couldn’t penetrate the depth of her darkness. “Woman, why are you weeping?,” they asked, likely in a tone that went far beyond curiosity or fact-seeking inquisitiveness, but with a joy-filled smile suggesting, “Ma’am, how could you possibly be crying?” But she just said, “They have taken my Lord, and I don’t know where they laid him.” She loved the Lord Jesus and couldn’t stand to be apart from him. She thought someone had taken his body and, even though she thought he was dead, she at least wanted to be there at his body with the piety we often see in people at cemeteries visiting and praying at the burial spots of their loved ones. The fulfillment of Jesus’ promise to rise on the third day hadn’t yet penetrated. She was probably too much in sorrow that it was too painful for her to think about what Jesus had said before. Then, in one of the most touching scenes in the Gospel, Jesus himself came to her in his Risen Body, and asked her the same question, probably once again with a tone that should have suggested that the waterfalls running down her cheeks, however moving, were not in touch with reality! “Woman, why are you weeping?,” he asked. “For whom are you looking?” She turned around and saw Jesus there, but neither her eyes nor her ears recognized him. She thought he was a stranger and guessed that he was a gardener who for some reason would have had cause to move Jesus’ cadaver. “Sir, if you carried him away,” she pleaded, “tell me where you laid him and I will take him.” That would have been quite a sight her carrying Jesus’ dead body! But it was clearly a sign of her loving affection. Jesus pierced through her sadness by calling her name, “Mary!,” he said. He probably said it in a tone that she well recognized. The one speaking was not a stranger, but the Good Shepherd who calls all his sheep by name. She turned around, called him “Rabbouni,” (Rabbi, Master or Teacher), and then started to hold onto his feet with such force that she would never lose him again. We’ve all had those hugs full of emotion when people never want to let us go. Jesus had to say to her, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.” Jesus still had a mission to accomplish and she would not be able to keep her relationship with him as it was in the past or as it was in the present. Her relationship was about to change immediately, as Jesus made her an apostle to the apostles, saying, “Go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’” And off she went, announcing, “I have seen the Lord!”

* There are so many lessons here for us! Many times, we, too, are so saddened by set-backs, pains, sufferings in ourselves and others, and even deaths,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Easter Monday

April 10, 2023

Acts 2:14.22-33, Ps 16, Mt 28:8-15

 

To listen to a recording of today’s homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.10.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today on this beautiful Easter Monday, we encounter a huge contrast in the readings about how to respond to the startling fact of Jesus’ resurrection.

* The chief priests and the elders of the people responded with denial. It wasn’t enough for them to use betrayal to arrest Jesus, illegality to try him, slander to accuse him before Pilate and malice to whip up the crowd to choose a murderer Barabbas over him. Now when the guards they had requested be placed at the tomb returned to them to tell them what happened during the night — that angels appeared, that there was a burst of light, that the stone was rolled back, that Jesus wasn’t there but his garments were left — the chief priests and the elders reacted once again with evil. They bribed the guards to lie, to say that while they were asleep, Jesus’ disciples came and stole his body and somehow carried him naked while the Sabbath was still occurring to some other part of the city. Of course if they were asleep, they would have had no idea what happened to Jesus’ body! But once people have become accustomed to, not to mention indomitable in, living a lie, they’ll begin to wrap it with many other lies not even grasping the implausibility. There are still many who want to deny the reality of the resurrection but as St. Thomas Aquinas once wrote, if the Resurrection didn’t happen, then the fact that a bunch of barely literate fishermen and nobodies from Galilee could convince so many down-to-earth people throughout the ancient world falsely that it did and all be willing to lay down their lives for that invented reality would be a greater miracle than the miracle of the Resurrection itself!

* There are some who deny the resurrection asserting that Jesus had just risen from the dead in disciples’ hearts, as a thing of faith. St. Paul responded very sharply to these ideas that were prevalent in ancient Corinth. If Christ didn’t rise from the dead then our faith is worthless. It’s all based on a lie. There are others who, while not denying the fact of the resurrection, want to deny its consequences. They don’t want to live with the Risen Jesus. They choose to remain down in the dumps. They choose not to seek the things that are above with the Risen and living Jesus, as we heard St. Paul urge the Colossians yesterday morning, instead choosing the things of darkness, sadness, sin and death. We need to be alert to these signs even in ourselves, that there are parts of us that want to deny the power of Jesus’ resurrection because we prefer not to be transformed in the dramatic way that the resurrection transformed Jesus’ dead body! Pope Francis wrote in his apostolic exhortation The Joy of the Gospel that many Catholics behave as if life is a long Lent without Easter, as if they’re perpetually returning from a funeral. Not even the fact of Jesus’ resurrection can brighten their day because the prefer to focus their attention and live in the negative. There are also other Catholics, far more common, who likewise don’t live in practical denial of the Resurrection, who don’t behave as if they’re perpetually returning from the cemetery, but who don’t comport themselves as if their life is much influenced by the reality of the Resurrection. To the extent that Easter is a transformative experience for them, it means mainly that they can eat chocolate or drink wine and beer again after the Lenten Season! It doesn’t mean that they have been changed at their core.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Campus Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Easter Sunday

April 9, 2023

Acts 10:34.37-43, Ps 118, Col 3:1-4, Jn 20:1-9

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.9.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The text that guided today’s homily was: 

* “This is the day the Lord has made,” we Christians sing throughout the world. “Let us rejoice and be glad!” What we celebrate today on Easter is far more than a liturgical rite. It’s more than the commemoration of something that happened one early Sunday morning. It is the most consequential event in the history of the world. It is the triumph of resurrection over crucifixion, life over death, light over darkness, love over hatred, faith over fear. By his resurrection Jesus has made every day a day of the Risen Lord in which each of us is able to say confidently with him what we prayed in the Psalm, “I shall not die, but live and declare the works of the Lord!” It’s a day on which, as we sang in the Sequence, we offer our thankful praises to the Paschal Victim, the Lamb who redeems us Sheep, the sinless Messiah who reconciles sinners, the Prince of Life who now reigns immortal and obtains for us new life.

* The transformation that Christ’s resurrection is supposed to bring about in us ought to be truly profound, like what happened in the first disciples of Jesus that early Sunday morning. To call Mary Magdalene, Peter John and the rest of his disciples dejected, lost and profoundly saddened only begins to describe what they were going through. Their whole universe had been turned upside down. Not only had they witnessed Jesus, their friend, brutally tortured and massacred, stripped and nailed to a cross as a common criminal, but they also had believed that he was the long-awaited Messiah, that he was God. Therefore, not only were they mourning the death of a loved one — which is already hard enough, as any of us who has lost a loved one recognizes — but they were also trying to come to grips with whether their friend, in whom they trusted, was, despite all his gifts, ultimately an imposter, or, if he was whom they believed him to be, whether God himself indeed had died. Even though he had at least three times announced what would occur, which meant they should have been counting down the seconds to the “third day” on which he said he would be raised, they remained disheartened and disconsolate.

* When Mary Magdalene, Salome and Mary, the mother of James, went to the tomb on Sunday morning, they were going reverently to anoint Jesus’ corpse. Little did they realize what a great metamorphosis had already occurred and what a great personal transformation awaited them. The stone had already been rolled away. The tomb was empty. A dazzling angel or two told them that Jesus had been raised. Jesus appeared to Mary Magdalene in the Garden and filled her with exhilarating goose bumps when he called her name! He appeared to the ten in the Upper Room, filled them with his joy and peace, and entrusted to them the continuation of his own mission. He appeared to the disciples on the Road to Emmaus and made their hearts burn as he described how the Son of Man’s crucifixion was not a contradiction but a confirmation of the messianic prophecies, and then revealed himself to them in the “breaking of the bread.” Their whole universe, which had been turned upside down two days before, was now turned right-side up again. And what incredible joy must have raced through every cell of their body, the type of joy to which words cannot even do justice! Everything for them changed … forever. The resurrection was the answer to their questions, the resolution to their doubts, the definitive peace to their angst,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Campus Ministry, Manhattan

Easter Vigil 2023

April 9, 2023

Gen 1:1-2:2, Ps 104, Gen 22:1-18, Ps 16, Ex 14:15-15:1-6.17-18, Is 54:5-14, Ps 30,

Is 55:1-11, Is 12:2-6, Bar 3:9-15. 32, Ps 19,  Ez 36:16-28, Ps 42, Rom 6:3-11, Ps 118, Mt 28:1-10

 

To listen to a recording of tonight’s homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.8.23_Easter_Vigil_Homily.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* At the very beginning of tonight’s Easter Vigil, the Church saying something astonishing. After we made the Sign of the Cross and greeted each other in the Lord, the Church has the priest give an introductory instruction describing the meaning of what we’re celebrating: “Dear Brothers and Sisters, on this most sacred night in which our Lord Jesus Christ passed over from death to life, the Church calls upon her sons and daughters, scattered throughout the world, to come together to watch and pray.” We remember that those words “watch and pray,” to keep a contemplative vigil, is exactly Jesus what Jesus told Peter in the Garden would help to strengthen his frail flesh to align with his willing spirit. As we gather to be strengthened by the Lord and to help strengthen each other, the Church makes an astounding promise: “If we keep the memorial of the Lord’s paschal solemnity in this way, listening to his word and celebrating his mysteries, then we shall have the sure hope of sharing his triumph over death and living with him in God.” The Church gives us an assurance that the Church makes in no other liturgy throughout the year. She gives us basically a guarantee that if we learn how to celebrate and live the Easter Vigil, then we will share, in this life and forever, Jesus’ victory over sin and death and abide in communion with him in the heart of the Trinity. The Easter Vigil synthesizes the entire Christian faith and if we live by what this liturgy teaches us, we’re promised the most important gifts of all in this world as well as guaranteed heaven. If this is what the Easter Vigil is about, aren’t you glad you came? If this promise is made only to those who “keep the paschal solemnity” in prayerful vigil, “listening to [God’s word] and celebrating his mysteries,” then it’s really important for us to pray this Easter Vigil, listen to what God is saying to us, and the respond to what he indicates, making not just this holy night but our whole life a living celebration of the faith contained in these mysteries.

* The Easter Vigil is broken down into four parts and each has great lessons for us of the mysteries we’re called to celebrate. The first part is the Lucernarium, the Liturgy of Light.

* As we bless the Easter Fire, we ask God that “by these paschal celebrations, we may be so inflamed with heavenly desires that with minds made pure we may attain festivities of unending splendor.” The fire burns away impurities and inflames us with its light and warmth. We next bless the Paschal Candle, which is meant to symbolize Jesus. As we trace a Cross and mark a year, we proclaim Christ’s eternity: “Christ yesterday and today, the Beginning and the End, the Alpha and the Omega. All time belongs to him and all the ages. To him be glory and power through every age and for ever. Amen.” Then we put five incense sticks in the paschal candle reminding us of Christ’s wounds that now rise up like incense in prayer for us: “By his holy and glorious wounds,” the priest prays, “may Christ the Lord guard and protect us.” Then as we light the candle, we pray, “May the light of Christ rising in glory dispel the darkness of our hearts and minds.”

* We begin the procession singing three times, “The Light of Christ.” Christ is the Light and we celebrate the mystery of how h...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Easter Sunday

April 8, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.8.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to wish you and your family a Happy Easter as we enter into the consequential conversation the Lord Jesus, risen from the dead, wants to have with each of us. He wants to meet us like he met Mary Magdalene in the Garden and call us by name. He wants to converse with us like he did with the disciples on the Road to Emmaus, to make our hearts burn as he explains the word of God to us and helps us to recognize him in the Breaking of the Bread. He wants to speak with us like he spoke with the fearful apostles in the Upper Room, to wish us peace, to show us his hands and his side, to impart to us the Holy Spirit, and to send us out from the Upper Room, like he sent them, as witnesses to his resurrection. Jesus ultimately wants to change our lives this Easter and help us to enter more deeply than ever before into his triumph of light over darkness, joy over sadness, love over hatred, and life over death. For this to occur, however, we can’t live Easter in a routine way, as just another important day that will expire in 24 hours. We can’t live it just as an Octave or a 50-day season. We really have to let what Easter means sink deeply within us so that it changes our thinking, our being, our doing, our loving. We have to enter into the Easter metamorphosis.

* The Easter Proclamation, popularly called the Exsultet from its first word in Latin, describes this metamorphosis. What some have called the “Gospel of Easter” or the “Easter Kerygma” is sung at the beginning of the Easter Vigil, after the blessing of the Easter fire and the blessing and lighting of the Paschal Candle. The Church has been singing it for 15 to 17 centuries at the start of her Easter celebrations to try to sum up, despite the poverty of human language, the world-changing importance of Christ’s Easter triumph. I hope that you have the chance to hear it by attending the Easter Vigil, which is the most important and beautiful liturgy of the whole year in which the Church pulls out all the stops in praise and thanksgiving to God for the gift of salvation Christ has brought us. I’d like to highlight a couple elements of it to describe the consequences of the conversation our encounter with the risen Christ is supposed to have.

* The first consequence is joy. In the Exsultet, the deacon, or if he’s not present, the priest, sings with jubilation like a trumpet of salvation the Church’s joy at Christ the King’s triumph, encouraging us to make the holy sanctuaries of the Church “shake with joy” as with “ardent love of mind and heart” we praise God for what he has done for us. We sing of how, in the Sacred Triduum of Holy Thursday, Good Friday and Easter, Jesus fulfilled the ancient Jewish Passover rites. “These, then,” we sing, “are the feasts of Passover, in which is slain the Lamb, the one true Lamb, whose Blood anoints the doorposts of believers.” We reenact, so to speak, with the procession of the Paschal Candle, symbolizing Christ and his light, how God led the children of Israel from slavery in Egypt behind the pillar of fire. And we sing of how Christ has liberated us from more than slavery to Pharoah, but has broken the “prison-bars of death and rose victorious,” leading us on an exodus from sin into the life of grace and communion with the saints. The first revolution in our life encountering the Risen Lord is meant to have abundant joy at his Resurrection,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Manhattan

Commemoration of the Lord’s Passion

Good Friday 2023

April 7, 2023

Is 52:13-53:12, Ps 31, Heb 4:14-16.5:7-9, Jn 18:1-19:42

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.7.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* As we come together as a relatively small band of disciples, the particular beauty of today’s Commemoration of the Lord’s Passion is that we have nowhere to hide. We cannot be bystanders or detached spectators. We are almost compelled, like Simon of Cyrene, or the Blessed Mother, John, Mary Magdalene, and Mary the wife of Clopas, to participate actively. To participate actively as we see Jesus, whom Isaiah prophetically described centuries before in today’s first reading, as “marred … beyond human semblance, … spurned and avoided by people, a man of suffering … from whom people hide their faces, spurned and … held in no esteem,” bearing our infirmities, enduring our sufferings, “pierced for our offenses, crushed for our sins, … like a lamb led to the slaughter, … silent, … oppressed and condemned, … cut off from the land of the living, smitten for the sin of his people.” To participate actively when, as we heard in the Letter to the Hebrews, “he offered prayers and supplications with loud cries and tears to the one who was able to save him from death.” To participate actively when various leaders of the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and Sanhedrin, together with the cooperation of Judas Iscariot, Pontius Pilate, Herod Antipas and sadistic Roman Soldiers, got their way, when Jesus’ words to the apostles, that he would be “handed over to the Chief Priests and the scribes and they will condemn him to death and hand him over to the Gentiles to be mocked and scourged and crucified” (Mt 20:17) were fulfilled.

* If we are going to enter interiorly into the Lord’s passion, if we are going to become deeply conscious of the way each of us is implicated in what Christ suffered and why (Jn 10:18), then one of the ways is to take personally the questions that are asked throughout the Passion narrative we just heard. These questions bring us into the heart of what is happening and are meant to influence the way we prayerfully unite ourselves to Jesus not only on Good Friday but throughout our life.

* We can examine five different questions today.

* The first is, “Whom are you looking for?” This query, made by Jesus of the soldiers accompanying Judas to arrest him, reminds us of the question he first asked of John and Andrew after Jesus passed John the Baptist at the Jordan and John pointed Jesus out as the Lamb of God. John and Andrew began ineffectively to tail Jesus, but Jesus, sensing their presence, turned around and asked, “What are you looking for?” They stammered to ask where he was staying and Jesus replied, “Come and you will see.” (Jn 1:37-8). Jesus asks us today, like he asked the future apostles, like he asked the guards, whom and what we’re seeking and why. He wants to have us follow him to see not only where he dwells on Good Friday but what is behind the vestibule of Golgotha. But we need to examine our desires and motivations: What are we really looking for with Jesus? So many during Jesus’ time were looking for a political messiah to kick out the Romans, which Jesus was not. Others were seeking someone to cure their illnesses, heal their infirmities, expel their demons, but Jesus’ mission was far greater than that. Others were coming to him because they had eaten their fill of the loaves and wanted another free meal. Others were convening to hear him preach, because he taught with an authority and freshness they couldn’t find among their rabbis, scribes or Pharisees.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Manhattan

Holy Thursday 2023

April 6, 2023

Ex 12:1-8.11-14, Ps 116, 1 Cor 11:23-26, Jn 13:1-15

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.6.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Holy Thursday is the only occasion during the year when the Church explicitly tells priests what to preach on. The rubrics tell us that “the Priest gives a homily in which light is shed on the principal mysteries that are commemorated in this Mass: namely, the institution of the Holy Eucharist and of the priestly Order, and the commandment of the Lord concerning fraternal charity.” The Church wants to make sure that not only do the faithful hear about each of these three “principal mysteries” but also are encouraged to enter into each of them more deeply.

* Let’s begin with the commandment Jesus gives us during the Last Supper to love one another as he has loved us, and how he puts that love into action in the gesture of washing the feet of those disciples who would be his apostles. Jesus’ entire life can be summarized by the first sentence of St. John’s account of Holy Thursday which we just heard: “Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.” The motivation of his life was love, and he loved us, as the Greek can perhaps better be translated, “to the extreme.” He loved us to his absolute limit, with all he had, holding nothing back. “No one has greater love,” he would tell the apostles later tonight in St. John’s Gospel, “than to lay down his life for his friends,” and we see the greatest manifestations of his total self-giving love in what he did during the Last Supper, how he gave himself for us on Golgotha, and how he triumphed over all that harms and kills us in his Resurrection.

* He epitomized his saving love in the gesture of washing the apostles’ feet. Washing another’s feet was the gesture of a slave. People at most wore simple sandals and along journeys on dirt roads their feet accumulated dust on dry days, mud on wet days, and animal waste often. That Jesus himself would take on the form of a slave and do this service for his disciples shows all of us that there was nothing he wouldn’t do to serve us and save us. Imagine if a billionaire on Park Avenue came down from his penthouse to clean the public bathrooms, and then wanted to go to the apartments of his janitorial staff and clean their toilets. That would only be a tiny glimpse of how great God’s humility was in taking on the service of a slave in washing the feet of his disciples. Most people would feel very uncomfortable at that type of service, at that type of love, but Jesus insisted on giving it. Only a few days before, when Jesus was dining in the house of Martha, Mary and Lazarus, Mary anointed Jesus’ feet with 300 days worth of priceless aromatic nard and dried them with her hair. Judas criticized Mary for wasting a year’s worth of salary on Jesus — three times what the 30 silver pieces he would receive for betraying Jesus were worth! — but Jesus defended her, saying she was doing it for his burial and that we wouldn’t always have him. On another occasion when a woman washed Jesus’ feet with her tears and dried them with her hair, Simon the Pharisee criticized Jesus for not recognizing the woman was a sinner. But the Lord said that she would be forgiven much because she had loved much and had expressed that love for Jesus by washing his feet, something that Simon himself didn’t do when Jesus entered because he didn’t love Jesus at all. By his own action at the beginning of the Last Supper, Jesus was “loving much” and showing how he was willing to “waste” not j...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of Holy Week

April 5, 2023

Is 50:4-9, Ps 69, Mt 26:14-25

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.5.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were pondered in the homily: 

* On this last day of Lent — tomorrow we enter into a new liturgical season, the shortest of the year, the Blessed Triduum — it’s key for us to grasp what the Lord is calling us to do as we turn away from sin and seek to be faithful to the Gospel. Today in the first reading, the third of four Suffering Servant Songs, we hear Isaiah’s reflections about what he and Jesus after him wants to do in us: “The Lord God has given me a well-trained tongue, that I might know how to speak to the weary a word that will rouse them.” With eloquence, Jesus wants to arouse us from our spiritual somnolence. What’s the “word” that will actually do that? It’s what he speaks with his body language: “I gave my back to those who beat me, my cheeks to those who plucked my beard; my face I did not shield from buffets and spitting,” all things we will be pondering over the next couple of days. The word of what our sins have done to Jesus should arouse us to contrition, to repentance, to entrusting ourselves to his mercy, and to amendment and the pursuit of holiness. Isaiah says, foretelling Jesus’ mindset, “I have not rebelled, have not turned back. … The Lord God is my help, therefore I am not disgraced; I have set my face like flint, knowing that I shall not be put to shame.” He was resolute, setting his face toward Jerusalem (Lk 9:51) like flint, the very hard rock always placed at the tips of spears in the ancient world. Jesus wants us to have that same firm resolve to set our faces toward him with trust and not to rebel or to turn back. He preaches this eloquent “word” to arouse the “weary,” because he knows that more than anything else our sins wear us down. We’re also worn down by trying to struggle against evil on our own without God. He comes to join us in that fight and help us set our faces on Jerusalem together with his.

* That brings us to the Gospel. Yesterday with the help of St. John’s account of the beginning of the Last Supper, we were able to look at Judas’ betrayal and contrast it with St. Peter’s. Today we look at the betrayal again from the perspective of St. Matthew. St. Matthew records something very important that Jesus said about Judas during this supper: “Woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.” That brings us face-to-face not only with the tragedy of the life of Judas but also the point of your life and mine. The lamentable misfortune of the life of Judas, the reason why it was better for him never to have been born, is not simply because the names “Judas” and “Iscariot” have become synonymous with the most notorious traitor in the history of the world. It’s because he had never come to grasp the point of human life. Even though he had been up close with the Lord Jesus for three years, he had never really come to know him and his merciful love. He had totally missed the point of Jesus’ parables of the lost sheep, lost coin and lost son. He hadn’t grasped that when he called Peter and the others to forgive 70 times 7 times, God himself would do the same. He hadn’t let penetrate the lessons Jesus had taught in forgiving the sinful woman in Simon the Pharisee’s House, the Paralytic, the Woman Caught in Adultery or Zacchaeus. He hadn’t grasped why Jesus had called Simon bar Jonah, whose first words to Jesus were, “Depart from me because I am a sinful man,” or Matthew, who was a despicable tax collector. Despite three years with Jesus,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of Holy Week

April 4, 2023

Is 49:1-6, Ps 71, Jn 13:21-33.36-68

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.4.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In the opening prayer of today’s Mass, we asked God the Father for the grace “so to celebrate the mysteries of the Lord’s Passion that we may merit to receive your pardon.” We can never strictly speaking merit the Lord’s mercy — because it’s always gratuitous — but we can merit, in a sense, to cooperate with it, to receive it well, to correspond to what God wishes to do in us through it. And today’s readings help us to know how to celebrate the mysteries of the Lord’s Passion in that way. We have in the first reading a look at what is happening from God’s perspective through the fulfillment of what he said through the Prophet Isaiah; and in the Gospel we have the historical perspective of what was happening and how the intended recipients were meriting or failing to merit God’s pardon. They reveal to us the strong contrast and paradoxical connection between glory and betrayal as well as the way to go from the latter to the former, namely the way of receiving and responding to God’s gift of pardon. Grasping this connection is essential for us to enter into the depth of mysteries we celebrate in Holy Week.

* In the first reading we encounter the second of four of the Suffering Servant Songs in Isaiah. We heard the first yesterday, will hear the third tomorrow, and on Good Friday will hear the last and most powerful of all. Today the Prophet begins by describing his own biography and foretells Jesus’ own: “The Lord called me from birth, from my mother’s womb he gave me my name,” something that happened when the Archangel appeared to Mary. Describing Jesus’ hidden life in Nazareth and the way he would be a “two-edged sword penetrating even soul and spirit” (Heb 4:12), he continued: “He made of me a sharp-edged sword and concealed me in the shadow of his arm. He made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me.” Then he turns to the tribulations he has suffered in his public ministry — the rejection of so many, the labelling of his words as diabolical, the hardened, rocky and thorny soil in response to what he was planting — and how God would bring good out of them. “Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the Lord, my recompense is with my God.” The purpose of all of these hardships is to save Israel and save the world. “For now the Lord has spoken who formed me as his servant from the womb, that Jacob may be brought back to him and Israel gathered to him. … It is too little, he says, for you to be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.” This lumen gentium is going to be for his glory and for God the Father’s glory. God pronounced earlier in the passage, “You are my servant … through whom I show my glory” and here through his service in mercifully gathering back not only the lost tribes but the entire human race, that glory of God will be shared with his servant: “And I am made glorious in the sight of the Lord, and my God is now my strength!” That’s what’s happening from God’s perspective.

* In the Gospel today, Jesus picks up on that message of the glory of God and of his suffering servant. “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him,” Jesus exclaims. “If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him at once.