Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the Fifth Week of Lent

March 27, 2023

Dan 13:1-9.15-17.19-30.33-62, Ps 23, Jn 8:1-11

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.27.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today’s powerful readings of the rescue of people from stoning through accusations of adultery can and ought to be looked at four different levels: the literal sense in which God rescued the innocent Susanna and the anonymous adulterous woman; the way that God similarly rescues us, whether guilty or innocent; the way that these actions point to the betrayal of Jesus by the “elders” whose consciences had been corrupted; and the way that God wants to transform us to have a similar care for those facing accusation, trial and even death.

* Let’s begin with the literal sense of these passages, which requires the majority of our attention since they are the basis for the others. In the first reading, we see the utter corruption of two old men — judges of the people chosen to exact justice — in the story of Susanna. The opposite of love is not hatred but lust, and in contrast to the beauty of self-giving love, we see today the real hideousness of rapacious iniquity. Either these judges would assassinate her soul through adultery or they would have her tried and killed by a false accusation if she didn’t succumb to their advances. While the desires of the flesh may attenuate over time, the lust for power, for control, for satisfying the insatiable desires of a corrupt heart can actually grow, as the conscience gets more and more deadened, such that it’s no longer a crime of the flesh but of calculation, using one’s prestige and office to do evil rather than good, to do injustice rather than implement justice. Daniel says that they “suppressed their consciences. They would not allow their eyes to look to heaven [in prayer], and did not keep in mind just judgment.” They had been thoroughly corrupted and their sins against the sixth commandment led, as they routinely do, to sins against the eighth, against the fifth and obviously against the first.

* In the Gospel we see similar wickedness. Another set of elders with a reputation for being religious and fair brought to Jesus a woman caught in the very act of adultery, using her to make a point, as a pawn, for their own lust for power. Two things stick out initially about their catching her and bringing her to Jesus. First, how did they catch her in the very act of adultery unless their eyes were already on her? And how come they didn’t bring the guy who was her partner in sin, but just her? Is it possibly because they excused the male because they themselves had often committed adultery with this woman in their own hearts? They brought her before Jesus to try to entrap him with the question as to whether she should be stoned in accordance with the law of Moses. If Jesus had replied, “No,” he would be setting himself up against the Mosaic Law and they could use that against him with faithful Jews. If he said, “Yes,” not only would he lose the support of the sinners he had come to call, save and reconcile, but he would put himself against the Roman authorities who had taken to themselves the sole authority to implement capital punishment. In their sinfulness, they were using her as a mere pawn to try to bring down Jesus.

* But God rescued each of them. Susanna said to herself, “I am completely trapped. If I yield, it will be my death; if I refuse, I cannot escape your power. Yet it is better for me to fall into your power without guilt than to sin before the Lord.” The early saints said that it was better to die than to sin.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year A

March 26, 2023

Ezek 37:12-14, Ps 130, Rom 8:8-11, Jn 11:1-45

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.26.23_CCM_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* The episode of Jesus’ raising Lazarus from the dead is so rich that whole retreats can be preached upon it. The Church gives it to us on the Sunday before Palm Sunday not only because it is meant to frame our preparation for Holy Week, but even more simply, because it is what Jesus did right before he entered Jerusalem on a donkey. By it, Jesus was teaching his disciples 2000 years ago — and continues to teach us today — invaluable lessons of our faith. Jesus said to his followers before heading to Bethany, “Lazarus is dead. For your sake I am glad I was not there, so that you may believe.” Jesus worked the miracle the way he did — from his initial delay, to the words he chose, to his prayer to the Father, to his calling forth of Lazarus after four days in the tomb — so that we may believe certain crucial truths that will help us not only better appreciate this miracle but also grasp the great things Jesus will accomplish during Holy Week in Jerusalem. Let’s focus on three of those truths.

* The first lesson Jesus communicates by the way he worked this miracle is that he is willing to die for each of his disciples. As soon as Jesus announced that he would go to Lazarus, the disciples exclaimed, “The Jews were just now trying to stone you, and are you going there again?” Later, when Jesus reiterated that he was going, St. Thomas, who was one of the most realistic and perhaps pessimistic of the disciples, said simply, “Let us also go, so that we may die with him.” They all recognized that Jesus was risking his life to go bring Lazarus back to life. We now know in hindsight what Jesus recognized in foresight: that their worst fears were about to come true — Jesus would be captured, tortured and killed. Jesus would indeed give his life to return Lazarus to life. But Jesus loved Lazarus enough to do it. Lazarus was his friend, and as Jesus would say a week later during the Last Supper, “No one has any greater love than this, to lay down his life for his friends” (Jn 15:13).

* The central truth Jesus wants us to capture is that we are his friends, too, and that out of love for us he went up the mountain not just to bring Lazarus back to life, but to give his life to bring each of us back to life. St. John tells us that Jesus “loved Martha and her sister [Mary] and Lazarus,” and the crowd, seeing him weeping at the tomb, said, “Look at how much he loved him!,” so Jesus loves us just as personally and just as much. Right after he described that no one has greater love than to lay down his life for his friends, he said: “You are my friends. … I have called you friends, because I have made known to you everything that I have heard from my Father” (Jn 15:14-15). It’s obvious that Jesus, from a distance, could have cured Lazarus and even brought him back to life. After all, he had already worked several such miracles from a distance, like the healing of the Centurion’s servant, the royal official’s son and the daughter of the Syro-Phoenician woman (Mt 8:13; Mt 15:28; Jn 4:50). By going up to work the miracle in person, however, Jesus was showing everyone that helping Lazarus was worth his life. In a similar way, God could have come up with another way to save us without Jesus’ leaving heaven, without his taking on our flesh, without his going up to Calvary and being massacred on a Cross, but he likewise wanted to show us we were worth saving. The greatest source of our human dignity is that Jesus accounted...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago, Illinois

Lenten Day of Prayer for Women

“The Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 25, 2023

 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_Eucharistic_Almsgiving_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago, Illinois

Lenten Day of Prayer for Women

“The Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 25, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_Desert_Adoration_1.mp3

 

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago, Illinois

Lenten Day of Prayer for Women

“The Word Made Flesh: The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

March 25, 2023

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_the_Mass_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry

St. John Cantius Parish, Chicago, Illinois

Women’s Lenten Retreat: “The Word Made Flesh:

The Eucharistic Revival and Jesus’ Call to Pray, Fast and Give Alms”

Solemnity of the Annunciation, Extraordinary Form

March 25, 2023

Is 7:10-14, Ps 45: 3.5.11.12, Lk 1:26-38

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Today as we celebrate this Women’s Lenten Retreat, we mark the most important event in human history, the time when, out of love for us and to save us, the Son of God himself became one of us in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary. Everything Jesus would later do flows from this event, which should never cease to fill us with wonder. And this incarnation is not just a one-time event in the distant past, but a continual reality. God-with-us is still with us, most especially in the enduring incarnation of the Holy Eucharist, something we will ponder together today and seek to nourish through the three-year-plus Eucharistic Revival being led by the U.S. Bishops. The Church has us focus on the significance of the Annunciation and Incarnation each day in the prayer of the Angelus, by which the Church helps us in the three antiphons and the closing prayer to ponder the good news of great joy announced by the Archangel, the gift of God-with-us, and Mary’s response. I’d like to ponder together this prayer and look at it in a Eucharistic key.

* Let’s begin with the third antiphon, taken from St. John’s prologue. “The Word became flesh … and dwelled among us.” The Eternal Word of God, who is (not was) with the Father and the Holy Spirit from the beginning, on this day took on our nature dwelling among us and within us. In today’s first reading, Isaiah on behalf of God, gave Ahaz the same privilege as God had given Ahaz’s great, great, great, great, great grandfather Solomon, to request a sign as high as the sky or as deep as the nether world, but neither Ahaz nor anyone else would have ever fathomed asking God for what God in fact ended up doing: that he would himself become a human being in the immaculate womb of a virgin full of grace in order to rescue us and lead us on the path to salvation. Jesus took on our human nature — not just human flesh but a human soul (or as St. Paul would have it, a human soul and spirit) as well — in order to redeem it all and eventually give it for us. That’s what the Letter to the Hebrews helps us to ponder. “Sacrifice and offering you did not desire, but a body you prepared for me,” it puts into the mouth of Jesus upon entering the world. Jesus replied, with words and body language, “Behold, I come to do your will.” Jesus had come to obey and to show us how to obey the loving, saving will of God the Father. To enter into the mystery of the Incarnation, we need to enter morally through faithful adherence to God.

* That brings us to the second antiphon of the Angelus. “Behold the handmaid of the Lord. … Let it be done to me according to your word.” The great Solemnity of the Incarnation we mark today wasn’t exclusively God’s work. By God’s own design, it also was totally dependent on human cooperation. And we see and rejoice in that total, grace-filled cooperation by the Immaculate Virgin Mary, who because she had never known sin was able to get a totally free and full response to God’s will to redeem the human race. She was willing to allow her entire life to develop according to God’s plan. In depictions of this scene, Mary is most often portrayed kneeling, meditating on the Word of God. She was already seeking to conform her life entirely to the Word of God. She was already a servant of God through his word.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Lent, A, Vigil

March 25, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.25.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s good to be back with you at the end of the program to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us on the Fifth Sunday of Lent. It’s a very poignant and relevant dialogue, one that is meant to have just as big impact in our life as the miracle Jesus worked for Lazarus had in his.

* When Martha and Mary sent Jesus a message that their brother Lazarus was ill, he remained where he was for two days until Lazarus had died. It confused the apostles and likewise confused Martha and Mary. When Jesus finally arrived, Martha ran out to greet him and said, “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.” When Mary later came, she said the exact same words. They had faith in Jesus that he could have healed their sick brother just like he had healed so many others. But Martha’s hope was not extinguished. She said to Jesus, “But even now I know that whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” It was now the fourth day and Jews, based on different passages in the Old Testament, believed that a person’s soul hovered around the body for three days after death, but by the fourth day the person had passed the place of no return. Martha, however, was not intimidated. “Whatever you ask of God, God will give you.” That led to one of the most fascinating dialogues on the meaning of faith we have in the Gospel.

* Jesus said to Martha, “Your brother will rise.” And Martha replied immediately with stunning words, “I know he will rise, in the resurrection on the last day.” She, together with Lazarus and Mary, had probably asked Jesus during one of his visits to their house to reveal to them what would happen to us after death and had learned from Jesus how he would destroy death and restore life. She hadn’t forgotten the lesson about the general resurrection. But that’s not what she was requesting … and that’s not what Jesus himself was immediately planning to do. Jesus was going to fulfill what he had prophesied through Ezekiel, which we will hear in the first reading on Sunday, “I will open your graves and have you rise from them,” then “you shall know that I am the Lord.”

* Jesus told her that ultimately the resurrection is not so much a concept, or state, or an event, but a relationship. “I am,” he told her, “the resurrection and the life; whoever believes in me, even if he dies, will live, and everyone who lives and believes in me will never die.” To be risen from the dead, to be fully alive, means to be in a living, loving friendship with Jesus. If one lives and dies in such a friendship with Jesus, he affirms, then death is nothing other than a change of address as the person continues in relationship with him who is the life and who came to give us life to the full.

* After he had affirmed this, Jesus looked Martha right in the eyes and asked, “Do you believe this?” Jesus asks us the same question. For us to look at the resurrection and the life not as concepts but as a personal relationship requires looking at Jesus not as an historical figure but as a living, acting, breathing, loving Savior present right now seeking to raise us to experience life to the full. Martha didn’t reply merely, “Yes, Lord!” She presented us the grounds of faith. She said, “Yes, Lord. I have come to believe that you are the Christ, the Son of God, the one who is coming into the world.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the Fourth Week of Lent

March 24, 2023

Wis 2:1.12-22, Ps 34, Jn 7:1-2.10.25-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.24.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* The middle part of Lent is a concentrated part of the catechumenate preparing unbaptized adults for the commitment they will make at the saving font and helping all baptized Catholics to get ready for the renewal of their baptismal promises, not just in words but in their entire way of life, at Easter. We have been focusing explicitly on it for the last two weeks in the readings at daily Mass. Part of that preparation is to get us ready to suffer for the faith. For the first 250 years of Christianity, to participate in the catechumenate was to enter a school for martyrs. To be a Christian you needed to be ready to die for the faith, as so many Christians did in the first few centuries when to be a Christian was illegal and punishable by death. The catechumenate would sometimes take years until the person baptized was ready to make that commitment to be faithful to Christ until death, just as Christ was faithful to us until death. But sometimes the catechumenate was very short, when soldiers, for example, asked to be baptized upon seeing the joyful heroism of the martyrs, only to baptized in blood themselves soon after they were baptized in water and the Holy Spirit.

* These considerations are important because today the Church begins a new series in the first reading of the prophecies about Jesus’ suffering. This is a bridge between the second phase of Lent on Baptism and the third phase on the prophecies of Jesus’ sufferings that would make the waters of baptism efficacious. We’re called during this part of our Lenten journey, therefore, not only to ponder what Jesus endured and how they fulfilled so many Old Testament prophecies, but also how we, too, like the early Christians, will suffer on account of his name. Our baptism, as we’ll hear in the epistle during the Easter Vigil, is an entrance into Christ’s death and resurrection. The Lenten journey of prayer, self-denial and self-giving are precisely meant to strengthen us through being faithful in these little things to be faithful in the supreme tests. We prayed in the Opening Collect of the Mass, “O God, who have prepared fitting helps for us in our weakness, grant, we pray, that we may receive their healing effects with joy and reflect them in a holy way of life.” Today is an opportunity for us to ponder how God prepares for us the fitting help of the Cross to strengthen us in our weakness and how he wants to help us receive the healing effects of the Cross joyfully and let the humble, cruciform love of the Cross to radiate in a holy life.

* Today in the Gospel, St. John tells us straight out that “the Jews were seeking to kill” Jesus and that many of the inhabitants of Jerusalem, when they saw him teaching in the temple precincts during the Feast of Tabernacles, asked aloud, “Is he not the one they are trying to kill?” Some of the Sanhedrin, chief priests, Saducees, Pharisees and Scribes were seeking to kill him because they were convinced that he was an agent of the devil, working miracles not by the power of God but by the power of Beelzebul to destroy the Jewish religion by violating the Sabbath through works of charity, driving money changers out of the temple and speaking about the Temple’s destruction and rebuilding, befriending notorious sinners, pretending to forgive sins, and various other practices that conveyed that Jesus was not only acting with divine authority but was the actual Son of God.

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent

March 23, 2023

Ex 32:7-14, Ps 106, Jn 5:31-47

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.23.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today in the first reading we have a powerful witness of intercessory prayer. The Israelites had given into idolatry and worshipped a golden calf and Moses begged God to forgive their sin. Like with Abraham’s prayer to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten just people were found there, so Moses’ intercession has always been considered a model of prayer.

* Back in 2011, Pope Benedict, in his great catecheses on Christian prayer, said about it: “Just as for the two cities in Abraham’s day, the punishment and destruction — in which God’s anger is expressed as the rejection of evil — demonstrate the gravity of the sin committed; at the same time, the request of the intercessor is intended to show the Lord’s desire for forgiveness. This is God’s salvation which involves mercy, but at the same time also the denunciation of the truth of the sin, of the evil that exists, so that the sinner, having recognized and rejected his sin, may let God forgive and transform him. In this way prayers of intercession make active in the corrupt reality of sinful man divine mercy which finds a voice in the entreaty of the person praying and is made present through him wherever there is a need for salvation. Moses’ supplication was wholly based on the Lord’s fidelity and grace. He referred first to the history of redemption which God began by bringing Israel out of Egypt and then recalled the ancient promise made to the Fathers. The Lord brought about salvation by freeing his people from slavery in Egypt; so ‘why,’ Moses asked, ‘should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’’ (Ex 32:12). Once the work of salvation has been begun it must be brought to completion; were God to let his people perish, this might be interpreted as a sign of God’s inability to bring the project of salvation to completion. God cannot allow this: he is the good Lord who saves, the guarantor of life, he is the God of mercy and forgiveness, of deliverance from sin that kills. Hence Moses appealed to God, to the interior life of God against the exterior judgement. But, Moses then argued with the Lord, were his Chosen People to perish, even though guilty, God might appear incapable of overcoming sin. And this he could not accept. … The intercessor wanted the People of Israel to be saved because this people was the flock which had been entrusted to him, but also because it was in this salvation that the true reality of God was manifest. The prayer of intercession is permeated by love of the brethren and love of God, they are inseparable. Moses, the intercessor, is the man torn between two loves that overlap in prayer in a single desire for good.   … The intercessor did not ask for his people to be excused of their sin, he did not list any presumed merits, either the people’s or his own, but appealed to God’s bounty: a free God, total love, who does not cease to seek out those who have fallen away, who is always faithful to himself, who offers the sinner a chance to return to him and, through forgiveness, to become righteous and capable of fidelity. Moses asked God to show himself more powerful than sin and death, and with his prayer elicited this divine revelation of himself. … With prayer, wanting what God wanted, the intercessor entered more and more deeply into knowledge of the Lord and of his mercy,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Wednesday of the Fourth Week of Lent

March 22, 2023

Is 49:8-15, Ps 145, Jn 5:17-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/3.22.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* From Monday of the Fourth Week of Lent through Tuesday of Holy Week, we ponder the Gospel of St. John at daily Mass. These passages focus on Jesus’ conversations with the “Jews,” mainly his critics among the Scribes and Pharisees, and contain some of Jesus’ most complex and deepest monologues. We’ll have a chance to enter into them and parse them spiritually during these days. But it’s important as we consider them that we keep in mind two of the central coordinates that should guide our interpretation, just as they have been guiding our Lenten preparation for Easter.

* First, the whole point of Lent is to help us enter into Communion with God the Father. Jesus called us to pray, fast and give alms differently than all the rest: he taught us to pray not for others to see but in intimacy with the Father in our inner room, whether we’re all alone inside a house or in the midst of a crowd; he told us to fast not so that others may notice but so that we can come to share God’s hunger to care for all his sons and daughters; he instructed us to give alms not to win others’ praise but as an extension of the Father’s providential care for us. The entire point of Lent is for us to realize what both the younger and the older sons in the Parable of the Prodigal Son failed to grasp: the enormous treasure of the love of the Father who gives us everything he has and to live in communion with that love. We see that in today’s readings very clearly.

* Second, during this second of three phases of Lent, from the third Monday through the Fifth Week of Lent, we have readings that are meant specifically to help the Elect to prepare for Baptism and for the Baptized to renew their baptismal promises, not just in words, but in the way they go about every aspect of life, so that they might live it with the “newness of life” to which Baptism introduces and calls us. In Baptism, we become God the Father’s beloved sons and daughters. The devil we reject in Baptism is the one who tries to tempt us, like he tempted Jesus, “If you really are the Son of God…” to distort our relationship with the Father through sin and presumption. The path of defeating the devil is to follow Jesus, to “listen to him,” as God the Father says to us on the Second Sunday of Lent in the Transfiguration.  Today Jesus will be describing for us his work of bringing us to life through Baptism and the Sacraments so that we may have life to the full.

* These considerations help us understand what Jesus is teaching us in today’s Gospel. He is teaching us about the Father, about himself as the Image of the Father, and about how we’re supposed to live made in God’s image and likeness, as sons and daughters in the Son. Jesus is the icon of the Father who came to reveal to us the Father’s love. But that love was shocking to the various older brothers among the religious class of scribes and Pharisees who wanted to make God in the image of their own rigid ideas. When Jesus healed the man crippled for 38 years in the Pool of Bethesda on the Sabbath, as the Church pondered yesterday, they thought it was a huge sin rather than a manifestation of God’s goodness. They believed that God who rested from creation on the Sabbath would take a day off from loving his sons and daughters on the Sabbath — just like the Scribes and the Pharisees, who had made the Sabbath an idol, were doing.