Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

February 11, 2023

 

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 the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, when we enter more deeply into one of the most important dialogues that’s ever taken place. Every three years we have the chance to ponder at Sunday Mass Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount. We begin with the Beatitudes, which we considered two weeks ago. Then, last week, we pondered our identity as Salt of the Earth and Light of the World. This Sunday we get into the heart of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Jesus calls us to live by a special set of Christian standards, a higher set of principles than the norms of the good pagans who love those who love them and higher than the standards even of the Jews most rigidly observant of the Mosaic Law. Unless our holiness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, Jesus stresses, we will not enter into the kingdom of heaven. So the stakes can’t be higher and what he’s going to tell us is too important to ignore.

* In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus sets out seven different ways that as his disciples our holiness is supposed to surpass others’. He gives us five this Sunday and the final two next week. These marks of Christian behavior go beyond merely keeping the natural law or the Ten Commandments. They are meant to transform our heart and whole life from the inside out. They challenge us not just to be “good” but genuinely “holy” and Christ-like. All are challenging, but we need to remember that by calling us to these high standards of ordinary Christian living, Jesus is showing us an exhilarating confidence that we, together with his help, can live up to them.

* The first standard Jesus teaches us this Sunday involves the whole way we treat others. He says that it’s not enough for us not to murder someone. We need to refrain also from the thoughts that set us on the path to maim and murder our brothers. He tells us, “If you are angry with a brother or sister, you will be liable to judgment; and if you insult a brother or sister, you will be liable to the council; and if you say, ‘You fool,’ you will be liable to the hell of fire.’” We are called, in short, to love others from our heart and head outward. We don’t love others if all we do is not kill them. If we’re envious, jealous, uncomplimentary, or vengeful within, we’re still not loving them. To enter into his kingdom, to become holy, we can’t kill with our hearts or tongues either. The first standard is truly to love our neighbor like Christ loves us.

* The second standard to which Jesus calls us is to make the first move in reconciling ourselves with those from whom we have been alienated either by our sins or their sins. “When you are offering your gift at the altar,” he tells us, “if you remember that your brother or sister has something against you, leave your gift there before the altar and go; first be reconciled to your brother or sister, and then come and offer your gift.” Jesus is saying to us that it’s not sufficient for us to be merely “good with God”; we also have to be “good with others.”  When we come to pray and ask God’s forgiveness, we must examine first whether others have something against us. If they do, Jesus tells us that we need to make the first move and go to reconcile, even if we have been the one aggrieved, just like God made the first move in reconcili...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Scholastica

February 10, 2023

Gen 3:1-8, Ps 32, Mk 7:31-37

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus works a great miracle of healing a deaf-mute in such a way that the people were astonished and exclaimed, “He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” The same miracle Jesus worked in the Decapolis he works all over the world. He worked it in your life and mine on the day of our baptism. He didn’t use spit, but through his minister he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the priest or deacon said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the glory and praise of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. The graces of baptism not only touched these organs but the entirety of our being to be receptive to God in fulfillment of the prayer made in the Alleluia verse, “Open our hearts, O Lord, to listen to the words of your Son.” He wants us to listen to him with hearts full of love, to treasure his word, to be transformed by it, so that through that transformation we might transform the world. Everything begins with hearing God speak to us and responding with faith.

* This is important for us to grasp in order to understand the nature of sin. In today’s first reading, we encounter the blow-by-blow details of what we call the “original sin,” but in it we see the essential physiognomy of any sin.

* It begins with listening to God poorly, rather than attentively and lovingly, rather than hanging on his every word. God had told Adam that he wasn’t to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but as he passed that on to Eve, the details changed, as Eve said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’” Even though Adam’s and Eve’s life depended on it, they hadn’t listened to God accurately. God had said nothing about not touching it. Every sin begins with a sin of listening. Pope Benedict mentions this in Verbum Domini, “Quite frequently in both the Old and in the New Testament, we find sin described as a refusal to hear the word, as a breaking of the covenant and thus as being closed to God who calls us to communion with himself. Sacred Scripture shows how man’s sin is essentially disobedience and refusal to hear.… For this reason it is important that the faithful be taught to acknowledge that the root of sin lies in the refusal to hear the word of the Lord, and to accept in Jesus, the Word of God, the forgiveness that opens us to salvation” (26). That refusal to listen does not just refer to those who totally reject paying any attention or reject what they hear, but also those who refuse to listen well and attentively.In Hebrew, the same word is used for “hearing” and “obeying,” because it was inconceivable that one could hear God asking something and refuse to obey. In Latin the same relationship is stressed. The word to listen in Latin is audire and to obey is ob-audire, which means to listen intentively, to eavesdrop. The first step in sin is to fail to listen to “every word that comes from God’s mouth,” not to treat what he says as the “words of everlasting life.”

* The second aspect of the devil’s temptation was...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Thursday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass for the Family

February 9, 2023

Gen 2:18-25, Ps 128, Mk 7:24-30

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.9.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* “It is not good for the man to be alone.” These words from today’s first reading come in the Genesis account after God says, throughout creation, “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,”  “It is good,” and with the creation of the human person,  “It is very good.” Finally God exclaims,  “It is not good for the man to be alone,” but he waited to make this judgment, we can say, until man himself had had this awareness. Even though man was in relation with God and with the animals he had named, there was still something missing. He needed a “suitable partner,” a “fitting helper” for him. And that’s what God gave in the creation of Eve. God created such a fitting helper, so that the two of them could help people live as the image of God, live in true communion, and grow more and more into God’s loving image. This points to two existential realities: first, each of us needs help and it’s not good for us to be without this help; second, we are created as a helper for others. We are created as fitting helpers likewise always in need of suitable help.

* What we also see in the passage is the basic complementarity at work in this helping and being helped. God didn’t create for Adam merely someone to kill time with, or even a generic helper, but rather a “suitable helper,” a “partner,” someone who makes up for our weaknesses with strength and someone who draws from us our strength to remedy his or her weaknesses. God created Eve out of Adam’s side, to show that they stand side-by-side, equal, before God. The rib symbolizes what covers the heart (the loving center of the person) and the lungs (what is necessary to breathe and survive). Adam exclaims, “Finally this one is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh,” a Hebrew expression meaning “strength of my strength and weakness of my weakness,” that they are like each other in strengths and weaknesses and need to help each other. The type of help that is needed is not just a “hand” for the ordinary things of life, but to live as as a loving communion of persons in the image and likeness of God. They can’t grow in love without each other. Without the analogy of human love, Adam had already discovered that he couldn’t really receive and reciprocate (however asymmetrically) divine love. The most suitable help given is with regard to their living in a fully human way according to the divine image.

* That’s what human marriage, par excellence, is supposed to be, when a man and a woman, like Adam and Eve, fittingly help each other to become who they are. That’s why Christ raised marriage to the dignity of a Sacrament, to give his help so that they might resemble the love in the heart of the Trinity, which Christ came as Bridegroom to make possible anew. But it extends to more than marriage. It’s not good for any of us to be alone, we all need fitting helpers, and we all need, to some degree, the complementarity between man and woman to remedy the ways in which, by original differentiation, we are not fully human. John Paul II talked about the “archetypical masculine” and the “archetypical feminine” and the way that men receive love by giving love and women give love by receiving love and how man’s relative strengths in complementarity to woman’s relative weaknesses, and woman’s relative strengths to man’s relative weaknesses, provide the support we need to grow as God’s image.

Fr. Roger J. LandryColumbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, ManhattanWednesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint Josephine BakhitaFebruary 8, 2023Gen 2:4-9.15-17, Ps 104, Mk 7:14-23

 

 

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

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The following points were attempted in the homily: 

In the Gospel today Jesus asks the disciples, “Are even you likewise without understanding?” Lest we fail to understand the absolutely revolutionary point Jesus is making in today’s Gospel, let’s take some time to do what he asks, “Hear me, all of you, and understand.”

Jesus was continuing his conversation with the Scribes and the Pharisees after their criticism that Jesus’ disciples ate their meals with ritually unwashed hands. The Scribes had determined that in order for someone to be pleasing to God they needed to obsess about ritual impurity, washing their hands twice with one-and-a-half egg shells full of water, and washing pots, jugs, beds, themselves and any other thing that had touched Gentiles or things not consecrated to the Lord. Jesus yesterday called them hypocrites because the word hypocrite means actor and they were, frankly, just pretending to be faithful to God, substituting human precepts for God’s word and will. Today Jesus extended the conversation to something that would have astonished the disciples, something that would have been totally revolutionary. He said, “Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” This point was revolutionary because it was precisely things from the outside that the Jews of Jesus’ day thought would make them impure. We remember that Judas Maccabeus and so many of his heroic contemporaries were willing to lay down their lives on the battlefield because the Greeks, 150 years before Christ, were trying to force the Jews to eat pork. They refused. Many people were martyred. Many Jews today still refuse to eat meat unless it’s kosher, unless all the blood has dripped out. Jesus was saying that the food we eat ultimately can’t make us impure before God. In doing this, St. Mark comments, “He thus declared all foods clean.” This is something that would take even the disciples a long time to come to grips with: St. Peter, for example, needed a vision in Joppa to help him to recognize that Jesus was not asking that Jews follow the scribal dietary laws.

What does make us impure before God? Jesus says it’s “the things that come out from within,” and then he defines them: “Evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly.” It’s from the tree of the heart that either good fruit or bad fruit comes. And where a person’s treasure is, there will the heart be. Does the heart treasure God and the things of God or does it desire evil? God wants us not to have “hearts far from” him, but hearts that are fully united to him. The type of purity he cares about is a pure heart that leads to pure hands, to pure speech, to pure vision, to thoughts, words and deeds of pure love.

In the first reading, we see the beginning of an illustration of what happens when one’s heart is not purely united to the Lord. We see where sin comes from. In the account of our beginnings in the Book of Genesis, we see that God placed Adam in the garden and gave everything over to him, to cultivate and care for God’s creation. He gave him only one restriction: “You are free to eat from any of the trees of the garden except the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. From that tree you shall not eat; the moment you eat from it you are surely doomed to die.” God didn’t place the tree there as bait to tr...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Parish, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Votive Mass for the Family

February 7, 2023

Gen 1:20-2:4, Ps 8, Mk 7:1-13

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.7.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s reading from the first chapter of the Bible, we come to one of the most important things ever said: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” We are made in God’s image and God ordered everything else in creation toward us.

* This is a truth that should first fill us with wonder. In the Responsorial Psalm, we see that astonishment, commenting on Creation in the Genesis narrative: “When I behold your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and the stars which you set in place,” the Psalmist prays, “What is man that you should be mindful of him, or the son of man that you should care for him? You have made him [as your image] little less than the angels, and crowned him with glory and honor. You have given him rule over the works of your hands, putting all things under his feet. All sheep and oxen, yes, and the beasts of the field, The birds of the air, the fishes of the sea, and whatever swims the paths of the seas.” We ought never to stop expressing our wonder not just at Creation in general but at how God made us in his image to exercise his dominion over creation!

* Secondly, this truth should drive us to unveil more and more the mystery it means.

* Over the course of centuries, for many the expression “imago Dei” meant two things that distinguished us from the rest of creation. We are rational; we can think like God. And we are free; we can choose like God. We are called, therefore, to think with the mind and thoughts of God and to choose the good as God always does. How often do we seek to purify our mind of earthliness so that we may “put on the mind of Christ” (Phil 2:5),  as St. Paul exhorts us in the second chapter of his Letter to the Philippians? How often do we seek to live according to the divine freedom, knowing that it is only in the truth that we will be set free (Jn 8:32) and that the purpose of our freedom is to love?

* St. John Paul II brought the notion of the image of God to greater light when he said that when we look at the Book of Genesis, we can see that to be made in the imago Dei is to exist in a loving communion of persons. God is Trinitarian. He lives in eternal communion.  He says in today’s text, “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.” Jews reading this for centuries tried to come up with explanations as to why God spoke in the first person plural when in almost the entirety of the rest of the Hebrew Bible he spoke in first-person singular. When Jesus eventually came and revealed that He and the Father were one, that they would send us the Holy Spirit and then send us out to baptize in the name (not names) of the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, we began to understand better the meaning of the first person plural (even though there are three persons in one God). The second indication is what happened when God actually created man in his image: “God created man in his image; in the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” The eternal God is neither male nor female. Until the Incarnation, there was never a body. To create man in his own image male and female is an indication he was creating man to live a Trinitarian existence, to live in a loving communion of persons. Male and female, man and woman, are meant to live in a nuptial communion that is similar to the way the love of the Father and the Son spirated...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Monday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Paul Miki and Companions

February 6, 2023

Gen 1:1-19, Ps 104, Mk 6:53-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.6.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* After having completed a four week meditation on the Letter to the Hebrews, by which we’re able to see everything in the light of God’s definitive Word, Jesus Christ, and learn how to keep our eyes firmly fixed on him, today we begin a study of the beginning of the Book of the Beginning — Genesis — that will accompany us for the text two weeks. It has an opportunity for us to “re-read” the beginning with the prism of what we have just learned in Hebrews.

* Genesis begins with a focus on the phases of Creation and how good it was. After the creation of light and its separation from darkness, after the creation of the sky and the earth, after the creation of the waters from land, after the creation of vegetation and fruit, after the creation of the Sun and the moon and the stars, Genesis says “God saw how good it was.” Tomorrow we’ll continue seeing this goodness in the creation of the creatures of the sea and the animals, which likewise were good, and arrive at the culmination of the human person whom God saw was “very good.” The goodness of creation leads us to exclaim in the Psalm, “May the Lord be glad in his works!” It ponders the earth, the ocean, the mountains, the streams, the wind, the mountains, the birds, the trees, and then exults, “How manifold are your works, O Lord! In wisdom you have wrought them all— the earth is full of your creatures; Bless the Lord, O my soul!” How important it is for us spiritually to enter into a hymn of praise for the essential goodness of creation!

* In the Gospel, however, we see the breakdown. It’s a corruption of that goodness we’ll see on Friday with the account of the original sin of Eve and Adam. Even though creation was ontologically good, moral evil entered. And that brought about a disharmony that was never originally intended. It partially ruptured the communion that was meant to exist between creatures and God, between creatures and each other, within creatures themselves, and within all of creation. That breakdown caused by sin was the source of the introduction of illnesses and what they lead to, death. We get a glimpse of that pain and suffering in the Gospel. As Jesus disembarked in Gennesaret, “people immediately recognized him. They scurried about the surrounding country and began to bring in the sick on mats to wherever they heard he was. Whatever villages or towns or countryside he entered, they laid the sick in the marketplaces and begged him that they might touch only the tassel on his cloak.” Such enormous pain and suffering! It was like whole towns were hospital wards. And they came to the Divine Physician. They must have heard about the miracle of the woman with the hemorrhage who was cured of her 12-year illness by touching the edge of his garment because St. Mark tells us that they were all trying to touch even the tassel of his cloak with faith and that as many as touched it were healed.

* There was a tremendous physical transformation that points to an even greater spiritual one. Jesus’ physical healings — as well as his preaching and all of his other miracles — were all signs of a deeper spiritual one he was accomplishing, the redemption of the world. This is something that should fill us with wonder and gratitude. Every Christmas morning we ponder that Jesus came into the world not just to restore the goodness of creation but to redeem and surpass it. In Latin,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

February 5, 2023

Is 58:7-10, Ps 112, 1Cor 2:1-5, Mt 5:13-16

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.5.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* Time at university is often one in which students ponder deeply about who they are and who and what they want to become. They think a lot about the future, about the difference they hope to make with their life, as they pray about why God created them at this time and place and what he is asking them to do with the gift of their life.

* In the Sermon on the Mount, which we began to consider last Sunday, Jesus speaks straight into these questions. He describes for us our vocation and mission as Christians, how as his followers we’re called to be different than the rest, to live by a separate set of standards than good pagans who love those who love them and are good to those who are good to them, and to have our holiness surpass that of the most fervent Jewish scribes and Pharisees according to the Mosaic Law. He calls us throughout the Sermon on the Mount, in short, to be like him, to be like his Father, to be perfect as he is perfect and holy as he is holy.

* We saw this last week as Jesus gave us the beatitudes, which highlight the difference his wisdom and the world’s, between the path we’re called to walk and the path that others walk. Whereas the world thinks we have to be rich to be happy, Jesus says we need to be poor in spirit. Whereas the world thinks we have to be a sexual phenom to be fulfilled, Jesus states we need to be pure of heart. Whereas the world things we must dominate others, Jesus says we must be meek, merciful and a peacemaker. Whereas worldly gurus say we should aspire to be popular and have everyone like us, Jesus says we should rejoice when others persecute us because of our fidelity to him. In each of these areas, Jesus is calling us not to live as others live, not to think as others think, but to think and live like him. As Saint John Paul II said once in a homily to young people on the Mount of the Beatitudes, “Looking at [Jesus],” John Paul said, “you will see what it means to be poor in spirit, gentle and merciful, to mourn, to care for what is right, to be pure in heart, to make peace, even to be blessed while persecuted. This is why he has the right to say, ‘Come, follow me!’” Jesus doesn’t just proclaim the beatitudes but is the beatitudes, and there’s almost no greater way to describe how Christians are supposed to live differently than others than by saying that we are called to be men and women who not only know the Beatitudes but live them like Christ.

* Immediately after giving us the Beatitudes, we come to the today’s Gospel, in which Jesus describes the vocation and mission we receive from that difference. With unforgettable, down-to-earth images, Jesus says that we have a double calling and task with respect to everyone else: to be the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World. We have a mission that goes far beyond the walls of our Churches. Together with Christ and our Christian brothers and sisters, we have been called to go out and transform, as Salt and Light, the rest of the human race. It is a partial but profound answer to the mystery of why we exist, why we’ve received the grace of baptism and the Christian faith, and what we’re supposed to do with our life, starting here at Columbia.

* In order to understand what our God-given vocation and mission entail more clearly, we need to ponder the images Jesus used and what they meant when he used them.

* When Jesus called his first followers to be the salt of the earth,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Saint Aloysius Roman Catholic Church, Glasgow, Scotland

Nuptial Mass of Nicholas Joseph Tomaino and Madeleine Janet Kearns

February 4, 2023

Tob 8:4-8, Ps 127:3-4, 1 Cor 12:31-13:8, Mt 7:21-29

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.4.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

To watch their beautiful wedding in its entirety, please click below:

 

This is the text that guided the homily: 

While Maddy was processing in today, as she was looking at Nick at the end of the nave and Nick and everyone else were looking at her as Pat confidently and joyfully walked her down the aisle, they were intentionally hoping that their and our gaze would being going much deeper than what our eyes could see. Lily, Maddy’s sister and Matron of Honor, in an arrangement she and Maddy had composed themselves, was singing Be Thou My Vision, the original Old Irish lyrics of which scholars say may trace back to the sixth century martyr Saint Dallán Forgaill. It’s a famous prayer of protection called a Lorica, beseeching God to be our vision, light, wisdom, truth, Father, king, treasure, inheritance, deepest love, and eternal victory, and to “still be our vision” as we hope to behold him beatifically.

Maddy and Nick chose it to be sung at that moment to orient not only their and our focus at the beginning of their wedding but also to orientate their whole marriage, praying that they might keep their contemplative gaze jointly fixed on God who never ceases to look at them with love, as well as that he might permit them to see all things in his holy light.

Be Thou My Vision rephrases what we ask for in Psalm 27, that we may seek and see the Lord’s face and behold the loveliness of his dwelling all the days of our life (Ps 27:4,8). It’s a petition for what St. Paul prayed Christian spouses in Ephesus would experience, that growing in purity of heart, they might see God in each other and reverence each other out of reverence for Christ (Eph 5:22). It’s a vision that Nick and Maddy have already been seeking to make their own.

During marriage preparation, Nick told me that he was helped a great deal by Dietrich von Hildenbrand’s book Marriage: The Mystery of Faithful Love, in which the great 20th century German philosopher wrote, “Just as in supernatural love of our neighbor, we penetrate at one glance to that innermost, mysterious essence of the other person in which, through all his imperfections, pettiness, arrogance and triviality, he reflects God, so in natural conjugal love, the real individuality of the partner is revealed.” The gaze of spouses toward each other is meant, in other words, to reveal both God and the God-given uniqueness of the other.

Nick commented on how Maddy does this for him. “Maddy reflects God so clearly to me, in word and in deed. I witnessed that in her tremendous faith, and love of God and neighbor; her selflessness, humility, and habitual exercise of virtue; her courage, no matter the circumstance; her beauty and her earnest desire to make use of her God-given talents for His glorification; her patience and cherishing of life’s treasures and joys; her playful spirit and good cheer.” He continued, “There is something so divinely charming about Maddy.” Like God, she is “someone on whom I can invariably rely and find peace. In any pursuit, she encourages me. She’s a model, in every respect, and makes me want to be a saint—to be truly good, to be the man I was made to be. … Maddy has been a leader and companion in faith, which has affected all aspects of our life together. She’s aided my own spiritual growth and encouraged me to live out the Gospel daily and to seek out truth. She’s inspired and helped me to continue to pursue virtue,

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

February 4, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.4.23_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 God wants to have with us this Sunday, in which Jesus, with unforgettable, down-to-earth images, will tell us about the double mission we have as Christians: to be the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World.  Notice, first what he doesn’t say: Jesus doesn’t calls us the salt or light of the Church, because our mission is to go out and transform the whole world, beginning, of course, with being transformed by Christ within the Church. If we’re not going out and striving to make disciples, we’re not really faithful disciples. If we’re not seeking to transform the world, we’re still clueless followers. Likewise, Jesus doesn’t say, “You mustbecome the Salt of the Earth and the Light of the World.” He says, rather, “You are the Salt and Light.” This is very significant. By our baptism, we have already received this identity and vocation. In the Baptismal Rite our Baptismal candle is lit from the Paschal Candle showing that Christ, the Light of the World, has passed his light on to us to be kept burning brightly. And in the Extraordinary Form of Baptism, salt is still put into the baby’s or catechumen’s mouth in order to remind them that they are to be salt for the earth.

* The key for us is whether we are faithful to this call and live this mission, whether we live as salt and light. Jesus says today that our salt can lose its saltiness and our light can be hidden, in which case it’s not doing any good. So our Christian lives can lose their special Christian character. We know that this has happened to many. Today Jesus reminds us of who we are and wants to strengthen us to be whom he has made us to be by baptism. To understand what our vocation and mission entails more clearly, however, we need to grasp the images Jesus used and what they meant when he used them. So let’s look at each of them more deeply.

* When Jesus called us to be the salt of the earth, his first followers would have understood it in three different ways because there were three fundamental uses of salt in the ancient world:

* The first was as apreservative. Salt was used to preserve meat or fish from rotting. There was obviously no electricity and therefore refrigeration in the ancient world. If any fish or meat was going to last in the sweltering Middle Eastern climate, it needed to be salted. There was an ancient saying that the animal and fish that were being preserved were already dead; salt would serve almost as a life-preserver, something that would keep the meat or fish filets from like likewise dying. It almost had a sense of the resurrection, giving them life whereas they, like the fish or animals from which they came, should be dead. All of this points to the fact that Jesus calls us to be his instrument to prevent the earth from going to corruption, from dying. We’re supposed to keep the world and others good. We all know that there are certain people who when they walk into a room keep others on their best behavior, because they lift others to a higher standard by the way they themselves live. That’s what Jesus is calling all of us to do. Are we the types of people who lift others to better behavior?

* The second purpose of salt was tostart a fire. At Jesus’ time, people would take animal dung, mix it with a lot of salt and then light it on ...

Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Feast of the Presentation of the Lord

February 2, 2023

Mal 3:1-4, Ps 24, Heb 2:14-18, Lk 2:22-40

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.2.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* Today we celebrate a great feast, one so central that we meditate upon at least two times a week in the fourth Joyful Mystery. The point of the feast is summarized in the first reading and in the beautiful instructions and prayers that we pray at the beginning of Mass just before the procession, which describe the Presentation fundamentally as an encounter. The Prophet Malachi tells us, “And suddenly there will come to the temple the Lord whom you seek.” The Lord comes to meet us. We emphasize this in the instruction as Mass begins before the procession of light. “Today is the blessed day when Jesus was presented in the Temple by Mary and Joseph. Outwardly he was fulfilling the Law, but in reality he was coming to meet his believing people.” After describing how Simeon and Anna met him in the Temple, we continue. “So let us also, gathered together by the Holy Spirit, proceed to the house of God to encounter Christ. There we shall find him and recognize him in the breaking of the Bread until he comes again, revealed in glory.” The awareness of the Presentation as an encounter with Christ continues throughout the Mass. In the Eucharistic Preface, we will pray that “we, too, [will] go forth rejoicing to encounter your salvation.” In the Collect, we implore that “by your grace, we may be presented to you with minds made pure.” At the end of Mass we will ask the Lord that “we, going forth to meet the Lord, [may] obtain the gift of eternal life.” All of these prayers convey that Jesus is constantly being presented to us and we are supposed to be constantly presenting ourselves to him. The Christian life is meant to be a continuous mutual presentation, a lifetime encounter of love and life. The candles we bless today are supposed to symbolize our burning love for him. We ask God the Father to bless them precisely “so that, treading the path of virtue, we may reach that light that never fails.” Our encounter with the Lord here on this feast day and then throughout the mutual encounter of Christian life is meant to lead to an eternal encounter in the heavenly Temple.

* So that’s what celebrating the Feast of the Presentation well intends to bring about in us. Concretely, however, this celebration also contains many practical applications to help us keep that continuous encounter throughout our life. I’d like to focus on five elements we can learn from this feast about that encounter with the Lord and how it’s meant to change us.

* The first thing we can ponder is the nature of consecration. St. Luke quotes the Mosaic Law in today’s Gospel, saying, “Every male who opens the womb shall be consecrated to the Lord.” The Lord told the Israelites through Moses “Every first-born son you must redeem,” adding, “If your son should ask you later on, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall tell him, ‘With a strong hand the Lord brought us out of Egypt, that place of slavery. … That is why I sacrifice to the Lord everything of the male sex that opens the womb, and why I redeem every first-born of my sons.’” (Ex 13:13-15). This right of “redemption” of the first-born Son was a way to relive the Passover, to make it present, to allow every generation to enter into God’s saving action. How much more beautiful still is it that in the Presentation Christ, the Redeemer, the New and Eternal Passover Incarnate, was himself being redeemed! He had come into our world precisely to lead us all through the true Passover in hi...