Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Saturday of the Seventeenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of Saint Ignatius of Loyola

July 31, 2021

Lev 25:1.8-17, Ps 67, Mt 14:1-12

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.31.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Over the course of the last ten days we have pondered, through the use of Jesus’ seven different parables, what the Kingdom of God is and how we enter it. He taught us about good soil and the three types of insufficient soil: stubborn, superficial and dissipated by pleasure or fear. He taught us that the Kingdom comes into contact with both wheat and weeds, that the dragnet of the Church encompasses both “good” and “bad” fish. We saw these parables played out yesterday in Nazareth, where the stubbornness and superficiality of Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes against both seed and Sower in the synagogue is contrasted with the faith of Mary and Joseph. We see it play out again today in the forest of thorns in the flesh of Herod and the receptivity of St. John the Baptist, who had made God his treasure and pearl. It’s important for us to see the huge contrast between the slavery that bound Herod even though he was externally a free king with the power to determine life and death and the freedom of John the Baptist, even though he was arrested, bound, imprisoned and eventually martyred. And it’s important for us to see the contrast of Herod’s actions and those of God as seen in the practice of the Jubilee in today’s first reading and in Jesus’ words in the Nazarene Synagogue.

* King Herod was so enslaved by lust and ego. We see this in his not only cavorting with but stealing and marrying the wife of his half-brother Philip. The book of Leviticus had said clearly, “You shall not have intercourse with your brother’s wife, for that would be a disgrace to your brother” (Lev 18:16). Herod had gone to Rome to visit his brother and while there seduced his sister-in-law, persuaded her to leave his brother, divorced his own wife and married her. To make the incestuous matters worse, Herodias was Philip’s and Herod’s niece as well. For all these reasons it was not right, as John the Baptist said, for Herod to have Herodias as his wife. His lust led to the eclipse of his conscience. With a string of violent verbs, the evangelist tells us that Herod had John arrested, bound, and imprisoned. He wanted to kill him, St. Matthew tells us, but he feared the people. He was eaten alive by fear. Eventually Herod would kill John when his vindictive putative bride pimped her princess daughter to do a striptease before her step-father/uncle and all his drunken courtiers to seduce him into vowing to give her anything she wanted. And when she asked for John the Baptist’s head on a platter, Herod gave the command. And to the Aramaic tune of Happy Birthday to You, the soldiers brought in, instead of birthday cake, the Baptist’s severed head and presented it to this lustful, power-hungry, self-important little assassin. But while that day was a tragedy for Herod and all those participating in his Satanic liturgy where lust ruled instead of sacrificial love, where immoral oaths dominated over the truth, it was a triumph for John the Baptist: in essence, his spiritual birthday in which he was born into eternity and we believe leaped for joy again. John the Baptist was free to say the truth because he was free ultimately of the fear of death. When Herod hears of Jesus, eaten alive by fear, he thought he was John the Baptist, saying, “He has been raised from the dead,” the very words the angels will use at the tomb about Jesus’ resurrection.