Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
October 5, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.5.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when we will be eyewitnesses of and participants in the dialogue Jesus had with the Pharisees, when they approached him and asked him a question about marriage. We are now living in an age in which many experts say that the greatest vocations crisis facing the Church is not to the priesthood or to religious life but to the Sacrament of Holy Matrimony. Many young people no longer sense a divine calling, or even naturally aspire, to marriage and to family. Far fewer are getting married. Those who do are having much smaller families. Both the Church and many of our societies are struggling as a result. St. John Paul II once said that the future of humanity passes by way of the family and the marriage and family crisis is threatening civilization. That’s why Jesus’ words about marriage this Sunday are so important and urgent.
* When the Pharisees approached Jesus to ask him about marriage, it wasn’t a question to learn or even of curiosity. St. Mark tells us, “They were testing him.” They were in the area across the Jordan from the Holy Land where John the Baptist had been preaching and baptizing. To ask Jesus about the lawfulness of marriage and of divorce there was to ask him a political question for which John the Baptist had already been killed by Herod Antipas. John had told Herod that it was not lawful for him to be married to the wife of his brother Philip, not just because this incest by affinity was contrary to God’s plan but because marrying another person’s wife certainly was. Herod thought that Jesus was John risen from the dead. To ask Jesus about marriage and divorce was to invite him to criticize the same king and potentially suffer the same consequence.
* Jesus responded not only by citing the Book of Genesis, but invoking, in a sense, his own memory of how things were at the dawn of creation. “In the beginning,” Genesis teaches, “God created man in his image and likeness; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.” Man is most fully in God’s image and likeness when he is united to the woman in a communion of persons in love. Just as in God, the mutual love of the Father and the Son eternally generated the Holy Spirit, so the mutual love of husband and wife can generate a third person, who is both a living fruit of their love and a means for that love to grow. In God’s plan, marriage is a singular sign and participation in God’s image and likeness. “Therefore, what God has joined together,” Jesus adds, “no human being must separate.” Marriage is part of God’s wisdom from the beginning to bring us into the loving union of the Trinity.
* In recent years, however, we know that the wisdom of God’s plan with regard to marriage and divorce been getting challenged from both inside and outside the Church. Many have begun to question openly whether God’s plan for marriage, taught courageously and consistently by the Church since Christ founded her, is true and relevant. These doubts or confusions about marriage are fraught with enormous consequences: for since God designed marriage to help us to discover who we are in his image and likeness and to reflect by analogy God’s own relationship with his people,
Episode: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/twenty-seventh-sunday-in-ordinary-time-b-conversations-with-consequences-podcast-october-5-2024/
Podcast: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/category/audio-homily/podcast/
