Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
July 20, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.20.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy 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 he’s going to say to us, as he said to his first apostles, “Come away by yourselves to a deserted place and rest a while.”
* I’m recording this from Indianapolis, where I am participating in the National Eucharistic Congress, the first in 83 years. With a population of 924,000, buttressed by the fifty thousand Catholics from across the United States who have come for the Congress, Indianapolis is far from a deserted place, but the same Jesus who summoned the apostles away from their work, their ordinary lives, their hangouts and at least many of their friends, has summoned us here, to be with him present for us in the Blessed Sacrament. In fact, Jesus regularly summons us to come to be with him, to find our rest in and with him, to refresh and remake us as he yokes ourselves to himself. He seeks to do this each Sunday, indeed each day at Mass. He seeks to do this in the heart-to-heart conversation apart from the daily hustle-and-bustle that we call prayer and especially in the summit of personal prayer that is Eucharistic adoration. And so I’d urge you to enter the Gospel scene this Sunday with these Eucharistic lenses. Jesus continues to actualize what he did in this Sunday’s Gospel, drawing us from the Eucharist to be with him, to be restored by him, so that he can send us out to help others to find in him what we do.
* So let’s return to the scene. After the hard work of the apostles’ missionary journeys, Jesus could see they were tired. Moreover, as Saint Mark tells us, “People were coming and going in great numbers that they did not have an opportunity even to eat.” So Jesus brought them off with him in a boat to a deserted place.
* We know that the rhythm of human life involves not just work, but rest, just as God in the Genesis account rested on the seventh day. Such rest is essential not just to recharge but to focus with God on the meaning of what we’ve done and are doing, on the gift of our life and how we are going to invest it. Jesus took the apostles away not just to give the apostles a break but to review with them all that they had experienced on their apostolic journeys.
* In a similar way, Jesus regularly seeks, in different ways, to draw us away from the daily grind, from the sometimes frenetic pace of life, from television and gadget screens, so that he might similarly refresh us, helping us to review with the grace of his light what we have been experiencing in the various aspects of our life. It’s an opportunity for him to help us press the reset button on our existence, to strengthen us in whatever struggles we face, to move us to thank God the Father for his blessings, to help us to see things more clearly, and to reprioritize according to what’s more important.
* Over the course two months as I’ve served as the chaplain to the eastern or Seton Route of the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage, in which my young pilgrims and I had the privilege to carry Jesus from New Haven Connecticut here to Indianapolis, we often had many different, powerful events each day: huge Masses, long Eucharistic processions, preaching several times a day or giving witness talks to crowds and schools,
Episode: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/sixteenth-sunday-in-ordinary-time-b-conversations-with-consequences-podcast-july-20-2024/
Podcast: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/category/audio-homily/podcast/
