Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
June 8, 2024
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 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 return to the Sundays of Ordinary Time in which Jesus describes for us the wok of the devil, Christ’s own response to him, and what he wants our response to be.
* In the Gospel, various of Jesus’ cousins came to seize him, claiming, “He is out of his mind.” They evidently couldn’t understand why he would leave his job in Nazareth, surround himself by a bunch of fishermen, tax collectors, zealots and others, and preach in such a way that many of the religious leaders of the time — the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and eventually high priests — would turn on him to have him killed. No one could deny his miracles and exorcisms, but some of the scribes accused him of doing his work through black magic, casting out the little demons, we could say, by the power of the great demon. The evil one had gotten Jesus’ critics, even some of his relatives, to begin to believe the lie that Jesus’ work was diabolical rather than divine. Jesus answered them quite clearly, cutting to the heart of the devil’s technique of dividing and conquering: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand.” The devil is a divider, Jesus is saying, and would never permit his infernal kingdom to be divided because then his plans would be defeated. He would never turn his principal weapon against himself. Just as he did with Adam and Eve, the devil continues to try to work his plan of division, to divide us from God through sin, to divide us from others, to divide husbands and wives, to divide families, to divide countries into terrible partisanship, to divide the Church into various labels like liberals and conservatives, social justice versus pro-life Catholics, to divide us on music, to divide us on which priests we prefer, to divide us any and every way he can. Jesus prayed during the Last Supper that we might be one, just as He and the Father are one. The devil seeks to make us a bunch of isolated, unhappy monads, like we see the devils divulge in a possessed man elsewhere in the Gospel, who said, “We are legion, for there are many of us.”
* But Jesus is stronger than the devil. He came into this world as the “Stronger Man,” to use his phrase from this Sunday’s Gospel, to bind the “strong man” of the devil and divide his spoils. In the Alleluia verse before the Gospel, we will sing about how he does so: “Now the ruler of the world will be driven out,” Jesus says, and “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (Jn 12:31-32). Jesus exorcises the devil by his crucifixion, when he was lifted up on Calvary, but in the very same action of expelling the devil he is attracting us to himself.
* To defeat the devil, Jesus wants to draw us to him in three ways.
* The first is through repentance and mercy. In the middle of this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus talks about the unforgivable sin, telling us, “All sins and blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness,
Episode: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/tenth-sunday-in-ordinary-time-b-conversations-with-consequences-podcast-june-8-2024/
Podcast: https://catholicpreaching.com/wp/category/audio-homily/podcast/
