Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Vigil
April 27, 2024
To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/4.27.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3
The following text guided the homily:
* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to join you again at the end of the program as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with us this Sunday, when he is going to share with us one of his most memorable and powerful images, revealing the type of relationship he wants us to have with him and with others and describing for us how to have a truly successful life according to his terms.
* We are living at a time of great fragmentation. The Church has been divided not only between Orthodox and Catholics, between Protestants and Catholics, but also among various groups of Catholics with regard to liturgy, morality, and truths of the faith. Politically we’re polarized and socially we’re stratified. As we’ve seen on many college campuses lately, like at Columbia where I serve as Catholic chaplain, we’re rancorously divided over what is happening in Gaza, what is happening on the campuses, and more. And all of these divisions ultimately trace themselves back to voluntarily separations from God through sin and choices against communion with others. That’s what makes Jesus’ words this Sunday so important, urgent, and helpful.
* Jesus tells us, “I am the vine. You are the branches.” He and his faithful, he and the Church, exist together like vine and branches do. That’s first a sacramental, or ontological, reality. By our baptism we have been incorporated into Christ himself as part of the life-giving vine with his own life flowing through us. But it’s also meant to be a moral reality: we are called to live in communion with him and with others in communion with him. This image of the fruitful union of God and his united people was foretold throughout the Old Testament. The prophets often compared Israel to a vine. Isaiah declared, “The vineyard of the Lord of hosts is the house of Israel” (Is 5:7). Hosea added, “Israel is a luxuriant vine that yields its fruit” (Hos 10:1). All of this was depicted visually in a stunning golden relief of a vine, with clusters of grapes as big as adults, running around the outside walls of the Temple of Jerusalem. The Church is the fulfillment of this image. The temple stands for God and when the people in faith attach themselves to God, they become a luxuriant vine stretching out its branches and bearing fruit even into the desert. Jesus was probably calling upon his apostles’ obvious knowledge of this golden sculpture as he was describing the image of the Vine and Branches on Holy Thursday evening, because they likely would have seen the gilded vine as they visited the temple earlier in the day. The problem, we know from our knowledge of Sacred Scripture, is that Israel as a whole didn’t stay attached to God in this way. God would ask through Isaiah, “What more was there to do my for my vineyard that I had not done? Why, when I looked for the crop of grapes, did it bring forth wild grapes?” (Is 5:4) It didn’t bear good fruit, because it had detached itself from God through sin. Jesus mentioned this in one of his parables, when he said the Vineyard owner sent multiples waves of servants, and finally his Son, to collect his share of grapes at harvest time, but the tenants of the vineyard manhandled the servants and killed the Son (Mt 21:33-43). This was referring to salvation history and to the way Israel treated the prophets God sent to them and treated even Jesus himself.
