Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fifteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

July 15, 2023

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.15.23_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 the Jesus will give us one of his most important parables describing how we’re supposed to respond to his words and work.

* I’d like to begin with a question: Why among the first apostles did eleven become great saints and one become the most notorious traitor of all time? As I’m recording this in Rome, we can ask similarly why have some popes become great heroes of faith like Leo, Gregory, Nicholas and John Paul and others have become scandalous and notorious? Wasn’t God trying to help them all equally to guide his Church? Why among the students of a poor, inner city school will some kids from down-and-out circumstances go on to become famous surgeons and others end up in jail? Why do some children go on to become great athletes while others with the same coaches and even greater physical coordination and endowments never make it? One of the most basic reasons is because some people are more receptive and responsive to grace, to education, and to coaching, respectively.

* This is an important lesson for us all to grasp and it will help us to understand better what Jesus will be teaching us on Sunday as he gives us the important Parable of the Sower and the Seed and teaches us crucial lessons about how to be a more fruitful disciple and a more effective evangelist, how to receive God’s grace and how to live in accordance with it. At the end of the Parable, Jesus says, “Whoever has ears to hear ought to hear!,” which is the ancient way of saying, “Pay attention!.” By means of the Parable, Jesus is going to help us to take a soil sample of our hearts, to determine how well we pay attention and how receptive and responsive we are to him, to what he teaches, and to all that he seeks to do in our life.

* To understand what he communicates in the Parable, we first need to grasp a little about ancient farming techniques. Sowers would scatter seed along long thin plots before any soil had been turned over. The seed would land on four different types of earth. The first was the hardened land between plots that would serve as paths on which people would walk. They were the ancient sidewalks and no seed could penetrate. The second was very thin “rocky” soil that would have thick layers of limestone a few inches underneath the surface. Here the seeds would take and quickly germinate because the water would be retained within the few inches of soil. Because the roots couldn’t penetrate the limestone, however, the sprouts would not be able to last for long, quickly dehydrating and withering as the rising sun grew in intensity. The third terrain Jesus describes as “thorny” soil, which was basically good earth that could have borne a lot of fruit if it weren’t covered with thornbushes and weeds that exhausted the nutrients of the soil so that good seed couldn’t grow. And the last type was good soil that Jesus describes bears much fruit.

* Just as a sower would scatter seed over all four types of earth, so Jesus scatters his word, his grace, his saving deeds over all four kinds of people represented by the respective soil samples. We see all four soil types among his first listeners.

* We saw in many of the scribes and Pharisees the hardened soil tha...