Fr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Twenty-Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A

September 17, 2023

Sir 27:30-28:7, Ps 103, Rom 14:7-9, Mt 18:21-35

 

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.17.23_MCs_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* One of the biggest challenges in human life, not to mention the Christian life, is to avoid the lure of self-centeredness and selfishness. When we’re infants, we crave attention and think the satisfaction of our desires is the most important things in the world. We’ll cry, howl, throw pacifiers and food, and engage in all types of other behaviors until our mom or dad attends to our wants and needs. We’ll pronounce everything “mine,” and take what our brothers, sisters or friends are playing with, as if we have a right to anything we want. When we grow into childhood and adolescence, the temptation is strong to remain in an egocentric and entitled universe, thinking that everything should revolve around our desires and fears. And our culture increasingly abets this tendency as parents reflexively take their children’s side against every teachers, as consumerism convinces us that the customer is always right, as we lionize the lifestyle of high-maintenance celebrity divas, as we insist others use whatever preferred pronouns we declare, as our culture trumpets a theme song that says, “my life, my body, my choice, my death,” and exalts what we believe are our rights over every responsibility.

* In today’s second reading, to help us achieve human and Christian maturity, St. Paul tells the first generation of Christians in Rome and all of us a basic fact that is meant to translate into a way of life. Against the temptation to think or behave as if we are or should be the center of the solar system, he puts before us a moral Copernican revolution: “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. If we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” We don’t belong to ourselves, he says; we belong to God. And he adds, “This is why Christ died and came to life.” The whole purpose of Jesus’ incarnation, passion, death and resurrection is to save us from sin, which as St. Augustine wrote in his City of God is the “love of self even to the contempt of God” (14:28). Jesus wants, rather, to help us follow him along the path of what Augustine termed the “love of God even to the contempt of self,” through doing what he mentioned last week, denying ourselves, picking up our cross and following him, losing our life so as to save it. St. Paul makes the point that, as Christians, we don’t belong to ourselves, but belong to God. Christian consecration in baptism is a change of ownership, in which we freely and trustingly hand over the title of our life to God. In response to a mentality that says, my life, my choice, my will, my name, we proclaim, “Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, thy name be hallowed.” And we do so not out of servile submission, but out of loving gratitude, recognizing that life isn’t a contest of wills between God and us, but a recognition that God loves us and wants us to be genuinely like him, to love like he loves, to be holy as he is holy, and, with his help, perfect as he is perfect. And so as mature Christians and human beings, we’re summoned to live not for ourselves or even die for ourselves, but to live and die for and as the Lord’s.

* The evil one obviously wants to frustrate this divine work and to help us remain obsessed with love of self to the contempt of God. And the most effective way he tries to do this is through lack of forgiveness. When someone wrongs us,