Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil

January 29, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.29.22_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 Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when we will once again join those in the Nazareth synagogue after Jesus reveals himself to them as the Messiah. It’s not a tranquil conversation. In fact, after the dialogues that took place before Pontius Pilate and on Calvary, it may be one of the most difficult colloquies in the Gospel. But it is important for us to enter into the drama, because the rejection of Jesus by those in his hometown is not only a prelude to what he endured in the Passion but also what can happen whenever we, and others, don’t want to accept Jesus on his own terms but try to box him into our own safe categories.

* This scene this Sunday is a continuation of what began last week when Jesus, arriving on the Sabbath in his hometown synagogue, was invited by the Chazzan, the synagogue leader, to read a passage of God’s word and to give a commentary. By this point, Jesus already had a reputation throughout Galilee for teaching with authority unlike any had ever heard. He was becoming famous especially for the miracles he was working, like casting out demons and curing the sick and the paralyzed. Jesus unrolled the scroll of the prophet Isaiah, read one of the most famous passages referring to the Messiah for whom the Jews had long waited and gave a once sentence homily, that Isaiah’s words, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor, … to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor,” were being fulfilled in their hearing.

* Mark and St. Luke both tell us that the listeners’ first reaction to Jesus’ teaching was astonishment. They were amazed at the “gracious words that came from his mouth” and “the wisdom that had been given to him,” both of which were probably very much on display in the way he read the words of Isaiah that he, the Word of the Father, had inspired seven centuries before. But that quickly changed once they began to reflect on what he said. First, Jesus was saying that he was the Messiah. That couldn’t be, they thought, because they knew him, they likely had pieces of furniture he made, they remembered him playing with themselves or their kids when he was younger. They didn’t believe, on the basis of Scripture and experience, that anything good, not to mention the Messiah, could come from Nazareth. “Is this not Joseph’s son?,” “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?,” they derisively asked aloud. Second, if the Scripture passage that their long-time neighbor and local construction worker had read was being fulfilled in their hearing, and he had come to proclaim the Gospel to the poor, liberty to captives, recovery of sight to the blind, freedom to the oppressed, then they naturally began to ask themselves whether he was saying theywere poor, captive, blind and oppressed.

* Rather than engaging their consciences, however, to see if what Jesus was saying might be true, rather than humbly asking, “What should we do?,” St. Mark tells us that they began to ask him to put a show there of healing like they heard he had done in the Synagogue of Capernaum. Jesus not only didn’tdo miracles there but St.