Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Friday of the Second Week of Advent

Memorial of Our Lady of Loreto

December 10, 2021

Is 48, Ps 1, Mt 11:16-19

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/12.10.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* As we have been pondering, Advent involves a triple dynamism: the Lord comes, we go out to meet him with lighted lamps, and then, transformed by the encounter with the Bridegroom, we continue to journey with him and finish together with him his mission.

* When we go out to meet him, it’s not just to shake his hand but to have him shake us up and transform us. In the Gospel today, Jesus says that many of us don’t encounter him with that conversion in mind. He describes his generation — and frankly every generation — like children in marketplaces “sitting” — in other words, not wanting to move. They’re playing different music and want everyone to respond to that music: if they play the flute, they want people to dance; if they play a dirge, they want people to mourn. The key is that they themselves want to set the terms of the interaction. Rather than convert, they want the others to move and change. That’s what Jesus was saying they were doing with both of the figures that the Jewish people had been awaiting, “Elijah” and the “Messiah,” the precursor and the Anointed One, ultimately God’s messenger and God himself. They criticized John the Baptist for his ascetical fasting; and when Jesus wasn’t fasting because he was showing us how to rejoice because the Bridegroom was with us, they criticized him for drawing close in mercy to the hedonists like the tax collectors and other sinners, who were enjoying the things of this world in a disordered way. They failed to grasp that it’s we who should be dancing to the Lord’s music and not the other way around. They were classifying-and-conquering not only the principal figure of preparation for the Messiah’s Advent, St. John the Baptist, but the Messiah himself.

* I also think it’s significant that Jesus describes them as sitting in the “marketplace.” The marketplace is where we go to buy things according to our preferences. Today this is an issue because in the marketplace we learn a type of “consumerism” that can then come to impact our faith. We like things to happen according to our pleasures and preferences: we like certain Mass times and not others, certain liturgical forms, certain music or none, certain popes, bishops or priests, certain Psalm tones, certain Eucharistic prayers, certain lengths of homilies, certain messages, certain styles. This consumerism can cause us to behave much like the children in the marketplace, trying to play the music for our relationship with the Lord. We play soft, sentimental hits and want the Lord just to touch our emotions. We’ll play marches and want the Lord to discipline those we criticize and boss them around like a drill sergeant. We’ll play horror movie music to try to “scare the hell” out of people. We’ll play heavy metal and drown out the Lord’s whisper. We won’t play any music at all, because we’re in a bad mood, or hate music, or can’t sing, or anything else. The point is that we need to attune ourselves to what the Lord is playing.

* In the first reading, God tells us through Isaiah, “I, the Lord, your God, teach you what is for your good, and lead you on the way you should go.” We need to allow him to teach and guide us, rather than our seeking to teach him how the world, our life and the lives of those around us should run. We need to follow him rather than, like Peter when Jesus called him “Satan,” try to lead him. We prayed in the Psalm,