Fr. Roger J. Landry

Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Tuesday of the Seventh Week of Easter

Memorial of St. Philip Neri

May 26, 2020

Acts 20:17-38*, Ps 68, Jn 17:1-19*

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/5.26.20_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* During the second half of the Easter Season, we focus on Jesus’ words during the Last Supper taken from the Gospel of John. For the past several weeks we have been pondering what we could call Jesus’ instructions to the apostles: for example, his washing the disciples’ feet to give us the example of washing other’s feet; his words about loving others as he has loved us; remaining attached to him the Vine and in him to the other branches; the suffering we’ll have to endure to give witness to Christ; the outpouring of the Holy Spirit and what the Holy Spirit will do. Today he continues to teach but he teaches us mystagogically, not pedagogically, as he prays and allows us to eavesdrop and enter into his prayer. It’s been called his great priestly prayer and in it we see why Jesus was living. He was living to glorify the Father. He asked God the Father to glorify him so that he could in turn glorify the Father. He glorified the Father by accomplishing the work the Father had given him to do, the work of revealing the Father’s love to the extreme in saving his sons and daughters. He also glorified the Father by leaving the disciples in the world so that they in turn could continue that saving work. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus, the Light of the World, said that his disciples would reflect his light and that others, in seeing their good deeds of love, would glorify God the Father in heaven. The greatest glorification of God the Father would take place when Jesus was exalted on the Cross. And the most luminescent, greatest deed of all is when we are lifted up on the Cross with Jesus, when we are willing to lay down our lives out of love for others, in simple deeds all the way to martyrdom.

* Someone who glorified God in this way and led many others to do so is St. Paul. Today we have his valedictory address to the Church in Ephesus, meeting with them at the port of Miletus. He describes his sufferings, tears and trials, the imprisonments and hardships that he endured and those that still awaited him, but through all of it, he says, he “did not shrink from telling you what was for your benefit,” “from proclaiming to you the entire plan of God,” from “bear[ing] witness to the Gospel of God’s grace, doing so in the square and in private, “in public or in your homes.” As he said to the Romans elsewhere, “I am not ashamed of the Gospel,” because he thought the whole Gospel was “good news” with power to save, and he wanted everyone else to know the truth that would set them free. Everything was with that goal in mind, to proclaim the full Gospel of God, including and especially the Cross. We spoke last week that he did not preach on the Cross in Athens, but when he arrived in Corinth, he resolved to know nothing but the Cross of our Lord Jesus Christ and to preach it as God’s power and wisdom. Later, he would write to the Galatians that he glories in nothing but the Cross, by which the world has been crucified to him and him to the world. He would go so far as to say he had been crucified — glorified — with Christ and the life he now lives, he lives by faith in the Son of God who loved him and gave his life for him. He proves Jesus’ point about those disciples in the world glorifying both the Son and the Father, as his whole post-conversion life bore this witness.

* Today the Church celebrates a saint whose life simi...