Fr. Roger J. Landry

Corpus Christi Basilica, Kazimierz, Kraków, Poland

Thursday of the Thirteenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Maria Goretti

July 6, 2023

Gen 22:1-19, Ps 115, Mt 9:1-8

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.6.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* The Tertio Millennio Seminar is not just a time for us to get to know our Catholic faith much more in depth, but to help us to see and live its practical consequences with greater fervor and fidelity. Today’s readings from Sacred Scripture, this renowned Basilica in which we’re celebrating Mass and the great young saint we remember liturgically today all help us to ponder and make more practical four different aspects of our life of faith.

* In the first reading, we see the culmination of Abraham’s great life of faith. By faith, we remember, at 75 years old, he packed up everything he owned and with his family set out to a place God would later show him; he didn’t know the destination but trusted in the Lord and was willing to go wherever the Lord would lead him. By faith, even though he and his wife Sarah were geriatric and childless trusted not only that they would conceive a child, but that through that child he would become the father of many nations, with children as numerous as the stars in the sky and the grains of sand on the seashore. God had him look up into the heavens to count the stars and, as Genesis says a few verse later, dusk came, meaning that Abraham was counting the stars while the sky was still blue. Just as he knew the stars were there even though he couldn’t see them with his physical eyes, so he trusted that his descendants would likewise be there. By faith, he trusted in the Lord’s promise even when the Lord would make him wait not just nine months for a child, not just nine years, but 24 years until Isaac, the son of promise, would be conceived. And in today’s Gospel, we see supreme test of Abraham’s faith, which is shown in his willingness to sacrifice Isaac, that son of the promise, at God’s direction. He was willing to do something so contrary to paternal love because he believed, as the letter to the Hebrews would later tell us, that even should Isaac be slain, God would necessarily raise him from the dead, since God had promised that Isaac would be the one through whom Abraham would become the father of many nations. This was 18 centuries before Jesus’ resurrection. We learn in the life of Abraham that faith means trusting in the Lord even when he asks us to journey, to believe beyond what we know of by biology, to be patient, and to be willing to sacrifice even what we hold dearest because we love God above all things.

* In the Gospel, we see another aspect of the gift of faith in the four friends of the paralyzed man, who, believing in Jesus, struggled to carry him on a stretcher to Jesus. We don’t know how far they needed to carry him in Capernaum, but no matter the distance, it wasn’t easy work; when they got to the house and saw how packed it was, out of love for their friend and faith in Jesus, rather than waiting, they did the very complicated maneuver of lifting their paralyzed pal up onto the roof, as we see in St. Mark’s and St. Luke’s accounts. They needed to keep their paraplegic or quadriplegic friend balanced as they lifted him up and then down, lest he fall on his head to greater injury or worse. What a scene the whole thing must have been, but they were not to be hindered or delayed.  And Jesus went far beyond what they were asking: “When Jesus saw their faith,” St. Matthew tells us, he healed the man’s sins and then healed the man’s paralysis.