Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

August 12, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.12.23_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 the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, in which Jesus will help the apostles, especially St. Peter, to overcome their primal fears and through which he seeks to help us, too, to go from fear to faith, and to overcome our terror of failure, abandonment, struggle, sickness, pain, the past, the future, death, the possibility of hell and anything and everything else, too.

* Let’s put ourselves first in this dramatic scene whose main elements are recapitulated in some way or another in the life of every disciple. In the scene right before this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus had had everyone sit down on the green grass for the multiplication of the loaves and fish, so we know that it must have been mid-March to mid-April in the Holy Land, because after that the grass begins to get scorched by the sun and loses its verdant color. That would mean sunset would have happened about 6 pm, which is the time the apostles got into the boat to begin the journey across the top of the Sea of Galilee. It would have been about a 5-6 mile journey that should have taken a few hours. The storm began to rage, St. Matthew tells us, when they were in the middle of the Sea, so about an hour or two along their trek. Jesus came to them in the “fourth watch of the night” — the period stretching from 3-6 am — which meant that by that point, they had been in the boat 9-12 hours, battling a ferocious storm, fatigued, soaking wet and fearing for their life. Jesus was placidly praying on the mountain as they were struggling for hours not to drown to death. Why did Jesus wait so long as his friends were in peril? It brings us back to the other time that they were afraid for their life on the Sea, when Jesus was asleep in the bow of the boat as they thought they were about to perish. In both cases, Jesus’ supposed inaction was to increase their faith. He was introducing them to a central truth of the spiritual life: that in order to be able to abandon ourselves to God, we must first feel what appears to be total abandonment by  It’s only then that we’re able to make the leap that faith entails. When all human means are exhausted, when even God seems to be absent, it’s then that we can make a deep act of faith to believe in him even when we can’t see or hear him.

* After hours of struggling for their lives, Jesus comes walking along the white caps of the churning sea. Their first reaction was to think they were seeing a ghost — after all, no one had ever seen a man walk on water before, not to mention surf waves without a surfboard. There was also a superstition that there were monsters at the bottom of the Sea of Galilee and likely that played into their alarm as well. Jesus, however, said to them across the howling winds, “Take courage! I am (here)! Do not be afraid!!” They were words of confidence that could help assuage their fears and give them courage. We see the first fruit of that in Peter. “Lord, if it is you,” he said, “Bid me to come to you across the water.” He first refers to the walking “ghost” as “Lord,” but then he qualifies it by saying, “if it is you.” He was hovering between belief and unbelief. At the word of Jesus, however, “Come!,” he did what he had precisely been trying to avoid over the previous 7-10 hours or more: he ...