Fr. Roger J. Landry

Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan

Thursday of the 18th Week of Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of the Dedication of St. Mary Major

Numbers 20:1-13, Ps 95, Mt 16:13-23

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.5.21_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were made in the homily:

* There’s a beautiful part of Mass, right before the proclamation of the Gospel, when we make a sign of the Cross over our foreheads, mouths and heart with a prayer for the Lord to be in our minds, on our lips and in our hearts. One would figure that we’d make a sign of the Cross over our ears to help our hearing, as was done at our baptism. We bless our hearts, rather, because we’re supposed to be hearing with our hearts, hearing with love and gratitude in a way that changes us at our core, symbolized Biblically by the heart. Once the heart is willing to believe, then the mind can more deeply grasp it, and once mind and heart together believe, then it is so much easier to proclaim what we have come to know and love.

* We see the opposite of this type of opening in today’s first reading, commented upon by the Psalm. The hearts of the Israelites in the desert were not open to the meaning of all God’s miracles to free them from Pharaoh in Egypt and then to care for them in the desert. That led to their constant murmuring, as if God was leading them through all of these theophanies to their graves rather than the Promised Land. Today they complain, “Why have you brought the LORD’s assembly into this desert where we and our livestock are dying? Why did you lead us out of Egypt, only to bring us to this wretched place which has neither grain nor figs nor vines nor pomegranates? Here there is not even water to drink!” As a result, God gave Moses the command to strike the rock twice and have it bring forth water. Even though the Israelites and their animals were able to lubricate their throats and hydrate themselves, their hearts did not much benefit through increased faith. And this scene we remember practically every morning in the invitatory Psalm before the Office of Readings in which we pray: “Oh, that today you would hear his voice: ‘Harden not your hearts as at Meribah, as in the day of Massah in the desert, Where your fathers tested me; they tested me though they had seen my works.” Every morning as we cry out with joy to the Lord, acclaim him as the Rock of Salvation, thank him and joyfully sing psalms to him, God appeals to us not to harden our hearts anew and test him and his patience by a lack of faith. As we prepare to drink from the living water he gives us, he wants us to remember Meribah and open ourselves to faith.

* We see the need for this continuous openness in the Gospel scene. After Peter had heard God the Father tell him in his mind that Jesus was not only the Messiah but the Father’s Son, after Peter had confessed him with his lips, we see that his heart was still closed to the type of Messiah Jesus would be and the way by which the Son of God would redeem us. When Jesus announced that he would “go to Jerusalem and suffer greatly from the elders, the chief priests, and the scribes, and be killed and on the third day be raised,” Peter thoroughly closed the hearing of his heart and said, ““God forbid, Lord! No such thing shall ever happen to you.” His heart was closed to God’s will, his love, his center was opposed, just like Satan’s was, which is why Jesus changed Simon’s name anew to the great tempter. Our hearts remain closed when we don’t love what Jesus did for us and when we don’t will what he will say tomorrow, in the continuation of this Gospel,