Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Tuesday of the 26th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Mother Theodore Guerin

October 3, 2023

Zec 8:20-23, Ps 87, Lk 9:51-56

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.3.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Today we come to the fulcrum of the Gospel of St. Luke, when he tells us that Jesus “resolutely determined to journey to Jerusalem.” Literally in the Greek it means that he “fixed his face on Jerusalem” and began the journey of ascent to the place where he would offer his life on the Cross for us all and complete his salvific mission. It would be there that Jesus would ultimately fulfill the prophecies announced by Zechariah after the exile. It would be to Jesus, the true temple destroyed and rebuilt in three days, to Jesus on the Cross, that people from different cities would say, “Come, let us go to implore the favor of the Lord,” “I, too, will go to seek the Lord, and “Let us go with you, for we have heard that God is with you.” It would there, on Calvary, that the refrain for the Responsorial Psalm today, “God is with us,” would take on new, salvific meaning.

* But before he would do that, he was going to try to include the Samaritans in that saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” Because, however, Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above receiving their Savior! And when the Boangerges brothers — the Sons of Thunder, John and James — sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John.

* The failure of both the Samaritans and the Boangerges brothers to focus on Jesus teaches us a valuable lessons: many times we can put our own grievances, our own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. We can take our eyes off of Jesus and off of where Jesus has set his eyes. We can put conditions on God’s saving work, like the Samaritans tried: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. He tells us, for example, in St. Matthew’s Gospel that whenever we refuse to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, care to the sick, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked and visits to the imprisoned, we fail to welcome him in need (Mt 25:31-46), and yet we continue to dissociate our care for the homeless, the hungry, the immigrant, the prisoner from Jesus himself. We also see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten, scourged and murdered. Still today many do not want to embrace Jesus’ determined vision about the way he wishes to be with us, united with us on the path of sacrificial love we call the way of the Cross. They seek Christ without the Cross,