Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)

January 16, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.16.21_Landry_ConCon.m4a

 

The text that guided the homily is: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, in which he will help us enter into the inner nature of the Christian calling. With the various convulsions and confusions happening in the United States, it is urgent for Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, to live out our Christian vocations to the full, and truly become the salt of the earth, the light of the world and the leaven our beloved country needs. And it’s crucial for us to ponder with Jesus today the three main stages of growth in any Christian vocation and to mature to full stature in him.

* The first stage of this divine drama is curiosity, wonder, and a eventually a certain amazement. When St. John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!,” two of those who had been following and helping John the Baptist — Andrew, and “another disciple” who very likely was John the Evangelist — were obviously intrigued. As good Jews, they knew the significance of the Paschal Lamb from the Passover rite to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt, which they reenacted each year. When John pointed out Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” they couldn’t help but be curious. So they did what curious people ordinarily do: they tried to find out more. Enquiring minds want to know. They began to follow Jesus, but they, being fishermen, were not particularly adept as private investigators. Jesus, aware that they were on his tail, turned around and asked them “What are you looking for?” Caught off guard, they asked, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Jesus didn’t respond with a direct answer to their small talk. He did not want to meet them at the level of curiosity; on the other hand, he didn’t want to kill that curiosity either, by admitting what he would say later, that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20). So he responded by trying to bring them from their curiosity to something higher: “Come and see!,” he said. He invited them to follow him more closely and to spend time with him.

* That brings us to the second stage of the growth in vocation: to come to be with Jesus, to follow him to where he is. We call this stage discipleship. “Disciple” is the Greek word for “student.” We come to Jesus the Master to learn from him. We come not just to learn facts from him or other information that we then ignore or forget later. We come to him to learn how to live, how to die, and how to live forever. At Jesus’ invitation, Andrew and John came and saw his homeless mansion. St. John gives us a very interesting detail (which is one of the reasons why he was almost certainly the “other disciple” he names, because it would have been hard for him to know it otherwise): “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” This detail shows us first how much of an impression that meeting with Jesus had in his life that he would never forget the precise time he met Jesus for the first time. It also shows us that this meeting wasn’t brief. Scholars convincingly have shown, based on the text of St. John, that it was probably a Friday when this encounter happened, and once Jews reached about 4:00 pm, the Sabbath would begin and travel would be prohibited. So it’s likely that Andrew and John got to spend not just an hour or two with Jesus but a little more than a full day with Jesus, peppering him with questions, answering his questions, laughing, praying,