Fr. Roger J. Landry

Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan

Friday of the Fifth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I

Memorial of St. Scholastica

February 10, 2023

Gen 3:1-8, Ps 32, Mk 7:31-37

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/2.10.23_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

* In today’s Gospel, Jesus works a great miracle of healing a deaf-mute in such a way that the people were astonished and exclaimed, “He has done all things well. He makes the deaf hear and the mute speak.” The same miracle Jesus worked in the Decapolis he works all over the world. He worked it in your life and mine on the day of our baptism. He didn’t use spit, but through his minister he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the priest or deacon said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the glory and praise of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. The graces of baptism not only touched these organs but the entirety of our being to be receptive to God in fulfillment of the prayer made in the Alleluia verse, “Open our hearts, O Lord, to listen to the words of your Son.” He wants us to listen to him with hearts full of love, to treasure his word, to be transformed by it, so that through that transformation we might transform the world. Everything begins with hearing God speak to us and responding with faith.

* This is important for us to grasp in order to understand the nature of sin. In today’s first reading, we encounter the blow-by-blow details of what we call the “original sin,” but in it we see the essential physiognomy of any sin.

* It begins with listening to God poorly, rather than attentively and lovingly, rather than hanging on his every word. God had told Adam that he wasn’t to eat of the fruit of the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil, but as he passed that on to Eve, the details changed, as Eve said, “We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; it is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’” Even though Adam’s and Eve’s life depended on it, they hadn’t listened to God accurately. God had said nothing about not touching it. Every sin begins with a sin of listening. Pope Benedict mentions this in Verbum Domini, “Quite frequently in both the Old and in the New Testament, we find sin described as a refusal to hear the word, as a breaking of the covenant and thus as being closed to God who calls us to communion with himself. Sacred Scripture shows how man’s sin is essentially disobedience and refusal to hear.… For this reason it is important that the faithful be taught to acknowledge that the root of sin lies in the refusal to hear the word of the Lord, and to accept in Jesus, the Word of God, the forgiveness that opens us to salvation” (26). That refusal to listen does not just refer to those who totally reject paying any attention or reject what they hear, but also those who refuse to listen well and attentively.In Hebrew, the same word is used for “hearing” and “obeying,” because it was inconceivable that one could hear God asking something and refuse to obey. In Latin the same relationship is stressed. The word to listen in Latin is audire and to obey is ob-audire, which means to listen intentively, to eavesdrop. The first step in sin is to fail to listen to “every word that comes from God’s mouth,” not to treat what he says as the “words of everlasting life.”

* The second aspect of the devil’s temptation was...