Catholic Preaching

The Hospitality Jesus Desires and Deserves, Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), July 20, 2025

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Msgr. Roger J. Landry

St. Raphael’s Parish, St. Petersburg, Florida
Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
July 21, 2025
Gen 18:1-10, Ps 15, Col 1:24-28, Lk 10:38-42

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/7.20.25_St._Raphaels_Homily_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

  • It’s a great joy for me to be with you this afternoon. I’m Monsignor Roger Landry, the National Director of The Pontifical Mission Societies, which coordinates for the Vatican the help that American Catholics give to the 1,124 missionary dioceses and territories across the globe. We have offices in Manhattan and in St. Petersburg, and whenever I’m here, Father Curtis and Father Claudius graciously welcome me into their home. Father Curtis asked me if I would be free to celebrate this Mass and I jumped at the chance. Their hospitality to me — and more generally, the hospitality of St. Raphael Parish to me — is a good backdrop for one of the main lessons of today’s readings.
  • In the Gospel, Martha and Mary welcome Jesus to their home, but they seek to welcome him in two different ways. Martha seeks to please the Lord by doing various things for him. St. Luke doesn’t specify what she was doing, but anyone who has hosted a guest knows the types of things that would have characterized her hospitality. She would have been finishing up whatever cleaning had to get done, setting up the place to eat, and doubtless preparing a meal.
  • In doing all of this, she was following in the sacred footsteps of Abraham and Sarah from the first reading, both of whom, in welcoming the three men, spared no effort. Sarah at once baked three cakes with choice flour; Abraham, at 99, ran to the herd to select a tender calf to be prepared and served it with curds and milk. Their great hospitality was rewarded. Little did they know they were serving God himself under the disguise of those three men, whom Abraham mysteriously greeted in the singular, “My Lord!” (The Fathers of the Church, as well as the great byzantine iconographers like Rublev, saw in these three persons addressed collectively as a singular “Lord” the Blessed Trinity). And it was that same God who promised them that, within a year — when Abraham was 100 and Sarah 91! — he would grant them a son, Isaac.
  • When Martha, however, similarly spares no effort to welcome God-incarnate with the same attention to detail — and solicits Jesus’ authoritative help in persuading her sister Mary to do her fair share of the preparations — Martha receives what at first glance seems to be a mild rebuke. To her plea, “Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me,” Jesus, rather than doing so, says to Martha, “Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things; there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her.”
  • What Jesus was not saying here was that Martha’s efforts were somehow evil or unappreciated. Shortly before he entered their home, Jesus, as we heard last week, gave the parable of the Good Samaritan, praising the one who made the effort to take care of another in contrast to those who did nothing. In several other places in the Gospel he praised service of others: he said that he himself had come among us as one who serves (Lk 22:27); he washed his disciples’ feet at the Last Supper and told them to do the same (Jn 13:12-14); he promised to gird himself with an apron and wait on those at the heavenly banquet (Lk 12:37); and he said that the greatest among us would be the one who serves the rest (Mt 23:11). Jesus was clearly not castigating Martha for her loving service. What he was saying to her, however, was that none of those efforts was strictly speaking essential, that therefore there was no reason to get worked about them, and that there was something more important, something that Mary realized and Martha as yet hadn’t.
  • Here’s what Mary recognized: Jesus had come to their home primarily not to be fed, but to feed. The welcome he sought most was their time, their friendship, their love, their open ears and open hearts. Mary understood this and sat at Jesus’ feet listening to him as if nothing in the rest of the world really mattered — because, in fact, Jesus implies, nothing in the rest of the world does matter anywhere near as much as that. Jesus once said in a parable, “The kingdom of heaven is like a merchant in search of fine pearls; on finding one pearl of great value, he went and sold all that he had and bought it” (Mt 13:45-46). Jesus was for Mary that pearl of great price more valuable than everything else in the jewelry collection of her life combined.
  • In these interactions in Bethany with Martha and Mary, Jesus was indicating to them, to the apostles, and to us today the most important priorities of all so that we, too, might choose the better part, by identifying the most important thing of all and then setting our minds and hearts on acting in accordance with that priority. So it’s key to get practical, because each of us wants one day to have Jesus say of us what he said of Mary in today’s Gospel, that we have chosen the better part and we won’t be separated from that Better Part even into eternity. We can ponder three applications.
    • The first is our hospitality toward Jesus. Like the sisters of Bethany, each of us is called to welcome Christ into our homes, both our physical homes and the spiritual abode of our hearts and souls. Do we really welcome Jesus and sit at his feet in prayer? Do we have a time and place where we pray regularly and say yes to him and no to other things that are relative or even real distractions? Christ knocks on the doors of each of our hearts and homes wanting to come in — as we’ll pray in the Communion Antiphon later — but how often and how much do we invite him in? The question is whether we, like Martha, are too caught up and anxious by so many other less important things that we’re welcoming into our minds and souls each day that we no longer have the energy or space to invite in Christ. Christ ought to be invited in first. That leads to the second point.
    • We’re called to imitate Mary in choosing the better part and truly allowing Jesus to feed us as he desires to do. It’s not enough for us to know what our priority should be. We also have to choose it. That means reorienting our life to make Jesus truly its center. One of the most common problems facing many even faithful Catholics today, and preventing their spiritual growth, is that they put many things ahead of God, on Sunday, on Monday and throughout the week. I like to call this mixed-up set of priorities the “Jesus is an important part of my life” syndrome. We try to squeeze Jesus into our schedule if we still have room if we’re not exhausted after having completed all the other activities we believe we “have to” do, whereas what we’re supposed to be doing is making God truly the God of our life, giving him first place, and then centering all the rest we do around our relationship with him. If only “one thing is necessary,” then if we do that one thing and fail to do everything else, then our life will still be successful; if only one thing is necessary, however, and we do everything else except that one thing, then, ultimately, we would have wasted our life. That’s what we must grasp, will and choose. Those who center their life around Jesus will have a totally different attitude, for example, toward prayer, Eucharistic adoration, daily Mass, and faith education opportunities where Jesus seeks to feed us. To choose Jesus as the best part of all was Mary of Bethany’s great wisdom and we will be wiser the more we imitate her.
    • The third application is to Martha. Martha often gets a bad rap in Church history in comparison to her sister because many interpret what Jesus did as a spiritual smack down, somehow denigrating the loving service Martha was doing for him in the kitchen. Jesus wasn’t at all minimizing the importance of what Martha was doing but was focusing on how she was doing it. The last thing Jesus would want would be for all of us merely to sit at his feet and allow everyone else to work to serve us. That entitled behavior is certainly not the Christian way or the way Jesus adopted. Like Martha, we are called to work hard serving others, but we’re supposed to do it with the spirit of Mary. That’s what the sanctification of our work is all about, to have Martha’s hands and Mary’s contemplative heart, so that we won’t be distracted by many other things, but so focused on Jesus in work, at school and in family life that we’ll be getting fed by him in action as we seek to serve others. That’s the vocation of every Christian. And one of the most important forms of service we can give to others is to help them to form the true priorities that will bring them to happiness, holiness and heaven. Jesus wants to send us as missionaries so that we might show others by our witness and words how to choose the better part, how happily to make God the true priority of one’s life, in the midst of so many modern distractions and anxieties that leave people without a sure compass and spinning out of control. This is what heroic missionaries do throughout the world in areas where the Church is too young, too poor or too persecuted to be self-sufficient. They by their own life have shown that Jesus is worth it and they’re trying to help others, sometimes in the most remote locations, to get to know Jesus, to welcome him, and to choose him as the better part. This is what each of us is called to do, with the diligence of Martha and the Jesus-centered focus of Mary
    • At tonight’s Mass, in the modern Bethany of St. Raphael’s Church, we, too, like Mary, have a chance to imitate Mary in welcoming Jesus into our life as he deserves and wishes to be welcomed. The same Jesus who visited their home comes here to St. Raphael’s in the Holy Eucharist, desiring, hoping, we will truly choose him as our priority, and having sat at his feet in the Liturgy of the Word, act on what he teaches. He has come literally to feed us. Tonight we ask him, through this nourishment, to give us the courage to reorder the priorities of our life. Jesus is the one thing necessary. Mary chose the better part. Now we beg her and Saint Martha to intercede for us before Jesus’ feet in heaven that we might receive the grace to make the same choice today, tomorrow and beyond in such a contagious way that we might become missionaries helping all those we know, indeed the whole world, reprioritize.

      •  

      The readings for today’s Mass were: 

      Reading 1
      Genesis 18:1-10a

      The LORD appeared to Abraham by the terebinth of Mamre,

      as he sat in the entrance of his tent,
      while the day was growing hot.
      Looking up, Abraham saw three men standing nearby.
      When he saw them, he ran from the entrance of the tent to greet them;
      and bowing to the ground, he said:
      “Sir, if I may ask you this favor,
      please do not go on past your servant.
      Let some water be brought, that you may bathe your feet,
      and then rest yourselves under the tree.
      Now that you have come this close to your servant,
      let me bring you a little food, that you may refresh yourselves;
      and afterward you may go on your way.”
      The men replied, “Very well, do as you have said.”

      Abraham hastened into the tent and told Sarah,

      “Quick, three measures of fine flour! Knead it and make rolls.”
      He ran to the herd, picked out a tender, choice steer,
      and gave it to a servant, who quickly prepared it.
      Then Abraham got some curds and milk,
      as well as the steer that had been prepared,
      and set these before the three men;
      and he waited on them under the tree while they ate.

      They asked Abraham, “Where is your wife Sarah?”

      He replied, “There in the tent.”
      One of them said, “I will surely return to you about this time next year,
      and Sarah will then have a son.”

      Responsorial Psalm
      Psalm 15:2-3, 3-4, 5

      R.(1a) He who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.

      One who walks blamelessly and does justice;
      who thinks the truth in his heart
      and slanders not with his tongue.
      R. He who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
      Who harms not his fellow man,
      nor takes up a reproach against his neighbor;
      by whom the reprobate is despised,
      while he honors those who fear the LORD.
      R. He who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.
      Who lends not his money at usury
      and accepts no bribe against the innocent.
      One who does these things
      shall never be disturbed.
      R. He who does justice will live in the presence of the Lord.

      Reading 2
      Colossians 1:24-28

      Brothers and sisters:

      Now I rejoice in my sufferings for your sake,
      and in my flesh I am filling up
      what is lacking in the afflictions of Christ
      on behalf of his body, which is the church,
      of which I am a minister
      in accordance with God’s stewardship given to me
      to bring to completion for you the word of God,
      the mystery hidden from ages and from generations past.
      But now it has been manifested to his holy ones,
      to whom God chose to make known the riches of the glory
      of this mystery among the Gentiles;
      it is Christ in you, the hope for glory.
      It is he whom we proclaim,
      admonishing everyone and teaching everyone with all wisdom,
      that we may present everyone perfect in Christ.

      Alleluia
      Cf. Luke 8:15

      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

      Blessed are they who have kept the word with a generous heart
      and yield a harvest through perseverance.
      R. Alleluia, alleluia.

      Gospel
      Luke 10:38-42

      Jesus entered a village

      where a woman whose name was Martha welcomed him.
      She had a sister named Mary
      who sat beside the Lord at his feet listening to him speak.
      Martha, burdened with much serving, came to him and said,
      “Lord, do you not care
      that my sister has left me by myself to do the serving?
      Tell her to help me.”
      The Lord said to her in reply,
      “Martha, Martha, you are anxious and worried about many things.
      There is need of only one thing.
      Mary has chosen the better part
      and it will not be taken from her.”

      The post The Hospitality Jesus Desires and Deserves, Sixteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), July 20, 2025 appeared first on Catholic Preaching.

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