Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil

January 21, 2023

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.21.23_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation the Lord wants to have with us this Sunday, when the Church will mark for the fourth time the Sunday of the Word of God, which Pope Francis decreed in 2019 would take place on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time. He established it, he said, to help believers, to assist you and me, to grow in our knowledge of Sacred Scripture, to mine its inexhaustible riches and help us better to proclaim that treasure to the world. Scripture, he added, is a “constant dialogue between the Lord and his people.” When approached in a spirit of prayer, it allows us to enter into the most consequential conversation of all. That’s why when Conversations with Consequences was begun back in 2019, the Catholic Association asked me to contribute a reflection each week on the Gospel for the upcoming Sunday, so that we might better respond to the invitation Christ gives us eek to enter into a prayerful discussion that overflows into a dialogue of life. As we mark this weekend the Sunday of the Word of God, we give thanks to the Lord for entering into colloquy with us and ask his help so that we might be able to bring many others into that life-changing, heart-to-heart exchange.

* Let’s turn to the consequential conversation the Lord wants to have with us in our parishes this Sunday. Matthew tells us that Jesus left his native Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee, in the territory of Zebulun and Napthali. The reason he did so was not just that his fellow Nazarenes had tried to kill him by tossing him off the cliff on which Nazareth had been built, but to fulfill a prophecy, the prophecy that Isaiah announced 700 years before in Sunday’s first reading: “Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles: the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” By that point in history, Zebulun and Napthali, two regions named after two of the 12 sons of Jacob, had been annihilated by the invading Assyrians. Those who survived were still in the darkness not only of collective trauma but of subjugation. Isaiah’s words were those of hope, that when the Messiah would come, he would bring great light to illumine their existential gloom, that he would bring redemption to their slavery and abjection. In the Gospel, we see the fulfillment of that prophecy. Jesus, the Light of the World, the long-awaited Messiah, came to them in order — by his teaching, by his miracles, by his presence, and eventually by his passion, death and resurrection — to lead them on an exodus from darkness into great light. He was going to help them see the light, live in the light, and walk as children of the light. That’s why, as St. Matthew recounts for us, Jesus’ first words were “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is another way of saying, “Leave the Darkness. Come, believe in, and live in, the Light!”

* Then Jesus made that pilgrimage from darkness into light even more specific. He saw two brothers, Simon and Andrew, fishing. He said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Even though St. Peter’s first words to the Lord, recounted in St. Luke’s version of this encounter, were “Depart from me,