Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

January 22, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/1.22.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when we will encounter Jesus preaching in his hometown synagogue. He was handed the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah and he read, from Isaiah 61, the passage describing the work of the eventual Messiah: he would be filled with the Spirit of the Lord, anointed to preach the Good News to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to the oppressed, to help the blind see, and to announce a Jubilee Year (Is 61:1-2). After reading that passage, Jesus very dramatically handed the scroll back to the synagogue attendant and sat down, as all the eyes in the room were locked on him. And he gave a shocking, one-sentence homily: “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” Today, in other words, the Messiah has come and he is speaking to you now! Today, the long awaited one, whom you have been eagerly anticipating for more than a millennium, is here!

* The words of Isaiah’s prophecy were being unveiled before their eyes. The Spirit of the Lord, that had come down upon Jesus in a visible way at his Baptism in the Jordan, as we celebrated two weeks ago, was very much still upon him. He was proclaiming the Gospel to the poor and lowly, to those who were humble enough to receive it, all throughout Galilee and making them lavishly rich with the treasure of God’s holy revelation. He was restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, vigor to cripples, health to the moribund and would soon even be restoring life to the dead. He was proclaiming liberty to those captive to sin through his merciful forgiveness and was letting those oppressed by the devil go free through exorcisms. In all of this, he was proclaiming a “year acceptable to the Lord,” a Jubilee Year, which was a reset button that God wanted the Jews to press every 50 years to reestablish their bonds with him and particularly with each other through charity. All of the aspects of this Messianic prophecy — and all the others — Jesus was actualizing before their eyes.

* Jesus wants continuously to fulfill Sacred Scripture in our hearing, before our eyes, in our minds, hearts and lives. He wants to preach the Good News to us and desires that we be sufficiently poor in spirit to receive it, recognizing how much we need that gift. He has come to set us free from captivity and oppression, especially to slavery to our addictions and sins. He has come to help us recognize our blind spots and recover our sight, so that we might first see him in prayer and the Sacraments and then learn how to see all things in his light. He wants to proclaim not just a year acceptable to the Lord but a lifetime and eternity pleasing to God and joyous to us. He wants to engage us in a consequential conversation of love and life that knows no end, planting the seed of the Word of God within us and helping us to bear great fruit, to let his word take on our flesh and be fulfilled in and by us.

* This Sunday we will celebrate for the third time a new and important annual feast, the Sunday of the Word of God, which Pope Francis established on September 30, 2019 to accentuate the importance that Sacred Scripture is meant to have in the faith, prayer and lives of believers. He announced it intentionally on September 30,