Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

June 25, 2022

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.25.22_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The following text guided the homily: 

* This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when we return to the Sundays of Ordinary Time after the six Sundays of Lent, the Seven Sundays of Easter and the special post-Pentecost feasts of the Holy Trinity and the Body and Blood of the Lord. In the Gospel the Church gives us, we encounter Jesus’ focus on his Mission, his calling to each of us to share his focus, and the rejection some people give to that vocation. It’s an important help for us so that we may notonly accept but embrace the journey Jesus is asking each of us to make with him in life.

* The Gospel passage begins with St. Luke’s telling us that Jesus had “resolutely determined,” he literally “fixed his face,” on Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the place where he will complete his salvific mission. Jesus was now laser-beamed on his passion, death and resurrection, which would constitute the new Passover on which he would lead his chosen people, and he wanted us to receive the fruits of that triumph and join him in passing from death to life. The evangelist tells us that he sent messengers ahead of him to a Samaritan village to prepare for his reception there, because he wanted to include the Samaritans in his saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” But because Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, St. Luke tells us, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above their receiving their Savior. And when the apostles James and John, whom Jesus had nicknamed the Boanerges brothers, the Sons of Thunder, sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John. The failure of both the Samaritans and the Boanerges teaches us a valuable lesson: Often people can put their own grievances, their own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. They can put conditions on God’s saving work: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Or like John and James we can get distracted by others’ rejecting Jesus that we in fact do the same. Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans and apostles of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. He tells us, for example, in St. Matthew’s Gospel that whenever we refuse to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, care to the sick, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked and visits to the imprisoned, we fail to welcome him in need (Mt 25:31-46). We also see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten,