Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

November 6, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.6.21_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 the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday. Last week, you remember, Jesus told us clearly what the first and greatest commandment is, the most important thing we have to do in life: to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength. Love, as we know, is more than merely words and feelings, but is shown in deeds. Love is choosing to act for the good of another, sacrificing oneself for sake of someone or something else. In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus presents us with a standard to help us to determine, in our concrete circumstances, whether we are really trying to love God with all we are and have.

* After Jesus had finished his “formal” teaching in the courtyard of the Temple of Jerusalem, he began to “people watch,” in order to instruct his apostles about how to put what he was teaching into action. They saw the stream of people depositing money in the temple treasury, which was a large tuba-shaped receptacle leading to a secure money box. People would put their coins in the horn at the top, which was like a funnel, and then the sound of the coins would resonate as they rolled down the metal tubing into the box. Many rich people, St. Mark tells us, were putting in large sums and “making a lot of noise” on the treasury tuba. But then a poor widow came and put in two lepta, two small coins that together were worth about a penny and likely barely made a sound. Jesus gave a surprising lesson that the disciples obviously never forgot. Jesus praised the poor widow rather than all the rest, saying that she had contributed more than all of them, for they, he said, “gave out of their surplus, but she gave everything she had, all she had to live on.” This widow, because of her poverty, could easily have been excused for giving nothing. She could have justly chosen to drop into the tuba only one of the lepta and kept the other for herself. But she didn’t. She gave it all. And her generosity was praised by Jesus and will remain famous until the end of time.

* What could have moved her to give to the Temple even what she needed to survive? There’s only one reason: her deep faith. She believed not simply that God exists, or that he worked various miracles in the past to help her people. She believed so much in him and was so convinced of the importance of what was going on in God’s house that she wanted to dedicate her life and all her goods to continuing and expanding it. She accounted the continuance and expansion of that saving work as worth more than even her own life.

* The truth is that the stronger our faith, the more we are willing to trust in God and the more we are willing to sacrifice. The more we love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, the more we will give of ourselves and what we have to the advance of his work. The first apostles, moved by faith in Christ, left fishing businesses and lucrative tax collection seats to follow Christ, even though they would have, like Jesus, no bread, no money, no bags, no change of clothes, and no place to lay their head (Lk 9:3; 9:58). The early Christians, as we read in the Acts of the Apostles, used to sell their property and lay the proceeds at the feet of the apostles in order to share with those in most need and advance the proclamat...