Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A) (Vigil)

June 20, 2020

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/6.20.20_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

The text that guided the homily was: 

* 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.

* After the Easter Season, Pentecost and the Feasts of the Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi, we return to the Gospels of ordinary times and pick up in the tenth chapter of St. Matthew’s Gospel, where Jesus says to us paradoxically something very consoling as well as something a little disconcerting before teaching us how the two go together. On the one hand, Jesus tells us not to be afraid, because our Father in heaven loves us more than all the sparrows in the world and knows us intimately down to our last strand of hair. Fifteen times in the Gospel, in fact, Jesus tells us not to be afraid, and almost every time he returns to the reason not to fear, because our Father in heaven — like any good father whom we remember on this Father’s day! — will provide for us and protect us. In the Sermon on the Mount, he tells us not to worry about what we will eat or drink or wear — things we really need — because that same Father who clothes the lilies of the field knows what we need and will take care of us (Mt 6:28-32). He tells us today that he doesn’t even want us to fear suffering and physical death, because not even death can separate us from our Father’s love (Rom 8:38-39). These words are even more important at a time in which so many fear the coronavirus and its consequences, the tenuous state of the world stability, and various worrisome trends in culture, law and politics.

* At the same time Jesus says that there’s one fear we should have: “Do not fear those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” This being who seeks to DESTROY us in hell is the devil, someone who would rather us ignore his existence and many in our age and even sometimes in the Church do. Out of love for us, Jesus tells us, very directly, that the devil exists, that he seeks to kill us, and that we should therefore have a healthy fear of him. St. Peter compares the devil to a type of wild beast: “Your adversary, the devil, is prowling the world like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). That someone he longs to consume is you and me.

* Jesus wants us to have a healthy fear of the evil one, which involves two elements:

* First, we need to know how the devil seeks to attack us. The devil has no power over us unless we give him that power. He cannot kill our soul unless we become his accomplices and allow our souls to be killed through mortal (deadly) sin, which separates our souls from the source of life, who is God. The way the “Father of lies” (Jn 8:44) seeks to accomplish this assisted suicide is by getting us to succumb to one of his lies, just as he did with Eve and Adam in the Garden (Gen 3). A healthy fear of the devil involves no paranoia, but a sane vigilance against his lies and against all his temptations to induce us to sin.

* Second, once we know that and how he’s out to get us, we have to know what the remedy is to defeat his attempt to defeat us forever. That remedy is a deep trust in God that expresses itself in saying yes to God in everything. The evil one got Adam and Eve to sin first by getting them to distrust God and his promises and then to do what God told them not to do; therefore, the antidote to the devil’s machinations is to accentuate the opposite of what t...