Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil

October 2, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.2.21_LandryConCon_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, when we will enter into the dialogue Jesus had with the Pharisees when they approached him in the area across the Jordan from the Holy Land and asked him a question about marriage. It wasn’t a question of curiosity or even to learn. St. Mark tells us, “They were testing him.” Jesus was in the area where John the Baptist had been preaching and baptizing and to ask him about the lawfulness of marriage and of divorce was to ask him a political question for which John the Baptist had already been killed by Herod Antipas. John had told Herod that it was not lawful for him to be married to the wife of his brother Philip, not just because this incest by affinity was contrary to God’s plan but because marrying another person’s wife certainly was. Herod thought that Jesus was John risen from the dead. To ask Jesus about marriage and divorce was to invite him to criticize the same king and suffer the same consequence.

* Jesus responded not only by citing the Book of Genesis, but invoking, in a sense, his own memory of how things were in the beginning. “In the beginning,” Genesis teaches, “God created man in his image and likeness; in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them,” because man is most fully in God’s image and likeness when he is united to the woman in a communion of persons in love. Just as in God, the mutual love of the Father and the Son eternally generated the Holy Spirit, so the mutual love of husband and wife can generate a third person, who is both a living fruit of their love and a means for that love to grow. In God’s plan, marriage is a singular sign and participation in God’s image and likeness. “Therefore what God has joined together,” Jesus adds, “no human being must separate.” Marriage is part of God’s wisdom from the beginning to bring us into the loving union of the Trinity.

* In recent years, however, we know that the wisdom of God’s plan with regard to marriage and divorce been getting challenged from both inside and outside the Church. Many have begun to question openly whether God’s plan for marriage, taught courageously and consistently by the Church since Christ founded her, is true and relevant. These doubts or confusions about marriage are fraught with enormous consequences: for since God designed marriage to help us to discover who we are in his image and likeness and to reflect by analogy God’s own relationship with his people, if we misunderstand what marriage is, we will misunderstand who we are, who God is, and how we’re called to live our life in God’s image and likeness.

* I think there are three main categories of challenges about marriage that our contemporaries need to take to Jesus:The first comes from those who try to say God’s plan for marriage shown in the Bible is irrelevant, that marriage is not necessary. The second comes from those who say that God’s plan for marriage is too demanding and, as the divorce rate of over 40 percent attests, to be married to one person until death is an unrealistic expectation. The third comes from those who say that marriage is bigoted because it excludes two people from the same sex from marrying; to make marriage require a husband and a wife is to base i...