Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

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

September 4, 2021

 

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

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/9.4.21_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, when we will get a glimpse of the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. On the force of this reputation, several true friends brought a man who was deaf and mute to Jesus, begging him to lay hands on him. They were not to be let down. The Lord put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Be opened!,” and the man’s capacity to hear and speak were healed. Amazement seized them all. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t help themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”

* “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments.

* This motto is being challenged in many segments of our culture today. Many of the first pagans, we remember, not to mention Scribes and Pharisees who thought Jesus was a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Little could they fathom what the small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies would be do in his name throughout the globe. Today, too, many in our culture treat the Lord and the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it.” To them Jesus, his teaching and the Church are a modern irrelevancy. They, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, more of these false ideas have been invading the minds of believers, and this is a much greater concern.

* If Jesus were to ask us whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? In general, I think all of us, as his disciples, would want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing and does everything well; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But it’s when we turn to specific issues that we see whether we, like the residents of the Decapolis, truly praise him for doing somethings well or all things well. We can consider a handful of test questions Jesus might ask us and our contemporaries to determine if we really trust him as God to do everything perfect...