A Faithful Tree Bearing Good Fruit, Twelfth Wednesday (I), June 26, 2019

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Visitation Mission of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Josemaria Escriva
Twentieth Anniversary of My Priestly Ordination
June 26, 2019
Gen 15:1-12.17-18, Ps 105, Mt 7:15-20

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• Jesus continues to bring to a conclusion the 16-course Sermon on the Mount we have been pondering for two-and-a-half weeks. He uses two images here. First, he discusses false prophets who wear the sheepskin garments of prophets but inside are far from God and who teach something opposed to his teaching. False prophets can be laxist or rigorist, pretending the faith is too easy or not merciful enough. They can, like the Scribes and the Pharisees, make it too much about external deeds, or, like the Sadducees, too little about external deeds, both of which separate faith from life. Jesus says instead we need to focus on a good tree bearing good fruit. We become a good tree by uniting ourselves to Christ as branches to the Vine, because, as he tells us in the alleluia verse taken from his discourse on the Vine and the Branches, if we remain in him and he in us we will bear good fruit.
• Becoming a good tree begins with a faithful response to God. We see that in Abram’s response to God in today’s first reading. He was faithful enough to leave home and go to a place the Lord would show. But after a decade his faith was being tested by doubts as to whether he would become a father at all. God took him outside and told him to look to the sky and count the stars … and later the sun was about to set, meaning that he was looking to the heavens during day light. He obviously couldn’t count the stars but he knew they were there. God was asking him to have faith that his descendants were likewise there like the stars. Abraham asked for more in what was clearly a dark night of faith, when a “deep, terrifying darkness enveloped him.” The Lord gave him that confirmation with the miraculous smoking fire pot and flaming torch in the midst of the sacrifice Abram had made.
• Today the Church celebrates the Memorial of Saint Josemaria, who was a good tree bearing good fruit and a father of so many in the faith. He was a true prophet proclaiming that everyone, including the laity, are called to holiness, called to be good trees, with faith flowing through deeds, uniting faith and life. He suffered from the false prophets of the age saying he was a heretic for saying lay people could be saints. He suffered during the worst of the Spanish Civil War, when it seemed to some on many occasions that the whole Church would be massacred and the Work destroyed before it had really grown. But like Abram he continued to believe, confident in what God the Father had revealed about the growth of the work.
• Today is the 20th anniversary of my priestly ordination and I give thanks to God for his fidelity to me making it possible for me to be faithful to him. I thank God the Father and God the Holy Spirit for uniting me through ordination to God the Son so that through that sacramental yoking, as branch to Vine, I might bear fruit for him. I thank him for the gift of priestly chaste celibacy that makes it possible for me, having left everything for Christ, to receive a hundred-fold in spiritual sons and daughters. I thank him for remembering his covenant forever. How can I repay the Lord for his goodness to me? For the 9818th time since my ordination, I lift up the chalice of salvation and call upon his name! (Ps 116)

The readings for today’s Mass were: