Fr. Roger J. Landry
St. Agnes Church, Manhattan
Seventh Sunday after Pentecost, Extraordinary Form
July 19, 2020
Rom 6:19-23, Mt 7:15-21
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following text guided today’s homily:
- Yesterday the Church marked the 150th Anniversary of Vatican I’s Dogmatic Constitution Pastor Aeternus, which formally defined as divinely revealed the dogma of papal infallibility. It put into words what the Church had long believed, that when the Pope, by virtue of his authority as shepherd and teacher of all Christians, defines a doctrine about faith or morals to be held by the whole Church, he does so infallibly by means the divine assistance of the Holy Spirit that Jesus promised to Peter and to the Church. As I wrote in an article for the National Catholic Register celebrating this sesquicentenary, to clarify that the Pope can teach something as infallibly true is resolutely to proclaim that there is truth; that God is real; that Jesus Christ, the incarnate Son of God and the Truth that sets us free, taught infallibly; and that he has given his own capacity to teach the truth without error to the Church and to those he has chosen, called and commissioned to lead the Church in communion with him.
- Jesus wants us to believe the truth, to live the truth and to teach the truth. The truth about God. The truth about the human person made in God’s image and likeness. The truth about prayer and the sacraments. The truth about right and wrong, good and evil, life and death, heaven and hell. The devil, on the other hand, is the “father of lies” (Jn 8:44), who seeks to deceive and confuse and ultimately get people to reject the truth about God, ourselves and others, and believe, live and teach falsehood.
- That’s why Jesus’ words today in the Gospel are so important. He tells us, “Beware of False Prophets,” those who rather than leading others in the ways of God lead them astray. Throughout the Old Testament, the chosen prophets of the Lord were always opposed by imposters, those who claimed the title prophet but didn’t speak the word of the Lord but a false word that their listeners often found more pleasant. False prophecy remained a major problem at the time of Jesus and the early Church. St. John wrote in his first letter, “Many false prophets have gone out into the world” (1 Jn 4:1). St. Peter wrote, “There were also false prophets among the people, even as there will be lying teachers among you (2 Pet 2:1). The Didache, authored in the late first century as a type of catechesis for the first Christians, said, “Let every apostle that comes to you be received as the Lord,” but cautioned them to pay attention: “If he teaches so as to increase righteousness and the knowledge of the Lord, receive him as the Lord,” but “if the teacher, … teaches another doctrine opposed to this, do not listen to him.” The Didache summarizes, “Not every one who speaks [charismatically] is a prophet, but only the one who holds the ways of the Lord. So from their ways shall the false prophet and the prophet be known.”
- This issue, this serious responsibility, of knowing how to distinguish between true and false prophets didn’t end with the apostolic age. We see it in the many heresies throughout Church history. We see it today. There’s a type of false prophet who preaches a laxist, easy way, as if the road to life is broad and to perdition is narrow. He or she doesn’t live by or repeat Jesus’ challenge to lose our life to save it, to pick up our Cross each day and follow him, to sacrifice ourselves to wash others’ feet, to love God not just a little but with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and to love our neighbor in a self-sacrificial way as Jesus has loved us. This type of false prophet manipulates God’s unconditional love to pretend as if God never gave us the Ten Commandments to train us to love. He tries to pretend that sin isn’t sin, that there’s no need for conversion, that God doesn’t really want us to heed his words to repent and believe but simply to go on doing exactly what we’re doing. There’s another type of false prophet who separates faith from life, union with God in the sanctuary from union with God on the streets, in the workplace, in the classroom, in the home. This type of prophet does not preach that liturgy is connected to life and pretends that as long as one is coming to Church and being generous, what that person does outside is never really a subject of his or God’s attention. A third type of false prophet is like many of the Pharisees of old, who use the moral prohibitions of Sacred Scripture as weapons to accuse and condemn others, without preaching the power of God’s mercy, without praying for others, without taking the planks of their own eyes. This type of false prophet creates a proud, small clique of believers apart from others, rather than moves people to join Jesus in seeking and saving what is lost.
- But while some false prophets are easy to spot, many are not. One really has to look carefully. One has to pay very close attention to the person’s words and behavior. Jesus talks about this in today’s Gospel. From the time of Elijah, prophets wore sheepskin mantles, by which they could be distinguished from others. False and true prophets both came in sheep’s clothing, and so one couldn’t just stop at superficial vesture. Jesus said that we needed to examine up close the fruit they produce. He uses two images: thorn bushes that produce tiny toxic fruit that at first glance looks like grapes and thistles that from a distance produce something resembling a fig. He calls us to get beyond first appearances, beyond initial words, beyond their crying out “Lord, Lord,” in prayer, to determine whether the fruit they produce is good, healthy and holy or toxic and spiritually lethal. “By their fruits you will know them,” Jesus says twice, reminding us, “every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit.” Are the prophets producing good fruit or bad? Are they making us genuinely more Christ-like or less? Are they challenging us toward holiness or toward worldliness? Are they summoning us, to use the words of the epistle from St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, to “present [our bodies] as slaves to righteousness for sanctification” or “as slaves to impurity, … lawnessness [and] sin”?
- Discerning between true and false prophets is not easy, not fast and not fun. Some Catholics would prefer to remain naïve, as if everyone who teaches theology at a Catholic university teaches according to the magisterium, as if every catechist in schools and CCD programs reliably passes on the fullness of the faith, as if every Catholic cleric who mounts the pulpit is giving you the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth as God intends. To remember that there are false prophets doesn’t mean that all of a sudden Jesus wants us to become paranoid, distrusting any teacher of the faith until we do an exhaustive background check on every word and action. Rather he wants us to be alert that sometimes there are false prophets who manipulate the faith of believers to justify their own behavior, or to be admired and popular, or to grow rich.
- It’s tempting, however, to focus mainly on discerning, outing and denouncing the false prophets today who lead people astray rather than in the Lord’s footsteps, but there are two larger — and I think more important — responses we should give to today’s Gospel.
- The first is that when we’ve recognized that someone is a true prophet, whose words and conduct align with the Lord’s and who bears evident fruit of holiness, whether we heed that prophet’s word, convert as they summon us to do, and sacrifice as God through them challenges us to do. While there are indeed false prophets, God never ceases to call and send out true ones. How well do we respond to them? Jesus, looking over the Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives just before he would enter on Palm Sunday, lamented, “Jerusalem, Jerusalem, you who kill the prophets and stone those sent to you, how often I have longed to gather your children together as a hen gathers her chicks under her wings, and you were unwilling” (Mt 23:37). Jerusalem as a whole didn’t convert even when Jesus came. Do we convert when we meet his true prophets? Do we follow what they say so that Jesus, through them, can gather us together under his wings? Often the prophets Jesus sends us are not dressed in sheepskin mantles, or religious vestments. Often they look like those with whom we live and work and go to school, literally. Do we accept, heed and honor prophets in our home? Do we listen to the saintly members of our extended family who urge us to a greater commitment to our faith? When a relative corrects us for a bad habit, or a friend calls us to forgive, or a colleague asks us to pray, or a stranger on the street summons us to greater charity, do we recognize that they might be the mouthpiece of God? How we respond to true prophets is the first application.
- The second and main application I’d like to ponder is the fact that by our baptism and our confirmation each of us now shares in Christ’s prophetic work. He has sent us out to proclaim the Gospel to every creature, teaching them to carry out everything he has commanded us, promising that he will be with us always until the end of time. We may not speak ex cathedra with a charism of infallibility like the Pope under special circumstances, but just as much as Jesus has chosen the successor of St. Peter to teach the truth, so Jesus has chosen us to spread his Word, to pass on the faith. He has called, constituted and commissioned each of us to be his prophets. But are we true prophets or false ones? Are our words a faithful echo of his? What fruit do we bear: spiritual grapes and figs or wild grapes and toxic berries? What fruit do others bear as a result of their interaction with us?
- Regardless of how we’ve done until now — and perhaps some of us have never really focused on it as much as we should have — how do we become the types of true prophets the Lord desires? How do we bear good fruit? Jesus tells us in today’s Gospel that it’s by becoming a good tree, because a good tree produces good fruit naturally. And how do we become a good tree? By staying attached to Christ. Jesus tells us in the Gospel of St. John that he is the vine and we are the branches. As long as we stay attached to him, he promises us that we will bear much fruit. To bear fruit as a prophet we need to remain in him and him in us, to be in the state of grace, to abide in his word and let it abide in us, to remain in a Holy Communion of will and life. We need to live according to the Holy Spirit, preach the truth in our body language, and bear the fruit of the Spirit: “love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, generosity, faithfulness, gentleness, self-control.” This is a challenging list, but we should never lose sight of the fact that the apostles, the first of the New Testament prophets, were not spiritual superheroes, but people much like us, with faults and failings. But they corresponded to the power of the Holy Spirit who came down on them on Pentecost and over time bore fruit that has lasted not only down to our day but will last into eternity.
- The false prophets are those who bear another type of fruit, because in essence they’re wolves hiding under sheep’s clothing. They bear bad fruit because their “tree” is corrupted, because they’re no longer attached to Christ the vine. To use today’s words from his Letter to the Romans, they’re “slaves to impurity and to lawlessness.” They preach and live a pseudo-gospel of acceptable immorality, often treating sexual sins as eighth sacraments that need to be celebrated and indulged rather than things that need to be repented of and confessed. They preach and live according to the flesh, with hatred, anger, envy, selfishness, and dissension, (Gal 5:19-21). They are cesspools of complaints and criticisms and often are judging not just other people’s actions but their souls. These bad fruit scandalize and drive many people away. They are false prophecy. And we need to be aware of it in others and humbly in ourselves.
- The outcome of these two types of prophetic living, the false and the true, cannot be clearer. This is the ultimate good or rotten fruit. St. Paul in today’s epistle describes that for those who are slaves to impurity and lawlessness, “the end of those things is death.” For true prophets, “the benefit that you have leads to sanctification, and its end is eternal life… in Christ Jesus our Lord.” One is a path of eternal life, another is of eternal death, of everlasting self-separation from the kingdom. Which path are we going to choose? It’s clear each of us would want the path that leads to life, but the question is which path will we will, will we choose, in concrete choices, over and over again? And what path will we help others to choose? The choice of being a true prophet is not just a path of moral integrity and cooperation with the Spirit, but one that recognizes that we need to know our faith enough to be able to pass it on with accuracy and conviction. To choose that path of being a true prophet means to take seriously our mission to preach the faith, in season and out of season, with our lips and our lives, showing as best we can the attractiveness of a life lived in accordance with God’s truth, goodness and beauty. The Church exists to teach this truth. Each of us has been called by Christ to believe it, to live it and to teach it.
- The Lord who today calls us to be good trees, to seek prayerfully the will of God and then, in accordance with his grace, to do it, is prepared to give us all the help he knows we need. He comes as the Vine to attach us anew to Him as branches, promising us that if we remain in him, and he in us, we will bear fruit that will last into eternity. This is our faith. This is the truth. How proud we are to profess it, inside Church and out!
The readings for today’s Mass were:
A reading for the Epistle of St. Paul to the Romans
I am speaking in human terms because of the weakness of your nature. For just as you presented the parts of your bodies as slaves to impurity and to lawlessness for lawlessness, so now present them as slaves to righteousness for sanctification. For when you were slaves of sin, you were free from righteousness. But what profit did you get then from the things of which you are now ashamed? For the end of those things is death. But now that you have been freed from sin and have become slaves of God, the benefit that you have leads to sanctification, and its end is eternal life. For the wages of sin is death, but the gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
The continuation of the Holy Gospel according to St. Matthew
Jesus said to his disciples: “Beware of false prophets, who come to you in sheep’s clothing, but underneath are ravenous wolves. By their fruits you will know them. Do people pick grapes from thorn bushes, or figs from thistles? Just so, every good tree bears good fruit, and a rotten tree bears bad fruit. A good tree cannot bear bad fruit, nor can a rotten tree bear good fruit. Every tree that does not bear good fruit will be cut down and thrown into the fire. So by their fruits you will know them. “Not everyone who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of my Father in heaven.
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