Bearing Fruit Attached to the Vine, 12th Wednesday (II), June 27, 2018

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Wednesday of the Twelfth Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
Memorial of St. Cyril of Alexandria
June 27, 2018
2 Kings 22:8-13.23:1-3, Ps 119, 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: 

• Today Jesus continues his concluding remarks in the Sermon on the Mount by stressing two points: first, the need to beware of false prophets; and second, the principle of discernment between true and false prophets is the fruit each bears.
• Throughout the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus has been contrasting his teaching with that of the Scribes and Pharisees, the virtuous pagans, and even the provisional, preparatory teachings of the Old Testament. From the Beatitudes onward, he was showing a different standard, his own standard, which he was encouraging us and helping us to adopt: whereas everyone else will encourage us to be rich, jovial, merciless, sexually “fulfilled,” satiated, and liked by all, Jesus stresses that the path to happiness, his own path, is to be poor in spirit, mournful, merciful pure in heart, hungry for holiness, and persecuted and hated because of him. He told us yesterday that many are on the broad road leading to perdition and few have found the narrow road leading to life. For that reason, he tells us to beware of those who preach, by words and actions, the anti-Beatitudes, who seek to draw people on the broad, easy, popular path.
• He tells us that the way that we can distinguish between true and false prophets — since every roving prophet dressed with a sheepskin mantle and looked alike and at first glance sounded alike — is to examine the fruit they produce up close. Jesus talks about two images: thornbushes that produce tiny toxic fruit that at first glance looks like grapes and thistles that from a distance produce something resembling a fig. We need to get beyond first appearances to see what the fruit of good, healthy and spiritually life-giving or toxic. At a deeper level, he’s calling all of us at the end of the Sermon on the Mount to attach ourselves through his teaching to him who is the Vine so that, as we sang in the Alleluia versicle, we might bear great fruit.
• Someone who did was St. Cyril and he learned that lesson from Our Lady, whose full dignity and honor he upheld at the Council of Ephesus. She was one fully attached, even umbilically, to the Vine, and she bore not just any old “fruit” but the one we called the “Blessed Fruit.”
• The way we remain attached to the Vine is by entering anew into Communion with the Vine incarnate each morning. The way we receive the vision to examine whether someone claiming to speak and work for God is by hearing his Word and evaluating everything on the basis of it. Today we come forward seeking to renew the “new and eternal Covenant” just like Hilkiah, Shaphan and the Jews renewed the Covenant in today’s first reading. We come to ask the Lord to teach us the ways of his decrees so that we might exactly observe them and keep them with all our heart as we prayed in the Psalms. Today we ask him for the faith, courage and help to be in our own day what St. Cyril in theirs, so that, like him, our lives may continue to bear “fruit that will last” into eternity.

The readings for today’s Mass were: