Building Our Life On The Rejected Cornerstone, Friday of the Second Week of Lent, March 1, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Friday of the Second Week of Lent
March 1, 2024
Gen 37:3-4.12-13.17-18, Ps 105, Mt 21:33-43.45-46

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:

• Today in the readings we focus on one of the most difficult experiences of human life: rejection. We ponder the rejection of the young patriarch Joseph by his family members and of Jesus by his creatures. It’s an occasion for us to ponder the times in our lives that we, too, have been rejected, especially those occasions that sting the most. But in response to the terrible rejections of Joseph and Jesus, the Responsorial Psalm has us proclaim today, repeatedly, “Remember the marvels the Lord has done!” In the Gospel, Jesus, citing Psalm 118, says, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. By the Lord has this been done; it is wonderful in our eyes!” (Ps 118:22-23). The verse right after that is the essential verse of Easter, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad.” To prepare ourselves in Lent for Easter, we must enter more deeply into the experience of the rejection we see through examining sin, the envy that causes it, and how God not only seeks — marvelously! — to take away our sins and forgive them but to make them part of our salvation.
• In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, we witness how Joseph’s brothers were envious of him because he was their father Jacob’s favorite. The fact that Jacob loved Joseph the most didn’t mean he didn’t love the other brothers, but their envy led them not only to close themselves to the love their father had for them but also to the love they should have had for their father and their brother. Their envy led them, as Genesis tells us, to “hate [Joseph] so much that they would not even greet him,” and that interior poison led them to do something much worse. When Joseph went out to help his brothers tend the flocks in Dothan, the brothers conspired to plan to murder him, toss his dead body into a cistern and then lie about it to their father by saying a wild beast had devoured him. They wanted to replicate Cain’s invidious murder of his brother Abel. To save Joseph’s life, one of the brothers, Reuben, persuaded the other siblings just to abandon Joseph into an empty cistern so that he might be able to rescue him later. And so they agreed and threw him down into an inescapable situation, with most of the brothers likely thinking that, while they themselves didn’t shed his blood, it would just be a longer dying process. But then they saw a group of Ishmaelites, basically their second cousins through their grandfather Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael, and sold him into slavery for 20 pieces of silver, not as an act of mercy but of simple profiteering from what they anticipated would be a situation tantamount to his death in Egypt. At every stage, their envy at Joseph’s good fortune led to evil. Their brotherly betrayal was a prophetic type of what would eventually happen to Jesus when he would be sold by one of his spiritual brothers, one of his closest friends, for silver, too.
• Jesus describes that betrayal, and the envy that led to it, in today’s Gospel. Jesus spoke to the chief priests and the scribes in a parable about the way they had treated all the messengers God had sent them and how they were going to treat him. In the prophets Israel had often been referred to as a vineyard planted by God (Hos 10:1). God had made the Israelites stewards of that vineyard but expected a harvest when vintage time grew near. The prophets were the ones sent to remind them of that yield of good deeds, but, as Jesus said, “one they beat, another they killed and a third they stoned.” Other prophets were sent and maltreated the same way. Finally God sent his Son but, in prophetic tones that would be fulfilled in the cry of “Crucify Him!” in Pontius Pilate’s praetorium, they shouted out, “This is the heir. Come let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.” They wanted to be owners, not stewards, of what they had received and were prepared to commit murder in order to maintain their privileges. They wanted to be the ones in charge of the inheritance of faith, not God himself. The chief motivation behind the persecution of the prophets and the crucifixion of Jesus, Jesus implies in the image, was envy, envy that led to a hatred so severe that it resulted in homicide.
• But we know that that’s not the end of either story. God’s mercy intervenes. God always seeks to bring good out of evil and in both cases God’s goodness triumphed over the worst of human wickedness. Joseph’s being sold for 20 pieces of silver, becoming a slave in Egypt and his ability to interpret dreams eventually brought him to the attention of Pharaoh and to the second position in the Kingdom, an office he was able to use not only to save millions of Egyptians lives during a time of famine but also his family. Likewise, Jesus’ being sold for 30 pieces of silver, taking on the appearance of a slave in order to serve us all and enduring the worst of nightmares, led him to save not only millions of Egyptian lives and so many fellow Israelites but the entire human race, including those who had conspired to have him crucified. To use his own words, quoting the Psalms, “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” That is indeed a marvel in our eyes!
• These two points should lead to three sets of resolutions on our part.
  • The first is about the terrible evil of envy and the destruction to which it leads. Envy is sadness and anger about someone else’s being blessed, a coveting of what others have that knows no limit. We need to see it for the capital sin that it is. And the greatest way to oppose envy is to be grateful for all we have rather than upset at what we don’t have and to thank God for the way he’s blessed others, especially our family members and friends.
  • The second resolution is about how to endure difficulty, hardship and betrayal we will suffer because of the evil and envy of others. God always seeks to bring good out of evil and we need to have confidence that our hardships endured can lead to our salvation and the salvation of others. “All things work out for the good,” St. Paul writes to the Romans. Especially when we’re in a situation like Joseph or like Jesus, we need to remember that it’s not the whole story, that God can always use that evil for good.
  • The third resolution is to build our lives on Christ the Cornerstone, something that the experience of rejection helps us to do more easily because rejection shatters our false foundations, when we perhaps haven’t built our life on him and his mercy but even in some ways rejected it. That’s what we have the chance to do each day in the Holy Eucharist, when we receive within that very rejected Cornerstone. To live a Eucharistic life is precisely to enter into the mystery of how God brings the greatest good from the greatest evil, how he turns the sin of envy into the greatest means of sanctity.
• As we prepare now to receive that “Stone rejected by the builders” in Holy Communion — the greatest marvel of all in our eyes and God’s — we ask him for the grace to build our entire life on Him, our most secure foundation. We beg him to draw good out of all the evil we’ve suffered out account of the envy of others. And we beseech him to help us never to succumb to that capital sin but rather to rejoice in all that he’s given us and given others. Rather than saying, “Come, let us kill him!,” and rejecting Jesus, instead we say, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!,” and embrace him with eternal love.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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