Daily Reflection for the Pontifical Mission Societies, December 4,2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
National Director, The Pontifical Mission Societies
Daily Reflection for December 4, 2025

Here is the video of today’s reflection.

The Youtube generated transcript for today’s reflection is:

I’m Monsignor Roger Landry, national director of the Pontifical Mission Societies. Coming to you from the beautiful campus of the Augustine Institute in St. Louis, Missouri. It is December 4th, the feast of St. Peter Damian, the fifth day in our Advent season. In today’s gospel, Jesus talks to us about the dispositions we’re supposed to have when we live Advent. He says, “Not everybody who cries out to him, Lord, Lord, will enter the kingdom of heaven, but only the one who does the will of his father in heaven.” throughout the Advent season with regard to Jesus coming in time in Bethlehem, coming in the here and now in the sacraments and in prayer and coming on the clouds at the end of time in his second coming. It’s not enough for us to cry out, “Come Lord Jesus Moranata.” He wants us to act on what the Lord himself is asking us to do to prepare ourselves vigilantly for his coming to convert and believe in the gospel. And he makes that very concrete in the second part of what we have for today’s gospel which is taken from his final words in his most famous homily on the sermon on the mount. He says the one who hears these words of mine and acts on them will be like a wise man who built his house in the rock that no matter what storms came it remained standing because it was built solidly on rock. But he says the fools are those who hear the word of God but don’t act on it. They hear it. They’re not deaf to it. They hear it, maybe they’re moved by it, but they don’t put it into practice. And Jesus compares them to a fool who at his time as a carpenter, he knew plenty of these fools that that’d look in the dry seasons at the creek beds, which were totally flat, and say, “Let’s have an easy work and build our house on that flat territory rather than on the uneven cracky rock situations.” But when the rains would eventually come and flow down the mountain, it would wash away those houses. And that’s what Jesus says we do when we just hear his words without really hearing them as words to be done, without coming up with a game plan to act on those words. Eventually, the rains are going to come and going to wipe us out just like almost everything was wiped out in the original flood at the time of Noah. St. John Damoscene whom the church celebrates today is a great 7th century Syrian saint in Damascus who built his whole life on the rock and gave his life to help others build their existence on the rock too. What was one of the great heresies of St. John’s time was against the incarnation. They didn’t really want to live the full practical consequences of Jesus taking on humanity. And so there was an iconoclasm that destroyed pretty much every icon in which Jesus appeared. They were misinterpreting the second commandment that said we couldn’t have graven images. But we forget that the invisible God took on our humanity and became that image. And so rather than destroy the icons, we’re supposed to embrace Jesus who is that living icon and then become in our own turn images to others. This is ultimately the entire work of the church. Missionaries are those who take the word of God to the ends of the earth so that people can not only hear it but build their whole lives on it. Today we pray for them that they might have the same fruit as St. John of Damascus. God bless you.

The Gospel reading on which the reflection was based on: