Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, February 26, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
February 26, 2022

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when he will speak to us about a few of the central things we are going to need to live a good and holy Lent, which begins in just three days on Ash Wednesday.
• Lent is a spiritual boot camp in which we strive, with God’s help, to become more and more like Christ. Jesus tells us in this Sunday’s Gospel, “No disciple is superior to the teacher, but when fully trained, every disciple will be like his teacher.” Lent provides the training for us to become like Christ. Just as he went to the desert for 40 days to pray, so we make the commitment to improve the quality — and for most of us — quantity of our prayer time. Just as Jesus fasted so much that the devil’s first temptation to him was to try to have him transform stones into bread, so we take on the self-discipline of fasting, which helps us to say “yes” to God and “no” to sin by training us to say “no” to our appetite for food and drink. Just as Jesus generously gave everything down to the last drop of his blood, so in Lent we seek to imitate his merciful love, giving of ourselves, our time, our gifts and our material resources, to those who are in need. The main purpose of Lent is to become like the praying, fasting, almsgiving Jesus and Jesus seeks to give us that training so that we can become like him, our teacher. He wants us, however, to make a commitment to receive that training, a dedication similar to how rookies approach training camp, 18-year-olds approach boot camp for the Marines, like hard-working students approach exam period.
• Lent is, second, about recognizing our blind spots, the sins that cloud our vision, and striving by God’s mercy to eliminate them. Jesus asks in the Gospel we’ll hear this Sunday, “Can a blind person guide a blind person? Will not both fall into a pit?” He adds, “Why do you notice the splinter in your brother’s eye but do not perceive the wooden beam in your own? … Remove the wooden beam from your eye first; then you will see clearly to remove the splinter from your brother’s eye.” If we are to become like Jesus through the training of Lent and the discipline of the Christian life as a whole, then we are meant to guide others in Jesus’ footsteps on the narrow way that leads to eternal life. But in order to lead others, we need to see clearly. That’s why in Lent we first need to examine our consciences, to recognize our sins, which Jesus compares to wooden beams in our eyes that prevent us from seeing God in all parts of our life, from noticing what he sees in others and in situations, and with God’s help to remove those planks. That’s the process we call repentance. Just like Jesus cured many blind men in the Gospel, so he wants to heal us. He says elsewhere in the Gospel that the eye is the lamp for the body, but if the eye is bad, the whole body will be in darkness; and if the light in us is darkness, he continues, how deep will the darkness be. In Lent Jesus wants us to see everything in his light so that our whole life will be filled with light, rather than darkness. And this is essential if we’re ever going to set the example for others that he wants us to set. If our eyes and souls are in darkness, we can’t help others remove the sins from their eyes. We’d be like eye surgeons with macular degeneration trying to do delicate corneal surgery. Lent is the time in which we go to Jesus the Divine Physician to be cured of our sins so that with charity and humility we can help others rid sin from their lives, too.
• That leads us to the third truth that Jesus will teach us this Sunday, which is about true Christian fruitfulness. When we receive Jesus’ training to be like him, when we respond to his help to take out the redwoods in our eyes so that we can see clearly and genuinely help others with their problems not as hypercritical diversions from our own, then we can become truly transformed people, capable with Jesus of bearing lasting fruit in deeds of love toward God and others. Jesus says, “A good tree does not bear rotten fruit, nor does a rotten tree bear good fruit. For every tree is known by its own fruit. … A good person out of the store of goodness in his heart produces good, but an evil person out of a store of evil produces evil.” For Jesus, the point of Lent and the Christian life in general is not so much about getting us to bear good fruit but about helping us become good trees that bear good fruit easily and more naturally. It’s not about random acts of kindness but about becoming regularly kind. To take an extreme example, we’re familiar with the stories of Mafioso dons and drug kingpins who profit from others’ suffering and become rich through illegal and immoral means who at the same time drop off cash in paper bags at their local parish for a renovation project or pastoral outreaches. While giving to the Church is obviously better than spending illicit profits in various other ways, such isolated deeds cannot make up for the life one leads, and are often just a smokescreen coming from vanity or a guilty conscience. Jesus wants more. He wants to transform persons. A more common example involves those who seldom come to Church or pray, or who are living in relationships contrary to the Gospel, but who nevertheless engage in otherwise laudable care for the poor and needy. They can often point to such good deeds as if they somehow excuse the lack of worship of God or the lack of integration of the faith into all aspects of their life. The fact that they do produce some good fruit is a sign that there’s some obviously some goodness in them, but their sins and bad fruit show that they are a little like a chimera, part good-tree and part bad-tree. Jesus in Lent wants to transform the whole of us into a good tree. How does he do that? He told us on Holy Thursday with the image of the Vine and the Branches. He said, “Just as a branch cannot bear fruit on its own unless it remains attached to the Vine, so neither can you unless you remain in me. I am the vine; you are the branches. Whoever remains in me and I in him will bear much fruit, because without me you can do nothing.” In Lent, Jesus wants to graft us onto him as branches to the vine, not just partially but fully. He wants us to remain in him in prayer. He wants us to remain in him in the way we eat and drink and work and recreate. He wants us to remain in him in how we relate to others, loving them in the truth of his divine love. This is the way to bear abundant fruit that will last.
• And so this Sunday, Jesus will engage us in a consequential conversation. He will help us to determine whether we really look to him as our Teacher, or whether, at a practical level, we follow worldly gurus, influencers, politicians, authors, celebrities or family members, friends or peers, more than we follow him. He will give us an eye check up so that we can ask him, through the Sacrament of Confession, to take away the obstacles that blind us and with him see others as he sees them and assist them to receive from Jesus the same life-giving and life-saving training. And he will provide the means by which we will be renewed interiorly and thoroughly as branches on Him the vine, so that together with him we may be a good tree bearing fruit that will last into eternity.
• This three-fold transformation takes place par excellence at Mass, when we listen to the Divine Master as he teaches us in the Liturgy of the Word, when we confess the planks in our eyes and ask him to remove them, when we recalibrate our vision and behold the Lamb of God and receive His flesh and blood from that Vine so that we, attached to him, might jointly love God and others with all we’ve got and be formed to lead them, as fully trained disciples, to the Christ we see.
• Let’s get ready for that life-changing conversation and embark with our Master on the training of the holy season of Lent!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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