Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 17, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Eleventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
June 17, 2023

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 the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday as we focus with him on the crucial question of vocations in general, and our vocation in particular, to be a worker in the Lord’s vineyard.
• Matthew tells us that when Jesus looked at the crowds, his heart was moved with pity because they were like sheep without a shepherd. Noting how great the harvest of souls was, he asked his disciples to pray to the Harvest Master — his Father — to send out laborers for his harvest. And while they were praying, Jesus helped Peter, Andrew, James, John, Philip, Barthlomew, Thomas, Matthew, James the son of Alphaeus, Thaddeus, Simon from Cana and Judas Iscariot recognize that they were the answer to their prayers. He gave him his own authority and told them to drive out unclean spirits, cure every disease and illness, raise the dead, and proclaim that “the Kingdom of Heaven is at hand.” That’s what these simple men then actually went out to do.
• We learn several very important lessons from the scene.
• The first is Jesus’ mercy. Just as Jesus looked with pity on the helpless and abandoned crowds then, so he doubtless looks at so many in today’s world with the same compassion, because so many are like shepherdless sheep, searching for direction, lost in the cosmos, or like the recent Centers for Disease Control survey our American teenagers, persistently sad and hopeless. They don’t recognize or hear the Good Shepherd’s voice, and so they tune into the voice of strangers and follow them into danger.
• Second is the harvest. Jesus tells us that the harvest is huge and there are few doing it. In St. John’s Gospel he said, “Look around you and see how the fields are ripe for harvesting!” (Jn 4:35). We don’t have to be a farmer to understand what will happen if we don’t act when the fields are ripe: the produce will corrupt. It’s a call to urgent action. The fields are ever white and ripe. We can’t waste time. For some people, perhaps for us, today may be the last day for action.
• The third thing is about the need for prayer. In response to the huge harvest, Jesus first has us pray for harvesters. This is a command with no expiration date, insofar as there will always been an urgent need until the end of time. In response to the need for vocations to the priesthood, religious life, marriage, the diaconate, Christian psychiatrists and psychologists, doctors, nurses, Catholic school teachers, catechists, you name it, the first thing we need to do is not a viral video, catchy poster, billboard, or program. It’s prayer. It’s always prayer. Vocations are always gifts from God to which human beings must respond, not things we earn from our own efforts, like salesmen showing quarterly earnings. The vocations crisis that the Church is suffering across the board in many locations is ultimately a prayer crisis. Not enough are praying for vocations, not to mention praying as if their eternal life depended on it. In response to the ripe harvest, we have to pray with urgency and insistence.
• The fourth thing is to notice what Jesus has us pray for. He has us ask God the Father, the Harvest Master, not for ‘bodies,” but “laborers,” hard workers. Harvesting for Jesus is not a cushy air-conditioned job in a plush corner office. The harvest needs people who are willing to roll up their sleeves and get their hands dirty, to work up a sweat. Who are these laborers that the harvest needs? So often Catholics can look at this passage as a call to pray for priestly and religious vocations. That is clearly one application of this passage, which is why it is often used by those in vocations work. The whole Church needs to pray more insistently for these vineyard laborers in an age when a shortage is already here and will become more acute. But I hope by this point, sixty years after the Second Vatican Council, what I’m about to say is obvious: priests and religious are not the only hard-workers the Harvest Master needs in his vineyard. I think back to the episode in the life of the prophet Isaiah, when he heard the Lord saying, “Whom shall I send, and who will go for us?” Isaiah’s response was not to think about all the others. His response is what God wants from all of us. Isaiah said, “Here am I, Lord; send me!” (Is 6:8). The fields are ripe for the harvest and all of us, as God’s chosen ones, have a role in bringing in that harvest. No one gets a pass from living out the consequences of one’s baptism and confirmation. If we think we do, we’re not really Jesus’ disciples, for Jesus said, “The one who doesn’t gather with me scatters” (Mt 12:30). Jesus says there’s no way to be neutral: we’re either gatherers and laborers in his vineyard, or we drive people away from him. Every Catholic is called to be a laborer in that vineyard. Each one of us is called to gather with him. To each of us Jesus says, “I appointed you to go and bear fruit that will last” (Jn 15:16).
• Sometimes Catholics can and do try to pass the buck on working in the vineyard. They can look at the Church like an inn rather than a home. We all know what happens in an inn. We give some money and others do all the work — they make our bed, clean the room, prepare breakfast, and fix things when they break. Catholics can sometimes look at their parish, their chaplaincy, and the Church as a whole with these lenses. They can think they’ve done their part by coming to Mass and putting a contribution in the collection basket, leaving others — clergy, religious, staff and volunteers “with time on their hands” — to do the work of the harvest. But this pattern never happens in a functional home, where everyone needs to pitch in. And it’s not the way God wants it in his home, the Church. There’s a saying — validated in my own priestly experience — that in most parishes, 5% of the faithful do 95% of the work. The rest come to Mass, say their private prayers, but often treat the Church like a business where others are working for them. Jesus wants to change this. That is what today’s Gospel is about. He wants us praying for laborers and then he wants to recognize that he’s summoning each of us as we’re praying, just like he did the first twelve, to be the answer to those prayers. He wants us to grasp that he wants, he needs, us to be hard workers for his harvest, to do our fair share, not simply out of justice, but as the path for us to work out our salvation and help in the salvation of others. The whole purpose why he founded the Church was to give us, as a community, the joint task to complete his mission. To proclaim as we do in the Creed that the Church is “apostolic” means that it is founded on the “mission” that the Greek word apostolos, “one who is sent,” signifies. For us to be successful as his mystical body, we can’t have only five percent of the organs doing the work for the whole body. We need to have the whole body working together. Jesus looks at the crowds of those who are lost, many of whom may not be saved, and looks at each of us — with all of the talents and opportunities and graces he’s given us — and says, “What are yougoing to do about it?” He asks, “Will you help me in this mission for the salvation of the world?”
• The last question is: Where does Jesus want us to harvest? A few of us he calls to be missionaries to preach the Gospel in distant places. But most of us he treats like he treated the twelve in today’s Gospel. He sent them first to the “lost sheep of the house of Israel.” He sent them to those around them, whom they knew, who spoke their own language, who shared their own culture. Likewise Jesus wants to send most of us to the “lost sheep” of our own houses, to the wandering lambs and goats of our families, of our friends, of our coworkers and fellow students. He wants to send us to the lapsed and lukewarm and unchurched people who are on all sides. He wants to send us to the wounded, mangled and abandoned, like “sheep without a shepherd,” to tell them that there is a Good Shepherd who is calling them by name, who loves them, who has laid down his life for them (Jn 10:3,11). But he wants to use our recognizable voice to get his message across. Others’ salvation may hinge on our saying yes to this mission.
• Jesus calls us to be generous in responding to this call. He tells us at the end of today’s Gospel passage, “You have received freely; you are to give freely.” Everything we have and are we have received from God, who gave his very life out of love for us. Jesus calls us to respond to the free gift of his life for us with the free gift of our life for him and others. To love others as he has loved us means precisely to lay down our lives out of love for the salvation of our family, our friends, even our enemies. We’re called to work as hard for their salvation as Jesus did for ours. This is our mission. This is the reason why we were chosen. This is the task of the Catholic Church and every faithful Catholic.
• To strengthen us for this hard work and as a reward for it, Jesus gives us his own flesh and blood in the Eucharist. In it we learn the meaning of generosity, how to give our body and shed our blood and sweat for the salvation of others. This is just one more proof that the Lord, who calls us to this mission, will give us all the help we need to fulfill it, if only we say yes, if only we look with compassion on the same crowds, if only we turn in prayer to the Harvest Master and plead for laborers and respond like Isaiah to that summons.
• This Sunday at Mass, the Harvest Master will ask us again, “Whom shall I send? Who will go for us?” Let’s give him the answer he’s awaiting.

The Gospel reading for this Sunday is: 

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