Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 3, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Vigil
July 3, 2021

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 head with him to his hometown Synagogue in Nazareth.
• It’s a scene that should bring those who truly love Jesus almost to the point of tears. Jesus came to his hometown. He already had a famous reputation for the teachings and the miracles he had worked throughout Galilee. He had cast out demons, cured the paralyzed and the sick, and taught with authority unlike any had ever heard. He visited his neighborhood synagogue on a Saturday, just like he did every Saturday as a boy and young carpenter. The head of the Synagogue allowed him to come up to teach. St. Luke’s Gospel tells us what he did (see Lk 4:16-30). Jesus unrolled the scroll of the prophet Isaiah and read the passage, “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring good news to the poor. He has sent me to proclaim release to the captives and recovery of sight to the blind, to let the oppressed go free, to proclaim the year of the Lord’s favor.” This was a passage referring to the Messiah for whom the Jews had long waited. Jesus’ homily, his commentary on that passage, was one sentence long: “Today this Scripture is fulfilled in your hearing.”
• Mark and St. Luke both tell us that his listeners’ first reaction to Jesus’ teaching was astonishment. They were amazed at the “gracious words that came from his mouth” and “the wisdom that had been given to him.” But that quickly changed once they began to reflect on what he said. Jesus was saying that he was the Messiah, that all the words that Isaiah wrote about the coming Anointed One were being fulfilled in him right then, right there. The future apostle Nathaniel (also known as Bartholomew) once wondered aloud whether anything good could come from Nazareth. Those in the Synagogue likely shared that sentiment, because they refused to accept that one they numbered among their own could be the fulfillment of their messianic hopes. They thought they knew Jesus.They likely had pieces of furniture he made. Perhaps he had played with their kids or grandkids when he was younger. So they murmured to themselves, to knock him down to size, “Is not this the carpenter, the son of Mary?” Their doubts soon multiplied and, as St. Mark tells us, they began to “take offense at Jesus.” Not only would they not believe in what Jesus said, but they began to be offended by him, because if he were the Messiah, it would necessarily change their relationship with him and, in fact, revolutionize their whole life. Jesus knew their thoughts and said, “A prophet is not without honor, except in his hometown, and among his own kin and in his own house.” That, St. Luke tells us, “filled them with rage. They got up, drove him out of the town, and led him to the brow of the hill on which their town was built, so that they might hurl him off the cliff, but he passed through the midst of them and went on his way.” In the matter of a few minutes, they went from praising Jesus with amazement, to doubts, to taking offense at him, to trying to murder him. Not only would they not accept Jesus as a prophet by heeding his words and welcoming him as they would the God who sent him, but they — like preceding generations whom Jesus would say elsewhere “kill the prophets and stone those who are sent to it” (Mt 23:37) — would seek to execute him.
• Jesus’ reaction to all of this, St. Mark informs us, was “amazement at their lack of faith.” In other cities, strangers who didn’t know him growing up were willing to leave everything to follow him, were moved and converted by his preaching, and were blown away by his miraculous power such that with faith they were bringing to him all those who needed help. But among his own people, he was rejected and deemed worthy of death. The question we need to ask is: Why did they reject him and ultimately try to kill him? St. John gives us the answer in the prologue to his Gospel: “He came to his own, and his own people did not accept him. … The light came into the world, and people loved darkness rather than light because their deeds were evil.” They didn’t want a real Messiah, even or especially if he were a native son. They wanted to keep their concept of Messiah neatly packaged, unthreatening, and something aspirational in the future; they didn’t want a prophet in the here and now, because if Jesus were the Messiah, then their day to day existence, their conduct, their values, and everything else would have to change, and they preferred to live in the darkness of a life without the Messiah and without the real God. They preferred not to have Scripture fulfilled in their hearing, to hear the good news, to be set free from their self-imposed prisons or to be cured of their spiritual blindness.
• But this Gospel does not refer merely to what happened 2000 years ago when Jesus returned to his hometown. Like every Gospel, it must be actualized, applied to the present day. Who are Jesus’ “own” people today? Who are his kinsmen, the modern Nazarenes that he wants to accept him as a prophet and have Scripture fulfilled in their midst? We are. Through baptism, we have become true members of his family, his spiritual brothers and sisters. Through the Eucharist, we become, we can say, his blood relatives. Many, perhaps most, of us have grown up with the Lord our whole lives. We’re literally “familiar” with him. As with our other relatives, we have pictures of him at home, celebrate his birthday every December, and mark the most important moment of his life each spring. The question for us is whether we, like the majority of ancient Nazarenes, allow our familiarity with Jesus actually to strengthen, rather than weaken, our faith. Do we allow our greater contact with Jesus to help us grow in love for him or to make us take him for granted?
• As we prepare to celebrate the Fourth of July and to pray for our country, it’s important to learn the lessons of Nazareth. Nazareth is a tale of two towns. On the one hand, it’s a place of most important welcoming of all time, when Mary, hearing God’s proposal through the Archangel Gabriel, replied, “Let it be done to me according to your word,” and by the power of the Holy Spirit, on behalf of the human race, welcome God into her womb with faith-filled love. It’s also the place where, months later, after Mary had returned from helping her cousin Elizabeth and Joseph had seen her very much pregnant, he, with the help of the angel of the Lord who appeared to him to assist him to overcome his fear, welcomed both her and Jesus growing within her, into his home and life. Nazareth is first a place of loving welcome. But it’s also, as we see in this week’s Gospel, a place of harsh and even homicidal rejection, where in a heartbeat, Jesus’ fellow Nazarenes went from praying to trying to murder their guest preacher.As we look with love at our country — and let’s focus specifically on us Catholics and on our Christian brothers and sisters — will we accept or reject Jesus?
• The answer to that question will be seen in whether we accept or reject Jesus as a prophet, as a teacher, as one with a way to follow. We show whether we have faith in Jesus by whether we have faith in his words and act on them. When Jesus comes to us, his own, as the light of the world, do we live and walk in the light of the Lord or “love darkness because our deeds are evil?” When he comes to us hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill or imprisoned, do we care for him or cast him aside? When he teaches us about whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters we do to him, do we immediately care for him in the littlest of his brethren, those growing in the womb? When he speaks to us about purity of heart and life or about the importance of marriage in God’s plan from the beginning as the indissoluble union of one man and one woman and speaks to us, do we order our lives to it or do we prefer the Barabbas of the sexual revolution? When he teaches us about loving our enemies, praying for our persecutors, forgiving 70 times 7 times, picking up our cross daily and following him, and seeking first and above all his kingdom, do we strive to live by the light of those words or do we ignore them? The biggest question of our life is whether we welcome, embrace and love Jesus as a prophet, the Messiah, and our Savior, or whether we ignore, reject, or even seek to snuff him out.
• Part of what has helped make our beloved country strong has been the virtues that flowed from the Christian life and particularly the openness so many citizens and immigrants have had to embracing Christ, his message and way of life, multitudes who have sought to love God and love their neighbor. There are, thankfully, many who still do. But one of the big challenges we face comes from Christians who just give lip service to the Gospel, much like many Nazarenes in Jesus’ day just gave lip service to the Torah and true Messianic hopes. In both situations, the question is whether we’ll accept Jesus as a prophet and live by what God teaches, or whether we, preferring darkness to light, will seek to dismiss the message and eliminate the messenger.
• This Christian Sabbath, the same Jesus who came to his own in Nazareth, will come to our parish Churches. He will teach us in Sacred Scripture, which will be fulfilled by Him live in our hearing. He will feed us with himself as the Word made Flesh. Let us ask our Lady and Saint Joseph to help us to welcome him as he desires and deserves and to help us, transformed by him, strengthen our country in gratitude and responsiveness, to the grace God has shed on our spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, and fruited plains.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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