Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 6, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
July 6, 2024

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Father Roger Landry and it’s a joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus this Sunday, as we ponder 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 — the equivalent of his parish Church — on the Sabbath, 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” (Is 61:1-2). 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,” he declared, “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. Through fulfilling Isaiah’s prophecy, Jesus was basically announcing that he was the Messiah, that all the words that the prophet wrote about the coming Anointed One were taking place 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 from 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 them, or their kids or grandkids when he was younger. So, to knock him down to size, they began to murmur to themselves, “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 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, 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 preferred, rather, to keep their concept of Messiah neatly packaged, unthreatening, and something aspirational and futuresque; 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, unconsciously, not to have Scripture fulfilled in their hearing, to have the good news announced to them, to be set free from their self-imposed prisons or to be cured of their spiritual blindness. They preferred, to use the words God said to Ezekiel in this Sunday’s first reading, to be “hard of face and obstinate of heart” and “rebellious,” and to make God’s true messengers feel, like we will hear in the Psalm, full of “contempt, … with the mockery of the arrogant, with the contempt of the proud.”
• But this Gospel does not refer merely to what happened 2,000 years ago when Jesus returned to Nazareth. 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 weaken, rather than strengthen, our faith. Do we allow our greater contact with Jesus to make us take him for granted or to help us grow in love for him?
• As we come off the celebration of the Fourth of July during this past week and pray for our country, all its cities, towns and inhabitants, 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 the 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, welcomed 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 and above all 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 as a whole and all our neighborhoods, the big question for the Church and our Church’s huge role in society is: will we accept or reject Jesus? We show whether we have faith in Jesus by whether we put 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 do we “love darkness?” 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 that whatever we do to the least of his brothers and sisters we do to him, do we therefore care for him in the littlest of his brethren, those growing in the womb, or do we look the other way when some want to celebrate their slaughter as a huge advance in human rights? When Jesus speaks to us about purity of heart or about the importance of marriage in God’s plan from the beginning as the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, do we order our lives to the truth 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, seeking first his kingdom, and picking up our cross daily and following him, 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 will welcome, embrace and love Jesus as a prophet, the Messiah, the Savior, the Way, the Truth and the Life or whether we will ignore, reject, or even ultimately, like those in Nazareth and later in Pilate’s courtyard, seek to snuff him out.
• The second biggest question of our life is whether we are prepared, in living according to Jesus’ words and announcing them as genuinely good news to others, to suffer out of love for Him, others and the truth, what Jesus himself suffered. If the Nazarenes did not want to accept Jesus as prophet because what he taught made them uneasy, we should be under no illusion that everyone will accept us when we live out the prophetic dimension of our baptism and confirmation. Jesus promised that the servant is not greater than the Master and if they hated him they would hate us. If we’re faithful to Christ, we, like him, will experience difficult rejection by some, including by those we know and love in our family or hometown. To be a true Christian today requires this type of holy realism.
• This obviously has an important application to the ongoing Eucharistic Revival. Jesus’ astonishing gift of himself in the Eucharist is rejected by many. Five of six Catholics don’t go to be with him and receive him even on the Lord’s day. Fewer make the time to go visit him in prayerful adoration. And those Christians who, recognizing that the Eucharist is Jesus Christ, make the commitment to try to come to receive him as often as they can, even every day, and who make time to come to pray before him, are often mocked, not just by those enslaved to secularist categories but sometimes by Protestant brothers and sisters. This reality of our welcoming or rejecting Jesus in the Eucharist is one of the most important questions the ongoing Eucharistic Revival is meant to raise and remedy.
• This Christian Sabbath, the same Jesus who came to his own in Nazareth, comes to the Catholic Church closest to us. He will teach us in Sacred Scripture and bring the words of the prophets to fulfillment. He will feed us with himself as the Word made Flesh, which is his continuous incarnation. Through the intercession of the Holy Family of Nazareth, Mary and Joseph, let us welcome Jesus with great love, receive his words as words to be done, and become his instruments to help our homes, neighborhoods and country grow in gratitude and responsiveness for all the grace God has shed on our spacious skies, amber waves of grain, purple mountain majesties, and fruited plains.

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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