Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, July 2, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
July 2, 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 joy 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 he reveals to us the crowning of what it means to be his disciple: to follow him so closely that his priorities become our priorities, his message our message, his mission our mission, his zeal for the salvation of others our own.
• In the Gospel, Jesus appoints seventy-two of his disciples and sends them out in pairs to proclaim the Gospel he himself had been proclaiming to them. A short time earlier (cf. Lk 9:1-6), Jesus had sent out the twelve apostles, those who would become his first priests. But to share the Gospel was not meant to be the task of priests alone. So he appointed 72 — probably the twelve apostles and 60 of whom we would call today lay people — and sent them out to the neighboring towns and villages. “The harvest is abundant,” he said, “but the laborers are few.” Jesus not only instructed them to pray to God the Father to send more laborers but chose them as responses to that prayer and as laborers for his harvest of souls.  I’ve always thought that the 72 was more than a symbolic number, but probably implies that the Lord basically sent out everyonewho was a willing, consistent follower. He wanted all hands on deck.
• Just as the Lord Jesus in this scene sends out basically everyone he had, so he wants each of us to grasp that he intends to send us out as well. Our willingness to pass on the faith is a sign of whether we really have faith, whether we know, love and are living it. Those who have received God’s love, heard his voice and received his light cannot keep that gift to themselves. Like St. Paul, we say, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel.” We bursting to share the treasure we’ve received to enrich others.
• How are we to carry out this apostolate of sharing the Gospel that Christ gives us? Jesus gives us two principles that are valid in every age.
• The first is that he sends the 72 out with a message. The message had two parts to it: “Peace” and “The kingdom of God is at hand!” The two are connected. The “peace” they were to announce was precisely the peace that Jesus had been preaching — peace with God through the forgiveness of sins. The way to experience that peace is to enter into God’s kingdom, to allow the Lord to be the king of one’s thoughts and actions. This was a revolutionary message. We have heard the words, “The kingdom of God is among you!” so many times that perhaps they no longer startle us. But we need to think back to the context. The seventy-two were sent to proclaim this kingdom at one of the times of greatest strength in the Roman empire, an empire that didn’t take well any challenges to its authority and was more brutal against supposed insurrectionists than a pack of wolves against injured animals. In the midst of Roman dominion, the seventy-two ordinary disciples of Christ were ambassadors of a different kingdom, a different type of allegiance — the kingdom of God. The two kingdoms did not necessarily conflict, as Jesus himself pointed to when he said, “Give to Caesar the things that are Caesar’s, and give to God the things that are God’s” (Mt 22:21). But he also said that when there was a conflict, we were to “seek first the kingdom of God and God’s righteousness” (Mt 6:33). Jesus’ disciples in every age are sent out to proclaim the priority of the Kingdom of God, a priority we are supposed to be modeling and not merely mouthing.
• The second principle is that he sends them out with a certain “packaging” for that message. They are sent out as “lambs in the midst of wolves,” not wolves in the midst of lambs. They were to proposethe Gospel in a compelling way to others’ freedom, not to impose They were to proclaim the Gospel with confidence, meekness, and the persuasive power of their faith, goodness and holiness. That was why Jesus instructed them to go out with no purse, no bag, no sandals. How could they possibly proclaim effectively that the kingdom of GOD is at hand if others could suspect them of trying to increase the size of their purse and build an earthly kingdom of their own? They were sent out two-by-two — even though they could have covered twice as much ground if they had been sent out individually — in order to show through their interaction with each other the love, forgiveness and Christian fraternity that are at the heart of the Gospel. Even the way Jesus prepared them to handle rejection — by wiping the dust off their feet as a witness of their rejection rather than carry the pain of their rejection with them to another town — shows that they were to carry only Jesus’ message rather than resentment. This was all part of the packaging to reinforce the proclamation of the peace of the kingdom.
• These instructions are super important and relevant as we approach the celebration of the Fourth of July on Monday. It’s a day on which we thank God for the blessings we have as a nation as well as for the enormous sacrifices made over the last 246 years to obtain and maintain our freedom. It’s also a day on which we Catholics need to reflect on the service Christ is calling us to render to our nation, which is, in a special way, the field he has called and commissioned us to harvest. The greatest service we can give to our country is, especially in a highly polarized time, to show the way of peace, and at a time in which some are showing increasingly intolerant, even totalitarian, tendencies, to proclaim that Christ is alive and the Kingdom of God is at hand. The greatest contribution we can make as U.S. citizens is to live, as St. Paul says, as fellow citizens of the saints and members of God’s household (Eph 2:19). The founding fathers of our country recognized very clearly that for our nation to endure, U.S. citizens needed to live as citizens of heaven and call others to do the same. The experiment in ordered liberty that is the United States of America would only succeed, they underlined, if the citizens were moral and religious, if they used their freedom well, if they obeyed God on their own and did the right thing even if they could get away with doing the wrong thing. President John Adams emphatically reminded us, “We have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. … Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
• It is, therefore, crucial for those of us who love our country to keep these admonitions from our second president in mind, because so many of our fellow citizens, especially many in secular media, universities and legal professions, have not only forgotten them but believe the exact opposite. In total disagreement with our founding fathers, they think that faith in God and religious morality are toxic threats to our republican form of government. They will tolerate our going together to Church on Sundays provided that we don’t try to live faith into the public square. By lawsuits and other means, they have long been trying to eliminate all references to God from schools, media and culture and to force a self-centered, practical atheism on us and future generations. By doing so they are threatening the very survival of the nation we love, which cannot perdure, as John Adams wisely admonished, without “religion and morality,” which “alone… can establish the principles upon which freedom can securely stand.” Without grounding freedom in a truth beyond the license to do whatever we please, true freedom unravels. People begin to claim that they have freedom to choose to abort their obviously human babies up to birth, or to redefine their sex and force everyone else to accomodate this invention, or to take their own lives regardless of the consequences to family members and loved ones, or to use increasingly addictive drugs and have society deal with the aftereffects in rising homelessness, joblessness, and lawlessness. A notion of freedom severed from religion and morality ultimately weakens our country and begins to tear it apart because our Constitution is wholly inadequate to govern anyone but a religious and moral people.
• That’s why, as we approach the Fourth of July, we need to thank God for some of the recent decisions of the U.S. Supreme Court, like overturning Maine’s law discriminating against religious schools, the State of Washington’s preventing even silent prayer at football games and similar functions, and especially the Roe v. Wade and Casey v. Planned Parenthood decisions that legalized abortion in all nine months of pregnancy and have led, in the last 49 years, to over 63 million deaths of little ones at the basic stages of development you, everyone else and I once have passed through on our way to birth. Those decisions have corrected some egregious mistakes. But now moral and religious people must build on them to help reform the poisonous aspects of our culture by seeking to reestablish the peace that comes from God and help infuse our culture with the peace and values of God’s kingdom.
• At the end of this Sunday’s Gospel, the 72 disciples return rejoicing at the power of Jesus they witnessed as they were sharing the faith. Despite the power of the Roman empire, the seeds of the Kingdom were successfully bearing fruit. As happy as they were about this, Jesus said that they should be even happier that their “names are written in heaven.” None of us is a number. We’re all a beloved name to God and to the saints, just as those to whom God sends us are beloved as well. As Jesus at the end of Sunday Mass prepares to commission us anew to go in peace to announce his kingdom, let us ask him to strengthen us by his body and blood, so that we might live always in holy communion with him, experience the power that comes from that bond, go out with courage to bring others into that same life-saving union, and strengthen our country by reproposing the faith that has helped over its history to make it strong. The harvest is abundant but the laborers are few. That’s why God has chosen us. Out of love for him, for others, and for our nation, let’s roll up our sleeves and get to work!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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