Great Sorrow and Constant Anguish, 30th Friday (I), October 31, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Paul Center, Steubenville, Ohio
Deacon Conference on “Scripture, the Soul of Sacred Theology: The Gospel of Matthew”
Mass for Ministers of the Church
Friday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
October 31, 2025
Rom 9:1-5, Ps 147, Lk 14:1-6

To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• At the beginning of our time together as we dedicate ourselves to Scripture as the Soul of Sacred Theology, we begin the first five verses of St. Paul’s three chapters in his Letter to the Romans on the relationship between Christians and the Jews. This is the second part of his Letter to the Romans, which we have been meditatively pondering for almost three weeks. In the first 8 chapters, we’ve meditated on what it means to be justified before God and how the Holy Spirit seeks to bring that about. Chapters 9-11 are about God’s plan for the justification of the Jewish people, particularly those who — unlike Mary, Mary Magdalene, the disciples and apostles — had not recognized Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah. Unfortunately, the Church only gives us two liturgical days every two years to pray about these important chapters, because tomorrow is All Saints Day with its proper readings, we have only one day over two years. This year it’s particularly important we do so, however, because on Tuesday, we marked the 60^th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions and especially to our Jewish elder brothers and sisters, themes that St. Paul grappled with in these chapters.
• St. Paul begins by stating how difficult the subject was for him. He was a Jew by ethnicity and formerly a proud Pharisee by profession. He loved Judaism and his fellow Jews and was so grateful for all the ways God has blessed him and his people through the Covenants. That’s why he begins the whole discussion saying: “I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie; my conscience joins with the Holy Spirit in bearing me witness that I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.” Great sorrow and constant anguish in his heart. A sorrow and anguish so penetrating that he would have basically done anything for them to have come to faith in the long-awaited Messiah, including being cut off from Christ the Vine so that they could be part of him. He loved them with the heart of Christ. He pondered all that God had given them: descendancy from Jacob, adoption as God’s children, his holy shekinah or glory, the covenants (with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David), the law, the worship at the Temple written out by him in Leviticus, the promises, the patriarchs and the genealogy of the Messiah. But his heart was filled with anguish because despite all that preparation, they had not embraced the fulfillment of their Jewish faith in Jesus, in whom their is filiation, glory, the new and eternal covenant, the Legislator, true worship and the down payment on all God’s promises and all the hopes God had given the Jews. This anguish is what led him to become all things to all people, including to his fellow Jews, so that each might come to Christ. Later in these three chapters he will describe God’s plans for the salvation of the Jews, and it’s fundamentally, through seeing God’s goodness working among the Gentiles, they might come to embrace it and be saved. But Paul, and God, wishes all of us have a similar anguish of heart for the salvation of others, the anguish that beat in Paul’s heart and in Christ’s Sacred Heart.
• This sorrow and anguish has characterized the Church’s prayer throughout the centuries as the Church has grappled with the subject of the way the Jewish people fit into Christ’s saving work, what is the connection between the Covenants God sealed with the Jews and the New and Eternal Covenant Christ is and made in his own flesh and blood. Catholics as individuals have not always gotten it right. The Church as a whole sometimes didn’t ponder sufficiently what the Holy Spirit led St. Paul to understand. That’s why Nostra Aetate in the Second Vatican Council is such a big deal. That’s why it’s worth celebrating 60 years after, with gratitude, in a big way. That’s why we need to appreciate its theological and moral synthesis and live it.
• Pope Leo spoke about the importance of the anniversary on Tuesday and underlined how it was based on the questions St. Paul grappled with in Rom 9-11. We must not forget,” he said, “how Nostra Aetate actually developed. Initially, Pope John XXIII commissioned Cardinal Augustin Bea to present a treatise to the Council describing a new relationship between the Catholic Church and Judaism. We can say, therefore, that the fourth chapter, dedicated to Judaism, is the heart and generative core of the entire Declaration. For the first time in the history of the Church, we [had] a doctrinal text with an explicitly theological basis that illustrates the Jewish roots of Christianity in a well-founded biblical manner. At the same time, Nostra Aetate (n. 4) takes a firm stand against all forms of antisemitism.”
• The two basic affirmations we find in paragraph 4 is that the Jews were not responsible as a people for Jesus’ crucifixion — all of us sinners are — and that antisemitism, sometimes flowing from the scapegoating of Jews, must be condemned. This is so important because we’re living in an age of increasing anti-Semitism nationally and internationally, of terrorist attacks on Jews and synagogues, of conceptual attacks on Jews under the guise of anti-Zionism from those on both the political left and the right, of the rise of Neo-Nazis in Germany and other places, and even Holocaust deniers within the lifetime of Shoah survivors. As Catholic clergy, with the Holy Father, we have to take a firm, resolute, united and defiant stand against anti-Semitism. George Weigel, in a powerful column this week, gave us clearly the theological and moral reason: “Antisemitism is a betrayal of Christianity, for Jew-hatred is Christ-hatred. Why? Because Jesus of Nazareth makes no sense without understanding him as he understood himself: as a son of God’s covenant with the Jewish people. … Christianity makes no sense without its Jewish parent, as the Christian New Testament makes no sense without the Hebrew Bible. Absent its foundation in, and tether to, Judaism, Christianity would have been another short-lived mystery cult from the ancient world. … Early Christians understood this. So even in its childhood, historically speaking, Catholicism decisively rejected the heresy of Marcionism, which scorned the Old Testament and created a repugnant caricature of the God of the Hebrew Bible.” It needs to be a source of great sorrow and constant anxiety that our Jewish brothers and sisters are suffering in this way and that this hatred is also Christ-hatred, Mary-hatred, Joseph-hatred, Peter-hatred, and ultimately God-hatred.
• Over the intervening six decades since the Council, the Church has developed its teaching on the relationship between Christians and Jews. In her documents and instructions, the Church has articulated clearly that “the Catholic Church neither conducts nor supports any specific institutional mission work directed towards Jews.” This is partially, I think, a result of some of the forced conversions by the State during times like the Spanish Inquisition and the consequent reasonable distrust among Jews. But it’s also out of reverence for the irrevocable Covenant our faithful God made with the Jews and, therefore, their ongoing mysterious role in salvation history. As St. Paul will ponder later in these chapters, and as Father Pablo Gadenz pondered at length in his great doctoral dissertation, Called from the Jews and the Gentiles, Pauline Ecclesiology in Rom 9-11, the refusal of many Jews to accept Jesus as their Savior was the occasion for the expedited evangelization of the Gentiles, and the conversion of the Gentiles, over time, is meant to entice the Jews to accept the mercy of God incarnate in Christ. We do care, like St. Paul did, for the Jews’ coming to the fulfillment of all the Messianic hopes, but our means are prayer, witness, friendship and conversation. We hope to bring them from good to better, from what was concealed in the Old Testament to what has been revealed in the New in Christ Jesus.
• Sorrow and anguish. We see that in play in the Lord Jesus in today’s Gospel, and it led him to urgent action. Someone with dropsy — or edema, swelling caused by fluid retention — was there as a plant, St. Luke says that “the people there were observing him carefully” to test whether Jesus would cure the man on the Sabbath. St. Luke tells us that Jesus took the bait and said to the hosts “in reply” to this man’s being in front of him, “Is it lawful to cure on the sabbath or not?” He didn’t hesitate to teach about the importance of every person and the urgency that we should have to love him or her and the anguish and sorrow we should feel when others objectify them, are indifferent to them, or otherwise offend their God-given dignity. After asking whether it was lawful to cure on the Sabbath — in other words, whether it was possible to do good deeds on the Lord’s day! — Jesus healed the man. The principle Jesus gave was that no one would ever allow one of his children or even animals who fell into a cistern to remain trapped and isolated on the Sabbath but rather would work on the Sabbath to rescue him. Jesus, with merciful affection, wouldn’t allow this man one more day to remain with dropsy. Jesus’ analogy highlights that we always do something with urgency for someone or something we really care about, someone who matters to us, whom we love, and we all recognize that such authentic love for that person would not be a violation of God’s will or law. The problem for the Pharisees was that they just didn’t really care about the man with dropsy. They didn’t love him. Jesus acts with the same urgency for us and our salvation, because he cares for us more than a parent cares for a child or a farmer cares for his animals. And he wants us to imitate that loving concern, that urgency, since many times we procrastinate on charity toward our neighbor because we really don’t love.
• This type of anguish is essential to the life of the Church. This type of sorrow and concern for those who are in need of Christ is meant to characterize the life of every minister of the Gospel. The Second Vatican Council’s Pastoral Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, released 60 years ago this December, begins not just with the words “Gaudium et spes” but right afterward, “luctus et angor.” It’s translated, “The joys and the hopes, the griefs and the anxieties of the people of this age, especially those who are poor or in any way afflicted, these are the joys and hopes, the griefs and anxieties of the followers of Christ; indeed, nothing genuinely human fails to raise an echo in their hearts.” I’d just like to pull out those words “luctus et angor,” because those are precisely taken from St. Paul today, the sorrow and anguish, because that — with the joy and hope that comes from the Gospel — is how we as Christians, and especially we as ordained deacons, are supposed to respond pastorally to the world. That’s what leads us to urgent action. At diaconal ordination, we are ordained in the person of Christ the Deacon, the one who came not to be served but to serve, and to give his life as a ransom for many, the one who taught us not to fight for the best seats at table but to fight for the towel. Deacons are icons of the charity of Christ, of his pain and anguish over the sufferings of others, of his joy, so that his joy may be in us and our joy perfected, and of his hope that we will stake our life on all of his promises. We’re celebrating today a Mass for Ministers of the Church and its written to encompass all those in Holy Orders, starting from the foundational sacrament of the Diaconate. We turned to God at the beginning of this Mass and asked, “O God who have taught the ministers of the Church not to be served but to serve their brothers and sisters, grant, we pray, that they may be effective in action, gentle in ministry and constant in prayer.” We’ll pray later over the offerings, “Holy Father, whose Son chose to wash the disciples’ feet and so set us an example, accept, we pray, the gifts of our service and grant that, offering ourselves as a spiritual sacrifice, we may be filled with a spirit of humility.” And after Communion, we will implore, “Grant, O Lord, to your servants, whom you have replenished with heavenly food and drink, that, for the sake of your glory and the salvation of believers, they may be found faithful as ministers of the Gospel, of the Sacraments and of charity.” Jesus the Deacon, Jesus the Eternal High Priest, in this Mass, as he speaks to us, as we enter into the Gospel, as we prepare to receive him, wants to strengthen us so that we may be true servants full of joy and hope, full of appropriate sorrow and anguish, as we work with urgency for the sake of divine glory and the salvation of all.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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