Persevering Prayer to the Harvest Master, 29th Sunday (C), October 19, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, New York
Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
October 19, 2025
Ex 17:8-13, Ps 121, 2 Tim 3:14-4:2; Lk 18:1-8

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today is World Mission Sunday, the day on which the Church universal prays in unison to the Harvest Master for laborers for his harvest across the world, for the laborers already at work, for each of us to recognize that we’re laborers, for the fruitfulness of that labor and the salvation of those for w hom we’re laboring. It’s a day on which the Church seeks to put our faith-filled prayer into action, sacrificing to care for the work of missionaries in the now 1,130 missionary dioceses and territories across the globe where the local Church is too young, too poor, or too persecuted to be self-sustaining. Earlier this week, Pope Leo released an unprecedented video he recorded for World Mission Sunday so that it could be played in preparation for this Mass in which he emphasized the special importance of this day: “Dear Brothers and Sisters,” he said, “on World Mission Sunday every year, the whole Church prays, united, particularly for missionaries and the fruitfulness of their apostolic labors. When I served as a missionary priest and bishop in Peru, I saw first-hand how the faith, the prayer and the generosity shown on World Mission Sunday can transform entire communities. I urge every Catholic parish in the world to take part in World Mission Sunday. Your prayers and your support will help spread the Gospel, provide for pastoral and catechetical programs, help to build new churches, and care for the health and educational needs of our brothers and sisters in mission territories. This October 19, as we reflect together on our baptismal call to be ‘missionaries of hope among the peoples,’ let us commit ourselves anew to the sweet and joyful task of bringing Christ Jesus our Hope to the ends of the earth. Thank you for everything you will do to help me help missionaries throughout the world. God bless you all!” Two weeks ago, I was privileged to be with him in St. Peter’s Square for the Jubilee of the Missionary World, which he called a “wonderful opportunity to rekindle in ourselves the awareness of our missionary vocation, which arises from the desire to bring the joy and consolation of the Gospel to everyone. …  The entire Church is missionary, and it is urgent … that we ‘go forth and preach the Gospel to all: to all places, on all occasions, without hesitation, reluctance or fear.’ … We are called to renew in ourselves the fire of our missionary vocation.” So today is a day to renew that fire, to experience what the prophet Jeremiah once confessed, “Within me there is something like a burning fire shut up in my bones; I am weary with holding it in, and I cannot” (Jer 20:9). It’s to feel the explosive evangelical fervor of St. Paul who exclaimed, “Woe to me if I do not proclaim the Gospel!” (1 Cor9:16). It’s to remember that by our baptism and especially through our Confirmation, the Holy Spirit has come down upon us with a tongue of fire so that we might share our faith with burning love. This is why you became missionaries of that love in order to satiate Jesus’ infinite thirst to have others, especially the poorest of the poor, experience it. That’s why I became a priest. That’s why each of us was created, redeemed, and entrusted by Jesus with the completion of his saving mission.
• The whole mission of the Church begins with prayer. It’s how it began with Jesus. As the future Pope Benedict XVI preached during the Great Jubilee of 2000, Jesus preached by day and prayed by night. Just as Jesus prayed all night before he called his first apostles, so “we ourselves cannot gather men. We must acquire them by God for God. All methods are empty without the foundation of prayer. The word of the announcement must always be drenched in an intense life of prayer.” That’s why St. Therese of the Child Jesus, whose relics are now traveling through the United States, is co-patron of the missions, because her life was indeed drenched in prayer. She never ceased to pray for the missions and to offer her sufferings for her spiritually adopted missionary priest brothers, Father Maurice Bellière in Malawi and Father Adolphe Rouland in China. When we look out at the fields of the world, we see that 5.5 of the 8.1 billion people alive are not Christian, they do not know Jesus as the Savior, Way, Truth, Resurrection and Life. They don’t know his love for them or how to follow him. One of the reasons why, St. Therese once said, is because of the complacency and laziness of Christians. We can make it more specific: it’s because we’re not praying enough for the missions, praying as if lives depend on the missions, because many of them absolutely do! We see what Jesus himself did: that indeed the fields are white and ripe for the harvest and, like Jesus, we are moved with pity for the crowds who are like sheep without their Good Shepherd. And so we pray to the Harvest Master with insistence today. And that prayer is not just meant to become a way of life, not just in terms of our praying each day, but also in converting that prayer into missionary sacrifice.
• That’s what today’s readings provoke in us. St. Paul reminds St. Timothy and all of us about the importance of Sacred Scripture, saying that it is “useful … for training in righteousness,” for helping us “remain faithful to what [we] have learned and believed,” for making us “equipped for every good work,” and “persistent whether it is convenient or inconvenient.” And today in the Gospel Jesus gives us a parable of the “necessity … to pray always without losing heart.” If a persevering widow was able eventually to get a corrupt judge to do the right thing when she was being victimized, Jesus says, how much more will God the Father, the Just Judge, “secure the rights of his chosen ones,” his beloved sons and daughters, “who call out to him day and night.” Jesus implies that God’s chosen ones call out to him not just when convenient, not just when there’s an emergency, but night and day. His chosen ones pray always without growing weary, seeking to unite themselves to him not just in formal times of prayer, but in their work, their study, their hobbies and even their sleep.
• We see the importance of this prayer in today’s first reading, where we encounter a pivotal scene from the journey of the Israelites across the desert. It happened at Rephidim, where Moses at God’s instruction had struck a rock and allowed it to gush forth water for the people to drink. A brand new well in the middle of the desert would obviously attract others who might see in the well not just the means to quench their thirst but a source of power and profit. And so unsurprisingly the fearsome Amalekites showed up. God told the Israelites not to be afraid and instructed Moses to climb a nearby mountain with the staff of God in his hand and allow Joshua and the Israelites to battle against Amalek and his soldiers. We see what happened during the fight. Whenever Moses raised his hands raised in prayer, the Israelites dominated. Whenever his hands grew tired and fell, the Israelites were pummeled. Hence Moses’ two assistants, his brother Aaron and Hur, had him sit on a rock as they from behind kept his hands raised in prayer until sunset. With the hands raised as an external sign of Moses’ constant prayer, Joshua and the Israelites ended up mowing down the Amalekites. Through this unforgettable lesson, God was teaching his people about the importance of praying always in order to persevere and be victorious in the battles of life, the battles all of us face, individually and as the people of God. The hands of Christ’s Mystical Body the Church are meant perpetually to be raised to God in prayer for the needs of the Church throughout the world, including and especially the Church’s mission. That’s what is meant to happen in the Liturgy of the Hours in which the Church prays insistently, at least five times a day, to the Savior. That’s what happens in the more than a half-million Masses celebrated by the 407,000 priests of the world each day, as every half hour more than another 10,000 priests lead the Church in entering Jesus’ prayer from the Upper Room and Calvary as he, lifted up on the Cross, seeks to draw all people to himself. That’s what happens when we pray the Rosary, as we do with even greater fervor this month of October, as we join ourselves to Mary in her persistent prayer for all the children entrusted to her by Jesus on the Cross.
• At the end of today’s Gospel parable, however, Jesus asks a haunting question: “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?” At first, those words seem like a non-sequitur. Jesus is talking about prayer through a story of a persistent widow and a corrupt judge but then he turns to asking about whether he will find people faithful. But there’s a crucial connection between the two. Prayer is faith-in-action. Jesus was asking whether when he comes — and by this he certainly means the end of our life, but since he can come at any point, he also means right now, tomorrow, any time — will he find us ultimately persevering in prayer? Will we be persevering in uniting all aspects of our life to God? If we are united to God in our prayer than we will be uniting ourselves to his will that all be saved and come to the knowledge of the truth and then with fire we will do whatever we can to share in that mission.
• Today, October 19, is the Memorial of the North American Martyrs. Yesterday I was up at the Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs in Auriesville, New York, where the Jesuit Missionaries Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil and Jean de Lalande gave their lives in the 1640s as they sought to share the gift of our faith with the Mohawks. They were men of intense prayer. Rene Goupil was killed right after he and Father Isaac were praying the Rosary for the fruitfulness of their efforts among the clans of the village. When Isaac was a seminarian he used to spend long nights in prayer before the Blessed Sacrament asking God to bless the work of the missions and to help form him into a faithful and fruitful instrument for the sharing of the Gospel. Their persevering prayer helped cultivate their missionary perseverance despite all of the hardships and setbacks that the arduous work of sharing the faith among the indigenous in eastern Canada and upstate New York entailed. They are doubtless interceding for us all on World Mission Sunday that we might pray like them and labor like them for the Lord’s harvest.
• Today in St. Peter’s Square, Pope Leo canonized seven new saints: Ignatius Maloyan, Peter To Rot, Vincenza Maria Poloni, Maria Carmen Rendiles, Maria Troncatti, José Hernández and Bartolo Longo. They were all figures of intense prayer. Pope Leo today in his homily focused on how they were personal embodiments of the faith Jesus at the end of today’s Gospel wants to find on earth. They were those whose faith made them strong in bearing witness to him in martyrdom and in mission. We count on their prayers on this World Mission Sunday from Jesus’ eternal right side.
• The Mass is the great persevering prayer of the Church. It began during the Last Supper, continued on Good Friday and has continued all the way down to the present day. It’s one continuous sacrifice, as Eucharistic Prayer III has it, “from the rising of the sun to its setting.” It’s where we come to unite ourselves to Jesus and where he hopes to find us not only present but praying with living faith, ready to persevere in prayerful union with him through the valleys and mountains of life all the way until, God-willing, we join the North American Martyrs, the saints canonized today, Saints Francis Xavier and Therese Lisieux, patrons of the Missions, St. Teresa of Calcutta, and all God’s holy ones in the eternally persevering prayer of the heavenly Jerusalem! The Lord gives us Mass each day as a school of prayer leading to mission, sent out at the end of Mass with the blessing of God to announce the Gospel of the Lord. The Mass is how God prepares us always to be ready for his arrival at the end of our life by helping us prepare with prayerful eagerness to receive him here, seeking to unite all aspects of our life to him, and striving to bring as many others as we can to receive the fruits of Jesus’ own earthly labors for his Father the Harvest Master. It’s where we daily seek to answer his question, “When the Son of Man comes, will he find faith on earth?”

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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