Properly Honoring and Welcoming Jesus, 14th Sunday (B), July 4, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of Our Lady of the Martyrs, Auriesville, New York
Fourteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
July 4, 2021
Ez 2:2-5, Ps 123, 2 Cor 12:7-10, Mk 6:1-6

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• This Sunday’s Gospel isa 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 realMessiah, 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 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 today’s first reading, to be “hard of face and obstinate of heart” and “rebellious,” and to make God’s true messengers feel, like we heard 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 celebrate the Fourth of July and 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 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 — and let’s focus specifically on us Catholics and on our Christian brothers and sisters — the big question for the Church and our Church’s huge role in society is: 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 a rescuer with a way to follow. 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 people 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. To be a true Christian today requires this type of holy realism. If we humbly live according to our faith and seek to share it, many in the media, in the academy, and in popular culture will call us “haters.” They’ll call us anti-woman because we’re pro-life, homophobic because we’re pro-marriage, unpatriotic because we treat immigrants they way we would treat Christ, bigoted because we believe there’s great meaning to God’s having made the human person male or female, and behind-the-curse-of-history and against progress because we choose Christ and his word over the latest fad. Are we ready for this? Are we ready to be rejected by the crowds, including even some of our family members and friends, because of our fidelity to Christ?
• Here at this Shrine of Our Lady of Martyrs, we draw strength from the witness of Saints Isaac Jogues, Rene Goupil, Jean de Lalande and Kateri Tekakwitha. They all experienced rejection for their choice to love Christ and spread love of him. In the case of Saint Kateri, she suffered rejection from the uncle who raised her, her extended family and many in the village, who tried to convince her she couldn’t be a good Mohawk and a Christian. In the case of the North American Martyrs, they not only experienced repeated rejection in their missionary labors, but also, as we know, brutal torture and martyrdom. All of them recognized the truth of what Saint Paul described in today’s second reading. Saint Paul, as we know, experienced a lot of rejection and was repeatedly scourged, stoned, and imprisoned for proclaiming the Gospel, and endured many other types of sufferings. But in prayer, Christ told him, “My grace is sufficient for you, for power is made perfect in weakness.” It’s when we suffer, in other words, that the power of Christ is able to shine all the more. That’s why St. Paul said, “Therefore, I am content with weaknesses, insults, hardships, persecutions, and constraints for the sake of Christ; for when I am weak, then I am strong.” The lesson for us is that as the Church’s public influence grows weaker from a political point of view, and as believers need to endure public attacks against religious freedom that we never had to face in previous generations, while it is clearly a cross, it is also a tremendous opportunity for the Gospel in all its purity and power to shine, just like it did in Jesus’ day in Nazareth and on Calvary, just like it did in the life of Saint Paul, just like it did in the lives of the North American Martyrs and the Lily of the Mohawks here in Auriesville.
• What’s really at stake, Pope Francis said this morning in his Angelus reflection in Saint Peter’s Square, is whether people will are willing to accept that God is not a concept or detached law-giver inhabiting a galaxy far far away, but chose to become God-with-us and remain with us until the end of time. The Holy Father said, “In the end, why didn’t Jesus’s fellow villagers recognize and believe in Him? … We can say that they did not accept the scandal of the Incarnation. … They did not accept the mystery… that the Son of God should be the son of a carpenter, that the divine should be hidden in the human, that God should inhabit a face, the words, the gestures of a simple man. This is the scandal: … God became concrete in a man, Jesus of Nazareth, he became a companion on the way, he made himself one of us. … An abstract, distant god is more comfortable, one who doesn’t get himself involved in situations and who accepts a faith that is far from life, from problems, from society. … Instead, God incarnated Himself: God is humble, God is tender, God is hidden, he draws near to us, living the normality of our daily life.” The people in Nazareth, like those later in Jerusalem, did not want to accept that God was among them, that the Messiah had come and that he was even more than the Messiah, and that he wanted to lead them not according to their earthly categories but according to his divine ones.
• As we reflect on our country’s 245^thbirthday, we can say candidly that part of what has helped make our beloved country strong has been its faith in God’s presence among us, in his blessing, in the incarnation. At times this may have been exaggerated, simplistic or even arrogant, as if we were somehow almost the new “chosen people” and “promised land.” But the central reality remains that, as most European countries progressively became more secular and sought to drive God out of their history, their present and their future, our country willed to be “one nation under God,” not just freeto worship him but proudto worship him and to put our faith into action through love of God and neighbor. The virtues that flowed from faith in God built up not only so many of the charitable, medical and educational institutions that have set America apart but also built up so many men and women, boys and girls into virtuous citizens who took others’ welfare seriously and were willing to sacrifice for it.
• Today, however, there’s a strong secular push in the United States that is winning. Secularism is defined as “living as if God does not exist.” It’s not a theoretical denial of God, which is atheism. It’s a practicaldenial of God, which means living, more or less, Monday through Saturday, and even Sunday, like the atheists do. This spirit of secularism has for a few generations now been attacking the souls of believers like a virus and even invading various churches that have lost their supernatural focus. It’s a serious problem among Catholics, too, leading to many to choose not to pray, not to frequent the sacraments, not to live by Christ’s moral teaching, but to think and live rather by the standards of the world. It is so important for us, as Catholics in America, to recognize that whether we accept Jesus as a prophet and live by what he teaches, whether we accept him as our incarnate Lord and seek to live in communion with him, is something that affects not just our life in this world and our eternal destiny; it’s something that also will have a huge impact on our families, on our parishes and the Church, and on the future of our country. If we do not remain one country under God, then we will become ever more divided, partisan and splintered as segments of society seek to manipulate the institutions of government and culture to secure their desires, regardless of the rights of others. If we do not remain one nation under God we may cease, I’m afraid, to be one nation. The stakes are huge. And they begin with whether we Catholics, who are one out of every four Americans, truly honor Jesus the Prophet and welcome him the way he desires and deserves.
• This Christian Sabbath, the same Jesus who came to his own in Nazareth, comes here. He has taught us in Sacred Scripture and brought the words of the prophets to fulfillment. He is about to feed us with himself as the Word made Flesh, which is his continuous incarnation. Through the intercession of our Lady and Saint Joseph and the Saints of Auriesville, let us welcome Jesus with great love, let us receive his words as words to be done, and let us become his instruments to help our 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 readings for today’s Mass were: 

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