Rejection and the Good God Wants to Bring From It, Friday of the Second Week of Lent, March 21, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Montserrat Jesuit Retreat Center, Lake Dallas, Texas
TPMS Southwest Regional Meeting
Friday of the Second Week of Lent
March 21, 2025
Gen 37:3-4.12-13.17-18, Ps 105, Mt 21:33-43.45-46

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

The following text guided the homily:

• Today, as we continue our reflections on the Mission of the Church and our Mission, we come face to face in the readings with one of the most difficult realities in the transmission of the faith, and, indeed, one of the most challenging experiences in human life: rejection. We ponder the rejection of the young patriarch Joseph by his family members and of Jesus by his creatures. It’s an occasion for us to ponder the times in our lives that we, too, in our life and missionary work, have been rejected. In response to the terrible rejections of Joseph and Jesus, however, the Responsorial Psalm surprisingly has us proclaim today, repeatedly, “Remember the marvels the Lord has done!” In the Gospel, Jesus, citing Psalm 118, says, “The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone. By the Lord has this been done; it is wonderful in our eyes!” (Ps 118:22-23). The verse right after that is the Alleluia verse of the whole Easter octave, “This is the day the Lord has made; let us rejoice in it and be glad.” To prepare ourselves in Lent for Easter, we must enter more deeply into the experience of the rejection through examining its causes, especially envy, and how God not only seeks — marvelously! — to remedy those causes but to make the whole experience of rejection part of our salvation.
• In the first reading from the Book of Genesis, we witness how Joseph’s brothers were envious of him because he was their father Jacob’s favorite. The fact that Jacob loved Joseph the most didn’t mean he didn’t love the other brothers, but their envy led them not only to close themselves to the love their father had for them but also to the love they should have had for their father and their brother. Their envy led them, as Genesis tells us, to “hate [Joseph] so much that they would not even greet him,” and that interior poison led them to do something much worse. When Joseph went out to help his brothers tend the flocks in Dothan, the brothers conspired to plan to murder him, toss his dead body into a cistern and then lie about it to their father by saying a wild beast had devoured him. They wanted to replicate Cain’s invidious murder of his brother Abel. To save Joseph’s life, one of the brothers, Reuben, persuaded the other siblings just to abandon Joseph into an empty cistern so that he might be able to rescue him later. And so they agreed and threw him down into an inescapable situation, with most of the brothers likely thinking that, while they themselves didn’t shed his blood, it would just be a longer dying process. But then they saw a group of Ishmaelites, basically their second cousins through their grandfather Isaac’s half-brother Ishmael, and sold him into slavery for 20 pieces of silver, not as an act of mercy but of simple profiteering from what they anticipated would be a situation tantamount to his death in Egypt. At every stage, their envy at Joseph’s good fortune led to evil. Their brotherly betrayal was a prophetic type of what would eventually happen to Jesus when he would be sold by one of his spiritual brothers, one of his closest friends, for silver, too.
• Jesus describes that betrayal, and the envy that led to it, in today’s Gospel. Jesus spoke to the chief priests and the scribes in a parable about the way they had treated all the messengers God had sent them and how they were going to treat him. In the prophets Israel had often been referred to as a vineyard planted by God (Hos 10:1). God had made the Israelites stewards of that vineyard but expected a harvest when vintage time grew near. The prophets were the ones sent to remind them of that yield of good deeds, but, as Jesus said, “one they beat, another they killed and a third they stoned.” Other prophets were sent and maltreated the same way. Finally God sent his Son but, in prophetic tones that would be fulfilled in the cry of “Crucify Him!” in Pontius Pilate’s praetorium, they shouted out, “This is the heir. Come let us kill him and acquire his inheritance.” They wanted to be owners, not stewards, of what they had received and were prepared to commit murder in order to maintain their privileges. They wanted to be the ones in charge of the inheritance of faith, not God himself. The chief motivation behind the persecution of the prophets and the crucifixion of Jesus, Jesus implies in the image, was envy, envy that led to a hatred so severe that it resulted in homicide.
• But we know that that’s not the end of either story. God’s mercy intervenes. God always seeks to bring good out of evil and in both cases God’s goodness triumphed over the worst of human wickedness. Joseph’s being sold for 20 pieces of silver, becoming a slave in Egypt and his ability to interpret dreams eventually brought him to the attention of Pharaoh and to the second position in the Kingdom, an office he was able to use not only to save millions of Egyptians lives during seven years of famine but also his family. Likewise, Jesus’ being sold for 30 pieces of silver, taking on the appearance of a slave in order to serve us all and enduring the worst of nightmares, led him to save not only millions of Egyptian lives and so many fellow Israelites but the entire human race, including those who had conspired to have him crucified. To use his own words, quoting the Psalms, “The stone rejected by the builders has become the cornerstone.” That is indeed a marvel in our eyes!
• This theme of rejection and the good, even salvation, that God wants to bring from it is very important for us to understand and live the Christian life in general, and the missionary dimension of our existence in particular. Jesus, when he was sending out first the 12 and then the 72, prepared them for rejection. He said that there would be towns that would not accept them, that those who rejected them would reject him and the Father who sent him, but then he instructed them to dust the dirt of their town off the soles of their sandals and move on. He didn’t want them nursing their wounds, because that would obviously neutralize the Joy of the Gospel, but to go to the next town free of the experience, recognizing that one closed door would lead to their walking through a future opened one. Later, he told his first missionaries that for sharing the light of the world with others, they would be dragged before civil and religious leaders, betrayed even by family members, hated by all, and some put to death. But, he said, it would lead to their giving testimony, their having a particular pulpit by which to proclaim the faith in a way that would make it obvious to all that the truth was worth both living for and dying for. He gave the Parable of the Sower and the Seed to help missionaries of every age to recognize that even though the seed of the Word of God is indefectible, even when the sower sows perfectly, some soil still rejects the seed, too hardened to be penetrated, and many don’t bear fruit because of superficial subterranean rocky surfaces or through the nutrient-sucking thorns of worldly cares and anxieties. But he teaches us to sow all the same, because eventually the Word of God will reach souls with good and fruitful foil that will bear fruit 30, 60 or 100 fold. He was encouraging them that even though 29, 59 or 99 people reject, the next person can bear so much fruit from our missionary work that it makes everything worth it. These are super important realities for every missionary to remember. In our work as missionaries supporting missionaries, it’s also essential for us never to forget these realities. We will experience rejection, not just from likely sources like atheists and Satanists, but even from the good. Sometimes we’ll experience it from bishops and chancery officials, from pastors, from the Christian faithful, from potential or former benefactors, even from colleagues who have offices that are supposed to promote the Church’s mission work. We shouldn’t be too surprised when it happens, because it’s a constitutive part of the Christian life. But when it does, we should never forget the marvels the Lord has done, and with faith, and hope, and love for God and others, dust off the sandals and joyfully keep knocking at the next door, sowing the seed of the life-changing truth of the Gospel and the invitation to the friendship with the God-man who has come into the world so that we might have life and have it to the full. We should in those circumstances recall that “all things work out for the good for those who love God” (Rom 8:28) and build our life anew on Christ the Cornerstone.
• As we prepare now to receive that “Stone rejected by the builders” in Holy Communion — the greatest marvel of all in our eyes and God’s — we ask him for the grace to build our entire life on Him, our most secure foundation. We beg him to draw good out of all the evil we’ve suffered, and the missionaries we support have suffered, on account of the envy of others. And we beseech him to help us never to succumb to that capital sin but rather to rejoice in all that he’s given us and given others. Rather than saying, “Come, let us kill him!,” and rejecting Jesus, instead we say now, filled with gratitude and awe, “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!,” and embrace him with eternal love.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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