Relating To, And Becoming Like, Our Father, Eleventh Thursday (II), June 18, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Gary
Mundelein Seminary Conference Center
Mundelein, Illinois
Thursday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
June 18, 2026
Sirach 48:1-14, Ps 97, Mt 6:7-15

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Three days from Father’s Day, the Church providentially has us ponder the way Jesus helped us confidently turn to God our Father. The essential mission of the Son of God made man was to bring us into the life of the Blessed Trinity, to help us become sons in the Son by the power of the Holy Spirit. Salvation isn’t just a rescue from a self-alienated eternity from God — a salvation from — but it was ultimately a redemption for. Jesus had come so that we might have life to the full, so that his joy might be ours, so that we might receive the kingdom that it is the Father’s pleasure to give. In this retreat, as we recalibrate our mission based on Jesus’, today’s Gospel gives us the opportunity to examine our relationship with God the Father as sons and then look at our own priestly spiritual fatherhood in light of the attributes of Father to whom Jesus helps us turn.
• As priests, we pray the Our Father many times a day: at Mass, at Lauds and Vespers, and at least six times in the Rosary. Liturgically, however, we have a chance to preach on the Lord’s prayer only three times a year at daily Mass: on Tuesday of the First Week of Lent, on the 11th Thursday in Ordinary Time, and on the 27th Wednesday in Ordinary Time, and on Sunday, only once in the three-year cycle, when St. Luke’s version of the Our Father appears in the 17th Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C. Strangely, we are not given St. Matthew’s richer version of the Our Father in Year A. Because it’s part of every Mass and we are always able to preach on the liturgy, it’s of course possible for us to share reflections on this most important vocal prayer in Christianity at other times, but I’m not sure how many of us take advantage of that opportunity. Therefore, we may not have the chance that sacred preaching gives us to go deeper into the meaning of the Our Father, what subjects Jesus has us ask for and in what sequence, and what things he doesn’t teach us to raise. The prayer of the Our Father, liturgically, is excised from the middle of yesterday’s Gospel, when Jesus is telling us in prayer not only not to do it for show but not to babble on like the pagans who think they’ll be heard by the sheer volume of words. For us and our people not to babble the Our Father but to pray it, it’s very helpful when we have the privilege to enter liturgically into its depths, since it is first and foremost meant to be prayed together in liturgy when we can most effectively pray, as one Body, in the first-person plural Jesus gives us.
• The first word is the most important. Pater in Greek, Abba in Hebrew. Jesus teaches us to turn as children to our dad who loves us. The second word, hemon, or “of us,” helps us to recognize that we’re part of a big family with whom and for whom he wants us to pray. We focus on the fact that he is in heaven, which is an indication of his holiness and an indication of our true homeland. Then we turn to the most urgent and important Jesus wants us to ask for: the Father’s name, not ours, to be hallowed, his kingdom, not our fiefdom, to come, his will, not ours to be done. Jesus has us focus in prayer, in other words, on God the Father not ourselves. He has us focus first and foremost on praise and thanksgiving, not contrition, intercession and petition, because praising God and thanking him are the most important forms of prayer. But we likewise know that when we hallow God’s name in word and deed we’re also sharers in his name; when we’re praying for and helping to establish his kingdom, we’re also summoned to enter into it as members of the royal family; when we’re begging for his will to be done, we know that his will is for our salvation and sanctification. But Jesus has us pray, first, patrocentrically, not egocentrically. Then Jesus specifies for us what petitions we should be making for ourselves. Each derives from the nature of God’s Fatherhood. Like all fathers who derive their identity from him, God the Father seeks to provide for us, to forgive us and protect us. That’s what we beseech. We ask him first to give us today our epiousios or supersubstantial bread, which we now if far more than material sustenance: it’s his own Son in the Holy Eucharist. We ask him for his mercy and for the grace to be merciful like him toward others. As a humble confession of our weakness, we beg him not to let us fall when tempted but to deliver us, in this world and forever, from the Evil One.
• It’s important for us to look at the Our Father not just as words or a formula to be recited but as a prayer to be lived. Jesus wants us to live in filial relationship to his Father and ours, to recognize that divine filiation means to look on and treat each other as brothers and sisters. He wants us to grasp that we hallow his name, we glorify him, by our “good deeds” that cause others to praise him. He wants us to seek and live in that kingdom of the Father that is our great inheritance and to help others enter into it. He wants us, just like the saints, to do the will of the Father. He wants us to be grateful to God’s providence and come receive his Son the Living Bread come down from heaven, to be as merciful as he is merciful, to count on him for strength in trial and to liberate us from the devil, his empty promises and evil works. The Our Father is meant to lead to a whole Christian way of life together with the Father, something that should mean even more to us as we approach Father’s Day.
• Since God’s fatherhood is the source from which all fatherhood in heaven and earth is derived and modeled, the Our Father also indicates to us a great deal about how we’re called to exercise our vicarious spiritual fatherhood as priests. We’re supposed to be dads, not distant men, full of affective and sacrificial love for those whom the Lord entrusts to us. We’re supposed to be family makers and therefore leaders and makers of communion. We’re supposed to be eschatological and anagogical figures pointing to heaven and showing people how to live in this world with their minds, words and hearts set above. We’re supposed to mention his name, not worry about our own; seek his kingdom with all its attributes rather than obsess about our own authority and possessions; to do his will like Jesus did, with joy and resolve, even in our own Gethsemanes. Like God the Father and natural fathers, we’re supposed to be providers, givers not takers, conscious of the fact that we can give at the altar what no one else can, and to make the Eucharist available, even and perhaps especially in the midst of life-threatening pandemics. We’re supposed to be men of mercy spurring others on to mercy, so that we can more effectively dispense and receive, and help others receive, divine mercy. We’re supposed to strengthen people in the fight against temptation, by pointing out temptations and giving them the means to avoid near occasions and choose the Lord when they can’t. And like any natural father who would die protecting their children from kidnappers or abusers or others who would do them harm, so we are out of love are summoned courageously to free them from the seductions and ambushes of the devil by teaching them clearly about the devil and the various means he employs to get us to choose sin and spiritual suicide over God and life.
• Missionaries continue Jesus’ mission of bringing people into communion with God the Father, to bring them to baptism by which they can truly call God their Father, to help them live out their divine filiation and so hallow God’s name and themselves, and, in short, to live the words Jesus taught us to pray. In the first reading, we have Sirach’s great praise of the Prophet Elijah, who illustrates this type of life. His whole life was in communion with God. He sought God’s glory. He strove to live and get others to live faithfully in the Lord’s vineyard, a sign of his kingdom, as well as anointed kings and reminded both the good and bad they were under God’s dominion. He always sought to do what God was asking, no matter how difficult. He prayed to God for food and God provided with ravens in the desert and through the faithful generosity of the widow of Zarephath. He learned from God the way of mercy, as we saw with Ahab, and convinced people of their need to repent. He was repeatedly strengthened when he was tested, as by the priests of Baal, and was delivered from evil, as God liberated him from Jezebel’s diabolically inspired machinations. All of this came from Elijah’s prayer, which was not full of babbling, but a gentle whisper, and a bold heart that recognized that God could do anything, including ignite a sacrifice drenched in water. Elijah’s example inspires us to this same type of filial prayer and life. How awesome, Sirach said, Elijah was in his wondrous deeds. How awesome God is who worked those wonders in Elijah. How awesome are the deeds God works through us, most especially the sacraments!
• It’s significant that the most important time we pray the Our Father is in the heart of the Mass, as we pray together with Jesus on the altar and each other, as the Holy Spirit helps us collectively to cry out “Abba, Father!” (Rom 8:15). It’s in the Mass that God answers the prayer Jesus taught us, giving us his Son precisely so that through, with and in Him, we can relate to God as Father, live for the Father’s glory, kingdom and will, be nourished by him with the greatest food ever, be strengthened by his mercy to let our sun and rain fall on the good and the bad, unite ourselves to him in the midst of trials and remain attached to the Stronger Man who came to free us in this world and forever from the evil One. As we prepare to pray the Our Father today, let us ask the grace to do so as beloved sons and priests called to be spiritual dads, with all the wonder with which Mary and the apostles learned it from Jesus’ lips and said it for the first time.

The readings for today’s Mass were: