Responding to the Lord in Prayer and In Life, Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), January 14, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Columbia Catholic Ministry, Notre Dame Church, Manhattan
Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year B
January 14, 2024
1 Sam 3:3-10.19, Ps 40, 1 Cor 6:13-15.17-20, Jn 1:35-42

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• As we begin this new semester, after having finished the Christmas Season and entered into the period of so-called “Ordinary Time,” the Church has us focus on the extraordinary, mind-blowing truth that God wants to enter into a deep, intimate, personal relationship with each of us. He wants us to do more than know about him and believe in his existence. He wants us to know him personally, to enter into friendship, to receive and reciprocate his love, and then, in that bond, to recognize who we really are, not only created in his image and likeness but summoned to flourish by living up to that origin and destiny. As we marked thorughout the Christmas season, prayed for specifically in the Liturgy of Christmas morning, and reiterate every Mass as the chalice is prepared, Christ took on our humanity so that we might enter into his divinity. But this is accomplished not just by his birth, life, passion, death and resurrection, but through a loving personal bond; not just through his agape [his total self-giving love] but through mutual agape, philia [love of friendship] and even eros [our attraction not just to others to the good, true and beautiful]. Today’s readings all help us to focus on this astounding reality, gift and task.
• In today’s first reading, we see God’s desire for a personal relationship with each of us. We meet the young Samuel. Samuel, we remember, was conceived after God heard his mother Hannah’s fervent prayers and tears in the Temple of Shiloh finally to be able to have a child. After he was born and weaned, Hannah with faith, courage and gratitude brought up to the Temple so that he might be dedicated fully to, and trained for, the Lord’s service. So he grew up in the Temple throughout his childhood up to his adolescence, which is where he meet him today. Despite his being full-time in the temple housing the Ark of the Covenant, the sign of God’s presence and accompaniment through the desert and into the Holy Land, the text tells us he was still “not familiar with the Lord.” He was there serving the Lord but didn’t know him. That wasn’t his fault, nor was it just because “the Lord had not revealed anything to him as yet.” It was because Eli and his sons who should have known the Lord and trained him to enter into personal relationship with him were “sleeping” in the Temple rather than vigilant and awake in God’s sanctuary. The Lord, however, was about to change all of that.
• Three successive times in the night, God called out to the young soon-to-be prophet by name, “Samuel, Samuel.” That very moniker already prophetically indicated the personal relationship God desired with him. “Shem” in Hebrew means “name.” The verb “Shema” means “to hear.” “El” refers to God. And so Shemu’el in Hebrew means both “name of God” and “God has heard.” It’s an indication that the Lord wants us to invoke his name in prayer and that he also wants to hear, and has in fact already anticipated, our invocations. Samuel was destined, we could say, to be a personification of prayer, of the Lord’s desire to enter into a life-changing and life-sustaining dialogue with him. We see in the scene that each time the Lord called Samuel, the boy promptly ran to Eli, who was characteristically sleeping, rather than praying, in the house of the Lord. The first two times, Eli just told Samuel to imitate his own priorities and go back to bed. But the third time God called Samuel and the boy awakened Eli, the priest finally snapped out of his storper, recognized that the Lord must be the one calling the boy, and helpfully told him to reply the next time, “Speak, Lord, for your servant is listening.” That’s what Samuel did and that’s when the Lord began to speak to him. In the dialogue of prayer that immediately followed, God revealed to this kid the evil that would come to Eli’s house as a result of their corruption. Eli’s two sons, Hophni and Phineas, out of gluttony had been extorting and confiscating the meat sacrifices people would bring to offer to God and had also been using their offices to sexually abuse the women who were trying to serve God at the entrance of the Temple. Yet Eli, who had been repeatedly informed of their sins and hypocrisy, merely told them they should stop but did do anything to stop them. God told Samuel that Eli’s family would be punished for what he called their “blaspheming God”: rather than praising God in his holy place, they were desecrating it, themselves and the women they were exploiting. The young prophet was reluctant to share the contents of his conversation with Eli the following morning, but when Eli insisted, he held nothing back. That was the first of a lifetime of conversations God would have with Samuel so that through him God might enter into dialogue, guide and help his people. God would reveal to Samuel to anoint Saul, then to reprove Saul for his infidelity, then to go to Jesse’s house and anoint the young, ruddy David, and so much more.
• Just as much as God called Samuel by name to prayerful conversation, so he calls us. But for that to occur, we need help. Many of us are not trained to listen, to tune into God’s frequency, even when we are in God’s presence. We need someone to teach us that prayer is not principally, “Be quiet, Lord, here is the list of things I want you to do for me,” but “Speak, Lord, I am listening and want to be your servant.” We need those who can help us us learn how to be still and silent before God, how to perceive his voice, how to converse with him, how to develop through prayer that intimate friendship, that truly familiar and familial bond, that God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit — who calls us by name — wants to have with us. And once we have learned through divine grace and good habit the art of prayer, God wants us to assist others to learn how to open up to the existential heart-to-heart dialogue God wants to have with them, too. This is one of the most urgent things we have to do in the Church, because secularism, living as if God does not exist, is the biggest problem facing humanity. The Church is meant to be a school of prayer, but in many places, we’re a failing school. So many young people drift away from the practice of the faith because, even though they have come to Church, had religious education classes, and came from practicing homes, they have never been helped to become “familiar with God,” to learn how to encounter him and enter into a personal conversation and relationship with him. They listen to Sacred Scripture but don’t recognize that through it God is speaking. They come to Mass, even receive Holy Communion, but think that they’re just receiving a thing, perhaps a holy thing, but just a thing, not Someone. They go to confession but believe that they’re just confessing their sins to a priest rather than through the priest confessing their sins to God who through the same priest will forgive them. More than anything, they may learn to “say their prayers,” but often don’t grasp through them that they are talking to God the Father when the prayer the Our Father, speaking directly to Jesus when they say, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you,” making Mary blush when they pray the Hail Mary and more. It’s not their fault that they came to Church but didn’t find God, or said their prayers and didn’t encounter him. They were never taught how to relate to the Lord one-on-one. I’ve been very moved this year by conversations with some students I’ve met under very difficult circumstances. After three different tragic deaths of Columbia students since September, I’ve been approached by some students who reached out for help. Some were Catholic. Others were not. They told me that in response to the sudden death of their friend they knew that they somehow needed to pray — that that was both an objective and subjective need — but they just didn’t know how to pray. They humbly came hoping I could first pray for them, and with them, and help them to learn how to pray on their own. On another occasion a student approached whose brother had a very dangerous brain tumor. One of her parents is Catholic and she was baptized, but her family had not practiced the faith as she grew up. But faced with her brother’s situation, out of love for him she wanted to help him by praying for him, but she meekly said she doesn’t know what to do. I’m so happy she and the others came. Teaching people how to pray is the most important thing the Church does, but it’s something we all have to get better at. This spring I’ll be doing a four-session mini-course on the Art of Prayer at the Merton Institute. I hope you’ll enroll. In the FOCUS Bible studies, we don’t just study Sacred Scripture, but learn how to pray with Sacred Scripture. I’d urge you to think about joining one. Likewise I’d urge you to take advantage of the other opportunities we give to learn how to pray, like daily Mass, adoration, our retreats and days of recollection, praying the Rosary throughout October, the Stations of the Cross during Lent and much more. My hope for each of you, during your time at Columbia and beyond, is that you will become proficient, indeed expert, at prayer in such a way that God can work as powerfully in your life as he worked in the life of Samuel, and so that you can help many other people learn how to pray, too.
• In the Gospel, we see how St. John the Baptist played the role of Eli in the life of two of John’s disciples. When he saw Jesus walk by, he immediately pointed out, “Behold the Lamb of God.” He drew their attention to Jesus. He stoked their curiosity and wonder. And out of their trust in John, these two disciples — Andrew and almost certainly John the Evangelist, the author of the account — began to tail Jesus, observing him at a distance. But Jesus obviously desired something far more intimate. He turned to these two fishermen, who would have made terrible private investigators, and said, “What are you looking for?” He was asking, “What do you seek?,” “What do you really want?” He wanted them to examine their own desires. Whether their answer was simply small talk, a question as to how far they’d need to journey if they were to keep stalking him, it was nevertheless profound and pointed to an important spiritual reality. They replied, “Rabbi, where are you staying?” They knew they didn’t just want to say “Hi” to Jesus or to exchange the ancient equivalent of business cards. They wanted to stay with him. They hoped to get to know him. Jesus, who had come for far more than small talk, who had taken on our nature precisely to enter into relationship with us and remain with us until the end of time and beyond, invited them, “Come and you will see.” He invited them to come spend time with him and that’s what they did. St. John notes, “It was about four in the afternoon,” which is not just a sign that he remembered the exact moment he met Jesus for the first time. As many Scripture scholars have taught based on different indications in St. John’s Gospel, it was an indication of how long they spent with him. The text says, “They stayed with him that day,” which means far more than they hung around until midnight; rather, the Biblical scholars teach us, it was almost certainly 4 pm on the sixth day of the Jewish week, or just about sundown on Friday, which meant that the Sabbath was about to begin and travel would therefore be forbidden. So when they went and saw where Jesus was staying and “stayed with him that day,” St. John means that they spent the whole Sabbath with Jesus. They did an entire Day of Recollection. They rested with the same Lord who rested at the end of creation and who created the Sabbath so that we might be restored in our relationship with him. That’s when their intense, life-changing friendship with Jesus began. That’s when he taught them the naturalness of prayer. It had such an immediate impact on them that, as soon as the sabbath was over and they were once again able to journey, Andrew ran to get his brother Simon to introduce him to Jesus, saying, “We have found the Messiah!” They had been able in that first retreat day to recognize all their desires had been fulfilled, that the long-awaited One had finally come, and that he desired to be with them. And when Andrew introduced Simon to Jesus, the Lord showed yet again how he wishes to have an I-Thou relationship with each of us. He changed Simon’s name, the name by which he would call him, to Cephas — meaning “rock” or “Peter” — giving Simon Peter the vocation and responsibility in the Church his Bride and Body that his personal, prayerful relationship with Jesus would make possible. In a similar way, after we have met the Lord, after we have entered into intimate friendship with him, we are impelled from within to introduce those we know and love and care about, in fact everyone, to a similar relationship with him. We never know what the Lord will do once we make the introduction, just as John the Baptist didn’t know, just as Andrew didn’t know. But the greatest gift we can give to others is to introduce them to Jesus, to point him out, to help them to learn how to converse with him, to be and stay with him, to follow him, to discover in him the fulfillment of their longings, and to be transformed by him. At the beginning of this new semester, we can ask ourselves: whom have I brought to meet Jesus? Whom have I helped to learn to pray? Whom have I accompanied to Mass to be able to say, to Jesus on the altar what John the Baptist said at the Jordan, “Behold the Lamb of God”? There are so many people on campus living without God, or just going through the motions of what they learned as kids, whom God desires to meet at a much more profound level. We all know them. We all know many of them. Whom can we invite and accompany like Andrew and Simon?
• The other readings today show two consequences of the personal encounter with God to which we’re called in prayer and in life. In the Psalm, which flowed from the prayer of King David whom God had had Samuel anoint, we see what’s supposed to happen from our perspective in our prayer and friendship with God. In prayer, as we sung, we wait for the Lord and he stoops down to hear our cries whenever we are in need. He gives us ears open to obedience, docile to his will, and places his law into our hearts. He puts a new song, a new hymn to God, in our heart and mouth and we are spurred to sing that hymn, to follow his will, to live by his law. The refrain teaches us three central aspects of prayer. We prayed, “Here I am, Lord.” The first thing we need to do is to show up. Second, we need to make it personal, calling on the Lord by name just as he speaks to us one-on-one. And then we prayed, “I come to do your will.” In prayer, we seek God, find God, come to know God, come to love God, and in loving him, we begin to love what he loves and therefore seek to do what he wills. So we first make ourselves present, “Behold, I come.” Then we call upon him, speaking to him directly. “To do your will, O Lord, is my delight.” Then we seek to do that will we have discerned, and because of the love that flows in our relationship with God, we find delight in doing his will. The result of the entire process, as we pray at the end of the Psalm, is that we’re moved to give God praise and glory not just privately but publicly. We announce his justice, his goodness, his holiness before the multitudes. Our whole life begins to point people to him. Our whole existence becomes an extension of our prayer, a part of our prayer, and a means by which we draw people to meet the same source of justice, goodness and holiness.
• That leads us to the second consequence of prayer that we find in the readings: that we seek to live our whole life in communion with God, conscious that the earth is the Lord’s and that no matter where we are, we are in his presence and can and should say, in words and body language, “Here I am, Lord. I have come to do your will.” In today’s epistle, St. Paul reminds us that the place of the conversation with God is not just supposed to be a Temple in Shiloh, or later in Jerusalem, or even here on 114^th and Morningside. The place of our dialogue is not even meant to be merely in Jesus himself, the eternal Word of God who tabernacled himself among us, the Temple that would be destroyed and rebuilt on the third day. Through the sacraments, God seeks to make each of us his dwelling place where he desires to carry out a living dialogue. St. Paul asks with a certain pained astonishment to the Christians in Corinth, “Do you not know that your body is a temple of the Holy Spirit within you, whom you have from God?” Our body, which, as St. John Paul II told us, is the sacrament of the human person, body and soul, is meant to be the temple of God’s holy presence. That theological and sacramental fact is supposed to lead to a moral response, which St. Paul makes it clear: “Therefore, glorify God in your body.” Our whole existence, who we are body and soul, is supposed to be a house of prayer, a loving, intimate friendship with God, in which we glorify him, praise him, thank him, ask for his mercy and his help for others and ourselves. We’re supposed to live in full-time communion with God. Whether we’re in Church, or in a prayer corner in our dorm room, or in a classroom on in Times Square, we’re called to be in communion with God. That’s why St. Paul tells the Corinthians that it’s such a contradiction when we begin to live in the body like the vicious, promiscuous and abusive sons of Eli did in the temple precincts of Shiloh. “The body is not for immorality,” he says, “but for the Lord, and the Lord is for the body.” Our body is meant to be the dwelling place of God, not a den of thieves or immorality. St. Paul was addressing specifically the sexual sins for which the Corinthians were sadly infamous. The word translated “immorality” is actually “porneia,” which means sexual sins and lust. The English word “pornography” means “written sexual sin.” When we give in to sexual sins — like pornography, or masturbation, or sexual sins with others — rather than glorifying God in the body, like Eli’s sons, we’re “blaspheming God” in the body. Of course, this is not the way those in the world treat such behavior. They’ll think that if we come to Church on Sunday but engage in immorality the rest of the week, we should still be up for canonization. But God loves us too much to let us think that way. The Lord has given us our body and soul to glorify him, to enter into and remain in communion with Christ, to be the temple of the Holy Spirit, to live not according to the flesh but according to the Spirit. We have indeed been purchased at a great price — Christ’s own death on Calvary — and the Holy Spirit wants to help us to live according to that incredible value and dignity. We are the Lord’s, St. Paul reminds us, and are meant to live always for, with, and in the Lord, just as in Jesus, God is for us; and, as St. Paul would tell the Romans, if God is for us, who can be against us? The Lord Jesus asks us anew today, “What are you looking for?” “What do you seek?” And if we’re seeking him, let’s not seek him by halves. Let’s be all in and seek to glorify him not just in his holy temple here in Church, but in the holy temple he has made each of us through Baptism and renews every time we receive him in Holy Communion. Just as we would never commit sexual or other sins here in Church because we know it’s sacred, let’s be just as resolved never to commit sins against our body as the temple of God. Rather, let’s receive the help he wants to give us through prayer and the Sacraments, especially the Sacrament of Penance, to live in such a way that, with chastity, purity and piety, we will glorify him always in the temple of our body and contagiously, joyfully and maturely show others that this type of life of friendship and full-time communion with God is possible for them, too.
• The greatest prayer and divine conversation of all happens at Mass, when God gives us ears open to obedience so that we may hear God’s word and live it. It’s where he calls each of us by name not just to come and see where he dwells but takes up his dwelling within us. It’s where we behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and where he illustrates for us just how much the Lord is for the body, as Jesus says to each of us, “This is my body given for you.” It’s where we say, “Behold, I come” and are strengthened to glorify him in our body and soul and to announce his justice to others, indeed to the whole world. It’s here where we find the Messiah and Son of God who wants us to spend not just a day with him but the whole of our life into eternity. As we prepare to receive him, we ask the help of the Holy Spirit, so that in our prayer, in our words, and in all of our actions, we may glorify God in the body, live and show that we are for the Lord, and draw many others to join us in this liturgy of life so that in heaven, we may sing the new love song, the hymn to our God he has placed within our hearts, in the vast assembly of all the angels and saints.

The readings for today’s Mass were:

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