Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 13, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday of Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
January 13, 2024

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a joy to have a chance to ponder with you the consequential conversation God wants to have with us this Sunday, in which he wants to help us enter more deeply into the inner nature of our Christian calling. Just as he engaged two of his first followers then, so he wants to guide us now into the three main stages of growth in any Christian vocation. At this time of so much instability, confusion and anxiety, as we mark this week the 51^st anniversary of Roe v. Wade, as we begin in earnest the presidential election season with the Iowa caucuses, as we continue to pray for a just end to the wars raging in Ukraine, the Holy Land and elsewhere, the world, our country, the Church, society, and our families need us to be the fully mature believers who can deliver Christ’s light, love and peace. So let’s enter into a life-changing conversation with Jesus as seeks to help us to come to full stature.
• The first stage of this consequential conversation is a true, deep encounter with Jesus. When St. John the Baptist saw Jesus walking by and said, “Behold, the Lamb of God!,” two of those who had been following and helping the Baptist — Andrew, and “another disciple” who almost certainly was John the Evangelist — were obviously intrigued. As good Jews, they knew the significance of the Paschal Lamb from the Passover rite to free the Jews from slavery in Egypt from reenacting it each year. When John pointed out Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” they couldn’t help but be curious and full of wonder and so they tried to find out more. Enquiring minds want to know. They began to follow Jesus, but, being fishermen, they were not particularly adept as private investigators. Jesus, aware that they were on his tail, turned around and asked, “What are you looking for?” Caught off guard, they asked, “Teacher, where are you staying?” Jesus didn’t respond with a direct answer to their small talk, because he did not want to meet them at the level of curiosity. So he responded by trying to bring them from curiosity to something higher: “Come and see!,” he said. He invited them to follow him more closely and to spend time with him. This was the first stage of their Christian life: a true encounter with Jesus.
• That leads us to the second stage of the growth in vocation: once we encounter Jesus, we’re summoned to change and invited to become his disciple. “Disciple” is the Greek word for “student.” We recognize Jesus is the Master and we begin to learn from him. We learn not just facts or other information that we might ignore or forget, but mainly we come to learn him and from him how to live, how to die, and how to live forever. We learn a new way of life. At Jesus’ invitation, Andrew and John came and saw Jesus’ homeless mansion, where he didn’t have a place to lay his head. St. John gives us a very interesting detail (which is one of the reasons why he was almost certainly the “other disciple” he names, because it would have been hard for him to know it otherwise): “It was about four o’clock in the afternoon.” This detail shows us first how much of an impression the encounter with Jesus had in his life that he would never forget the precise time he met Jesus for the first time and decided to follow him. It also shows us that this meeting wasn’t brief. Scholars convincingly have shown, based on the text of St. John, that it was probably a Friday when this encounter happened, and once Jews reached about 4:00 pm, the Sabbath would begin and travel would be prohibited. So it’s likely that Andrew and John got to spend not just an hour or two with Jesus but a little more than a full day with Jesus, peppering him with questions, answering his queries to them, laughing, praying, just being with him. Whatever happened over that length of time, they were changed and converted. They were no longer curious hangers-on; they were believers. They were prepared out of that faith to follow him faithfully the rest of their lives on earth, and when he would later visit them on the Sea of Galilee and call them from their boats, nets, fish, families and homes, they responded immediately.
• But, because they really believed in him, they were not content to remain merely at the level of discipleship. Andrew, as soon as the Sabbath was over, quickly moved to the third stage: the apostolate. Once he was able to travel, he ran to find his brother Simon, to announce to him the news any Jew would have longed for centuries to hear: “We have found the Messiah!” He could not restrain from sharing with the brother he loved that they had won the jackpot of jackpots. Then he did something more: he brought his brother to meet Jesus, so that Simon could share the same joy. Little did Andrew know what the Lord would do with his brother, that Jesus would change his brother’s name to “Cephas” (Peter) meaning “rock,” and later say, “You are Peter, and on this rock I will build my church, and the gates of Hell will not prevail against it” (Mt 16:18). All Andrew did was announce the good news to his brother and bring him to Jesus, and Jesus did the rest. Little do we know what will happen when we announce Jesus to others and try to bring them to encounter him and choose to follow him. That’s something we don’t need to know. Once we’ve really encountered Christ, once we have begun to learn from him and follow him, we’re impelled interiorly to share him with others so that he can work the same wonders in them as he has worked in us.
• Jesus wants every one of us to engage each of us in just as consequential a conversation, so that we, like them, might pass through these three vocational stages. There are many people who remain, even into adulthood, at the level of fascination with Jesus. They’re admirers but have never really encountered him at the life-changing depth Jesus desires. Even Catholics who have received all the sacraments of initiation can still not have taken this first step on the ladder of faith. They know a lot about Jesus. He is clearly too famous to forget and his claims about heaven and hell and the importance of our choices on earth are too important easily to dismiss. So they encounter Jesus at a safe distance, as an important historical figure, and behave as if they are followers of Jesus because they try to live by some of the things he said. But they mainly go through the religious motions, hedging their bets. They may come to Mass, they may receive holy communion, they may say some prayers, but they won’t really center their lives around listening to the Lord speaking to us in prayer and calling us to change. They’ll be good to their neighbor, and perhaps support the Church, but without really putting their hearts into it. To the many people at this vocational stage, Jesus says full of tenderness, “What are you looking for?” He invites us to “come and see,” to enter into his life more deeply. He tells us, “I am the way, the truth and the life!,” and beckons us to follow. Jesus eagerly wants all those who are at this stage to encounter him at a personal level and from there be upgraded to the status of true disciples on the inside and outside both.
• Discipleship is the second stage. Like with Saints Andrew and John, this means not just meeting Jesus but staying with him and following him wherever he wants to lead. It means treating him not just as someone who’s important in our life, but as God, as the single most important reality of our existence, for whom we’ll sacrifice everything else if necessary. A true disciple of the Lord will live a life of deep prayer, will make Mass the “source and the summit” of his or her existence, will seek to be a good student, sitting at the feet of the Master and pondering his words in Sacred Scripture and trying to act on them, will love those who the Lord loves and has called into his family the Church. Are we at this stage of discipleship? Is our relationship with Jesus the most defining reality of our life? If he were to call us today to follow him more intimately, to make a major change in our life, are we prepared because of that relationship to leave everything else behind to follow in his footsteps? Jesus wishes to give us the grace all need to live at this level.
• But as important as this is, it’s not enough. Once we recognize the beauty of the life of true discipleship with Jesus, we naturally want to share that reality with all those we love. Like St. Andrew, true disciples cannot stop themselves from bursting out to all those around them, “We have won the lottery! We have found the Messiah! We have encountered God and his salvation!” If we love Jesus, we will naturally want to spread love of him. We will also want to bring others to him so that they can experience the same joy we have found. Jesus, of course, could have stayed on earth until the end of time and proclaimed the Gospel himself to every man and woman. But he loved us enough, and trusted us enough, that he wanted us to share in his mission of the salvation of the world. Today the Lord wants to stoke in us a desire for the full flourishing of Christian vocation in us to come to him and to be sent by him, to be a holy disciple and an ardent apostle.
• This Sunday, Jesus wants us to follow him to his house on earth, the place where he stays, where he speaks to us, feeds us, and renews us. He will turn to us and ask, “What are you looking for?,” and wants to help us to seek him, to find him, to love him, to share his life and to bring others into communion with him. As we prepare on Sunday to behold and to receive the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, we ask for his help to become like Saint John the Evangelist and Saint Andrew so that at the end of the celebration of the Christian Sabbath, filled with the fire of the Holy Spirit, we will go to find those we love and bring them Jesus, the great news personified. We have indeed found the Messiah and more than the Messiah! At a time when our world, Church, society and families need him more than ever, let us make it our top priority to bring Jesus to others and others to him!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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