Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 16, 2021

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B)
January 16, 2021

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

The text that guided the homily is: 

• 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 will help us enter into the inner nature of the Christian calling. With the various convulsions and confusions happening in the United States, it is urgent for Christians in general, and Catholics in particular, to live out our Christian vocations to the full, and truly become the salt of the earth, the light of the world and the leaven our beloved country needs. And it’s crucial for us to ponder with Jesus today the three main stages of growth in any Christian vocation and to mature to full stature in him.
• The first stage of this divine drama is curiosity, wonder, and a eventually a certain amazement. 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 John the Baptist — Andrew, and “another disciple” who very likely 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, which they reenacted each year. When John pointed out Jesus as the “Lamb of God,” they couldn’t help but be curious. So they did what curious people ordinarily do: they tried to find out more. Enquiring minds want to know. They began to follow Jesus, but they, being fishermen, were not particularly adept as private investigators. Jesus, aware that they were on his tail, turned around and asked them “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. He did not want to meet them at the level of curiosity; on the other hand, he didn’t want to kill that curiosity either, by admitting what he would say later, that “the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head” (Mt 8:20). So he responded by trying to bring them from their curiosity to something higher: “Come and see!,” he said. He invited them to follow him more closely and to spend time with him.
• That brings us to the second stage of the growth in vocation: to come to be with Jesus, to follow him to where he is. We call this stage discipleship. “Disciple” is the Greek word for “student.” We come to Jesus the Master to learn from him. We come not just to learn facts from him or other information that we then ignore or forget later. We come to him to learn how to live, how to die, and how to live forever. At Jesus’ invitation, Andrew and John came and saw his homeless mansion. 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 that meeting with Jesus had in his life that he would never forget the precise time he met Jesus for the first time. 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 questions, laughing, praying, just being with him. Whatever happened over that length of time, they were changed. They were no longer curious hangers-on; they were believers. They were prepared out of that faith to follow him and when he would later visit them on the Sea of Galilee and call them from their boats, their nets, their fish, their families, their homes, they responded prompthy.
• 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 proclaimed that they had won the jackpot of jackpots and could not restrain himself from sharing that news with the brother he loved. Then he did something more: he brought his brother Simon to meet Jesus, so that Simon could share the same joy. Little did Andrew know what the Lord would do with his brother. Little did he know 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 his brother 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 him. That’s something we don’t need to know because it’s at the level of curiosity. We’re compelled, though, to share Christ and let him work the same wonders in those we know as he has worked in us.
• Jesus wants every one of us to 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 not followers. Even Catholics who have received all the sacraments of initiation can still be at this first step on the ladder of faith. They know a lot about Jesus. Jesus is clearly too famous to forget and they can recognize that his claims about heaven and hell and the importance of our choices on earth are too important to dismiss easily. So they sort-of follow Jesus, but do so at a distance, going through the motions, kind of hedging their bets. They’ll come to Mass, they’ll receive holy communion, they’ll say some prayers, but not 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 support the Church, but without really putting their hearts into it. To people at this vocational stage, Jesus says to us 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 wants all those who are at this stage to be upgraded to the status of true disciples, not just on the outside but on the inside.
• Discipleship is the second stage. It involves following Jesus not at a distance, but up close. Like with Saints Andrew and John, it means being with Jesus, and following him where he wants to lead us. It means treating him not just as someone or something that’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 them Lord loves and has called into his family the Church. Are you at this stage of discipleship? Is your relationship with Jesus the most defining reality of your life? If he were to call you today to follow him more intimately, to make a major change in your life, are you prepared because of that relationship to leave everything else behind to follow in his footsteps? Jesus wishes to give you the grace us 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 it 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 him, we will naturally want to spread love of him to others. 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, whether out of curiosity or discipleship, Jesus wants us to follow him to his house on earth, where he stays, where he speaks to us, feeds us, and renews us. He turned to us and asks, “What are you looking for?,” and he 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 John the Baptist and 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 this great news personified. We have indeed found the Messiah and more than the Messiah! At a time when our country needs him more than ever, let us make it our top priority to bring him to others and others to him!

The Gospel for this Sunday was: 

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