Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 8, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Tenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
June 8, 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 privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when we return to the Sundays of Ordinary Time in which Jesus describes for us the wok of the devil, Christ’s own response to him, and what he wants our response to be.
• In the Gospel, various of Jesus’ cousins came to seize him, claiming, “He is out of his mind.” They evidently couldn’t understand why he would leave his job in Nazareth, surround himself by a bunch of fishermen, tax collectors, zealots and others, and preach in such a way that many of the religious leaders of the time — the Scribes, Pharisees, Sadducees, and eventually high priests — would turn on him to have him killed. No one could deny his miracles and exorcisms, but some of the scribes accused him of doing his work through black magic, casting out the little demons, we could say, by the power of the great demon. The evil one had gotten Jesus’ critics, even some of his relatives, to begin to believe the lie that Jesus’ work was diabolical rather than divine. Jesus answered them quite clearly, cutting to the heart of the devil’s technique of dividing and conquering: “How can Satan drive out Satan? If a kingdom is divided against itself, that kingdom cannot stand. And if a house is divided against itself, that house will not be able to stand. And if Satan has risen up against himself and is divided, he cannot stand.” The devil is a divider, Jesus is saying, and would never permit his infernal kingdom to be divided because then his plans would be defeated. He would never turn his principal weapon against himself. Just as he did with Adam and Eve, the devil continues to try to work his plan of division, to divide us from God through sin, to divide us from others, to divide husbands and wives, to divide families, to divide countries into terrible partisanship, to divide the Church into various labels like liberals and conservatives, social justice versus pro-life Catholics, to divide us on music, to divide us on which priests we prefer, to divide us any and every way he can. Jesus prayed during the Last Supper that we might be one, just as He and the Father are one. The devil seeks to make us a bunch of isolated, unhappy monads, like we see the devils divulge in a possessed man elsewhere in the Gospel, who said, “We are legion, for there are many of us.”
• But Jesus is stronger than the devil. He came into this world as the “Stronger Man,” to use his phrase from this Sunday’s Gospel, to bind the “strong man” of the devil and divide his spoils. In the Alleluia verse before the Gospel, we will sing about how he does so: “Now the ruler of the world will be driven out,” Jesus says, and “when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself” (Jn 12:31-32). Jesus exorcises the devil by his crucifixion, when he was lifted up on Calvary, but in the very same action of expelling the devil he is attracting us to himself.
• To defeat the devil, Jesus wants to draw us to him in three ways.
• The first is through repentance and mercy. In the middle of this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus talks about the unforgivable sin, telling us, “All sins and blasphemies that people utter will be forgiven them, but whoever blasphemes against the Holy Spirit will never have forgiveness, but is guilty of an everlasting sin.” What is this sin of blasphemy against the Holy Spirit? The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes that it is impenitence, which means either a failure to recognize our need for God’s mercy, or to think God has the power to forgive our sins, or to repent and come to receive his mercy. “There are no limits to the mercy of God,” the Catechism declares in paragraph 1864, “but anyone who deliberately refuses to accept his mercy by repenting, rejects the forgiveness of his sins and the salvation offered by the Holy Spirit.” The only sin God won’t forgive is, in essence, a sin we won’t allow him to forgive, because we, like the devil, seek to hold on to our sin rather than let him take away our sins and those of the world. So the first response we need to have is a great love for the Sacrament of Penance by which Jesus, the Stronger Man, binds the devil and divides his spoils, allowing us to begin anew to be free.
• The second response is by associating ourselves with Our Lady. We remember from the Genesis account of original sin that God said to the devil, “I will put enmity between you and the woman, between your offspring and hers.” He describes the scorn that Jesus and his mother Mary — whom Jesus would repeatedly call “Woman,” because on Calvary he would make her the Mother of all the Living — would have for the slithering serpent. On Saturday the Church celebrated the Memorial of the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary and we were able to celebrate how her heart was full of God and free of sin. Immaculate literally means without stain. From the first moment of her life, in her Immaculate Conception, she had this total enmity for the evil one and she wants us to have the same. Our second response to the devil and his desire to divide us from God, others and within ourselves, is to entrust ourselves to our Lady, to her prayers, and to ask her to help us have that same scorn for the devil, all his evil works and all his empty promises.
• The third response is obedience to God. In this Sunday’s Gospel, when the crowd said to Jesus, “Your mother and your brothers and sisters — his male and female cousins, because there’s no distinction in the terms for relatives in the spoken Aramaic of Jesus’ day — are outside asking for you,” he said that his mother, brothers and sisters are comprised of “whoever does the will of God.” This wasn’t a put-down of Mary, but Jesus’ greatest praise. Mary was one whose whole life can be defined by her response to the Archangel Gabriel at the Annunciation, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” Her whole life was a fiat, an amen, a yes. And she seeks to help us to respond to the Lord in this way. We know that the devil’s great theme song is “Non serviam!,” I will not serve, I will not obey. He seeks to bring us from distrust, to disobedience, to disunity, to definitive self-alienation or hell. The response of a Christian is “Serviam!,” the desire to hear the Word of God always as words to be lived. It’s to say, “Yes!” to God, not “No!” Jesus came from heaven to earth to found a family, a functional family, all of whom seek to help each other to put God’s saving word into practice, to do to follow his example, to love one another as he has loved us first.
• Ultimately to put into practice his command during the Last Supper to do “this” in memory of him. Especially during this ongoing Eucharistic Revival, it’s key to grasp how the Mass is a great means to live the realities Jesus is describing in this Sunday’s Gospel. In the Eucharist, Jesus is indeed “out of his mind” in two senses. First, he was out of his mind by acting in a way in contravention of worldly logic. He was out of his mind to leave heaven and take on our humanity. He was out of his mind to allow himself to be rejected and ultimately murdered by his creatures. But he’s out of his mind most in humbly hiding himself under the appearances of bread and wine. The expression, “out of his mind,” in the Greek, means more precisely “out of himself,” and in the Holy Eucharist Jesus indeed is not thinking about himself at all but about us. In the Eucharist, we receive him, the self-identified Stronger Man, in the shocking appearance of humility and weakness, but it’s through our holy communion with him that he seeks to make us, in all our weaknesses, strong in him. He does so by helping us to embrace the Cross by which he defeated the devil and divided his spoils. To pick up an instrument of crucifixion would make us seem out of our minds, but we know with St. Paul that the cross is indeed the power and wisdom of God, the source of strength and knowledge, because it makes it possible for us to love. We also know that by means of our holy communion with him, Jesus seeks to make us — the Church, his Mystical Body and Bride — truly strong in unity, as we pray at Mass, “one Body, one Spirit, in Christ.” That’s why the devil hates the Mass so much and tries to divide us even in our approach to the sacred liturgy, having us focus more on the language we use, the orientation of the altar, the posture with which we receive Holy Communion more than we do the Word of God and adoringly and lovingly receiving the Word made Flesh. It’s in the celebration of the most holy Eucharist that we cry out for God’s mercy, saying “I confess,” and “Kyrie, eleison,” turning to the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world and asking him to have mercy on us and grant us peace. It’s in Mass that we pray together with Mary and the whole Church as we listen attentively to the Word of God, obediently acting on what Jesus told us to do, “doing this in memory” of him not just by celebrating Mass but learning from his self-giving how to say to others, this is my body, this is my blood, this is my sweat, these are my tears, given out of love for you. At Mass is where the whole Church prays as a family, “Lead us not into temptation but deliver us from evil.” This is where Jesus, the Stronger Man, wants to draw us to him in his Passion, bind within us whatever seeks to harm us, and fill us with himself.
• As you hear this, I will be on Day 22 of the 65-day National Eucharistic Pilgrimage and will have Mass followed by a Eucharistic procession at the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception in Washington, DC, which is, I believe, the most beautiful and comprehensive Church built to the Blessed Mother in the world. Please know of my prayers for you there, as we pilgrims, on behalf of the whole Church in our country, to have the same enmity she did against the devil and the same love she did for the Lord Jesus, whom she cherished for nine months in her womb, and cherished just as much when she received him anew within her at the post-Ascension Masses celebrated by St. John and the other priests of the early Church. We ask her, too, to intercede for us so that we may be just as “out of our mind” as she and her Son were. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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