The Heart that God Sees and Summons, Second Tuesday in Ordinary Time (II), January 20, 2026

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Pontifical Mission Societies USA, St. Petersburg, Florida
Tuesday of the Second Week in Ordinary Time, Year II
January 20, 2026
1 Sam 16:1-13, Ps 89, Mk 2:23-28

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

The following points were attempted in the homily:  

• Today we have the opportunity to deepen our understanding of the meaning of vocation, which can nourish both our baptismal vocation to be holy and faithfully love God and others as God loves, as well as the missionary vocation that flows from that baptismal calling.
• In the first reading, we have the vocation story of David. God sent the prophet Samuel to Jesse’s house to anoint the one whom God would indicate he had chosen to be his king after he rejected Saul for his infidelity. Samuel had long served the Lord but he still looked too much with human eyes than God’s vision. When Samuel first saw Jesse’s eldest son Eliab, he thought, “Surely the Lord’s anointed is here before him.” But the Lord said to him, “Do not judge from his appearance or from his lofty stature.” That’s precisely what had been done with Saul, who we heard on Saturday “was a handsome young man. There was no other child of Israel more handsome than Saul; he stood head and shoulders above the people.” But God as we know ultimately rejected Saul for stubborn infidelity. The Lord told Samuel, “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.” And so the presentations happened of the next six sons, but none was chosen by God. Finally, Samuel asked if there were any other boys and Jesse replied that the youngest was still tending the sheep. After he was sent for, this ruddy, youthful, handsome boy approached and the Lord said, “There. Anoint him, for this is he!” And Samuel did anoint him, so that well before he would supplant Saul as the acknowledged leader of God’s people, he would be getting prepared by “the Spirit of the Lord [who had] rushed upon him.”
• The Lord normally chooses those superficially unlikely, because he sees what we often miss. The Blessed Mother would say in her famous Magnificat, “The Lord has looked with favor on the lowliness of his handmaid.” St. Paul would declare in his First Letter to the Corinthians, “Consider your own calling, brothers. Not many of you were wise by human standards, not many were powerful, not many were of noble birth. Rather, God chose the foolish of the world to shame the wise, and God chose the weak of the world to shame the strong, and God chose the lowly and despised of the world, those who count for nothing, to reduce to nothing those who are something, so that no human being might boast before God.”
• The Lord sees the heart, but we need to ask: What was it in David’s heart that God saw? What was it in our heart that God saw?
  • In David’s heart he saw great courage, the courage that would lead him to go against the fearsome Goliath armed just with a slingshot and the name of the Lord.
  • In David’s heart he saw the capacity for passionate fidelity not counting on human respect. David wasn’t embarrassed to dance in front of the ark of the Lord even when his loved ones taunted him for it.
  • In David’s heart he saw sincerity and the capacity to receive his mercy. After Samuel told Saul he had sinned, like we saw yesterday, Saul made excuses. After Nathan told David he had sinned, David immediately repented.
  • In David’s heart he saw humility and a capacity for forgiveness. David forgave Saul who was trying to kill him. He forgave his Son Absalom who tried to steal his kingdom. He forgave Shimei, who was cursing him as he was fleeing.
  • In David’s heart he saw a capacity for shepherding after his own heart. David was a young shepherd, capable of risking and giving his life for his sheep, capable of risking and giving his life for God. In him God the Father ultimately saw an image of the heart of his 28th generation grandson, the Son of David who would become the Good Shepherd.
• Jesus mentions an illustration of that shepherdly wisdom after God’s own heart in today’s Gospel. Jesus reminds his critics among the Pharisees that when David and his soldiers were fighting for the Lord and were starving, they entered the shrine where Abiathar was high priest and ate the “bread of offering,” the showbread that would normally remain there for a week as an offering of the best of grains before being replaced and consumed by the priests. David had a heart capable of prioritizing according to God’s will, seeing that the Lord isn’t glorified by his sons — not to mention his soldiers — starving, that the good of the practice of the bread of offering in the temple isn’t absolute, and higher goods need to be remembered. Jesus’ heart was similar. When his apostles were starving on the Sabbath, they plucked off the heads of grain, meshed them in their hands, and ate, even though according to the Scribes and Pharisees — and not according to God — they were violating the Sabbath. The Scribes and Pharisees, to prevent the people of Israel from ever getting close to breaking the commandment to keep holy the Sabbath Day, created a whole series of regulations with regard to work. We see this throughout the Gospel. They preferred that people starve rather than mesh grain a little in their hands, as if going hungry glorified the God who gives us each day our daily bread. David’s heart saw God’s will more clearly than the Scribes and Pharisees did, and it was one of the reasons why he was chosen.
• The saints we celebrate are models of the type of heart that the Lord chooses. The unlikely calling of David is a foretaste of the vocation of St. Fabian. He was a Christian layman who came to Rome to see what would happen after the death of Pope Anteros in 236. The electors were deadlocked. They looked for divine inspiration and saw a white dove flying, which helped them to open themselves up to who the Holy Spirit would want. The dove descended, passed over the heads of various of the leading candidates and then settled on this spectator, Fabian. They took it as a sign that this good man, from a noble family, was the one God wanted, and they chose him, ordained him a deacon, priest and bishop and he served through 250. At the beginning of his pontificate, he had decent relations with the Roman authorities and was even able to arrange with them for the return of the relics of Saints Pontus and Hippolytus. It was peaceful enough to build an organization to care for the poor and he was the one who arranged the sections of the city into diakonia, to care for the poor in an organized way, adapting to what the Lord wanted even though obviously there had been no such structures before him. In the year 250, however, the emperor Decius turned on the Christians and Fabian was the first one martyred. The Lord saw in him the courage, commitment, and shepherdly care he saw in David and Fabian witnessed to it to the end. .
• We see a similar heart in the life of St. Sebastian. He was a guard very much in the favor of the emperor Diocletian who was able to remain faithful to the Lord while serving in the Roman army. He used his office as the head of the guards in order to support Christians who were being rounded up as martyrs and to console and, on some occasions, convert their pagan parents, friends and family members who had come to try to talk them out of “wasting” their lives in martyrdom. But when word eventually got to Diocletian about what Sebastian was doing for the Christians — and that he himself was a Christian too — Diocletian responded by rage as if Sebastian had betrayed him. And, as the early Christians said, he was martyred twice. The first time he was shot seemingly to death with arrows and they brought him for burial, but there they recognized he wasn’t dead and nursed him back to health. Having recovered, he went back to try to talk sense into Diocletian, surprising him on a staircase and preaching to him almost as a man returned from the dead. Diocletian would have none of it and had him beaten to death by clubs. In every circumstance, Sebastian was faithful to the Lord, courageous, seeking to extend the mercy he had received and trying to guide others, in life and death, to the Good Shepherd who had given his life for them.
• God in his eternal vision likewise saw something in our hearts that led him to call us to baptism and to mission. He probably saw a similar capacity for passionate fidelity even though many of our contemporaries would think that we’re crazy for prioritizing Christ over the things of the world and coming to Mass during the week simply because we want to, rather than because we have to. God saw in us the courage to do what others were persuading us not to do, and the courage to persevere. God saw in us the capacity of humbly receiving his mercy, letting our life be defined by it, and forgiving others, including those who have really hurt us. He saw in us a capacity for shepherding others through spiritual fatherhood and motherhood, for caring for all those where the Church is new, poor or persecuted, for nurturing and for our willingness to lay down our lives for the sake of those entrusted to us, however small and vulnerable. He saw in us ultimately something that reminded him of the love of the heart of his Son. He chose us and anointed us from early in life so that we might correspond to our Christian vocation. And he sent the Holy Spirit upon us, as he did upon David, to help us to attune our hearts ever more to his wisdom.
• Today we are preparing not to sacrifice a heifer but ourselves together with the Lord. In the great miracle of Lanciano, when 1300 years ago the host took on the accidents of human heart wall, something confirmed in anatomical and histological tests in the 1970s, we can get a glimpse that in every Mass, the Lord seeks to give us a heart transplant, to give us his own heart together with his entire Body, Blood, Soul and Divinity, so that our hearts may become increasingly pure and see and revere him in everything; so that our hearts may beat in synchrony with his and continue loving as he loves us first, so that God the Father in seeing our hearts might more and more see a reflection of his Son’s. Today, in gratitude for our vocations and the way the Lord called us like he called David, we turn to God and we ask him for the grace ultimately to be faithful to our calling! And we pray that God will be able to say about us what he said about David in today’s Psalm, “I have found [Roger, and Joe, and Keith, and Melanie, Jennyfer, Ines, and each of you], my servant.”

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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