The Hope the Lord Gives Us Through His Word, Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Word of God Sunday, January 26, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Corpus Christi Monastery, Bronx, NY
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
January 26, 2025
Neh 8:2-6.8-10, Ps 19, 1 Cor 12:12-30, Lk 1:1-4.4:14-21

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

The following points were attempted in the homily: 

• This Sunday we celebrate for the sixth time a new and important annual feast, the Sunday of the Word of God, which Pope Francis established to accentuate the importance that Sacred Scripture is meant to have in the faith, prayer and lives of believers. He announced it intentionally on September 30, 2019; September 30 is the annual liturgical feast of St. Jerome, the famous translator of the Bible from the Greek and Hebrew into Latin, then the common language of the people; and he did so in 2019 leading up to the 160realize the certainty of the teachings
  you have received.0th anniversary of St. Jerome’s death and birth into eternal life the following year. As many of you will recall, St. Jerome is famous for emphasizing, “Ignorance of Scripture is ignorance of Christ”: that unless we are familiar with what Jesus said and did in the Gospel, how he fulfilled all the messianic prophecies of the Old Testament in peoples’ hearing, and how the apostles proclaimed him, we really do not know him. Saint Jerome learned that lesson the hard way. As a brilliant young student traveling to study from the great masters of his day, he got deathly ill with an influenza that took the life of his companions. He had been up until that point a lukewarm Christian, far more passionate about Greco-Roman literature than the faith. During his sickness he had a dream in which he appeared before the judgment seat of Christ. When he professed he was a Christian, Jesus replied that he was, rather, a Ciceronian, because he knew far more about Cicero and his writings than he did about Christ and his teachings. It rocked Jerome to the core. He didn’t know Christ because he didn’t know the Scriptures! After he awoke and recovered, he resolved to pour his mind, heart and time into the study and diffusion of the Word of God. In establishing the feast, Pope Francis expressed a desire that St. Jerome’s example of converted zeal would be contagious, that each of us would “grow,” he said, “in religious and intimate familiarity with the sacred Scriptures,” “appreciate the inexhaustible riches contained in that constant dialogue between the Lord and his people,” “experience anew how the risen Lord opens up for us the treasury of his word enabling us to proclaim its unfathomable riches before the world,” and “marked by this decisive relationship with the living word…, grow in love and faithful witness.” The theme of today’s sixth celebration of the Sunday of the Word of God is “I hope in your word,” taken from Psalm 119 (119:74). God through his Word wants to fill us with hope. The word “hope” appears about 150 times in Sacred Scripture. We draw hope from God’s revelation, which manifests his committed love to us. We place our hope in the fulfillment of all God’s promises that we hear and read and allow to take on our own flesh. We seek, having heard and been transformed by the Word of God, to bring that hope to others!
• We see the hope that comes from God’s word and from the fulfillment of his promises in today’s Liturgy of the Word. In the Gospel, we encounter Jesus preaching in his hometown synagogue, just as St. Luke tells us in what he calls his “orderly sequence” that Jesus was doing in all the synagogues of the region of Galilee, leaving the people astonished. He was handed the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah and read, from Isaiah 61, the passage describing the work of the eventual Messiah: he would be filled with the Spirit of the Lord, anointed to preach the Good News to the poor, to proclaim liberty to captives and freedom to the oppressed, to help the blind see, and to announce a Jubilee Year (Is 61:1-2). After reading that passage, which enfleshed and expressed the longing of the Jewish people for centuries, Jesus very dramatically handed the scroll back to the Chazzan, the synagogue attendant, and sat down, as all the eyes in the room were locked on him. And he gave a shocking, one-sentence homily: “Today this Scripture passage is fulfilled in your hearing.” Today, in other words, the Messiah has come and he is speaking to you now! Today, the long awaited one, whom you have been eagerly anticipating for more than a millennium, is here! Today the Word of God that filled you with hope is now seeing that hope actualized!
• The words of Isaiah’s prophecy were being unveiled before their eyes and decoded to their ears. The Spirit of the Lord, who had come down upon Jesus in a visible way at his Baptism in the Jordan, as we celebrated two weeks ago, was very much still upon him. Jesus was proclaiming the Gospel to the poor and lowly, to those who were humble enough to receive it, all throughout Galilee and making them lavishly rich with the treasure of God’s holy revelation. He was restoring sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, vigor to cripples, health to the moribund and would soon even be restoring life to the dead. He was proclaiming liberty to those in the bondage of sin through his merciful forgiveness and was letting those oppressed by the devil go free through exorcisms. In all of this, he was proclaiming a “year acceptable to the Lord,” a Jubilee Year, which was a reset button that God wanted the Jews to press every 50 years to reestablish their bonds with him and through charity with each other. All of the aspects of this Messianic prophecy — and all the others — Jesus was realizing live in their midst.
• Jesus wants continuously to fulfill Sacred Scripture in our hearing, before our eyes, in our minds, hearts and lives. He wants us to experience the completion of the hope we have placed in his Word. He wants to preach the Good News to us and desires that we be sufficiently poor in spirit to receive it, recognizing how much we need that gift. He has come to set us free from captivity and oppression, especially to our slavery to addictions and sins. He has come to help us recognize our blind spots and recover our sight, so that we might first see him in prayer and the Sacraments and then learn how to see all things in his light. He wants to proclaim not just a year acceptable to the Lord, not just one year of Jubilee like the Jubilee of Hope now one month old, but a lifetime and eternity pleasing to God and joyous to us. He wants to engage us in a daily consequential conversation of love and life that knows no end, planting the seed of the Word of God within us and helping us to bear great fruit, letting his word become fulfilled in and through us. He wants us ultimately — like Saint Luke and like those who he calls “ministers of the Word” who transmitted the Gospel to his own generation — in turn to pass on to others the reasons for the hope we bear within through “realizing the certainty of the teachings [we] have received.”
• The same Jesus who entered his hometown Synagogue on the Sabbath enters this Convent in the Bronx today. He speaks to us live as the Gospel is read. He comes to teach us, to heal us, to console us, to be with us, to strengthen us and to send us out. But for that transformation to occur, we first must accept him, let his word enter, take on our flesh, and dwell within us. He wants us to receive him and his word on good soil and bear abundant fruit. He wants us to respond not like the majority of Nazarenes, but as Mary of Nazareth, saying, “Let it be done to me according to your word.” He wants to help us realize that his words are our “spirit and life,” that he speaks the “words of eternal life,” and that, as we prayed in the Psalm, his teaching is perfect, refreshing, trustworthy, wise, right, joyful, enlightening, pure, enduring, true, and just.
• We see how to receive the Word of God aright, how to respond to it, and how to rejoice in it as the fulfillment of the deepest longings for which God has placed in our hearts, in today’s first reading. The setting was after the exile when, rummaging through the ruins of the Temple, they found the “Book of the Law of Moses,” what the Jews would call the Torah. They rediscovered with incredible joy and gratitude God’s holy Word. During their 70 years in Babylon, the exiles had recognized that they had been brought into captivity ultimately because they had failed to live by God’s word. They were determined not only not to let that happen again but to make up for 70 years of lost time. Ezra the Scribe brought the book of the law before the men, women and children old enough to understand (basically five and above) and proceeded to read from the Torah from dawn to midday — basically six or seven hours — and then “all the people listened attentively.” When he opened the scroll, all the people stood out of reverence. Ezra blessed and thanked God for his word and all raised their hands high and answered, “Amen! Amen!,” a Hebrew word that means “to uphold,” showing that they were intending to build their lives on it. After that, they knelt and bowed before the Lord who was speaking to them as his holy word was announced. We find in this passage seven things that should characterize our interaction with Jesus’ word as we hear it together, seven ways that show us how to pray what we hear, to assimilate what God speaks, what is typically called Lectio Divina, or “divine reading” or meditation.
  • The first was reading. Ezra and the scribes read plainly from God’s word in discrete passages, like points of meditation. The word “read” in Hebrew means to “proclaim” since reading Sacred Scripture was always done aloud. It also means, “translate,” because many of the post-exilic Jews were at best rusty in Hebrew. It points to the connection between reading and proclaiming, making it intelligible to the minds and lives of those hearing. The first step is to let God speak.
  • The second aspect was interpreting, or explaining the word of God. As the scribes read, they helped the people to grasp some of the applications. There are often many meanings to God’s word. The Catechism of the Catholic Church describes three different types of spiritual meanings, one linked to Jesus (typological), another to ourselves and our response in faith (moral), and a third to heaven and to our vocation to be saints (anagogical). When we ponder and proclaim the word of God, when we listen to and read it, this aspect of explaining it is very important if we’re ever going to reach the third stage.
  • The third stage was understanding the Word of God. This is far more than an intellectual grasp of the material, but the Hebrew word means that there’s a knowledge at the level of one’s entire personality and that it impacts us at the level of our whole being. The Latin translation for this understanding is sapientia, which is normally understood as “wisdom,” but its literal translation is to “taste.” When we understand the Word of God, we taste it, it delights us, it becomes part of us as we become what we eat, although, as Ezekiel experienced when God had him eat the scroll of the Word of God, sometimes this digestion of God’s word can seem bitter because it leads to the crucifixion of our old way of being.
• These three stages are all basically the first movement of the Word of God as we seek to grasp at the level of our being what God is saying to us, what he wants fulfilled in our hearing. It’s like the liturgy of the Word when God’s word is proclaimed through the readings and then interpreted and helped to be comprehended in the homily.
• The next four stages involve our response to what has been announced, explained and comprehended.
  • The fourth stage is listening to or literally obeying  the Word of God. Nehemiah tells us, “All the people listened attentively to the book of the law.” Listening is far more than just hearing what was read. The Jewish people are basically formed out of the command to listen. The famous Shema they pray each day reminds them of Moses’ words, “Hear, O Israel, that the Lord your God is God alone.” To listen means something different than merely absorbing the Word through our ears, as if it were just a form of auditory reading. Rather, in Hebrew there’s no distinction between hearing and It’s the same word. To listen to the Word of God is to listen to it as a word to be done, as an imperative once understood. In Latin, we keep the connection between hearing (audire) and obeying (ob-audire), which means a listening so attentive that we’re hanging on every word. St. James calls us not to be merely idle listeners but “doers” of the Word. We’re called to say like Mary, who was praised by Jesus for hearing the Word of God and doing it, “Let it be done to me according to your Word.” To be a member of Jesus’ family, Jesus said elsewhere, we must do the will of the Father in heaven. This is the type of attentive listening to the Word that is being described here. Listening in order to act.
  • The fifth stage is converting. “Do not be sad, and do not weep,” the people are told, because they were all weeping as they heard the words of the law. St. James says the Word of God is like a mirror, and when they looked at the Mirror of God’s word, they saw who they were supposed to be and who they in fact were and it brought them to tears. They bowed down and prostrated themselves before the Lord, their faces to the ground. Likewise, the Word of God is meant to bring us to conversion, to change our ways, so that we may conform ourselves to what God is telling us through his Word. The ultimate goal of the Church’s proclaiming the Word of God, as the Second Vatican Council taught in its decree for priests, is conversion and holiness.
  • The sixth stage is responding to the word of God with acts of charity. The text tells us that “all the people raised their hands high, saying ‘Amen. Amen’” and immediately began to allot portions of food and drink to those who didn’t have any “because they understood the words that had been expounded to them.” The real impact of the Word of God is that it’s supposed to help us to love others as God has loved us. The conversion it brings about is meant to help us love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength and love our neighbor. Hearing the word of God must change our life and make it more loving. That’s what we see happened with the Jews who “understood” the words of the Lord: it spurred them to charity. That’s what happened in the life of St. Marianne Cope, a fellow New Yorker born in Germany who grew up in Syracuse, whose feast the Church celebrated on Thursday, leading her to enter the Sisters of St. Francis in order to teach and care for the sick and ultimately to respond to St. Damian of Molokai’s plea for help to go to Hawaii and teach and care for the lepers. That’s what happened in the life of St. Teresa of Calcutta, who when she heard Jesus speak to her summoning her to be a religious and later, on the train to Darjeeling, calling her within her call to quench his infinite thirst for souls, later to be his light, and always to care for him in the distressing disguise of the poor, that’s what she did. The same thing is supposed to happen in us, that hearing the Word of God is meant to transform us to learn how to proclaim it above all in body language, in deeds of love.
  • The seventh and last stage is celebrating. There was a great feast. “Go, eat rich foods and drink sweet drinks,” they were told, “for today is holy to our Lord. Do not be saddened this day, for rejoicing in the Lord must be your strength!” The Word of God is meant to fill us with joy and lead us to celebrate that joy with others, sharing our joy, our food, our drink, our lives with others. Rejoicing is supposed to be our strength as believers and is meant to flow from the total transformation the Word of God does in us. “The precepts of the Lord give joy to the heart,” as we prayed in the Responsorial Psalm. There’s obviously an allusion to the Eucharistic feast here, when, after having heard the Word of God, we eat the most unbelievable food ever and drink the choicest beverage of all time. The Liturgy of the Word is interconnected with and leads to the Liturgy of the Eucharist. And the Liturgy of the Eucharist is meant to lead to the Liturgy of Life. It’s supposed to lead to an overflowing, loving, joyful communion, as we “do this in memory of Christ” and seek to give ourselves and our lives to save others and lift them up.
• We hope in God’s word, which is meant to lead us to conversion, holiness, charity and joy. No matter what part of the Mystical Body of Christ we are — whether, to use St. Paul’s metaphor from today’s passage to the Corinthians, we’re a foot or a hand, an eye or an ear, whether we’ve been given the charism of apostles, prophets, teachers, miracle workers, priests or Dominican nuns — all of us in Jesus’ Mystical Body are called to help each other hear the Word, look with love on God and others, use our feet to go to them and our hands to care for them. The Bible is not a dead document but a “living word,” since the Word of God is not principally a book or a series of books but a Person, an incarnate Word, whom we encounter through the Bible’s sacred words. He’s the one who has come into this Chapel like he entered the Synagogue of Nazareth. He’s the one whose words are Spirit and life. He’s the one who continually fulfills Scripture in our hearing! And he’s the one who through that fulfillment seeks to bring us to the fullness of life.
• We know that Jesus’ words are not merely informative, but They change us and change reality. When he said, “Let there be light,” there was light. When he said “Quiet!” to demons, they shut their traps. When he calmed a storm, there was immediately tranquility on the sea. And today Jesus speaks for us the same performative words he did in the Upper Room on Holy Thursday, saying over simple bread and wine through a priest through whom he is acting, “This is my body” and “This is the chalice of my blood!” The power of his words totally change bread and wine into Himself. This is the fulfillment of the hope of God’s word found in the Tree of Life in Genesis, in the sacrifice of Abel, Melchizedek, and Isaac, in the Passover feast, in the manna in the desert, of the multiplication of loaves and fish, and of so many other foretellings in which God had stoked the appetite of his people for the perfection of their hope. Let us receive the double fulfillment of these words in our hearing and allow that perfect, refreshing, trustworthy, wise, right, joyful, enlightening, pure, enduring, true, and just, and life-giving Word to enter in, change us and through us change the world!

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download