The Light of Jesus’ Word and Call, Third Sunday (A), January 22, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year A
Sunday of the Word of God
January 22, 2023
Is 8:23-9:3, Ps 27, 1Cor 1:10-13.17, Mt 4:12-23

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

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today the Church marks for the fourth time the Sunday of the Word of God, which Pope Francis decreed in 2019 would take place each year on the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time. He established it, he said, in the hope that it would help believers “grow 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 and enables 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.” And so we approach the gift of God’s word in today’s readings with those hopes in mind.
• In the Gospel, St. Matthew tells us that Jesus left his native Nazareth and made his home in Capernaum by the Sea of Galilee, in the territory of Zebulun and Napthali. The reason he did so was not just because his fellow Nazarenes had tried to kill him by tossing him off the cliff on which Nazareth had been built, but to fulfill a prophecy, the prophecy that Isaiah announced 700 years before in today’s first reading: “Land of Zebulun, land of Naphtali, on the road by the sea, across the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles: the people who sat in darkness have seen a great light, and for those who sat in the region and shadow of death light has dawned.” By that point in history, Zebulun and Napthali, regions named respectively after two of the 12 sons of Jacob, had been annihilated by the invading Assyrians. Those who survived were still in the darkness not only of collective trauma but of subjugation. Isaiah’s words were those of hope, that God, their light and their salvation, would eventually illumine their existential gloom and bring redemption to their slavery and abjection. In the Gospel, we see the fulfillment of that inspiring prophecy. Jesus, the Light of the World, the long-awaited Messiah, came to them in order — by his teaching, by his miracles, by his presence, and eventually by his passion, death and resurrection — to lead them on an exodus from darkness into great light. He was going to help them see the light, live in the light, and walk as children of the light. That’s why, as St. Matthew recounts for us, Jesus’ first words were “Repent for the kingdom of heaven has come near.” This is another way of saying, “Leave the darkness; come, believe in, and live in, the light!”
• Then Jesus made that pilgrimage from darkness into light even more specific. He saw two brothers, Simon and Andrew, fishing. He said, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” Even though St. Peter’s first words to the Lord, recounted in St. Luke’s version of this encounter, were “Depart from me, O Lord, because I am a sinful man,” even though he was a man vexed by a life at least partially in darkness, Christ called him. And he left the darkness of sin behind, as well as his boats, the biggest catch of fish in his life, and everything else immediately to follow Christ into the light. As did his brother Andrew. As did James and John moments later. Such was the power of Christ, of his personality, of the way he emitted the luminous presence of God, that ordinary, hard-working men would leave everything on an instant to follow him.
• But that was just the beginning for the apostles. We see today that they accompanied the Lord as he went throughout Galilee, passing on the light of his teaching and curing every disease and sickness, showing others that he wanted to take theirs and others’ souls, too, from the darkness of sin and doubt, the gloom of depression, the pall of grief, into the radiance of a life changing relationship of love with him. The call that was so personal for Peter, Andrew, James, John and later for Matthew the tax collector turned evangelist is meant to be just as personal for us. The Lord calls each disciple by name and summons us to follow him into the light so that we, in turn, can become his light illumining the paths of others to him — and through, with and in Him, to his body the Church, and ultimately to the radiant house of the eternal Father.
• It’s important, as we listen each Sunday to the Word of God, that we grasp that the Gospel is not meant to be just informative, but transformative. The Lord wants to fill us with the light of his truth and the incandescent flame of his love, and to send us out to illumine and inflame others. It’s key to recognize the personal call that Christ makes to each of us to repent and leave any and all darkness behind, and to believe by following him into the light and by living and walking always illumined by him. It’s not enough for disciples just to turn the lights on for an hour on Sundays or for a few minutes before we go to bed and to live the rest of our life as if the shades are constantly down. Jesus calls us to find in him our light and salvation, to walk and live with him in the light and maturely and responsibly to follow him on the pilgrimage out of the cave.
• We can examine today two particular ways that the Word of God, the Light of Truth, is meant to change us. The first is with regard to Church unity. We are now in the fifth day of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity. When Pope Francis established the Sunday of the Word of God, he expressed hope that since the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time would fall each year either within or at the end of the Octave of Prayer for Christian Unity, the Sunday of the Word of God might bear great ecumenical fruit. “The Scriptures point out,” he said, “for those who listen, the path to authentic and firm unity.” We see that, obviously, in the seventeenth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, where Jesus, on Holy Thursday, the night he was betrayed, at the end of the celebration of the first Eucharist, prayed that believers might be one, just as the Father is in Jesus and Jesus in the Father, so that the world may know that the Father sent the Son and that the Father loves us as much as he loves the Son. But we also see that appeal for Christian unity in today’s second reading, taken from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians. He urged the first Christians in Corinth, “in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ,” as his very ambassador, “that there be no divisions among you but that you be united in the same mind and in the same purpose.” Division is a severe wound to the Mystical Body of Christ and a scandal to believers and non-believers both. It is one of the chief goals of the evil one. In Corinth, the rivalries came because people lost a sense of Christ and adopted a sense of celebrity cliques. The apostle writes, “Each of you is saying, ‘I believe to Paul,’ or ‘I belong to Apollos,’ or ‘I belong to Cephas,’ or ‘I belong to Christ.’” St. Paul reminds them that Christ isn’t divided. He states that Christ was crucified for them to take away the sins that cause division, and on Calvary, he was to draw all people to himself, to gather what had been scattered. St. Paul says that the Christians in Corinth were baptized into Jesus’ name, not anyone else’s, and they were supposed to live with “one Lord, one faith, one baptism” (Eph 4:5-6). He points out the road to unity by fully committing anew to adhere to Christ. Disunity flows when people prioritize their spiritual descent from Peter, Andrew, Luther, Calvin, Zwingli more than to Christ, when they associate more with particular popes, priests, megachurch pastors, or movements in the Church that they do with the Lord. If we truly ground our existence on Jesus, on his passion, death and resurrection, on our baptism, on the Word of God, then we will seek to become living commentaries of that word and of Christ’s clarion call to a communion among us that represents the Trinity.
• The second way the Word of God is meant to change us this Sunday is in response to Jesus’ call that we “might have life and have it to the full” (Jn 10:10). Today we mark today the fiftieth anniversary of the dreadful, indeed diabolical, Roe v. Wade decision that legalized abortion in the United States, led to the industrial slaughter of over 65 million children made in Jesus’ image and likeness and is at the root of the political and social polarization in our country not to mention the cause of tremendous divisions in the Church. Jesus, our light and salvation, came into the world to bring great light to a people sitting in darkness and dwelling in a land overshadowed by death and he sent out his Church — he sent out us — with the light of his teaching and his love to continue his mission. There’s no greater darkness than a culture that seeks to snuff out the light of life and love at its very beginning. There’s no greater obscurity than the biology-ignoring euphemisms that pretend that the child in the womb is not human or deserving of protection and his or her mother is not entitled to help. There’s no greater blindness than to shut one’s eyes to the radiant truth of Jesus’ words that whoever receives a little child in God’s name receives him (Mk 9:37) and that whatever we do to the least of Jesus’ brothers and sisters, we do to him (Mt 25:40). We give thanks to God that last year, after 49 years of constant prayer, penance, witness, political and cultural engagement and legal argumentation, the Supreme Court saw the light and overturned the pitch blackness of But we know that the Dobbs decision was just a beginning, not the end. There’s still much work to do to create the conditions so that abortion will become unthinkable, so that pregnant women will be supported in every circumstance to bring their babies literally into the light, and to have confidence that they will have what they need to grow in that light. There’s still so much work to change habits, attitudes and practices that put women in vulnerable circumstances. There’s still so much work to do in states that permit abortion or even celebrate, like its darkness, like New York, as if abortion is somehow light itself. St. Teresa of Calcutta reminded Harvard students in 1982, the United Nations General Assembly in 1985, Bill and Hillary Clinton in 1994, and many others everywhere that the greatest destroyer of peace, the greatest form of spiritual poverty, the greatest darkness, is the practice of abortion, by which the life of those made in God’s image and likeness at the same vulnerable stage of life we once were in our mother’s womb, is ended. As we mark the fiftieth anniversary of Roewith the sadness at how much evil it unleashed, and gratitude that it is no longer the law of the land, we ask God for his grace so that the light that Jesus brought into the world, the light that shines in the darkness, will radiate in all its splendor through the Church and through each of us as Christian believers, so that every child will be loved, wanted, protected and assisted with the love that God has for each of us.
• On this Sunday of the Word of God, as Jesus summons us to repent for the kingdom of God is at hand, as he calls us to himself just as he called his first apostles, as he teaches in our churches and chapels, proclaims the Gospel of his kingdom, and cures diseases and illnesses, let us ask him for the grace to respond as immediately, wholeheartedly, heroically and perseveringly as Peter, Andrew, James, John and Matthew to his Word. Let us ask him, too, to send the Holy Spirit to us so that as we recommit to bring the gift of his light to all those persons and areas living in darkness, into wherever the darkness of division remains in the Church and within the hearts of believers, and to all those dwelling in any way in the valley of the culture of death. Let us ask for the grace to be effective instruments to lead them, with us, into God’s kingdom of light, life and love, in this world and ultimately in the Heavenly Jerusalem where “night will be no more, nor will they need light from a lamp or the sun,” for the Lord God will be our light and will reign in splendor forever and ever.

The readings for this Sunday were: 

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