The Prayer and Witnesses That Accompany Our Mission, Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent, April 3, 2025

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
The Pontifical Mission Societies Southeast Regional Meeting
Franciscan Center, Tampa, Florida
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent
April 3, 2025
Ex 32:7-14, Ps 106, Jn 5:31-47

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

The following text guided the homily: 

Today the Word of God helps us with two different and crucial aspects of our life as missionary disciples in communion and catalysts supporting the global mission that is the Church. It’s fitting during this regional meeting for us to take full advantage of the richness of what God gives us to strengthen us in our apostolic vocations.

The most important thing we do in our missionary life and work is to pray. Everything begins with God. Just like Jesus prayed all night before he called his first twelve missionaries, so we, at his instruction, pray to the Harvest Master for laborers for the harvest. Just as Jesus during the first Eucharist prayed not just for those harvesters but for all those who would come to the Gospel through their missionary labors, so we pray for all those whom Jesus wants to draw to himself through our work and the work of our fellow missionaries throughout the globe.

In today’s first reading, we see one of history’s most powerful witnesses to intercessory prayer. The Israelites in the desert had given in to idolatry and worshipped a golden calf and Moses begged God to forgive their sin. Like with Abraham’s prayer to spare Sodom and Gomorrah if only ten just people were found there, so Moses’ intercession has always been considered a model of prayer.

In 2011, Pope Benedict, in his great catechetical series on Christian prayer, spoke about the importance of Moses’ prayer of intercession. He stated, “Moses’ supplication was wholly based on the Lord’s fidelity and grace. He referred first to the history of redemption which God began by bringing Israel out of Egypt and then recalled the ancient promise made to the Fathers. The Lord brought about salvation by freeing his people from slavery in Egypt; so ‘why,’ Moses asked, ‘should the Egyptians say, ‘With evil intent did he bring them forth, to slay them in the mountains, and to consume them from the face of the earth?’’ (Ex 32:12). Once the work of salvation has been begun it must be brought to completion. … God … is the good Lord who saves, the guarantor of life, he is the God of mercy and forgiveness, of deliverance from sin that kills. Hence Moses appealed to God, to the interior life of God against the exterior judgement. But Moses then argued with the Lord, were his Chosen People to perish, even though guilty, God might appear incapable of overcoming sin. And this he could not accept. … The intercessor wanted the People of Israel to be saved because this people was the flock that had been entrusted to him, but also because it was in this salvation that the true reality of God was manifest. The prayer of intercession is permeated by love of the brethren and love of God, they are inseparable. Moses, the intercessor, … did not ask for his people to be excused of their sin, he did not list any presumed merits, either the people’s or his own, but appealed to God’s bounty: a free God, total love, who does not cease to seek out those who have fallen away, who is always faithful to himself. … Moses asked God to show himself more powerful than sin and death, and with his prayer elicited this divine revelation of himself. … With prayer, wanting what God wanted, the intercessor entered more and more deeply into knowledge of the Lord and of his mercy, and became capable of a love that extended even to the total gift of himself.”

Pope Benedict then applied these lessons to Jesus and to us. First to Jesus: “In Moses, on the summit of the mountain, face to face with God, who made himself an intercessor for his people and offered himself, … the Fathers of the Church saw a prefiguration of Christ who from the very top of the Cross was truly before God, not only as a friend but as Son. And not only did he offer himself, … but with his pierced heart … he took upon himself our sins to ensure our salvation. His intercession was not only solidarity but identification with us: he bears all of us in his Body. And thus his whole life as a man and as Son is a cry to God’s heart, it is forgiveness, but forgiveness that transforms and renews.” Then to us: “We should meditate upon this reality. Christ stands before God and is praying for me. His prayer on the Cross is contemporary with all human beings, contemporary with me. He prays for me, he suffered and suffers for me, he identified himself with me, taking our body and the human soul. And he asks us to enter this identity of his, making ourselves one body, one spirit with him because from the summit of the Cross he brought not new laws, tablets of stone, but himself, his Body and his Blood, as the New Covenant. Thus, he brings us kinship with him, he makes us one body with him, identifies us with him. He invites us to enter into this identification, to be united with him in our wish to be one body, one spirit with him. Let us pray the Lord that this identification may transform and renew us.”

Jesus wants us to identify with his intercessory prayer from the Cross for the salvation of the human race, so that no one might perish but everyone might have eternal life, and eternal life is that they come to know God the Father and Jesus Christ whom he has sent through the powerful work of the Holy Spirit. The first and most important thing we do in the Pontifical Mission Societies is pray to God like Moses for all those throughout the world who do not yet know him and his saving, merciful love, who may have wandered away from him, who may be keeping him just as a part of their life rather than loving him with all of their mind, heart, soul and strength, and we pray for missionaries that as they sow the seed of the Gospel with perseverance they might find good and fruitful soil. That’s why even though it gets the least attention, the Pontifical Union, which forms people in missionary spirituality, is perhaps the most important, insofar as it keeps up the work of our co-patroness St. Therese in praying without ceasing for the missions and missionaries.

We see the intercessory prayer at work in Christ himself in today’s Gospel. Like Moses with the stiff-necked Israelites in the desert, Jesus was trying to bring the hard-hearted Scribes and Pharisees to conversion so that they might be able to receive the mercy God wanted to bestow. It wasn’t easy. Today’s scene continues Jesus’ response to the Scribes and Pharisees who were opposing him as evil because he healed on the Sabbath day the man crippled for 38 years. They had imputed their own false ideas of the holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath day to God and then, because Jesus violated those false ideas, condemned him for the violation. They thought that the holiness God wanted was to avoid any work at all, including works of charity; what God had forbidden was in fact slavish work so that, instead of enslaving ourselves to work and what work produces on the Sabbath, we would allow him to restore us to true freedom, a freedom that is meant to make it possible for us to love. The holiness God wanted us to keep on the Sabbath was most of all that of loving Him and loving neighbor. God doesn’t take a weekly day off from loving us — as if a loving father or mother could take a hiatus from caring for their children — and never intended us to do the same. The Christian sabbath, for us, is meant to be a special day of prayer, including intercessory prayer for the missions. The Pharisees’ and Scribes’ misunderstanding of the Sabbath was at the root of their deep confusion of what God was asking of them in general, something of which Jesus wanted to cure them, if only their hearts were open.

That brings us to the second great lesson God gives us in the Liturgy of the Word today, which is about the various witnesses to the authority by which Jesus worked the healing of the cripple and his various other miracles. Since the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t believe Jesus could possibly be working miracles on the Sabbath by God’s power — because God in their imagination went on vacation each Sabbath — he had to be doing so by some other authority. Elsewhere they explicitly accused him of working miracles on the Sabbath by the power of Beelzebul, the prince of demons, basically in order to destroy the Jewish religion! So Jesus necessarily takes up the question of authority and five different witnesses that point to it. It’s key for us to understand these five witnesses, so that we can grow in our knowledge of Jesus through these five different means of testimony. It’s key so that in our missionary work we can turn others, like Jesus did, to the testimony of these witnesses. But it’s also crucial so that in turn we can become a “sixth witness,” like the members of the early Church were and as saints always are.

The first witness Jesus cites is John the Baptist, who had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God. Jesus said, “You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth. I do not accept human testimony, but I say this so that you may be saved.” John had pointed out Jesus as the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Jesus would ask them explicitly, when they peppered him with questions to test him, whether they accepted the testimony of John, and they refused to say either way. The point is that, though they were fascinated by John, they didn’t accept John’s testimony and the offer of salvation that would be brought by the Lamb he indicated through the forgiveness of their sins. We are called in our missionary work to accept the testimony of John the Baptist and all of the prophets and we are similarly called, as the Church remembers at the beginning of every liturgical year, that we need to make straight the paths, clear away the debris of sin, that prevents Christ from entering our life. Every missionary is a precursor of the Lord, like John the Baptist.

The second witness Jesus cites involved the works he was doing. Jesus declares, “But I have testimony greater than John’s” and then immediately describes that greater witness: “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.” He could only do what he was doing — healing the sick, casting out demons, raising the dead, multiplying loaves and fish, calming storms — by the power of God. But they didn’t want to accept the testimony of the works, works that the Messiah had been prophesied to accomplish and many more. Their hearts were hardened and there was just no way they were prepared to receive Jesus, no matter what he did. Even after he rose from the dead, they didn’t want to accept the deed of the resurrection, but instead paid off the guards to say, absurdly, that the disciples had stolen his body while they were asleep (when no one asleep could possibly have known anything). Because they were going to reject Jesus no matter what, they rejected the divine provenance of all of his works. For us as missionaries, we need to point to Jesus’ works, their credibility and the way they changed persons and history. We particularly need to point to the resurrection and the way his risen life has changed us. This is what gave the apostles’ credibility. They were willing to travel the whole world, be tortured and martyred because they knew that not even crucifixion could keep them in the grave, and as St. Thomas Aquinas once perceptively stated, if this small group of relative nobodies could persuade a down-to-earth skeptical age that a crucified carpenter had risen from the dead if he hadn’t risen from the dead, that would have been a greater miracle than the resurrection itself.

The third witness is Sacred Scripture. Jesus says, “You search the Scriptures, because you think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf. But you do not want to come to me to have life.” There are over 1,000 prophecies about the coming Messiah in the Hebrew Scriptures and Jesus by that point had been fulfilling almost everything on the Messianic job description except of course for the prophecies of his upcoming suffering, death and resurrection. But as much as the scribes, Pharisees and chief priests affirmed themselves as experts in the Scriptures, they obstinately resisted the conclusion that any of them pointed to Jesus, despite the fact that he was fulfilling each of them. As missionaries, we, accepting divine revelation, must become fluent in the Word of God, not necessarily by memorizing all of its details like the scribes did, but by enfleshing it like our Lady did, letting her whole life develop according to God’s word. St. Gregory the Great once said, vita bonorum viva lectio, that the life of the saints is a living reading of the Word of God. We’re all called to show what it means to live off every word that comes from the mouth of God, how we believe that God’s word is a lamp for our steps and a light for our path, how Jesus has the words of eternal life.

The fourth witness Jesus mentions is Moses. Jesus says, “Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, because he wrote about me.  But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?” Everything Moses accomplished was together one long prophecy about Jesus. Moses’ interceding for the Israelites before God on the mountain in today’s first reading was a prophecy of Jesus’ praying on the hill of Calvary for God the Father to forgive us because we didn’t know what we were doing. His ascending Mt. Sinai and returning with the Ten Commandments pointed to how Jesus ascended the Mount of the Beatitudes and gave us the New Law. His leading the Jews in the Passover was a prophecy about what Jesus himself would do through his new and eternal Passover, leading us through the desert of death into the eternal Promised Land. Moses had told the Jews, “The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like me from among your own brothers. You must listen to him” (Deut 18:15). That prophecy was still very much awaiting fulfillment at the time of St. John the Baptist, who was asked by the crowds, “Are you the prophet?” (Jn 1:21). John wasn’t, but Jesus is. But the Scribes and Pharisees didn’t want to accept Moses’ testimony. They didn’t want to listen to him. As Pope Benedict taught us earlier, Jesus was also the fulfillment of Moses’ action in today’s first reading, asking God to eliminate him rather than the people. That request would be, in essence, fulfilled in the Passion, when Jesus, the new Moses, would actually be killed as an expiatory sacrifice for the sins of the people. But they didn’t want to accept any of that fulfillment of Moses’ life either. As missionaries, we need to accept the testimony of Moses. As my predecessor, Archbishop Fulton Sheen, used to emphasize, Jesus is the new Moses, the fulfillment of everything to which Moses testified. The more we know and accept that testimony, the more powerful will be the conviction with which we live and testify.

The fifth witness is the most important. It’s God the Father. Jesus said, “The Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.” He added, “But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.” This witness was implicit in the other four. It’s God the Father who called John the Baptist to prepare the way for his Son. It’s God the Father who was speaking and working through each of Jesus’ miracles. It’s God the Father who inspired Sacred Scripture by the power of the Holy Spirit. It’s God the Father who called Moses at the burning bush, sent him to Pharaoh, worked the ten plagues, separated the Red Sea, fed the Israelites with Manna and quail, quenched their thirst with water from the Rock, gave the Ten Commandments, accompanied them in a pillar of fire and so much more. But all of that testimony was, in a certain sense, indirect. God the Father gave direct testimony of Jesus at his baptism, saying from heaven, “This is my Son, my beloved, in whom I am well-pleased.” God the Father gave direct testimony at the Transfiguration, witnessed by Peter, James and John, in which he said, “This is my beloved Son. Listen to him!” God the Father would later give witness to Jesus, not only speaking during the Last Supper that he had glorified Jesus’ name and would glorify it again, but most spectacularly by raising Jesus from the dead on the third day. But they weren’t prepared to receive the testimony of God either. As missionaries, we not only heed God the Father’s witness of his Son but seek to become living continuations of it. The best way we do is entering into the love the Father has for the Son, so that we become witnesses in the world of what St. John wrote in his first letter: “See what love the Father has bestowed on us in letting us be called children of God, yet that is what we are.”

Today, four weeks into the Lenten conversion God wants to work in us, as we reflection our the missionary nature of our Christian life, it’s good to ask ourselves how docile we are to everything God has given us to strengthen our faith, grow in relationship with him and make us more effective apostles. Have we accepted the testimony of John the Baptist pointing to Jesus as the Lamb of God taking away the sins of the world by coming to that Lamb to have him take away our sins in the Sacrament of God’s mercy and get at them at the real roots? Have we accepted the witness of so many miracles — the miracles in the causes of saints, the daily miracles on the altar and the confessional, and so many others —  to help increase our faith in the power of prayer by praying with perseverance for the miracles we and others need? Have we embraced the witness of Sacred Scripture by studying the Bible, all it reveals about Christ and about us, and putting its words into practice? Have we accepted the witness of Moses pointing to Christ and begun to follow the New Moses, Jesus, up close? And have we heard the witness of God the Father and really begun to listen to Jesus and recognize through him that God wants us not only to be but behave always as his beloved and much-pleasing sons and daughters? It’s also a time to look at the power of intercessory prayer and to recognize that throughout the Lenten season, each of us individually, and the whole Church, turns to the Father and begs him, on account of the work of his Son, to have mercy on us and on the whole world and to bring of the sons and daughters he has created home to his house, where Jesus was incarnated, born, died, rose and ascended to prepare for us.

The Eucharist is what all five of the witnesses Jesus describes point to. This is the fulfillment of the Manna given to Moses in the desert. This is the Lamb of God pointed out with the very words of John the Baptist at every Mass. This is the fulfillment of the prophecy of Sacred Scripture contained in Isaiah that God will prepare for us a banquet of the choicest food and drink (Is 25). This is the greatest of all of Jesus’ signs of love, transforming simple bread and wine into his body and blood, soul and divinity, so that we can enter into a holy communion with him. And this is the greatest gift of all from God the Father, who witnesses just how dear we are to him that he will give us the One who is most precious to Him so that we can by this reception of his body and blood enter into the inner life and love of the Trinity. Let us accept this witness at the depth at which God desires and in turn become the “sixth” witnesses whose whole lives attest, not just on the Sabbath but even every day, to the truth of Jesus’ continuing saving presence and redemptive work. The Eucharist is in fact the great prayer of intercession made for the world, in which we enter live into Christ’s eternal prayer of intercession from the Upper Room and Calvary — and into God’s response on Easter Sunday! Of this we are witnesses, together with the Holy Spirit, to the ends of the earth.

The readings for today’s Mass were: 

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