Fr. Roger J. Landry
Sacred Heart Convent of the Sisters of Life, Manhattan
Thursday in the Tenth Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Landry, Bishop
June 10, 2021
2 Cor 3:15-4:1.3-6, Ps 85, Mt 5:20-26
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
The following points were attempted in the homily:
- Today in the Gospel, Jesus tells us something that should startle us, especially early in the morning: “Unless your righteousness surpasses that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.” That’s a very tall order. The Scribes were the experts of Sacred Scripture in its every detail. They consecrated their whole life to knowing the Word of God. The Pharisees were the ones who sought to live the Word of God expounded by the Scribes to the letter. Many of the Scribes were Pharisees and vice versa. They prayed three times a day. They fasted not just the one time prescribed per year but twice a week. They tithed not only the various items that God had instructed but the tithed their whole income. By worldly, even by classically religious standards, their righteousness seemed to be almost unsurpassable. But they were missing something. Their righteousness was fundamentally based on their own efforts, their own study, their own will-power, their own sacrifices. It also featured an extrinsic understanding of being right with God: as long as they did the right things, everything, they thought, was fine with God. As the converted Pharisee St. Paul would once say back to them, they thought that they were saved by their own works of the law, by their own external adhesion to the Mosaic law, and not by God, not by a faith-filled living relationship with God.
- When Jesus calls us to surpass the righteousness of the Pharisees, he’s doing something shocking, similar today to saying that our holiness needs to surpass the Carthusians and the Poor Clares to enter the kingdom of heaven. What he was doing was not fundamentally calling us to surpass them in memorizing the New Testament along with the Old, in praying four times a day instead of three, in fasting three times a week instead of two, in giving twenty percent of all we have back to God instead of ten. He’s calling us, rather, to three things: first, to have his own relationship to the law in fulfilling the law; second, to grasp that it is all about loving God with everything we have and loving our neighbor as Christ has loved us (which is why we have today’s Alleluia verse, to help us remember this); and to interiorize the law so that our heart is changed, not just our outward behavior. He’s calling us to allow the Word of God, Love incarnate, to become enfleshed within. He’s summoning us to permit God to give us a new heart, to place his law within us as he pours Himself, the Holy Spirit, into our hearts. God had told us through the Prophet Jeremiah that one day he would write his law in our hearts, and that’s precisely what Jesus came to do. That’s what the Holy Spirit seeks to accomplish.
- Today Jesus begins a series of powerful applications of what this looks like, because these are things on which everyone needs to surpass the Scribes and the Pharisees. The first is with regard to the fifth commandment. The Lord says, “You have heard that it was said to your ancestors, You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment. But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother will be liable to judgment, and whoever says to his brother, ‘Raqa,’ will be answerable to the Sanhedrin, and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.” Jesus wants to transform the way we relate to others so that we will love them as he has loved us. It’s not enough merely not to kill others. He doesn’t want us to insult them. He doesn’t want us to hate them. Jesus wants to teach us to love those whom others would be tempted even to murder, to love those who make us angry, to love those who are fools. This is something that he found often in the Scribes and Pharisees and was calling us to surpass. That’s the type of offering God wants us to give him when we come to worship him, which we see in the second part of today’s Gospel. Jesus says, “Therefore” — linking both parts and this is key for us to grasp as we come here today to pray the Mass — “if you bring your gift to the altar, and there recall that your brother has anything against you, leave your gift there at the altar, go first and be reconciled with your brother, and then come and offer your gift.” The type of offering God wants from us is the offering of love, of forgiveness and reconciliation, of kindness, toward his beloved sons and daughters who are our blood or spiritual brothers and sisters. He recognizes that murder begins in the heart, with resentment, with fear, with vengeance, with lack of harmony. If love for others is lacking, he says, our offering to God is in vain. We can’t come to receive the gift God wants to give us if we’ve closed our hearts to the way he wants us to live. Ultimately the offering God calls us to make when we come before him is our “logike latreia” (Rom 12:2), the only worship that makes sense, our bodies, our entire lives, as a holy and acceptable oblation. It’s to put ourselves at God’s total service. And if we refuse to reconcile, then we are not at God’s service. If we’re not loving our neighbor, we’re really not loving God. Our approach to those who have something against us must be similar to the Father in the Parable of the Prodigal Son who was always seeking to reconcile with his son who had squandered everything: that’s the approach we should have toward reconciliation when we have been wronged; the response we have when we’ve done the wrongdoing is obviously straightforward, one of humble contrition. If we think, however, we can just focus on God without reconciling with our neighbor Jesus is telling us today the absolute opposite, and giving us a choice between the “kingdom of heaven” and a “prison” from which we will not be released until we have paid the last penny. This type of reconciliation with others, this type of fraternal, faithful love, was what many Scribes and Pharisees refused to do. They condescendingly disdained their neighbor who didn’t live as outwardly righteous lives as they did. They disparaged the Gentiles as if their entire bodies were meant just to be fuel for the fires of Gehenna. That’s why for many of them their worship was in vain because they refused to allow God to transform them into his loving, merciful image and likeness.
- St. Paul, who was a Pharisee before his conversion, talks about the relationship between old and new in the passage from his Second Letter to the Corinthians we have today for the first reading. He says that many of the children of Israel had a veil over their hearts and that Christ removes the veil when he comes not to abolish but to fulfill the law of Moses. The more we look to Christ, the more we see the real meaning of the law and commandments and are transformed into his image. Christ and his righteousness are the light shining out of darkness into the hearts of believers, changing them. That’s the Christ Paul was preaching as Lord and enslaving himself to us in order to reveal.
- The saint we celebrate today had a righteousness surpassing that of the Scribes and Pharisees, perhaps the most beautifully named saint of all time, St. Landry, the 27th Bishop of Paris, from 650-661. Not many people — outside of Louisiana, where there is a whole country named after him and a huge Church in Opelousas where I celebrated my tenth Mass a week or so after my ordination — have a devotion to him, but in Paris there’s a chapel dedicated to him at Notre Dame Cathedral not to mention a beautiful one in St. Germain L’Auxerrois, where his relics were interred until they were destroyed during the French Revolution. St. Landry is famous in particular for caring for the poor and the sick. He sold all of his own personal property and much of what the Church had to care for the poor of Paris during a famine and, because there were no hospitals to speak of at the time, he built the first, which he dedicated to St. Christopher, because so many of the sick were pilgrims who had no family to care for them. Eventually this hospital grew to become the huge institution called Hotel Dieu, God’s hotel, where he sought to treat patients like they were Christ saying to him, “I will ill and you cared for me.” He gave alms generously with righteousness, praising and thanksgiving God on the one hand and caring for him in disguise on the other. The liturgical prayers for his solemnity in the 1738 Paris Missal, which I’ve translated (below), point to his charity based on the charity he received, his love for God and for others.
- As we prepare to receive Jesus, we remember that we’re coming to give ourselves as gifts to the Lord in response to how he gives himself to us. He entered our world to reconcile us to himself, even though he had never wronged us. He made the first move. He gives the total gift of his love. And he tells us, as we receive that gift, “do this in memory of me.” Let’s open ourselves up to the gift of Jesus in Holy Communion and the gift of the Holy Spirit whom he will send us together with the Father so that we might by God’s own power do what God commands and have our righteousness not only surpass that of the Scribes and Pharisees, but arrive to the full measure of the justice of Christ by Christ’s own interior help.
The readings for today’s Mass were:
Reading 1 2 COR 3:15—4:1, 3-6
Brothers and sisters:
To this day, whenever Moses is read,
a veil lies over the hearts of the children of Israel,
but whenever a person turns to the Lord the veil is removed.
Now the Lord is the Spirit and where the Spirit of the Lord is,
there is freedom.
All of us, gazing with unveiled face on the glory of the Lord,
are being transformed into the same image from glory to glory,
as from the Lord who is the Spirit.
Therefore, since we have this ministry through the mercy shown us,
we are not discouraged.
And even though our Gospel is veiled,
it is veiled for those who are perishing,
in whose case the god of this age
has blinded the minds of the unbelievers,
so that they may not see the light of the Gospel
of the glory of Christ, who is the image of God.
For we do not preach ourselves but Jesus Christ as Lord,
and ourselves as your slaves for the sake of Jesus.
For God who said, Let light shine out of darkness,
has shone in our hearts to bring to light
the knowledge of the glory of God
on the face of Jesus Christ.
Responsorial Psalm PS 85:9AB AND 10, 11-12, 13-14
R. (see 10b) The glory of the Lord will dwell in our land.
I will hear what God proclaims;
the LORD–for he proclaims peace to his people.
Near indeed is his salvation to those who fear him,
glory dwelling in our land.
R. The glory of the Lord will dwell in our land.
Kindness and truth shall meet;
justice and peace shall kiss.
Truth shall spring out of the earth,
and justice shall look down from heaven.
R. The glory of the Lord will dwell in our land.
The LORD himself will give his benefits;
our land shall yield its increase.
Justice shall walk before him,
and salvation, along the way of his steps.
R. The glory of the Lord will dwell in our land.
Alleluia JN 13:34
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
I give you a new commandment:
love one another as I have loved you.
R. Alleluia, alleluia.
Gospel MT 5:20-26
Jesus said to his disciples:
“I tell you, unless your righteousness surpasses that
of the scribes and Pharisees,
you will not enter into the Kingdom of heaven.
“You have heard that it was said to your ancestors,
You shall not kill; and whoever kills will be liable to judgment.
But I say to you, whoever is angry with his brother
will be liable to judgment,
and whoever says to his brother,
Raqa, will be answerable to the Sanhedrin,
and whoever says, ‘You fool,’ will be liable to fiery Gehenna.
Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar,
and there recall that your brother
has anything against you,
leave your gift there at the altar,
go first and be reconciled with your brother,
and then come and offer your gift.
Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court with him.
Otherwise your opponent will hand you over to the judge,
and the judge will hand you over to the guard,
and you will be thrown into prison.
Amen, I say to you,
you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.”
To view the propers for the Solemnity of St. Landry from the 1738 Paris Missal, please click below:
To see a translation of the propers in English, please click below:
St. Landry Propers Translation
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