Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, January 22, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
January 22, 2022

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• This is Fr. Roger Landry and it’s a privilege for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation Jesus wants to have with us in this Sunday’s Gospel, when we will encounter Jesus preaching in his hometown synagogue. He was handed the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah and he 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, Jesus very dramatically handed the scroll back to 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!
• The words of Isaiah’s prophecy were being unveiled before their eyes. The Spirit of the Lord, that 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. He 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 captive to 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 particularly with each other through charity. All of the aspects of this Messianic prophecy — and all the others — Jesus was actualizing before their eyes.
• Jesus wants continuously to fulfill Sacred Scripture in our hearing, before our eyes, in our minds, hearts and lives. 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 slavery to our 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 but a lifetime and eternity pleasing to God and joyous to us. He wants to engage us in a 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, to let his word take on our flesh and be fulfilled in and by us.
• This Sunday we will celebrate for the third time a new and important annual feast, the Sunday of the Word of God, which Pope Francis established on September 30, 2019 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, which is the feast of St. Jerome, the famous translator of the Bible from the Greek and Hebrew into Latin, then the common language of the people. 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 something 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 struck 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 hope that St. Jerome’s example of converted zeal will be contagious, that each of us will “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.”
• I would like to underline two points. The first is about celebrating the Word of God as the great treasure it is. Back in 2008, Pope Benedict hosted in the Vatican a Synod of Bishops on the Word of God in the Life and Mission of the Church. A bishop from Jelgava, Latvia named Bishop Anton Justs, gave an intervention I’ve never forgotten. He described a priest, Fr. Viktors, who in the first days of the Communist occupation had been arrested for possessing the Bible and commanded to step on it. Instead, he knelt and kissed it, for which he was condemned to ten years of hard labor in Siberia. When he returned a decade later as an emaciated witness to Scripture’s inestimable value, he celebrated Mass with his people. After proclaiming the Gospel, he lifted the text, pronounced Verbum Domini and kissed once more the Word of God. He and the people cried profusely with gratitude to God. Fr. Viktors wasn’t alone in his testimony. “In Latvia, during the Soviet era,” Bishop Justs continued, “no religious books, no Holy Scriptures, no catechisms were allowed to be printed. The reasoning was: if there is no printed Word of God, there will be no religion. So our Latvian people did what the first century Christians did: they learnt the passages of the Holy Scriptures by heart.” And specifically with regard to celebration, he recounted, “Still today in Latvia there is an oral tradition alive. We stand on the shoulders of our martyrs to proclaim the Word of God. Our grandchildren remember their grandfathers and grandmothers, who died for their faith; they want to be, in their turn, heroes of faith. In Latvia we proclaim the living Word of God! We go in the processions and on the pilgrimages, we sing songs and we pray and say: ‘This is the Word of God, for which our grandparents died.’”A people learning Sacred Scripture by heart, taking the Bible on pilgrimages, proudly proclaiming the Word of God, and seeking to be heroes in witness to it — this is what the Catholic Church is meant to be. This is the type of faith and celebration Pope Francis, by establishing the Sunday of the Word of God, is trying to catalyze.
• The second point is about learning Sacred Scripture. About a decade ago, I happened to meet a priest from Cleveland at Green Airport in Providence, Rhode Island. I invited him to lunch. When the cashier asked if there would be one check or two, I said one and gave my credit card. Fr. Bob immediately interjected, “Sirach says we should go Dutch!” I stared at him quizzically, but retorted, “Jesus calls us to love one another as he loves us and the Last Supper wasn’t Dutch. I’m paying!” When we got to the table, immediately after grace, I asked whether he had invented the quotation from Sirach. “Not at all!,” he enthusiastically replied, as he pulled a worn Bible from his backpack and amazingly opened it to the exact page in the Book of Sirach where it says not to be ashamed to “share the expenses of a business or journey” (Sir 42:3). Blown away, and frankly filled with holy envy by his command of Scripture, I asked how he had come to know the Word of God so well. He told me he had made a promise the day of his diaconal ordination to read the entire Bible once a year and that he had been faithful to that promise. “After 24 years,” he said with a smile, “You get to know what Sirach says about restaurant bills!” I asked him how long it takes to read the whole Bible in a year. He replied that it takes cumulatively only 75 hours, or 12-15 minutes a day. Since that encounter, I’ve tried to emulate Fr. Bob’s commitment to reading the Bible each year and have encouraged many others to join us. 12-15 minutes a day can change your life. There are so many books and smart phone applications that make reading the Bible in a year easier, intelligently varying the passages to help one understand it better than if one just read from cover to cover. And Fr. Mike Schmitz has a very helpful podcast Bible in a Year, which has helped hundreds of thousands enter more deeply into the treasure of the Word of God. I’d encourage you to find and use one of these great means to get to enrich yourself each day more and more with the treasure of the Word of God.
• The same Jesus who entered his hometown Synagogue on the Sabbath will enter our Churches this Sunday. He will speak to us live as the Gospel is read. He will come to teach us, to heal us, to console us, to be with us, to strengthen us and to send us out. As Fr. Viktors and the faithful Latvians under Communism heroically demonstrated, 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 continually fulfills Scripture in our hearing! He’s the one with the words of eternal life! As we celebrate the Sunday of the Word of God, let us respond to that word with love, enthusiasm and gratitude, “Thanks be to God!” and “Praise to you, Lord Jesus Christ!”

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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