Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 25, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
June 25, 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 joy for me to be with you as we enter into the consequential conversation the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when we return to the Sundays of Ordinary Time after the six Sundays of Lent, the Seven Sundays of Easter and the special post-Pentecost feasts of the Holy Trinity and the Body and Blood of the Lord. In the Gospel the Church gives us, we encounter Jesus’ focus on his Mission, his calling to each of us to share his focus, and the rejection some people give to that vocation. It’s an important help for us so that we may notonly accept but embrace the journey Jesus is asking each of us to make with him in life.
• The Gospel passage begins with St. Luke’s telling us that Jesus had “resolutely determined,” he literally “fixed his face,” on Jerusalem. Jerusalem is the place where he will complete his salvific mission. Jesus was now laser-beamed on his passion, death and resurrection, which would constitute the new Passover on which he would lead his chosen people, and he wanted us to receive the fruits of that triumph and join him in passing from death to life. The evangelist tells us that he sent messengers ahead of him to a Samaritan village to prepare for his reception there, because he wanted to include the Samaritans in his saving mission. He had already been to Samaria before, where he met the woman at the well. The end of that scene had the Samaritans all exclaiming in Sychar around the well of Jacob, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” But because Jesus was planning to head on to Jerusalem, with whom the Samaritans had been in a theological war for centuries, St. Luke tells us, “they would not welcome him.” They put their disagreement with the Jews above their receiving their Savior. And when the apostles James and John, whom Jesus had nicknamed the Boanerges brothers, the Sons of Thunder, sought to call down fire from heaven on the Samaritans as God had once destroyed Sodom and Gomorrah, we see that they, too, had taken their eyes off of Jerusalem and Jesus’ salvific will. So Jesus, rather than rebuking the Samaritans (which he easily could have), rebuked James and John. The failure of both the Samaritans and the Boanerges teaches us a valuable lesson: Often people can put their own grievances, their own petty scores to settle, above God and the work of salvation he wants to accomplish. They can put conditions on God’s saving work: “We’ll allow you, the Savior of the World, to enter our village provided that you promise that you won’t go to Jerusalem!” Or like John and James we can get distracted by others’ rejecting Jesus that we in fact do the same. Even though all of us recognize how silly it is when the Samaritans and apostles of yesteryear do it, we need to become more conscious of the way we likewise refuse welcoming Jesus. He tells us, for example, in St. Matthew’s Gospel that whenever we refuse to give food to the hungry, drink to the thirsty, care to the sick, welcome to the stranger, clothing to the naked and visits to the imprisoned, we fail to welcome him in need (Mt 25:31-46). We also see it when we refuse the Cross, like St. Peter and the apostles initially did when they reprimanded Jesus after he said that he would be betrayed in Jerusalem, suffer at the hands of the religious and civil leaders, be beaten, scourged and murdered. Still today many do not want to embrace Jesus’ determined vision about the way he wishes to be with us, united with us on the path of sacrificial love we call the way of the Cross. What happened in Samaria in today’s Gospel is one more illustration of what St. John described in the prologue to his Gospel, that Jesus “came to his own and his own received him not.”
• As Jesus left Samaria with his face still resolutely determined on Jerusalem, he met three different people, two of whom volunteered to follow him and one of whom Jesus directly called. But to all of them, Jesus described what it would mean to follow him. What the cost of discipleship is. Those lessons are ever actual as we prepare to meet Jesus this Sunday.
• In the first vocation story, a man runs up to Jesus and says, “I will follow you wherever you go.” Jesus had come into the world to make disciples and so we would have expected that this man’s desire to follow Jesus would have filled Jesus with joy. Instead, Jesus replied, “Foxes have dens and the birds of the sky have nests, but the Son of Man has nowhere to lay his head.” Jesus wanted him to know the price of discipleship, especially at a time in which messianic expectations had hyped up the Jews to think that the Messiah would kick out the Romans and set up a political administration in which there would be plenty of patronage. Jesus wanted the man to grasp that to follow him wherever he went meant to go after someone who was basically homeless, to value him more than one’s own home and one’s own bed, to realize that he wouldn’t even have what foxes and birds take for granted. Jesus was saying that anyone who decides to follow him needs to know that it’s not going to be a comfortable or easy life, but a life of self-sacrificial love and the embracing of a daily Cross. We, too, need to ponder the radical nature of God’s call. Are we willing to follow Jesus wherever he goes? If he asks us, like God asked Abraham, to leave our own native place at 75 and go to a place he would eventually show us, would we follow him, or would we value our home, our bed, our old habits more than we do the Lord?
• The second scene involves a man to whom Jesus said, “Follow me!” But this man replied, “Lord, let me go first to bury my father.” When we hear this, we can presume that the person’s dad had just died and he just wanted to go home for the funeral and then immediately return. The text doesn’t say that, however. What’s much more likely was that the man’s father was very much alive and might live for decades still. What the interlocutor was likely communicating was, “Jesus, I’d like to follow you, but my father comes first. As soon as I’ve fulfilled all of my obligations to him, then I’ll come and follow.” Jesus’ reply was powerful: “Let the dead bury their dead. But you, go and proclaim the Kingdom of God.” As Jesus would say a little later at the raising of Lazarus, he is the Resurrection and the Life and everyone who lives and believes in him, even if he dies, will live (Jn 11:25-26). For us to become alive in the most important sense of all, we need to be in a living relationship to him. If we’re not following him, if we’re not allowing his life to reign within us, we’re dead, even if all our corporeal vital signs are healthy. He was calling this man to become fully alive through following him who is the Resurrection and the Life. He was giving him a choice between life and death, between living and dying even while breathing. Jesus was encouraging him to let those who are “dead,” who don’t have this relationship, bury their confrères. Jesus doesn’t call most people to make a strict choice between him and their family members. He calls us, after all, to honor our father and mother and wants the family to be an image of the Church and the communion of persons who is God. Burying the dead is and will always remain a spiritual work of mercy. But at the same time, Jesus is reminding us that he must come first, so that our family life will become the life of the living rather than the walking dead. Our vocation is to a new type of familial life that will last forever and Jesus wants us to seize it, as he called this man in the Gospel.
• The third vocation scene is another one that involves the family. After being summoned by Jesus, this person replied, “I will follow you, Lord, but first let me say farewell to my family at home.” This was almost identical to what Elisha had said to Elijah in the Old Testament, where Elijah had given permission. Jesus, who could see what was in the heart of the one with whom he was speaking, grasped what the request symbolized. The person simply was oblivious to the greatness of the request he had received to follow Jesus. The young man was putting a condition on the call to follow Jesus. He was placing human respect, human courtesy, and family above that summons. Very likely Jesus also suspected that this man’s family members might have objected to his leaving them behind to follow Jesus fully. So Jesus said, “No one who sets a hand to the plow and looks to what was left behind is fit for the Kingdom of God.” He was saying, “Don’t look to what you’re leaving,” but rather, “Look ahead to what you’re gaining, to the work you’re called to do with me.” And he was focusing on the urgency of the work of the kingdom against the tendency to procrastinate on fixing our face and our heart with Christ on his saving work.
• This Sunday I will celebrate the 23rd anniversary of my priestly ordination. I ask for your prayers that I may be faithful in following Jesus with the determination, priority and urgency he desires and helping others to do the same. I will likewise pray for you. The same Jesus who summoned the Samaritans, the apostles, and these three people he encountered along the way, comes to summon each of us anew. He will remind us of the cost of following him but also the reward, and as a foretaste of that reward, he will give us his Body and Blood, to help us on the inside to follow him wherever he goes, to keep our hands on the plow and our eyes ahead, fixed on Jerusalem, fixed on Him on the Cross and on the victory what Jesus accomplished there brings. Making this whole-hearted, resolute decision to follow Christ is the most important decision we’ll ever make.

The Gospel passage on which this homily was based was: 

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