Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, November 12, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Thirty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
November 12, 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 as the Church seeks to deepen our annual November meditation on the Last Things. In the Gospel, Jesus gives various details about the end times. He describes how the house of God will be attacked, how there will be imposters claiming to be speaking for God and asking us to follow them, how there will be wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, persecutions, hatred, betrayals by family members and friends, and how even some of his followers will be put to death. When Jesus’ listeners asked, “Master, when will this happen?” — presumably so that they could be prepared — he didn’t answer their question directly, not only because the time of the second coming was known only to the Father, but also, and perhaps most importantly, because he wanted them to be prepared for it always. If he had given some date weeks, decades or centuries later, the temptation would have been just to go on with life as normal. But Jesus had come to establish a totally new normal, a norm of faith, a norm of vigilant awaiting, a norm of full-time Christian behavior. He wanted the day of the Lord to be a perpetual state, so that each day would be the Lord’s day, a day in which we exclaim, “This is the day the Lord has made!” And the signs of the day of the Lord he gives us help us to maintain this awareness, because they are in fact events we see in every age, when there’s destruction, natural disasters, wars, famines, illness, betrayals, attacks on the Church, and the persecution and killing of Christians.
• But if pay close attention to this Sunday’s Gospel, theres seem at first glance to be a contradiction. How can Jesus affirm at the end of the Gospel simultaneously that some of his followers will be put to death but that not a hair on their head will be destroyed? In short, why would God allow so many terrible things to happen to those who trust in him? How’s that protecting them down to every last strand of hair?
• Let’s get specific with events in the news: Why would he allow Hurricane Ian or Nicole to rip through Florida and destroy so many homes? Why would he allow what’s happening in the Ukraine, China, Cuba, Venezuela, Madagascar, or Myanmar? Why would he allow the ballot measures and various candidates in favor of abortion to win on election day? Why would he allow so many attacks against Christians in Nigeria, where earlier this week 11 were killed and over 80 kidnapped? Why, in fact, would he allow so many periods of persecution and martyrdom throughout the centuries or allow half of all the martyrs in the history of the Church to have shed their blood in the last century?
• The answer is something we all have to grasp in order to grow in faith. While it’s not a contradiction, it’s a hard truth all the same. God permits these evils in order to help us become better disciples and better apostles, more fervent followers of him and more passionate proclaimers of his salvation. He who permits evil solely because he intends to bring from it a greater good, does so to help us become more faithful and bring other people to faith. He tells us in the Gospel that all of these disasters and sufferings “will lead to your giving testimony” — and not just any testimony. He tells us that he will give us the grace of “a wisdom in speaking that all your adversaries will be powerless to resist or refute.” The adversities we encounter for our faith shouldn’t separate us from the Lord, but move us to abandon ourselves even more to Him. When we’re brought to our knees by natural disasters or man-made hatred, it provides the opportunity for us to pray far more devoutly, to grow in faith, and to be proven like gold in a crucible. When we’re tested more severely in the faith, God always comes to our aid to help us pass those tests, provided that we open ourselves up to his presence during trial and respond to him. And that type of faith is the greatest means to bring others to faith.
• We’ve seen since the early days of the Church that the blood of the martyrs is the seed of Christians (sanguis martyrum semen Christianorum). So many have converted when they see the way Christians suffer harassment, persecution, imprisonment, torture and even martyrdom with peace, serenity, joy and chants, how we forgive our enemies, how we pray for our persecutors, how we freely lay down our life in love for Him who freely laid down his life to save our own. But we also see it on a lesser scale when Christians, having suffered natural disasters like the rest, rush unselfishly to help others before thinking of themselves, how so many far from the catastrophes sacrifice in Christ’s name as Good Samaritans to help people rebuild. Just as Jesus’ betrayal, suffering and martyrdom strengthened his own adhesion to the Father’s will — “Not my will, but yours be done!” he cried to the Father three times in the Garden of Gethsemane — and just as it led to his giving the most powerful testimony of all from the Cross of God the Father’s merciful and saving will, so when we suffer it’s to enable us to give a great testimony of faith. It’s a chance for us to show that we Christians live, suffer and even die differently than the rest, because we know, as St. Paul wrote to the Romans, that neither persecution, famine or the sword, neither death nor life, nor anything in all creation can separate us from the love of God in Christ Jesus our Lord (Rom 8:31-39). When we remain faithful under duress, it teaches others that Jesus is worth living and worth dying for. That type of witness can’t help but move people.
• And so we need to think of our own sufferings and how God has given them as an opportunity for us to grow in faith and to share the faith. I remember a married woman who was betrayed by her husband. She had been trying for years to get him to pray with her, to go to confession, and to come to Church with her each Sunday. He wasn’t interested for years — and it took a toll on their marriage. Eventually one night at a work party, he had too much to drink and ended up going home with a woman who was not his wife. When he returned the following morning, his wife was waiting for him. He was so ashamed at what he had done. He thought his marriage was over and his family would be divided because he had said so many times that if she were ever unfaithful to him, he would never be able to forgive her. He anticipated she would treat him by the same merciless standard. But in the midst of his tears and hers, she said to him, “I forgive you!” He couldn’t believe it. He asked her how she could forgive him something so evil. She replied that on the day they were married, she made a promise to be faithful to God and to him “for better or worse” and she was prepared with God’s help to keep that promise as they confronted the “worse” together. She added that just as God had forgiven her, so she could receive the strength to forgive her husband. The whole experience of his wife’s strong mercy led him that weekend to return to receive God’s mercy for the first time in decades. He turned his life around. He began to pray, to come to Mass and to receive that same strength of Christian faith that he saw in his wife. She had lived an exemplary Christian life throughout their marriage, but none of that sufficed to get her husband to return to the faith; it was only when out of her suffering she gave witness to the full beauty of the Christian faith that her husband accepted not only the faith but truly grew to recognize how lucky he was to have the holy Christian wife like he did. And the wife told me that even though the entire experience was excruciating for her, she had never felt closer to God in her life than when she was sharing his mercy with her husband. God always tries to bring good out of evil and we need to be aware that out of the evil he allows us to suffer, he wants to bring about the good of our sanctification and the sanctification of others.
• One of the reasons why Jesus allows persecutions, natural disasters, betrayals and other objective evils that he wants to convert into moral and apostolic goods is because they wake us up and help us no longer take our faith for granted. They force us to live by faith, whereas when things are fine, our faith can just fade into the background. C.S. Lewis once said in a beautiful reflection on suffering, “God whispers to us in our pleasures, speaks in our consciences, but shouts in our pains. It is his megaphone to rouse a deaf world.” God speaks to us with a bullhorn when we and others are suffering — and gives us an opportunity likewise to speak with a megaphone to others through our words and actions, because others are now awake and attentive. But we don’t have to wait for that megaphone, for an outright persecution or hurricane or personal disaster in order for God to wake us up. Jesus’ words in this Sunday’s Gospel ought to be a sufficient alarm clock. Every day is meant to be a day of the Lord. Every day the Lord sends us his Holy Spirit to strengthen our faith and help us to give witness to our faith by words and deeds.  Every day is an opportunity for us to live differently than the rest and more like Christ.
• Jesus finishes his words this Sunday with a message of great hope. “By your perseverance,” he says, “you will save your lives.” He calls us to stay with it. He recognizes that the great temptation that faces any of us whenever we’re suffering, whenever we’re doing anything hard and challenging, is to give up. Jesus tells us not to quit. When we feel like throwing in the towel, he tells us to use it to wash and wipe the feet of those who are beating us down. In doing this, Jesus isn’t saying, merely, “Do what I say,” but rather “Follow me!” Despite all he suffered — from betrayals to brutal scourgings to the burden of the weight of the Cross — he kept getting up and heading toward the finish line, giving witness to the love that made even that much suffering bearable. By his perseverance, he opened the gates of heaven. By our perseverance, we will enter those gates.

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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