Twelfth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, June 24, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twelfth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
June 24, 2023

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 the Risen Lord Jesus wants to have with each of us this Sunday, when Jesus will say to us something very consoling on the one hand and very disconcerting at the same time on the other, before teaching us how the two go together.
• Jesus first tells us “Fear no one,” and goes on to give us the reason not to be afraid: because our Father in heaven loves us more than all the sparrows in the world and knows us intimately down to our last strand of hair. Fifteen times in the Gospel, in fact, Jesus tells us not to be afraid, and regularly gives us as the reason because our Father in heaven will provide for us and protect us. In the Sermon on the Mount, for example, he tells us not to worry about what we will eat or drink or wear — things we really need — because that same Father who clothes the lilies of the field knows what we need and will take care of us (Mt 6:28-32). In this Sunday’s Gospel, he tells us that he doesn’t even want us to fear suffering and physical death, because not even death can separate us from our Father’s love (Rom 8:38-39). These words are even more important at a time in which so many are eaten alive by anxiety, insecurity and fear due to problems in their personal or family life, their studies, their career, or because of the state of the world, various worrisome trends in culture, law and politics and a litany of other concerns.
• At the same time that Jesus tells us, “Fear no one,” he adds that there is one fear we should have. “Do not fear,” he says, “those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather fear him who can destroy both soul and body in hell.” Who is this who can destroy us in Gehenna? Saints and Biblical scholars have answered this question in two ways. The majority said it refers to God, who created us, who will judge us, and who has the ability to send us to eternal self-alienation in Hell for having chosen against him in this life. By this interpretation, Jesus is saying, “Fear God rather than men,” and then goes on in the Gospel to help us learn how to relate to God not fundamentally out of fear but out of love, since this God who we should fear is one who, Jesus says, protects sparrows, has numbered every follicle, and will embrace with love and gratitude everyone who acknowledges Jesus. The second, minority, interpretation is that the one who can destroy both body and soul in hell is the devil. Of course the devil is not divine and certainly cannot destroy in the same way God would be able to destroy, but he can torment both body and soul forever.
• Even though I’m inclined toward the first interpretation, that Jesus is telling us not to be afraid even of those who threaten to murder us but rather to focus on the God who loves us and in correspondence to the gift of fear of the Lord seek not to displease or deny him in the world but acknowledge him before others, including when threatened, I want to spend our time on the minority interpretation because the devil is getting a lot of attention today, many Catholics are asking questions and some are indeed becoming anxious. Two movies have recently been released focusing on the devil, The Pope’s Exorcist, which is really a shallow and disappointing horror movie starring actor Russell Crowe supposedly based on the life of the former exorcist of Rome, Father Gabriele Amorth; and the critically-acclaimed movie Nefarious, which focuses realistically on the demonic possession of a fictional death row inmate in his conversations with a social psychologist. Even if the major interpretation of the passage is about a reverential fear of God, Jesus throughout the Gospel wants us to help us have a healthy awareness that the devil exists and seeks to kill us, and that we should therefore, as we proclaim in our baptismal promises, reject him, his evil works and his empty promises. St. Peter, the feast of whose martyrdom we will celebrate on Thursday, compares the devil to a type of wild beast: “Your adversary, the devil, is prowling the world like a roaring lion, seeking someone to devour” (1 Pet 5:8). That someone he longs to consume is you and me.
• What does a healthy fear of the evil one, which Jesus wants us to have, look like? It involves two elements:
  • First, we need to know how the devil seeks to attack us. The devil has no power over us unless we give him that power. He cannot harm our soul unless we become his accomplices and allow our souls to be killed through mortal (deadly) sin, which separates our souls from the source of life, who is God. The way the one Jesus calls the “Father of lies” (Jn 8:44) seeks to accomplish this assisted suicide is by getting us to succumb to one of his deceptions, just as he did with Eve and Adam in the Garden (Gen 3). A healthy fear of the devil involves no paranoia, but a sane vigilance against the devil’s lies and against all his temptations to induce us to sin.
  • Second, once we know that and how he’s out to get us, we have to know what the remedy is to defeat his attempt to conquer us forever. That remedy is a deep trust in God that expresses itself in saying yes to God in everything. The evil one got Adam and Eve to sin first by getting them to distrust God and his promises and then to do what God told them not to do; therefore, the antidote to the devil’s machinations is to accentuate the opposite of what the devil wants to achieve. If our best defense is a good offense, we need to trust in God and seek to do his will in all things. If we trust in God the Father enough to say “yes” to him and “no” to the devil, if we base our lives on the Truth Incarnate (Jn 14:6) rather than on the “father of lies,” then we don’t need to fear the devil any more than Jesus did. Jesus is the “stronger man” whom he tells us in St. Luke’s Gospel has “attacked and overpowered” the devil, “taken away his armor” and “divided his spoils” (Lk 11:21-22). If we stick fully with that Stronger Man, if we love him with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, then we have nothing to fear — that’s why Jesus’ statements in the Gospel this Sunday are a paradox and not a contradiction. It’s only when we are not totally God’s that we have to fear, as Jesus tells us, because the devil is constantly at the gate waiting for us to echo his “no” to God so that he might seduce us away from God in this world and forever.
• The devil’s global strategy with us is to oppose God’s plans for us. This involves, first, opposing God’s plans for us to become holy. The only way for us to share eternally in Jesus’ victory is for us to become a saint, because only saints are in heaven. To keep us from heaven, the devil wants to keep us from becoming godlike. With some of us, he tries to accomplish this by convincing us that we don’t really have to be holy; we just need to be good, to get a D+ rather than an A+ on our imitating of Christ. With others he tries to make us fear the consequences of sanctity, that if we strive for holiness, we’ll lose our friends, jobs, freedom, personality, identity, and perhaps even life. That’s all a lie. The second thing he opposes is our call to be ardent apostles, to bring others to holiness, to love our neighbor as Christ loves us. Loving others necessarily involves sharing the Gospel. Jesus tells us this Sunday, “What I say to you in the dark, tell in the light; and what you hear whispered, proclaim from the housetops.” The devil gets us not to act on this call to acknowledge Christ before others in two ways: he convinces us that it’s not really our mission to announce the Gospel, but rather priests’ and nuns’, or catechists’, or somebody and anyone else. His second subterfuge is to frighten us away from proclaiming the Gospel, by making us fear that we don’t know the faith well enough to pass it on, or by thinking that our friends and family will consider us hypocrites if we start to proclaim the Gospel now; or by getting us to fear that if we bring the Gospel to the public square, we’ll suffer for it. This fear, of course, is justified: if we preach the Gospel, we may suffer for it, as some before us have, but that’s why Jesus tells us not to fear those who can only kill the body. He wants us not to fear those who seek to intimidate us this way, including the devil, but rather to have courage, to recognize he is with us, and that the Father, who loves us, will deliver us from the evil one if we ask for his help.
• To defeat the devil and grow in courage to live as holy missionary disciples, the greatest help we have is the Eucharist, in which we receive Jesus Christ, the conquerer of sin and death, the vanquisher of the devil, the Strongest Man of all, within us. Jesus in the Eucharist is the greatest source of holiness and the greatest impetus to live and spread the Gospel. The devil hates the Eucharist, and tries to do whatever he can to keep us away from the Eucharist. He tries first to keep us away from Mass and Eucharistic adoration and to disbelieve in Jesus’ real presence, and he has successfully persuaded five of six Catholics in the US to prioritize something other than Mass on Sunday and seven of ten to think that the Eucharist is just a thing rather than the Son of God who defeated him. If he can’t stop us from attending Mass and believing in the Eucharistic Lord, then he tries to get us to receive the Lord in a routine way or sinful state. The best way, therefore, to be equipped to withstand the devil’s onslaught is to receive the Lord with ever greater frequency and fervor and respond to his work within us with ever greater zeal and fidelity. That’s what the Church in the U.S. is seeking to do during this Eucharistic Revival. Every time we receive Jesus well in the Eucharist, we share in his victory over the devil and are strengthened with courage to carry that victory out to others. So as we get ready for Mass this Sunday, let us take to heart what Jesus tells us, “Be Not Afraid,” and receive with love, gratitude and faith, the One who has definitively defeated the devil and has shown us the way to share in his victory in this life and forever.

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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