Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 17, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 17, 2024

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, in which Jesus will continue to speak to us, for the fourth of five weeks, on the mystery of his body and blood in the Eucharist. How much we need to hear this as the Church in the United States tries to respond to the graces to live the ongoing Eucharistic Revival well. We need the Revival because, for the most part, most Catholics in the United States have not lived by what Jesus teaches us so clearly during these weeks. So let’s listen to what we will hear with fresh ears.
• In the second reading of Sunday’s Mass, St. Paul will tell the Ephesians and us, “Be careful, then, how you live, not as unwise people, but as wise!” He will encourage us to “make the most of the opportunity” of life, not to “continue in ignorance, but try to understand what is the will of the Lord.” He stresses that we have a choice about how we are to live. While there are many who live unwisely and in ignorance, who waste the opportunity of life God has given them., St. Paul reminds us of God’s call to live differently, to seize the chance and live according to God’s will.
• But what does it mean to live wisely, to make the most of our opportunity, to live according to the will of God? The first reading from Sunday’s Mass tells us. The Book of Proverbs shows wisdom building her house, preparing a banquet, and inviting others to come in. Wisdom is a term, a title, for God: God says, “You who are simple, turn in here! To the one who lacks understanding, Wisdom says, ‘Come, eat of my food, and drink of the wine I have mixed! Forsake foolishness that you may live; advance in the way of understanding.’” Notice what Wisdom, what God, doesn’t do to pass on his wisdom: He doesn’t build a classroom and prepare a lecture. Significantly he builds a house — we could even say a Church! — and prepares a banquet. He doesn’t bring in the ignorant principally to teach them, but to feed them on the “bread” and “wine” he’s prepared, which Wisdom calls “my food.” We will grow in the path of wisdom, in other words, through consuming wisdom, through becoming what we eat. The foolish think that we can learn it all intellectually, that faith is fundamentally an intellectual exercise, in which we can comprehend everything we need to. It’s not that instruction is unimportant — learning from Jesus the Master is essential! — but it’s also true that our finite minds can only learn and retain so much. The wise path, the one in which we advance in the way of understanding, is one where we enter into communion with that nourishment that we cannot make or achieve of our own, the nourishment God provides at the banquet he’s throwing in the house he’s built.
• This sets the tone, obviously, for this Sunday’s Gospel, when Wisdom incarnate, Jesus Christ, will speak about the fulfillment of the prophecy about the banquet of Wisdom announced in Proverbs. Jesus tells us that to live wisely, to advance in the way of understanding, we literally need to eat his flesh and drink his blood. We know that the Scribes and the Pharisees and many of the disciples were much more comfortable with an intellectual or conceptual religion, memorizing and repeating the Scriptures and rabbinical commentaries. When Jesus, however, told them something that surpassed their human abilities to understand, when he indicated that the path to true wisdom was to become simple and to eat of the food and imbibe the drink he had prepared, they responded with doubts and derision. We see in them foolishness masquerading as intelligence, worldly prudence substituting for true Wisdom. “How can this man give us his flesh to eat?,” they murmured. Such a reaction, on the surface, was reasonable. If some ordinary rabbi had said that others needed to consume his flesh, we could understand why there would be opposition. If our mom were to tell us that for dinner we were going to consume dad’s flesh and drink grandma’s blood, we would be disturbed and wonder if she had taken hallucinogens. But the crowds present were saying that about the same man who the previous day had fed about 25,000 people on five loaves and two fish, who had been astonishing and amazing them with his teaching over the past two years, whom they had witnessed heal people by the hundreds, making paralyzed men walk, people with withered hands whole, curing lepers and liberating those possessed by demons. None of that seemed to matter. Their worldly wisdom, which tried to frame everything according to human categories rather than reframing their human categories according to God’s, led them to rejecting the enfleshment of God’s wisdom when at last he came.
• Next week we will hear that it wasn’t just the ignorant pagans, or the hard-hearted Scribes and Pharisees or the feeble-hearted, worldly Sadducees who rejected Jesus. Many of Jesus’ discipleswould say, “This is a hard teaching. Who can endure it?,” and walk away from the Lord Jesus, as if Jesus would never challenge them beyond their theological and gastronomic comfort zones. Even many of Jesus’ followers were not simple, humble and faithful enough to eat Wisdom and become truly wise.
• Now it comes to us. Throughout this triennial five-week course on the Eucharist, Jesus has been getting us ready to make a choice. He repeatedly challenges us this Sunday: “Unless you eat the flesh of the Son of Man and drink his blood, you have no life in you.” “Whoever eats me will live because of me.” “Whoever eats this bread will live forever.” He who is the Truth incarnate is telling us that unless we eat him, we will have no life. We will just be walking spiritual corpses. We may still have bios, the Greek word that indicates the biological life we share with plants and animals, but we won’t really have zoe, the type of divine life that he came into the world to give us so that we might have life more abundantly (Jn 10:10). Jesus gives us the greatest wisdom of all, that to live is to live off of him, but there are many who reject this wisdom, including Catholics who tragically forsake Jesus each Sunday as he eagerly desires to feed us with himself at Mass or who neglect him on Holy Days like last Thursday’s Solemnity of Our Lady’s Assumption. Moreover, many who would never miss on Sundays or Holy Days still do not live by Jesus’ teaching, because they do not find in the Eucharist their life principle. To eat Jesus’ body and drink his blood is more than a mechanical act of digesting Him the same way we consume a donut or drink coffee. To eat his body and drink his blood means to draw our life from him, to treat him as God and to recognize that without him in our life, we’re devoid of the one thing necessary. Coming to Mass, some can say to themselves, is a good thing, a holy thing, an important religious duty they faithfully accomplish. But they don’t really look at Mass, at adoration, at a truly Eucharistic life, as a thing of life and death. And that’s what Jesus is saying it is: a thing of life and death. Few Catholics look at the Eucharist this way: that if they weren’t able to receive Jesus on a given week — because of weather, a sickness, or travel — they would feel forlorn of the most essential reality in life, as a thing of life and death. Many can miss Mass with a certain nonchalance. They don’t feel spiritually dead when they don’t receive the greatest gift in the history of the world, perhaps because they’ve never really yet allowed Jesus in the Eucharist to bring them fully alive.
• Jesus means what he says, and we shouldn’t succumb to the temptation of the evil one to try to water his words down. Unless we eat his flesh and drink his blood — unless we enter into communion with him and keep that holy communion with him — we have no life in us. To the extent that we’re spiritually alive, it’s because we’re living off of him. The Second Vatican Council phrased this teaching in a very powerful way. The Council fathers said that Jesus in the Eucharist is the “source and summit of the Christian life.” He is the source, the point from which everything flows; and he is the summit, the goal toward which everything goes. If we’re living a life that’s truly Christian, we will be uniting everything we do to Jesus in the Holy Eucharist. And if we’re not actively and consciously uniting all that we’re doing to our Eucharistic Lord, we’re not yet living the truly Christian life. The Christian life, in other words, doesn’t involve merely knowing the Catechism, or living by the Ten Commandments, attending Mass each week and going to Confession at least once a year. It involves making Jesus in the Eucharist the Source and Summit, the alpha and omega, the beginning and end of our life, drawing our strength from the Jesus in the Eucharist and seeking to do everything in Communion with Him.
• The choice facing each of us this Sunday involves true growth in wisdom or remaining where we are. Jesus say to us, with the words of Proverbs, “You who are simple, turn in here!” Divine wisdom calls to us again, saying, “Come, eat of my bread and drink of the wine I have mixed. Lay aside immaturity and walk in the way of insight!” The choice before us is to draw our life from holy Communion with Jesus and live off Him in the Mass, or to seek our life principle somewhere else, serving some other god of our own making and structuring our life on some other foundation that Him who is the rock. This is the most important choice we’ll ever make in life. If during this Revival, we truly choose Jesus, it will change not only the way we look at Sunday Mass, but also daily Mass, at Eucharistic adoration, and at the unity of the Christian moral life. Our entire existence is meant to be Eucharistic, a commentary on the words of consecration, as we, having received Jesus’ body and blood, go out to others to say, “This is my body, this is my blood, this is my sweat, my heart, my calloused hands, all my efforts, given and poured out for you.” This Sunday Jesus puts before us that way of holiness, the path of wisdom, the route of love and life. Let’s ask the Eucharistic Jesus’ help to choose him who is the Way with all our heart and commit ourselves to help others to take the same wise path!

The readings on which the homily was based were: 

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