Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 20, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-First Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
August 20, 2022

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

The text that guided the homily was: 

• 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 Jesus will speak to us about the path to eternal life. On Monday, as you remember, we celebrated the solemnity of Mary’s Assumption, body and soul, into heaven. The Son of God came into the world so that each of us might spend eternity, body in soul, in heaven alongside her. In this Sunday’s Gospel, as Jesus is heading up to Jerusalem teaching the multitudes along the way, a person from the crowd asks him how many actually make it to heaven. Jesus’ response is as relevant to us today as it was to his auditors 2000 years ago.
• “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” the person inquires. It seemed to be a question flowing from curiosity. Jesus did not come down from heaven, however, to satisfy our curiosity. He came to save us and responded not by stating how many will be saved, but how that interlocutor and others will be saved: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” A similar thing happened at another time, when the disciples asked the Lord about the timing of the end of the world. “Tell us, when will this be, and what will be the sign of your coming and of the end of the age?” (Mt 24:3). Jesus replied not by supplying information they could put into their calendars, but by telling them how to be ready no matter when it occurred. In both cases, Jesus was not being evasive; rather he went beyond trivia to what is most important: making us aware of what we need to know and to do in order to experience the salvation he won for us.
• We can say, almost as an aside, that many in our world would do well to pay attention to what Jesus does not answer in the Gospel. Jesus’ failure to answer the question about the number of those to be saved shows the absurdity of groups, like the Jehovah’s Witnesses, who want to claim that they know the exact amount of people who are saved (144,000, taking literally a symbolic number used in Rev 14:1). It also shows the absurdity of many of those who found storefront churches and claim that they know for certain when the end of the world will be. Not only does Jesus not give us or them that information, but Jesus said in the Gospel that not even he knew when that would occur — only His Father knows (cf. Matt. 24:36 ).
• Even more than paying attention to what Jesus, in his answer, does not say, we must pay attention to what he does: “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” This word, “strive,” in Greek is the same word we have for “agonize” and it’s used in a tense that means “keep on agonizing.” It points to the type of struggle and suffering Jesus says it will take to enter into his kingdom. To be saved, to enter the Kingdom, to get to Heaven, in other words, we need continuously to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to go into agony, to make the greatest, possibly most painful exertion of our life, to fit through a gate that is “narrow.” We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in training camp to make the cut, harder than gymnast works to make the Olympics and win the gold, harder than an immigrant father of large family works to ensure his family’s survival. The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through.
• But what if we don’t love the Lord that much? What if we really don’t make an heroic effort? We might not get an A-plus on our discipleship, but we’ll still make the cut, won’t we? Listen to what Jesus says in St. Matthew’s Gospel about the relative numbers heading toward life and toward perdition. “The gate is wide and the road is easy that leads to destruction, and there are many who take it. But the gate is narrow and the road is hard that leads to life, and there are few who find it” (Mt 7:13-14). Jesus does not tell us whether those on the wide, easy, congested “highway to hell” actually end up in Gehenna or whether those on the narrow, uphill road to life actually end up in heaven — Jesus’ whole mission and that of the Church he founded, after all, is to try to rescue people from the former to the latter — but Jesus does tell us pretty clearly about the way the vast majority of people is trending. Over the last few decades, people have gotten the notion that the Christian life is exactly the opposite of what Jesus describes, that salvation is cheap and that everyone gets to Heaven — except perhaps genocidal serial killers, public smokers and people we don’t like. Such an attitude is a diabolical ambush. It’s a lie from the father of lies and also a very dangerous heresy — universalism or apocatastasis— that carries with it potentially the most serious of eschatological consequences. He who is the Gate of the sheepfold tells us that we need to agonize to enter into him. Jesus said these words as he was on the road to Jerusalem, and we know what happened when he got to Jerusalem. He entered into his agony, the agony that led to our salvation and opened up the narrow door. But we need to be willing to follow him along that path of sacrificial love — and to admit that it’s not a much-traveled path. We can ask: Which is more popular today, the path of spiritual poverty announced by Jesus or the one of materialist wealth? The path of purity or pornography? The path of peace-making or score-settling?   The path of turning the other cheek or slapping back? The path of keeping the commandments or breaking them? Jesus’ path is not an easy one and he never pretended that it was. Loving according to his standards can be crucifying. But he’s telling us in this Sunday’s Gospel that it’s eternally worth it. He who said that we must “love the Lord … with all [our] strength” meant it. All our strength. All our mind, heart, and soul, too (cf. Lk 10:27)!
• Someone might object, “I’ve never heard things expressed like this before. There must be some type of loophole. As long as I consider myself a good person, as long as I come to Mass each week and keep the commandments, as long as I pray, pay, and obey, I don’t have anything to worry about, right?” In this Sunday’s Gospel, there were many who thought they had an “in,” only to be profoundly mistaken. They remained on the outside, knocking, trying to get in, to no avail. “We ate and drank with you!,” they cried. It wasn’t enough. “We heard you teaching in our streets.” That wasn’t sufficient either. To both, Jesus said, “I do not know where you come from.” In St. Matthew’s Gospel, Jesus gives even more stunning examples. “Lord, Lord,” they said, “did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many miracles in your name?” (Mt 7:22). Jesus says even to these he will declare, “I never knew you” (Mt 7:23). Jesus was indicating that a mere external relationship with him is not enough. It’s not enough just to come to hear Jesus’ words. It’s not enough to eat and drink with Jesus in the Last Supper in which we participate in the Mass. It’s not enough to mention his name to a few others or even to do a few good deeds in his name. In each of these things, Jesus says that we can still remain a stranger to him, someone unknown. After all, Judas ate and drank with Jesus, he heard his discourses, he was sent out by him to announce his kingdom and in his name he cast out demons and worked miracles (cf. Mt 10:8ff). Yet he never really knew who the Lord was. He followed Jesus on the outside, not on the inside. Even though Jesus wanted it so badly, Judas never became his intimate friend, he never became a real member of his family. And we know that Judas ultimately valued Jesus less than 30 pieces of silver. We have to do more than listen to Jesus; we have to put his words into action, even difficult words like we find in this Sunday’s Gospel. We have to do more than eat and drink with him; we need to become whom we eat. We need to do more than announce his name and do some good deeds; we need to live by his name (Christian) and allow Him to work through us. We need to enter into intimate friendship and communion with Him.
• To be a faithful Christian means to “agonize” to follow Christ always. There is no point at which we can stop fighting to follow him and “live off the interest” of previous years of good discipleship. We are called to fight the good fight, to struggle, until the day we die. As Archbishop Sheen used to say, “If we’re not going uphill, we’re sliding downhill.” If we’re not swimming against the current of the world toward Jesus, we’ll be floating down stream over the falls. “Unless you pick up your cross each day and follow me,” Jesus tells us, “you cannot be my disciple” (Lk 9:27,14:27). In the midst of a culture that is consistently trying to water down our commitment to God, Christians who want to be faithful need to strive even harder to pick up the Cross God gives us each day and unite ourselves to Christ on the Cross. Christ, himself, is the “gate to the sheepfold” (Jn 10:7,9). The reason why the gate is narrow is because it is the width of the Cross.
• In the face of this challenge, Jesus doesn’t leave us agonizing on our own, with all our weaknesses, staring at the uphill narrow road. He gives himself to us to strengthen us on the inside so that we might finish the race and keep the faith. We can indeed do all things in him who strengthens us. He empowers us by his word, he bolsters by the intimate friendship of prayer, and fortifies us by the awesome gift of Holy Communion so that united with him we might follow him step by step, entering into him who is the narrow gate. If we do this, then at the end of our earthly life, when we appear before the gates of the eternal Jerusalem and ask, “Lord, open to us,” we will see him smile, open the gates, call us by name and say, “I do know you! Come on in! Enter into the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of time!” (cf. Mt 25:34).
• Let’s prepare ourselves for this Sunday’s eternally consequential conversation

The Gospel on which this homily was based was: 

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