Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, August 31, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
August 31, 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, when, after several weeks of focusing on Jesus’ words to us in St. John’s Gospel about Jesus’ self-gift of himself in the Holy Eucharist, we return to St. Mark’s Gospel where Jesus will speak to us about the type of homage God expects of us. This applies to every interaction we have with God, but similarly, in this ongoing Eucharistic Revival, to the way we treat him in the Holy Eucharist.
• This Sunday we have a dramatic scene in which Jesus and his followers are criticized by the Pharisees for not obsessing about the ritual hand washings traditionally done by Jews before a meal. Jesus, the truth incarnate, responds with force and clarity. He calls them hypocrites — literally in Greek, actors — and cites the Prophet Isaiah against them, saying, “This people honors me with their lips, but their hearts are far from me; in vain do they worship me, teaching as doctrines human precepts.” Then Jesus tells the Pharisees: “You disregard God’s commandments but cling to human tradition.”
• Jesus’ words that the Pharisees were only seeming to serve the Lord while their hearts and actions were doing otherwise would have come as a great shock to his listeners. The Pharisees were considered extraordinarily faithful Jews. They went to the synagogue every Saturday. They prayed at least three times a day. They fasted twice a week, rather than just once a year like other Jews on the Day of Atonement. They paid tithes on their whole income, rather than just on the things explicitly mentioned in the Mosaic Law. They used to walk to Jerusalem a few times each year to celebrate the major Jewish feasts like Passover at the Temple. They washed before every meal. They only ate kosher meat. They wore special clothes. And yet in all of this, Jesus, like the Triune God through Isaiah, says remarkably, “This people pays me lip service, but their hearts are far from me.” And Jesus was right! The people who did all of these religious deeds were also the ones who ended up conspiring to kill Jesus, working together with their archenemies, the Herodians, the Sadducees and Romans to have Jesus arrested, tortured and ultimately crucified. Their hearts were indeed far from him! They were in fact not authentically religious at all, because in their hearts they were murderers instead of worshippers.
• But they and many others thought they were exemplary believers because of the way they scrupulously adhered to their human traditions above God’s clear commandments. St. Mark describes this Sunday in the Gospel the complicated and rigorous practice of Jewish ceremonial washings, something that God had not revealed that he wanted done but something that the Scribes in the fourth and fifth centuries BC had developed to foster what they called ritual purity. They needed to wash their hands in two directions with exactly one-and-a-half egg shells of clean water, first from the fingertips down and then with the fingertips at the bottom. This was the religious practice they obsessed about, as if such collectively neurotic, hygienic washings of hands, cups, jugs, kettles and beds were what would help them to grow in God’s image and live in love with each other.
• In response to their challenge, Jesus summoned the crowd and taught them about the purity God himself wants. In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus praised the “pure of heart,” saying, “They shall see God,” and reminded us, “Where your heart is, there will your treasure be.” Jesus had come into the world not to show us how to wash our hands but to give us a heart transplant, to take out our heart of stone and replace it with a heart of flesh, cleansing us so that we might receive within the love of God, treasure it with gratitude, and then love God and love others as God had loved us first.
• And so Jesus says to all those assembled, “Hear me, all of you, and understand. Nothing that enters one from outside can defile that person; but the things that come out from within are what defile.” He emphasized that nothing coming from the outside, either touching a jug or a ritually impure person, or even anything we eat, can make us impure in the sight of God. The purity that God cares about, he said, is what comes from the heart. The heart is the real core of the person, pointing to what we love and desire. It’s what’s in the heart — and the actions that flow from the heart — that renders a person pure or impure, holy or sinful, Jesus says. Jesus states that it is from the heart, from what we desire, that sins, like “evil thoughts, unchastity, theft, murder, adultery, greed, malice, deceit, licentiousness, envy, blasphemy, arrogance, folly,” all come. These evil desires, Jesus says, are what make someone impure, and we see several of them, especially malice, deceit, envy, arrogance, and murderous thoughts on evident display in the actions of the Pharisees.
• Jesus wants all of us to hear him and understand the truths he is describing. He wants this conversation with the Pharisees to be consequential in the way you and I understand our faith and live it. Especially with regard to him in the Holy Eucharist, do we honor him with our lips or with our hearts? Do we say to him and mean, as St. Peter said last week, “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life,” or do we pay greater attention to celebrities or presidential candidates or others vying for our attention. Do we say to Jesus in the Eucharist, like St. Thomas the Apostle, “My Lord and my God,” and treat him with awe and prioritize him, or do we relate to him as if he’s just bread and wine? Do we disregard God’s commandments in favor of human traditions, clinging to our own preferences of the ways we’d like to worship God, or do we do this, the Eucharist, in Jesus’ memory as he commanded? Do our hearts treasure his self-gift in the Eucharist or are our hearts set on worldly things? Do we really mean the words we pray at Mass, “Lord, I am not worthy to receive you but only say the word and my soul shall be healed?,” or do we give him lip service? Do we try to receive him with love and purity of heart or do we come to communion with hearts defiled by evil thoughts, unchastity, greed, malice, deceit, envy, arrogance, or even by licentiousness, theft, blasphemy, adultery and murder? Do we truly adore him or worship him in vain?
• There are important considerations because there are many today who do what Jesus warned the Pharisees about in today’s Gospel. They try to substitute human traditions for God’s commandments, like the pseudo-commandment to be nice over the Christian duty to call people to repent and believe. They substitute football stadiums for Churches on Sunday. They substitute politically correct ideas on human sexuality, gender, sex, marriage and family for what God has revealed. They supplant the commandment not to kill to permit the destruction of human life in the womb or in hospitals and nursing homes. They replace God’s command to love our neighbor as ourselves with justifications for treating migrants and refugees, or the poor and needy, or those of other races, or religions, with hardened hearts. Or to keep to things more particular to the Eucharistic Revival, they cling to liturgical preferences — about music, priests, homily length, or even parishes — more than they do to Jesus Christ in the Sacraments.
• Jesus in this Sunday’s Gospel is trying to call the Pharisees — and everyone else — to conversion. The point is not to become like the Pharisees in obsessing about how others are living, rather than examining our own hearts. It’s to make a commitment to ensure our souls are as clean as the Pharisees wanted their hands to be. It’s to honor the Lord with both our lips and our hearts. It’s to cling to his teaching in all its beauty and fullness. It’s to take great advantage of the Sacrament of Confession in which God power-washes our insides. It’s to ensure that we place our treasure in the things of God and seek the opposite of what Jesus condemns: to commit to chastity, generosity, self-sacrifice, faithful love, goodness, truthfulness, integrity, happiness over others’ gifts, praise of God and others, humility and wisdom. It’s to respond to Jesus who says, “Hear me all of you and understand,” with great attention, comprehension, and action.
• The great way to do this is at Mass, as the Eucharistic Revival has been striving to make clear. This is where we come to honor the Lord, to worship him, not in vain, but with our lips, hearts, mind, soul, strength and voices. It’s where we come to cling not to human traditions and desires but to God and his commandments. It’s where we recognize that while nothing that enters from the outside can defile a person, what enters into us in Holy Communion can sanctify a person, provided that we receive him as he deserves and desires. And it’s where Christian conspire not to put Jesus to death, but to enter into his passion, death and resurrection, and come out of Mass in allegiance to bring Jesus to the end of the earth. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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