Twenty-Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, October 1, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Seventh Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
October 1, 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, when the apostles approach Jesus to ask him for something. They did not ask the Lord for money. They didn’t ask for fame. They didn’t ask, like Solomon, for worldly wisdom and prudence. They didn’t ask for health or a long life. They asked for something they had discovered was far more important than all of these things combined. They begged him, “Increase our faith!”
• Their petition for increased faith reveals their humble recognition that up until then — even though they were followers of Jesus, even though they were listening to his words, even though they had become in fact his friends — they were not living enough by faith and that they needed the Lord’s help to grow. This Sunday we’re urged to make the same prayer to the Lord.
• To ask for an increase in faith means to ask for three things, since faith means these three things.
• It means, first, to grow in an obedient trust in God. We see this type of trust in Abraham, our father in faith, and in Mary, our mother in faith. When God asked seventy-five year-old Abraham to leave everything he had behind and journey to a far-away land, Abraham trusted in God and did so (Gen 12:1 ff). He trusted in God when God promised that he and Sarah in their old age would finally conceive a son (Gen 15:5; Gen 18:1 ff). He trusted in God even when God had him wait almost 25 years — even after he was 75 — to fulfill that promise. He trusted in God when, 13 years later, God seemed to be asking him to sacrifice that son, Isaac, even though Isaac was the son God promised through whom he would make Abraham the father of many nations (Gen 22:1ff). Abraham trusted in the Lord so much that he would do anything God asked. Similarly, Mary trusted in God’s words through Gabriel that she would conceive a child without the help of a man and that child would be the Son of God (Gen 1:35). She trusted in God when Simeon prophesied that her Son the Messiah would be a “sign of contradiction” rather than a triumphant king and that her own soul would be pierced (Lk 2:34-35). She trusted when she saw her Son carry the wood of his sacrifice up the same mountain that Isaac ascended and no angel held back the hands of the Roman soldiers as they nailed him to the Cross. She trusted when she held her Son’s limp, bloodied body in her arms. She trusted that God would bring great good, in fact our salvation, out of all of this evil. Likewise for us to ask God to “increase our faith!” is to ask Him to increase our trust in Him, so that we might confidently obey him in everything, but especially in the most difficult times and circumstances. On Wednesday this week we will celebrate the feast of St. Faustina Kowalska, the Polish cloistered nun through whom Jesus revealed to us devotion to his Divine Mercy. Jesus had her paint an image of his blessing us with his mercy at the bottom of which he instructed her to write, “Jesus, I trust in you.” The first way we’re called to grow in faith is through trusting in God, trusting in his ways, trusting in how all things — even suffering, or death, or crucifixion — work out for the good for those who love him. When we pray, “Lord increase our faith,” God responds to infusing within us this gift, but he also puts us in tests and circumstances — like he did with Abraham and Mary — in which we are able to grow that moral muscle. Whenever we entrust ourselves to God in such circumstances, we grow in faith.
• The second meaning of faith is the content of what we believeon the basis of our trust in God who reveals those truths. This meaning refers to the various truths of the faith, found in the Creed we profess each Sunday, in the Catechism of the Catholic Church, and embedded throughout the Church’s prayer. To appeal to the Lord “to increase our faith!” means to ask him to give us a greater knowledge and understanding of the truths of faith he reveals. The Lord wants to augment our assimilation of the doctrine of the faith, to help us cooperate with the Holy Spirit as he seeks to “guide us to all truth” (Jn 16:12-13). But in general God won’t do so without our effort. To pray for increased faith implies a willingness to make the effort, in response to God’s help, to get to know our faith better, by praying Sacred Scripture, by studying the Catechism, by reading what the Popes and Bishops write to us, by attending adult education classes, by taking advantage of the incredible materials available now in books, podcasts, videos, online, from programs like Word on Fire, or Formed, Dynamic Catholic, or Ascension Press, or so many solid Catholic publishing houses. To ask God to increase our faith without a willingness to put more effort into learning and understanding the content of the faith would be like a seventh grader’s asking God to help him get a 100 on a test without wanting to study. It is only in such a process of growing in faith through working with the light of the Holy Spirit to understand it better that the Lord makes us ever more persons of faith.
• The third meaning of faith is lived faith, what St. Paul calls “faith working through love” (Gal 5:6). St. James reminds us that “faith without works is dead,” and if we have true faith, it will impact — and impact in a big way — how we think, how we speak, how we behave. A few years ago, Pope Francis made Archbishop Sigitas Tamkevicius of Lithuania a cardinal. He had spent over a decade in a Soviet labor camp because he was a Catholic priest who courageously defended human rights. He survived those years through prayer and Mass, secretly absconding bread and grapes from the kitchen to make the elements needed for Mass. He was asked by a reporter about the brutal suffering he endured, and he didn’t want to get into his scars. He wanted to focus on something he considered more important. Cardinal Tamkevicius responded matter-of-factly, “If a believer isn’t ready to suffer for his faith, then he’s not much of a believer.” This is the faith of the martyrs. This is the faith of the saints. To be a believer is to commit to live what we believe. We believe in the word of God and therefore we treasure it and read it. We believe in the Sacrament of Baptism and bring our children at the earliest instant. We believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist and so come to Mass, because we recognize that there can be nothing greater than being in the presence of God and receiving him within. We believe in the need for the forgiveness of sins and so we humbly come to confession to receive the mercy Jesus sent out the apostles on Easter Sunday to bestow in his name. We believe in the commandments, the beatitudes, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy. We believe in the original differentiation between man and woman as part of the image of God, in simple right and wrong. As we mark Respect Life Sunday, we believe in the dignity of every human life and whatever we do to the unborn and their moms, whatever we do to the least of our brothers and sisters, we do to Jesus. We seek in short, with God’s help, to live by the faith and the morals that flow from the faith. To ask God to increase our faith is to desire, with God’s help, to grow in steadfast practiceof the faith.
• This Sunday, as we echo the apostles’ prayer for increased faith, God wants to help us grow in trust of him, in knowledge and understanding about the truths of our faith, and in our putting our faith into action. Jesus says that if we have faith the size of a mustard seed, we can transplant forests into seas. To give us that increase in faith, he gives us himself on the inside in the Holy Eucharist. At the end of this Sunday’s Gospel, he says that the faithful servant is one who does all that has been commanded, and who, after plowing or tending the sheep, enters the house, puts on an apron and continues to serve. Well, as we prepare to do what Jesus commanded, to “do this in memory of” him, we remember that Jesus, at the Last Supper, girded himself with an apron and washed the feet of the apostles, and promised elsewhere that if he finds his servants vigilant and faithful, he will gird himself, have them recline at table and proceed to wait on them (Lk 12:37). That is what happens at the Holy Eucharist. Even though we come to serve him, he serves us. The Lord wants to grant us the increase in faith we need and to prove it, he gives us himself. As we prepare to give ourselves to God, he gives us himself. Sometimes people have more faith in the power of two Advil to relieve a headache than they do in the power of receiving Jesus in the Eucharist to make us holy. But if we receive him with the faith he wants to give us, he can, through Holy Communion, increase our faith so that it might be like that of the saints and martyrs. From the inside Jesus can and wants to help us live for our faith, love our faith, give witness to our faith, and, if God wills it, courageously suffer for our faith and die for Him who suffered and died out of love for us. This is our faith. This is the faith of the Church. How proud we are to profess it in Christ Jesus our Lord!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

Podcast: Play in new window | Download