Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (A), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 30, 2023

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, A, Vigil
September 30, 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.
• For the third straight week, Jesus teaches us by means of a parable. This Sunday it’s generally called the Parable of the Two Sons. Like last week, he employs the image of working in a vineyard, because from the time of Isaiah, the Holy Land was always referred to as a luxuriant vineyard entrusted by God. Last week Jesus spoke to us about his calling all hands on deck, going out at 6 and 9 am, noon, 3 and 5 pm, to call laborers into his vineyard, because he wants us all working to take in the great harvest of souls. This time he focuses on two brothers called by their father to work in his vineyard. The first son initially refuses when his dad tells him, “Son, go out and work in the vineyard today.” Afterward, however, he changes his mind and goes to work. Later, Jesus implies that this is the proper way to understand those prostitutes and tax collectors and other types of sinners, who even though for lengthy periods of time they had said “no!” to the sixth, seventh and other commandments, eventually converted and were now living and working in the Lord’s vineyard, building up and entering into his kingdom. The second son responds to his father’s command saying respectfully, “I will go sir,” but never acts on that promise. Jesus says that this son represents precisely those whom he was addressing, the scribes and the Pharisees, who so many times very publicly prayed in the temple chanting their loud “amens!” to God, but who were not following through on their covenantal commitments. The Pharisees, scribes and elders, who with their lips were outwardly saying yes to the Father’s will but with their actions were saying no, ended up showing where this hypocrisy can lead: they ended up framing Jesus and having him tortured, crucified and killed.
• It’s obvious that the Lord wants all of us today to reflect not only on what we say to God, but especially on how we follow through on the commitments we make to him. We’re listening to this program called Conversations with Consequences, dedicated to helping us live better in accordance with our Catholic faith, because, I presume, we are all basically people who have said “yes” to God many times over the course of our lives. On the day of our baptism, either we or our parents and godparents on our behalf, spoke up and made our baptismal promises. At our Confirmation, we renewed those commitments to reject Satan, his evil works and empty promises, and to believe in God the Father, Son and Holy Spirit, the holy Catholic Church, the communion of saints, the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body and life everlasting; we also made the commitment at our Confirmation to go to work in the Lord’s vineyard, with tongues of fire, to proclaim the Lord’s Gospel with ardent passion. The Lord wants us to ask ourselves today whether we’ve been following through on those commitments and been getting down to work in his vineyard. If we have not been following through, if we’ve been saying “no” to the Lord with our bodies despite the “yes-es” of our lips, then he wants to help us to learn from the example of the first son. It’s not fundamentally words that matter, but deeds of conversion and faith. For many of us sons and daughters of God, our “yes” in faith has become routine. We say it so naturally and readily that we have ceased to understand the meaning of what we’re saying and to act on that commitment. Every week we say “Amen!” to the words, “The Body of Christ,” but do we really structure our lives in a way consistent with this affirmation? We say, “Thanks be to God!” when the Word of God is proclaimed at Mass, but do we show that gratitude for this incredible gift by making time each day meditate on what God is saying to us and apply it to our lives? We affirm, “I believe in one God, Father, Son and Holy Spirit” but do we still believe when God asks us to do something challenging, like hard work in his vineyard, or does our faith weaken when God asks of us something we don’t want to do? We confess our faith in the “one, holy, Catholic and apostolic Church,” but do we look at the Church as just one other organization to which we belong or rather as the Bride and Body of Christ that he set up for our salvation and for the salvation of our family members, friends, enemies and the whole world?
• It’s clear that God is seeking to move us today to let our hearts be touched by faith, to get beyond words, to make our life an “Amen!” and a “thy will be done!” To learn how to do this we need to grasp that there’s a third son whose example is set before us today in this Gospel scene, someone who both says “yes” and then does what he is asked. It’s the Son who told us the parable: Jesus himself. As we read in the letter to the Hebrews, upon entering into the world, Jesus said to his Father, “Here I am, Lord, I have come to do your will” (Heb 10:7-9). Jesus never had to change his mind, as the first son did in the parable, because in his mind he was always seeking what the Father wanted. The more we think with the mind of Christ, and live according to that mentality with the help of God’s grace, the more we will please the Father. In response to Jesus’ question in the Gospel, “Which … did the will of his father?,” we’re called to respond that Jesus did the will of the Father! And today Jesus calls us to follow him in doing the Father’s will with him. He calls us to say “yes” to the Father in unison with him and to act on that “yes.”
• As we prepare for the month of October, dedicated to Mary under the title of Our Lady of the Holy Rosary, we can similarly focus on how she, like the blessed Fruit of her womb, always sought to say “fiat” to God and let her whole life develop in fidelity to God’s will. Throughout October, we’re invited by the Church to grow spiritually through praying the Holy Rosary, pondering both Jesus’ and Mary’s perpetual yeses to God in the joyful, luminous, sorrowful and glorious moments of their lives. It helps us to echo Jesus’ and Mary’s fidelity in putting God’s word and will into practice. As St. John Paul II powerfully commented in his 2002 exhortation on the Rosary, “How could one possibly contemplate the mystery of the Child of Bethlehem, in the joyful mysteries, without experiencing the desire to welcome, defend and promote life, and to shoulder the burdens of suffering children all over the world? How could one possibly follow in the footsteps of Christ the Revealer, in the mysteries of light, without resolving to bear witness to his ‘Beatitudes’ in daily life? How could one contemplate Christ carrying the Cross and Christ Crucified, without feeling the need to act as a ‘Simon of Cyrene’ for our brothers and sisters weighed down by grief or crushed by despair? Finally, how could one possibly gaze upon the glory of the Risen Christ or of Mary Queen of Heaven, without yearning to make this world more beautiful, more just, more closely conformed to God’s plan? … Far from offering an escape from the problems of the world, the Rosary obliges us to see them with responsible and generous eyes, and obtains for us the strength to face them with the certainty of God’s help and the firm intention of bearing witness in every situation to love,” to the truth, and ultimately to God. In helping us to focus on Mary and Jesus, the Rosary strengthens us to imitate them in our faithful yes to God. It’s a school of the new and eternal covenant. So I’d urge you this month to begin to pray the Rosary if you don’t pray it every day, and, if you do, to pray it with greater devotion focused on obtaining what the mysteries contain. And this month of October we should all have a special intention as we pray it: for the Synod on Synodality taking place in the Vatican, so that through it, under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, the whole Church will say yes to God and follow through on our commitments to him, rather than be tempted by the spirit of the world just to pretend as if we’re saying yes to God while wanting to do our own thing.
• The other great means to help us to live the lesson of this Sunday’s parable is the Holy Eucharist, which we ponder, of course, in the fifth Luminous mystery. The Eucharist, which we are so mind-blowingly privileged to receive, helps us to conform our whole life to God’s will. Jesus had prayed in Gethsemane that the Father would take the chalice from him, but then added three times, “But not my will, but thine be done!” (Lk 22:42). That chalice was the cup of his suffering, filled with his own blood. When Jesus told us during the Last Supper to “do this in memory of me,” he was not merely telling us to convene as we do today to celebrate this greatest event of all. Jesus was telling us to make our lives truly Eucharistic and, following Jesus’ example, become obedient even to our own death, saying to God and to others, “This is my body, this is my blood, this is everything I am and have, this is my will, given for you.” May this third Son, this faithful Son whom we will receive at Mass, help us not merely to say, “Amen!,” but to follow through on the mission he out of love has entrusted to each of us and all of us, so that, not merely by our lips but by our lives, we might help each other to become living commentaries of the words “Thy will be done!,” as we respond to God’s words, “Son, Daughter, go and work in the vineyard today.” God bless you.

The Gospel reading on which the homily was based was: 

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