Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 24, 2022

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Sixth Sunday of Ordinary Time, C, Vigil
September 24, 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 he gives us one of his most moving and powerful parables of a poor man dying at a rich man’s gate and the rich man’s subsequent torment in hell. None of us can remain unmoved when we hear the story of Lazarus, covered with sores, being licked and consoled by dogs, longing to eat just the crumbs from the rich man’s table. No one can remain unstirred by the desperation of the rich man after he dies, tormented by thirst and worried about his brothers. What moves us all the more is not simply the state each of them is in, but the fact that each was avoidable.
• In the Parable, the rich man goes to Hell not because he was rich, not because he had earned his money in an immoral way, not because he had been asked by Lazarus for help and refused, not because he had sent dogs to lick Lazarus’ wounds or had done anything at all evil to him. He went to Hell because when there was a poor man at his gate he simply did nothing. He was condemned not because of anything he had done, but precisely because of what he hadn’t done: he was so caught up in himself that he didn’t make any effort at all to help out a man who was struggling and dying in his midst. He simply ignored him.
• In St. Matthew’s Gospel (Mt 25:31-46), Jesus made clear that when he judges us, he will separate us into two groups on the basis of how we have treated the poor and needy among us. To those on his right who will be saved, he will say, “Come, you who are blessed by my Father, inherit the kingdom prepared for you since the beginning of the world, for I was hungry, thirsty, a stranger, naked, ill or imprisoned and you cared for me.” But to those on his left, he will declare with great sadness, “Depart from me, you accursed, into the eternal fire prepared for the devil and his angels, because I was hungry and you gave me no food, thirsty and you gave me no drink, naked and you gave me no clothes, a stranger and you gave me no welcome, ill and in prison and you didn’t care for me.” The condemned will poignantly ask, “Lord when did we see you hungry, thirsty, naked, ill, a stranger or a prisoner and not minister to your needs?” Jesus will then reply, “As often as you failed to do this to the least of my brothers and sisters, you failed to do it to me.” The rich man went to Hell because in neglecting the dying poor man at his doorstep, he was neglecting God himself. In failing to love his neighbor, he was failing to love God and in fact failing to love himself properly, too.
• So many Catholics are accustomed to thinking about how God wants us to change simply in terms of the bad behavior we know he wants us to excise from our life. We think about sin just in terms of commissions, the bad thoughts we have, the malicious or mendacious words we say, the wayward deeds we commit. But, as we note at the beginning of each Mass, these are not all the sins we commit. We confess to Almighty God and to each other that we have sinned not just in our thoughts, words, and deeds, but “what I have failed to do.” Few of us spend much time, however, examining ourselves on these failures. We omit the omissions, the acts of love we should have done but didn’t do. The lesson Jesus teaches us in the Gospel is that it’s not enough for us not to do evil, but we also have to do good, to sacrifice ourselves for those who are needy, to look past ourselves, identify their needs, and do what God makes possible to remedy them.
• We’re now living in an internet age in which we see can see all the tragedies happening throughout the country and the world all at once. We see news report of floods in Pakistan, a hurricane in Puerto Rico, another massacre against Christians in Nigeria or Madagascar, Uyghers imprisoned in detention camps in China, Ukrainian refugees in Poland, South Sudanese refugees in Uganda, Venezuelan refugees being moved as political pawns from one part of the United States to the next, and we’re tempted to flip the channel and wash our hands. We know that 829 million people in the world, one in nine, are chronically malnourished and 155 million children will go to bed tonight hungry, but we say there’s little we can do. We recognize that, even after Dobbs, each year more than 600 thousand babies, made in God’s image and likeness, will have their lives ended through abortion in our country, but we turn a deaf ear to their silent screams. The magnitude of the need can sometimes make us just turn inward, mind our own business, and divest ourselves of responsibility.
• Pope Francis has called this the “globalization of indifference” and he’s trying to wake the world up to the way we can live like the rich man in this Sunday’s Gospel. When he went to the small Italian island called Lampedusa where over 20,000 people died over the previous quarter-century on a perilous 16-hour journey on a rough stretch of the Mediterranean packed as sardines mostly on pirate smuggling vessels, he poignantly asked, “Who is responsible for the blood of these brothers and sisters of ours?” And he answered, “Nobody! That is our answer. … Today no one in our world feels responsible… for our brothers and sisters. We have fallen into the hypocrisy of the priest and the levite whom Jesus described in the parable of the Good Samaritan: we see our brother half dead on the side of the road, and perhaps we say to ourselves: ‘poor soul!,’ and then go on our way. … The culture of comfort, which makes us think only of ourselves, makes us insensitive to the cries of other people. …  We have become used to the suffering of others: it doesn’t affect me; it doesn’t concern me; [we say] it’s none of my business!” Where does this indifference come from? How can so many in the world, including so many Christians, get to the point where we chronically fail to be Good Samaritans, where our hearts are no longer touched by the misfortune of others, where we fail even to weep over others’ misfortune when we notice it? It happens when we begin to prioritize our own desires over others’ needs. Our hearts become stony, corrupted, anaesthetized and deadened by the consumerist love of money and material things. Like the rich man in the Gospel who dresses like a king and acts like a god, we can stuff ourselves with so much food and pleasure that we longer empathize, so blinded by our ego that we fail even to notice the Lazaruses whom God places at our doorstep not only to help them but convert and change us.
• The solution to this complacency is not just to do “something” for the poor but to remember God, and in God to rediscover who we really are and who others are. In this Sunday’s Gospel, the Lord wants us to overcome our apathy toward others, our indifference, our neglect, our lack of responsibility and love. He is never indifferent to us, he never forgets us, and left heaven to come down to save each one of us lost sheep because each of us is infinitely valuable to him. He wants to help us to learn how to love others in this same way. But we’ve got to be willing to respond to his help to learn to put others’ needs ahead of our own, to sacrifice for them, to take responsibility.
• At the very end of this Sunday’s Gospel, the rich man asks Abraham to send Lazarus to his five brothers to warn them that they need to be charitable, to overcome their indifference to the plight of those in need, lest they join him in the place of flames. Abraham, representing God, replies that his brothers have Moses and the Prophets, all of whom have testified to the fact that the Lord expects us to care for the sick, hungry, naked, oppressed, imprisoned, the blind, the strangers, the widowed and all those in need. The rich man says that that won’t be enough, because they, just like he used to, were ignoring the poor and ignoring Moses and the Prophets, too. They were, in short, ignoring God. “But if someone from the dead goes to them,” the rich man says, “then they will repent.” Abraham replies, however, that if they are deaf to the Law and the Prophets, if they are deaf to God, then they will be unmoved even by the appeals of someone risen from the dead. Well, this Sunday, we receive what the five brothers in the Parable did not. Not only do we have Moses and the Prophets to speak to us about charity, but Jesus, risen from the dead, will come to proclaim to us this Parable live. At Mass, we encounter him not under the appearance of a poor man but under the even humbler appearances of bread and wine. As he gives us his Body and Blood, tells us, “Do this in memory of me,” which means not just to celebrate Mass but to go and do what he does, giving our body, our blood, our sweat, our tears, our food, our material resources to others. Let us act on his words. God who calls us to be remember him and to love others as Good Samaritans will give us all the help he knows we need to do so, but we need to respond to that grace. Embracing that divine assistance, let us put in the effort to notice those in need, to love them, to cross the street and to take responsibility for them. This is the path that, when it comes time for our judgment, will enable Jesus to wave each of us to his right for having cared for him in the person of others. This is the way that we may take our seat with all those eating not just scraps from the Master’s table but sharing in the sumptuous eternal wedding banquet for which the Mass is a foretaste. God bless you!

The Gospel on which the homily was based was: 

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