Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time (B), Conversations with Consequences Podcast, September 7, 2024

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Conversations with Consequences Podcast
Homily for the Twenty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil
September 7, 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 we will get a glimpse of the awe of those who witnessed Jesus’ miracles and works live. Jesus, by this point in Saint Mark’s Gospel, had already made people’s hearts burn with his preaching. They had seen him cast out demons, cure many who were sick, feed a multitude with few pieces of bread and fish, walk on water and even raise a young boy and a young girl from the dead. On the force of this reputation, several true friends brought a man who was deaf and mute to Jesus, begging Jesus to lay hands on him. They were not to be let down. The Lord put his finger into the man’s ears, touched his tongue with spit, looked up to heaven, sighed, and cried out in Aramaic, “Be opened!,” and the man’s capacity to hear and speak were healed. Amazement seized them all. Even though Jesus told them not to say anything about the miracle, they couldn’t restrain themselves. They were astounded beyond measure and cried out, “He has done all things well!”
• “He has done all things well!” This line of joyful amazement in front of Jesus should be the Christian motto. “Jesus has done all things well!” In his preaching, in his miracles, especially in his salvific passion, death and resurrection, each of us should cry out with the residents of the Decapolis that the Lord has indeed hit a homerun on every swing. Everything He does flows from His infinite wisdom. He really does know what is best for his people in terms of our eternal salvation and carries it out. And his work hasn’t stopped. He continues to listen to us in prayer. He continues to grant miracles directly and through the intercession of saints. He continues to nourish us in the sacraments. He continues to do so much good and do it amazingly well.
• There would be many people at Jesus’ time who would disagree that Jesus was doing all things well. Many of the Scribes and Pharisees thought Jesus was a blasphemer and would turn out to be a colossal failure, a criminal executed shamelessly on the electric chair of his day, a so-called king who died crowned not with gold but with thorns. Little did they know what would happen on Easter Sunday! Many of the zealots who were looking to evict the Romans or who had political ideas of who the Messiah would be likewise thought he was a failure. Little could any of these groups fathom what the small band of fishermen, tax-collectors and other relative nobodies would do in Jesus name throughout the globe. Today, too, many in our culture challenge whether the Lord in fact does everything well. They criticize his teachings and the Church he founded as “behind the times,” not “with it,” and a modern irrelevancy. They, too, will be in for a surprise one day! But as our society is becoming less Christian, more of these false ideas have been invading the minds of believers, too, and this is a much greater concern.
• If Jesus were to ask us whether we think he did all things well, how we would respond? In general, I think all of us disciples would want to respond that, yes, we do believe that He is the Lord and therefore wisely knows what he’s doing and does everything well; after all, if Jesus made mistakes, he could not be divine. But it’s when we turn to specific issues that we see whether we, like the residents of the Decapolis, truly praise him for doing some things well or all things well. We can consider a handful of test questions Jesus might ask us and our contemporaries to determine if we really trust him as God to do everything perfectly for us and our salvation. “Do you believe that I did all things well in reiterating for you the Ten Commandments, or do you think I should have made some of them optional? Do you believe that I did well in establishing the sacrament of my body and blood as the source of our personal loving communion and stating that unless you eat my flesh and drink my blood you have no life in you? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing the Sacrament of Confession on Easter Sunday night and do you come to me in the way I established so that I may forgive your sins? Do you believe that I did well in setting a high standard for discipleship, in calling you to imitate me in living the beatitudes, love others as I have loved you, to be merciful to others just as I have been merciful to you seventy-times seven times and more; to humble yourself to wash others’ feet; to deny yourself, pick up your cross every day and follow me along the path to Calvary? Do you believe that I knew what I was doing when I ordained only men to be my apostles and priests? Do you believe that I did well in making marriage the indissoluble union of one man and one woman, in calling you back to God’s plan for marriage in the beginning? Do you believe that I did all things well in establishing a heaven and a hell, or do you think I would have been more loving if everyone were to get to heaven no matter what he or she does in life?
• Questions like these are important ones for us to ask, because sometimes we can begin to allow the devil to sow seeds of doubt as to whether Jesus knows what he’s doing. To believe in Christ means to trust his words and actions, to believe in what he said and what he did. This isn’t always easy to do and Jesus never promised that it would be. We can recall from the Gospel a couple of weeks ago how hard it was for the Twelve to believe in Jesus’ words that they needed to gnaw on his flesh and drink his blood, a full year before Jesus made sense of these words by taking bread and wine at the Last Supper, changing them into his body and blood and giving them to his apostles to eat. When Jesus asked if they wanted to abandon him as a result this teaching, St. Peter, with real faith, said, not that he understood everything, but “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life. We have come to believe and know that you are the Holy One of God.” In other words, Peter said, “Jesus, you have done everything well until now and we trust that in this, too, you’re doing perfectly and precisely what we need.” Jesus calls us to trust in him in the same way.
• One area in which we need to trust Jesus is in the responsibility he has given us for the spread of the Gospel. As he ascended into heaven, he gave us the great commission to go and proclaim the Gospel to every creature, baptizing them in the name of the Trinity, teaching them to carry out everything he has taught us, and knowing that he’s with us always until the end of time. He trusted us enough that he put the salvation of others in our hands. Yet, 20 centuries later, only 2.5 of 8 people on the planet are Christian, and only half of those Catholic. So many people don’t yet even know Christ and his saving power. St. Therese of the Child Jesus, when once asked why so many centuries after Christ there were still so many who hadn’t heard of him, replied with great simplicity, that it was because of the laziness of Christians. While Jesus did all things well, many of us have not yet done well in responding to Jesus’ summons and cooperating with the Holy Spirit in spreading the faith. Jesus calls us to follow him in striving to do our mission well. That’s something now I’ve been tasked by the Church to help catalyze. On Thursday, the Vatican’s Dicastery for Evangelization appointed me the National Director of the Pontifical Mission Societies in the U.S., which means, as of January, I’ll have the responsibility of strengthening Catholics in our country in our missionary identity, in our prayers for those in the missions and in our concrete support. Just as Jesus went into the Decapolis to spread the faith among non-Jews, so we’re called to bring Jesus — his teachings and his very presence — to the ends of the earth, so that they, too, may find in him their Good Shepherd, their Savior, their Lord, who through his passion, death and resurrection, did all things well to make possible for them eternal life and love. So I’d like humbly to ask your prayers as I take up this new assignment for the Church as well as to ask you to join me in praying that all Catholics in the U.S. will be renewed in apostolic zeal so that we may assist the One who does all things well reach those with need him just as much as we do.
• On the day of our baptism, Jesus, through a bishop, priest or deacon, worked in your life and mine a miracle similar to what he did in the Gospel. He didn’t use spit, but through his sacred minister, he put a dry finger in our ears and then touched on tongue, as the minister said, “May the Lord Jesus who made the deaf to hear and the mute to speak grant that you may soon receive his word with your ears and profess the faith with your lips to the praise and glory of God the Father.” He opened up our ears in faith to hear his word and our mouths to speak to him and about him. He worked this miracle so that we might listen to him, treasure his word, and be transformed by it, so that through that transformation we might transform the world. That’s the way the Church’s mission works in every age. We have ears and mouths opened so that we might hear God and then speak to him and speak of him.
• As we prepare for Sunday Mass, we ask the Lord to renew in us the graces of our baptism, to hear, obey and treasure the saving word he proclaims to us in the consequential conversation of the Gospel, and to pass it on with great courage and holy pride as a lifeline to the whole world. Jesus has done all things well, and he wants to continue doing things well through us. And his greatest ongoing work is what we do at the altar in his memory. As we prepare to encounter him at Mass, may we imitate those in the Decapolis in not being able to restrain ourselves from speaking about all the good he does so beautifully well! God bless you!

The Gospel passage on which the homily was based was: 

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