Msgr. Roger J. Landry

Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY

Twenty-Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C

September 28, 2025

Amos 6:1,4-7, Ps 146, 1 Tim 6:11-16, Lk 16:19-31

To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below: 

The following text guided the homily: 

• Today Jesus gives us all a parable that begins with a rich man who was adorned in royal purple clothes and exquisite priestly linen who dined sumptuously each day. In the first reading, the prophet Amos describes people in Jerusalem who slept on beds of ivory — just think about what that cost! — eating lambs and calves, having jam sessions on harps, drinking wine not from glasses but from bowls, and anointing themselves with the best oils, the ancient version of the best skin care products, perfumes and colognes. These figures are those whom many in our culture are trained to aspire to emulate, to be rich and carefree, woofing down lamb, veal, filets and caviar, guzzling down precious aged wine and liqueurs, having private concerts of the finest musicians, dressing to the nines like royalty and sleeping on beds made out of the trunks of elephants. Today we’d add garages full of fancy automobiles, private jets, stables of horses, marble floors, and perhaps golden toilet seats. It all sounds pretty good to materialist ears.


• But in a huge wake up call, God through Amos proclaims “woe” to those who live this way and the Lord Jesus in the parable describes how the rich man ended up going to hell, across an unpassable chasm from eternal happiness, in torment because of flames and tortured over the fate of family members living the same vain lifestyle. Through today’s readings, especially by the Gospel parable, God communicates to us quite clearly that he wants us to live differently. He does not want any of us to remain unmoved when we hear the story of Lazarus, covered with sores, being licked and consoled by the compassion of stray dogs, longing to eat just the rich man’s leftovers. He does not want any of us to remain unstirred, either, by the desperation of the rich man after he dies. What Jesus wants us to realize is not simply the state each of them is in, but the fact that each predicament was totally preventable.


• 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 pester Lazarus 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 infinite 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.” Jesus identifies with the poor man. In the Alleluia verse, we sang St. Paul’s words to the Corinthian Christians about how Christ, “though he was rich, became poor for our sakes, so that by his poverty we might become rich” (2 Cor 8:9). Christ became poor so that in caring for him in the disguise of the poor, we might become rich in what matters. The rich man in today’s Gospel 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. This point was made once by the brilliant late Archbishop of Chicago, Cardinal Francis George, who once told a group of wealthy donors, “The poor need you to stay out of poverty, but you need the poor to stay out of hell.” Or as Archbishop Charles Chaput, the retired Archbishop of Philadelphia, has often said: “Either we care for the poor or go to Hell.” Jesus’ message is clear.


• This is a message many of us need to hear. Many of us 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, like the bad thoughts we have, the mendacious or malicious 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 in “what I have failed to do … by my own most grievous fault.” 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, like the rich man, 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.


• This is a challenge today because we’re now living at a time in which — on account of technological advances in television, cameras, the internet and social media — we can see, unlike ever before, all the tragedies happening across the country and globe almost all at once. We see news report of natural disasters like floods, earthquakes, hurricanes, typhoons and cyclones, tornados, wildfires, as well as of manmade atrocities like massacres, bombings, assassinations, and the carnage of war; rather than being stimulated to compassionate action, many of us become desensitized, tempted to turn the page, flip the channel and wash our hands. We know that 733 million people in the world, one in eleven, are chronically malnourished and 148 million children go to bed each night starving, but many say there’s little they can do. As we walk the streets of Manhattan and the Bronx, we pass so many homeless begging for food and money that it’s tempting to pretend we don’t see them or to try to walk on the other side of the road. Even after the Dobbs decision, we recognize that each year more than 1.1 million babies, made in God’s image and likeness, have their lives ended through abortion in our country alone, but most turn a deaf ear to their silent screams. Pope Leo spoke about this blindness and deafness to the needs of others in his homily this morning at St. Peter’s Square on the Jubilee of Catechists. He said, “The story that Christ tells us is, unfortunately, very relevant today. At the doorstep of today’s opulence stands the misery of entire peoples, ravaged by war and exploitation. Through the centuries, nothing seems to have changed: how many Lazaruses die before the greed that forgets justice, before profits that trample on charity, and before riches that are blind to the pain of the poor!  …  The Church tirelessly proclaims this word of the Lord, so that it may convert our hearts.” We can multiply the examples of indifference and neglect, but the sheer magnitude of the needy and their needs can sometimes lead us just to turn away and turn inward, mind our own business, and divest ourselves of responsibility.


• Where does this indifference come from? How can so many in the world, including so many of us 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 no longer even weep over others’ misfortune when we notice it? Pope Francis used to blame “the culture of comfort,” flowing from consumerism, which can make us addicted to our own desires over others’ needs. Love of money and material things gradually makes our hearts stony, corrupted, anaesthetized and deadened. Like the rich man in the Gospel, we can stuff ourselves with so much food and pleasure that we longer empathize. We can be so blinded by ego that we fail even to notice the Lazaruses whom God places at our doorstep, not just so that we might help them but so that through them he might convert and change us.


• Many of us are in need of that conversion. The good news is that the Lord’s grace is powerful and can in fact change us. That gives us, in this Jubilee, great hope. One of the greatest examples showing the possibility of a profound personal moral revolution is St. Vincent de Paul, whose feast the Church celebrated yesterday. He is one of the greatest saints in the history of the Church, but he didn’t start that way. He began as a selfish e