Fr. Roger J. Landry

Conversations with Consequences Podcast

Homily for the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, B, Vigil

August 3, 2024

 

To listen to an audio recording of this short Sunday homily, please click below: 

https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/8.3.24_Landry_ConCon_1.mp3

 

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, as we enter into the second of five weeks of meditation on the sixth chapter of St. John’s Gospel, in which Jesus speaks to us prophetically about the reality of his presence in the Holy Eucharist and how we should respond to it.

* Jesus’ words to us during these weeks are especially relevant considering we are in the heart of the National Eucharistic Revival, having just completed the National Eucharistic Congress and the National Eucharistic Pilgrimage that led to it. The Revival is meant to help us revivify our relationship with the Eucharistic Jesus and equip us as apostles to help others enter into a similar, life-changing relationship with him. Jesus’ words are also relevant because of the outrageous opening ceremonies that took place a week ago at the Summer Olympics in Paris, when organizers somehow thought it was appropriate at the beginning of this athletic competition gratuitously to mock the Last Supper of Jesus as if it were a bacchanal orgy. The most important Catholic response to such an offense is not to cry and complain, but to pray, do reparation and take even more seriously what the desecrators want to impugn. Jesus this Sunday and over the course of the rest of the month will speak to us directly of what he wants us to prioritize.

* At the beginning of this Sunday’s Gospel, we see that those who received Jesus’ free meal in the miraculous multiplication of the loaves and fish, on which we focused last Sunday, were looking for another free meal. Jesus called them out on it, because he wanted to help them grow in faith. “Amen, I tell you, you are looking for me, not because you saw signs” — in other words, because you saw me perform a miracle and it’s led you to put faith in me and in my words — “but because you ate your fill of the loaves.” They came because of their material hunger and saw Jesus as a means to address their material hungers and needs. This is not evil in itself. Jesus would teach us to pray, “Give us today our daily bread.” Many come to the Lord not just with wants but real material needs, not knowing how to pay the rent, or put food on the table, purchase medications, or find a job to help support loved ones. God wants to hear these prayers. As a loving Father, he wants us to bring our needs to him. It wasn’t this that Jesus was criticizing. Jesus was criticizing the fact that they had stopped there, that they were concerned most about their material needs.

* Jesus tells them, and tells us, “Do not work for the food that perishes, but for the food that endures for eternal life, which the Son of Man will give you.” So many people, good people, spend most of their adult lives working to put food on the table, to nourish themselves and their families. We all know how important that is, but Jesus is saying that as hard as we work to fulfill that duty of love, we must work much harder for the food that he will give us, the food of eternal life. What is that food that God puts on the table? What is that nourishment of eternal life? If most people spend forty hours a week or more, sometimes working two or three jobs for perishables, what is the imperishable nutrition for which Jesus tells us we should labor even more strenuousl...

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