Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini, New York
Feast of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini
Jubilee of the Poor and World Day of the Poor
November 16, 2025
Is 58:6-11, Ps 34:1-7, Rom 12:9-16, Jn 6:24-35
 
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* Today we have the joy, at this Shrine of St. Frances Xavier Cabrini housing her sacred relics under the altar, to be able to celebrate her feast day on the closest Sunday, to thank God for her vocation, life and missionary work, and to invoke her powerful intercession. We do so on the 33rd Sunday of Ordinary Time in the Church’s liturgical year, on which, since 2017, has marked the World Day of the Poor. This now annual observance is augmented today by the Jubilee of the Poor within the year-long Jubilee of Hope. In his Message to help the Church prepare for this observance, Pope Leo explicitly connected the World Day of the Poor to the Jubilee of Hope and focused specifically on the loving care for the poor that is meant to flow from our Christian hope. The points he makes we can easily see illustrated in the life of the great missionary of hope, St. Frances Xavier Cabrini.
* “Hope, sustained by God’s love poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit, turns human hearts into fertile soil where charity for the life of the world can blossom,” the Holy Father wrote, clearly describing the good and rich that led to so much fruit in the life of our saint. Pope Leo emphasized, “The Church’s tradition has constantly insisted on the circular relationship between the three theological virtues of faith, hope and charity. Hope is born of faith, which nourishes and sustains it on the foundation of charity, the mother of all virtues. … Charity is not just a promise; it is a present reality to be embraced with joy and responsibility. Charity engages us and guides our decisions towards the common good.” He said that each of us, like St. Frances Cabrini and the Missionary Sisters of the Sacred Heart she founded, “is called to offer new signs of hope that will bear witness to Christian charity, just as many saints have done over the centuries.” In his recent encylical Dilexi Te, on love for the poor, he specifically mentioned St. Francis Cabrini whom he said distinguished herself, among other things, by her love for and pastoral care of migrants. The first American pope wrote, “Saint Frances Cabrini, born in Italy and a naturalized American, was the first citizen of the United States of America to be canonized. To fulfill her mission of assisting migrants, she crossed the Atlantic several times. Armed with remarkable boldness, she started schools, hospitals and orphanages from nothing for the masses of the poor who ventured into the new world in search of work. Not knowing the language and lacking the wherewithal to find a respectable place in American society, they were often victims of the unscrupulous. Her motherly heart, which allowed her no rest, reached out to them everywhere: in hovels, prisons and mines.” He noted that’s why, 75 years ago during the Jubilee of 1950, Pope Pius XII proclaimed her “Patroness of All Migrants.” That’s why the US Bishops, under her patronage, have urged all Americans to to make “The Cabrini Pledge” and become “Keepers of Hope” for others. St. Frances Cabrini founded hospitals, schools, orphanages, universities and so many other institutions to reach out to the most vulnerable and marginalized. Those institutions of hope, what in St. Frances Cabrini’s life was dubbed an “empire of hope,” all flows from the conviction, Pope Leo underlined, that “the poor are not a distraction for the Church,

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Convent of the Missionaries of Charity, Bronx, NY
Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, Year C
World Day of the Poor
November 16, 2025
Mal 3:19-20, Ps 98, 2 Thes 3:7-12, Lk 21:5-19
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* During the month of November, the Church leads us in a meditation on the Last Things. This is helpful for Catholics in every stage and state of life, because we can often be tempted to defer pondering death, judgment, heaven and hell out of a lack of urgency, assuming that we have many years and even decades before the humanly inevitable. Today, however, the prophet Malachi describes that the day of the Lord will come suddenly, blazing like an oven scorching proud evil doers but rising like a sun of justice with healing rays on those who fear God’s name. In the Gospel, that long awaited Sun of Justice, Jesus himself, gives far more details about the end times. In apocalyptic language that we shouldn’t downplay, he describes how the temple of God will be attacked, how there will be imposters claiming to be speaking for God and asking us to follow them, how there will be wars, insurrections, earthquakes, famines, plagues, persecutions, hatred, betrayals by family members and friends, and how even some of us will be put to death. It’s a harrowing account demonstrating, essentially, that the foundations on which we’re often tempted to place our stability and security — from physical health, to food and drink, property, family, governments, religious edifices and practices — will be shaken and collapse. The only thing left will be the only true and secure foundation, the one on which we should be constructing our life now, God himself.
* The immediate reaction of Jesus’ listeners was to ask, “Master, when will this happen?,” presumably so that they could be prepared. Jesus didn’t answer their question directly, because he wanted them to act on the information right away. If he had given a date weeks, decades, centuries or millennia later, the temptation would have been just to go on with life as normal. But Jesus had come to establish a totally new normal: a norm of faith, of vigilant waiting, of full-time Christian behavior. He wanted the day of the Lord to be a perpetual state, so that each day would be the Lord’s day, a day in which we could exclaim, like we do every Easter, “This is the day the Lord has made!” And the signs of the day of the Lord Jesus gave us help us to maintain this awareness, because they are in fact events we see in the newspaper almost every day: destruction, natural disasters, wars, famines, illness, betrayals, attacks on the Church, and the persecution and killing of Christians.
* Instead, Jesus gave them and us three ways to respond to what he was saying.
* The first was, “See that you not be deceived!” and described that many would come, supposedly in his name, trying to exploit the situation. “Do not follow them!,” Jesus tells us emphatically. In every age there are legions of false prophets and Jesus tells us to be on guard against them. They deceive us about God, ourselves, and what God expects of us. They proclaim a false Gospel, indeed a false religion and ideology, and want us to believe their lies and fall in line. So many of the “isms” of modern life broadcast through the media, taught in the classroom, propagated by governments in political campaigns and internationally are part of this false prophecy. Are we alert not to be deceived? Do we know the Gospel well enough to spot even the most subtle of them?
* The second thing Jesus told us was that our sufferings “will lead to [our] giving testimony,

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Leonine Forum Monthly Mass
IESE Business School Chapel, New York
Thursday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Faithful Departed
November 6, 2025
Rom 14:7-12, Ps 27, Lk 15:1-10
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily:

* Today St. Paul summarizes one of the essential aspects of Christian identity and life: We are God’s, not as property he owns, but as beloved sons and daughters he loves. Jesus, through his life, death and resurrection did everything so that we might become children of God. Our behavior is meant to flow from this identity. Therefore, St. Paul says, “None of us lives for oneself, and no one dies for oneself. For if we live, we live for the Lord, and if we die, we die for the Lord; so then, whether we live or die, we are the Lord’s.” In this month of November, the Church helps us to ponder how to live according to our identity. We begin the month on All Saints Day, those who truly lived for the Lord and the martyrs who similarly died for him. On All Souls Day, we not only pray for the Faithful Departed — as we do tonight for the deceased members of the Leonine Forum, John Aroutiounian and Begho Ukueberuwa — but also consider death, so that we can learn how to die for the Lord. Throughout the month, we seek to grow in the capacity to live intentionally and to die intentionally, consecrating ourselves to God in life (which is how, from our perspective, we belong to God) and commending ourselves to him in death, echoing Jesus’ last words on the Cross.
* This sense of belonging to God as beloved sons and daughters is very strong in today’s Gospel, which is perhaps the most moving chapter in all of Sacred Scripture, when Jesus gives us the Parables of the Lost Sheep, Lost Coin and Lost Sons, all of which stress how God’s love for us is greater than our sins, how he rejoices when he is able to restore us to our identity. When we wander away from him like the lost sheep, he never ceases to come after us to try to restore us. When are spousal significance of our life seemed ruptured — that’s what the lost coin is, because a Jewish woman would have ten silver drachmas on a head piece; losing one of them would be like a woman’s losing a wedding ring today, a symbol of one’s sense of loving belonging to a spouse — God rejoices abundantly when we rediscover it. And in the parable of the Lost Sons (which the Church doesn’t have us ponder this week, because it comes up powerfully every Lent and twice in the Sunday lectionary), we see how even when the Prodigal Son treats the father as dead and the older son treats him almost as as a slave owner, the father never stops loving them both as sons, waiting for the first son’s return and encouraging the older son’s coming into the familial celebration. The main point of this chapter is how dear we are to God, how much we belong to him from his perspective, and how he wants us to grow in our identity, in our subjectively belonging to him who has objectively and lovingly made us members of his family.
* That brings us back to today’s first reading and how our understanding of this double-belonging is supposed to influence the way we look at others. After St. Paul stresses that whether we live or die we are the Lord’s because he is the Lord of the dead and the living, he asks, somewhat surprisingly, “Why then do you judge your brother or sister? Or you, why do you look down on your brother or sister?” The “then” is like a “therefore.” If we belong to the Lord of life and death, then, he implies, that we should not be looking negatively or judgmentally at our brothers and sisters,

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 6, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.6.25_Missionary_Preaching_1.mp3

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 5, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.5.25_Eucharistic_Meditation_on_Daring_to_Do_All_You_Can_1.mp3

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Wednesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Votive Mass for the Evangelization of Peoples
November 5, 2025
Rom 13:8-10, Ps 112, Lk 14:25-33
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* In yesterday’s Gospel, Jesus gave us a parable about the Church’s mission — to invite everyone to a great dinner, a joyous banquet — and likewise taught us how not to respond to that invitation. We saw that people excused themselves to care for their fields, oxen, and newly married wife, none of whom recognized the importance of the calling they were receiving.
* In today’s Gospel, Jesus doubled down on the point he was making in order that we grasp clearly the greatness of the call and the need to make decisive choices to put God in his proper place and order all other aspects of our life to him. This is stuff that every missionary to be effective must first grasp and live.
* Jesus does so in a dramatic way. St. Luke tells us that “great crowds” were traveling with him. He had fixed his face on Jerusalem (Lk 9:51) and was on a long way of the Cross; the multitudes, like the apostles, thought and hoped that they were on a triumphal procession for Jesus to be recognized as Messiah, to unite the people and to drive out the Romans. Jesus turned around to the crowds and didn’t say, “How nice of you to come!” Rather, out of love he challenged them — really challenged them out of love — to know what they were signing up so that they would be prepared to follow him all the way. He wanted them to count the cost of discipleship and be willing to pay it, knowing that to obtain the pearl of great price, to enter the banquet of the kingdom, wouldn’t come on the cheap. He tells us that to follow him as his disciple to salvation, we have to do three things:

* First, we need to “hate” father and mother, spouse and children, brothers and  sisters. The Hebrew word for “hate” doesn’t mean “detest,” but rather “put in second place” or “knock down a peg.” Jesus, after all, calls us to honor our father and mother, not despise them. But we have to make sure that they don’t become gods in our life, that if there is ever a choice between what God is asking of us and what our family members are asking of us, that we say “God’s will be done” instead of “My loved one’s will be done.” And we need to remember that if we do “hate” them in this way, we actually will love them more because we will love them in God.
* Second, Jesus says one needs to hate “even his own life,” “carry his own cross” and “follow” Him. We need to account Jesus’ life more valuable than our own, in imitation of him who deemed our life more valuable than His. This is the faith that led the martyrs to heaven. If we love our comforts, our life in this world more than we love God, then we won’t be completing the work of salvation because Jesus clearly taught us that to save our life we must lose it and that unless we fall to the ground and die like a grain of wheat we won’t bear the fruit of salvation.
* Third, Jesus says one must “renounce all his possessions.” We must renounce the stuff that possesses us and then as good stewards use everything we have and are for God and his service, giving of ourselves together with our things for God and others, because if we cling to possessions we will not be able to fit through the eye of the needle to salvation.


* In buttressing the conditions of the completion of the work of our salvation, Jesus employs two analogies that point to the cost of disciplesh...

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 5, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.5.25_Forming_Missionary_Disciples_in_Communion_1.mp3

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 5, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.5.25_Missionary_Prayer_to_the_Harvest_Master_1.mp3
 

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 4, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.4.25_Missionaries_Helping_To_Remember_Jesus_1.mp3

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
Tuesday of the 31st Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
Memorial of St. Charles Borromeo
November 4, 2025
Rom 12:5-16, Ps 131, Lk 14:15-24
 
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The following outline guided the homily: 

* Beautiful Gospel for Priests Seeking to Have the Mind and the Heart of Missionaries, the Mind and Heart of Christ.
* Parable about the Kingdom of Heaven in which we see his zeal.

* Invitation sent out to a banquet, to a “great dinner” to which he invited many.
* “Come, everything is now ready.” Don’t hesitate.
* “One by one, they all began to excuse themselves.”

* Work — ‘I have purchased a field and must go to examine it” or ‘I have purchased five yoke of oxen and am on my way to evaluate them; I ask you, consider me excused.’
* Other loves — ‘I have just married a woman, and therefore I cannot come.’


* Zeal for everyone

* ‘Go out quickly into the streets and alleys of the town and bring in here the poor and the crippled, the blind and the lame.’
* “There’s still room.”
* “‘Go out to the highways and hedgerows and make people come in that my home may be filled.”




* Our task is to invite people to that great dinner. This clearly has a Eucharistic significance on earth but it also has heavenly significance. Blessed are those who will dine in the kingdom.
* First, to respond fully to the invitation. To show up properly dressed in our baptismal garment that the royal tailor has given us. Then to help others show up. First, those who should be there. Catholics. But then the neglected. Then everyone.
* For this, we need a few qualities mentioned.

* We need unity — We, though many, are one Body in Christ and individually parts of one another
* We need to use our gifts and all of them — “Let us exercise them.” Prophecy, ministering, teaching, exhortation, generosity, diligent supervision, cheerful mercy.
* We need love above all — Everything in this third section of the Letter to the Romans beginning today can be summed up, I think, by his expression in the middle of today’s passage, “Let love be sincere.” He’s calling us exactly to what Jesus Christ called us to do in the Gospel, to love: to grow in the image and likeness of God, who is love; to love God with all our mind, heart, soul and strength, and our love our neighbor as ourselves; to love as he loves us. St. Paul helpful adds the adjective “sincere.” Sincerity means that it has to be both truthful and from the heart, cut off from all duplicity. We can examine the entire passage from the perspective of sincere love and look at the way we live. St. Paul gives us a Litany of what made him the greatest missionary of all time. For us to have the mind and heart of missionaries, we must have these qualities.

* Hate what is evil — If we love God and love others, we hate all evil and sin that alienates, divides, and ultimately kills those bonds of love.
* Hold onto what is good — When we love God, we are grateful for what he has given and treasure it, and similarly when we love others, we focus fundamentally on how good they are.
* Love one another with mutual affection — Our love can’t be cold. It must be full of affection, full of warmth, full of emotion. We should behave in such a way that others would think we’re the president of their fan club, that we don’t just love them but like them, and admire them and rejoice in them.

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 4, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.4.25_Missionary_Conversion_1.mp3

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 4, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.4.25_Having_the_Heart_and_the_Mind_of_Missionaries_Overview_1.mp3

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Annual Retreat for the Priests of the Diocese of Charleston
Sand Dunes Resort, Myrtle Beach, South Carolina
November 3, 2025
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/11.3.25_The_Eucharistic_Mission_of_the_Priest_1.mp3

Fr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Paul Center, Steubenville, Ohio
Deacon Conference on “Scripture, the Soul of Sacred Theology: The Gospel of Matthew”
All Saints Day 2025
November 1, 2025
Rev 7:2-4.9-14, Ps 24, 1 Jn 3:1-3, Mt 5:1-12
 
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The following text guided the homily: 

* Today on this great solemnity, we first celebrate the saints. We celebrate the great and famous saints we know about, like the holy deacons Saints Stephen, Philip, Lawrence, Ephrem, Francis of Assisi, Vincent of Zaragoza, Romanos, Alcuin, and Francis di Paola. We celebrate also the countless quiet saints, the “saints next door,” among whom we pray are numbered our deceased loved ones and those who passed on to us the gift of the faith, who died in the love of the Lord and now live in His love. The saints are the multitude who have “washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb,” as we heard in today’s first reading, and brought those white baptismal garments “unstained into the everlasting life of heaven,” like they were instructed to do on the day of their baptism. These are the “great multitude that no one could count, from every nation,” who have not just been called “children of God” through baptism, as St. John told us in today’s second reading, but have lived as children of God throughout their lives, seeking to love God with all their mind, heart, soul and strength and to love their neighbor as Christ loved them. They are the ones who, as we prayed in the Psalm, have longed to see God’s face, who, by God’s mercy, had sinless hands, pure hearts, and desires not for vain things but for the things of God. These are the ones who have ascended “the mountain of the Lord,” the eternal Jerusalem, and who “stand in his holy place.” These are the ones who are singing today in that holy place the beautiful endless song glimpsed in the passage from Revelation, “Salvation belongs to our God who is seated on the throne, and to the Lamb!”
* But All Saints Day is not just about celebrating those who have lived truly successful lives, who have received and responded to the love of God and made the eternal Hall of Fame. It’s also meant, in having us focus on them, to spur us to imitate them so that one day November 1 will in the future be our day, too. As the traditional American Gospel hymn intones, “O Lord, I want to be in that number when the saints go marching in.” St. John Paul II reminded us as we began the third Christian millennium that everything the Church does is meant to help us become holy, to help us respond to what the Second Vatican Council called the “universal call to holiness.” St. John Paul II wrote, “Since Baptism is a true entry into the holiness of God through incorporation into Christ and the indwelling of his Spirit, it would be a contradiction to settle for a life of mediocrity, marked by a minimalist ethic and a shallow religiosity. To ask catechumens: ‘Do you wish to receive Baptism?’ means at the same time to ask them: ‘Do you wish to become holy?’ It means to set before them the radical nature of the Sermon on the Mount: ‘Be perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect’ (Mt5:48).” He continued, “This ideal of perfection must not be misunderstood as if it involved some kind of extraordinary existence, possible only for a few ‘uncommon heroes’ of holiness. … The time has come to re-propose wholeheartedly to everyone this high standard of ordinary Christian living: the whole life of the Christian community … must lead in this direction.” On All Saints Day each year the Church indeed reproposes wholeheartedly this high standard of the Christian life, that God calls us not to mediocrity, or minimalism,

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Saint Paul Center, Steubenville, Ohio
Deacon Conference on “Scripture, the Soul of Sacred Theology: The Gospel of Matthew”
Mass for Ministers of the Church
Friday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
October 31, 2025
Rom 9:1-5, Ps 147, Lk 14:1-6

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The following text guided the homily: 

* At the beginning of our time together as we dedicate ourselves to Scripture as the Soul of Sacred Theology, we begin the first five verses of St. Paul’s three chapters in his Letter to the Romans on the relationship between Christians and the Jews. This is the second part of his Letter to the Romans, which we have been meditatively pondering for almost three weeks. In the first 8 chapters, we’ve meditated on what it means to be justified before God and how the Holy Spirit seeks to bring that about. Chapters 9-11 are about God’s plan for the justification of the Jewish people, particularly those who — unlike Mary, Mary Magdalene, the disciples and apostles — had not recognized Jesus as their long-awaited Messiah. Unfortunately, the Church only gives us two liturgical days every two years to pray about these important chapters, because tomorrow is All Saints Day with its proper readings, we have only one day over two years. This year it’s particularly important we do so, however, because on Tuesday, we marked the 60th anniversary of the Second Vatican Council’s Decree on the relation of the Church to non-Christian religions and especially to our Jewish elder brothers and sisters, themes that St. Paul grappled with in these chapters.
* St. Paul begins by stating how difficult the subject was for him. He was a Jew by ethnicity and formerly a proud Pharisee by profession. He loved Judaism and his fellow Jews and was so grateful for all the ways God has blessed him and his people through the Covenants. That’s why he begins the whole discussion saying: “I speak the truth in Christ, I do not lie; my conscience joins with the Holy Spirit in bearing me witness that I have great sorrow and constant anguish in my heart. For I could wish that I myself were accursed and cut off from Christ for the sake of my own people, my kindred according to the flesh.” Great sorrow and constant anguish in his heart. A sorrow and anguish so penetrating that he would have basically done anything for them to have come to faith in the long-awaited Messiah, including being cut off from Christ the Vine so that they could be part of him. He loved them with the heart of Christ. He pondered all that God had given them: descendancy from Jacob, adoption as God’s children, his holy shekinah or glory, the covenants (with Noah, Abraham, Moses, David), the law, the worship at the Temple written out by him in Leviticus, the promises, the patriarchs and the genealogy of the Messiah. But his heart was filled with anguish because despite all that preparation, they had not embraced the fulfillment of their Jewish faith in Jesus, in whom their is filiation, glory, the new and eternal covenant, the Legislator, true worship and the down payment on all God’s promises and all the hopes God had given the Jews. This anguish is what led him to become all things to all people, including to his fellow Jews, so that each might come to Christ. Later in these three chapters he will describe God’s plans for the salvation of the Jews, and it’s fundamentally, through seeing God’s goodness working among the Gentiles, they might come to embrace it and be saved. But Paul, and God, wishes all of us have a similar anguish of heart for the salvation of others, the anguish that beat in Paul’s heart and in Christ’s Sacred Heart.

Msgr. Roger J. Landry
Chapel of The Pontifical Mission Societies, St. Petersburg, Florida
Wednesday of the 30th Week in Ordinary Time, Year I
October 29, 2025
Rom 8:26-30, Ps 13, Lk 13:22-30
 
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The following points were attempted in the homily:

* “Lord, will only a few be saved?,” someone from the crowd asked Jesus today. He didn’t reply by satisfying the person’s curiosity, because he didn’t come from heaven to earth to answering the interrogatives of inquiring minds. He had come from heaven to earth to save us, and so he responded not by saying how many are saved by how any is saved. “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” The word translated as “strive” is the Greek word to “agonize.” To be saved, to enter the Kingdom, to get to Heaven, in other words, we need to agonize, like Jesus did in the Garden of Gethsemane, to conform our will to the Father’s. We need to work harder than an undrafted free agent gives everything he’s got in an NFL training camp to make the cut. The width of the narrow door to Heaven is the span of a needle’s eye, the girth of the cross, something that is anything but easy to pass through.
* Over the last several decades, people have gotten the notion that the Christian life is easy. Most people think, rather, that everyone gets to Heaven — except perhaps those who don’t like us, serial killers, public smokers and those people we don’t like. Such an attitude is a diabolical ambush. Jesus never taught that the Christian life is a cakewalk. He who is the Gate of the sheepfold tells us that we need to agonize to enter into him. Jesus said these words as he was on the road to Jerusalem, and we know what happened when he got to Jerusalem. He entered into his agony, the agony that led to our salvation and opened up the narrow door. But we need to be willing to follow him along that path of sacrificial love.
* Jesus says in the Gospel today that many will seek to enter through the narrow door but not make it. They will be left outside the door, pleading, “We ate and drank in Your presence and You taught in our streets,” and, as Jesus added in a similar passage in the Sermon on the Mount, exclaiming, ‘Did we not prophesy in Your name, and cast out demons in Your name, and do many miracles in Your name.” Jesus says that God will then reply, “I never knew you” (Lk 13:25-27; Mt 7:21-23). Jesus is emphasizing that it’s not enough to have heard Him speak. It’s not sufficient to have eaten and drunk with Him, even the Holy Eucharist. It’s not adequate to proclaim the Gospel in His name, do exorcisms or even work miracles. After all, Judas Iscariot did all of these things, but he never really knew Who Jesus was. We need to enter into intimate friendship and communion with Him. We need to follow Him not just on the outside, but on the inside. We need to become His true friend. We need to agonize to let go of everything in our life that’s not ordered to God, that’s not compatible with the life of faith. We need to squeeze humbly into Jesus and live in full-time loving friendship with him.
* If this were simply a thing of willpower, we would have reason to despair. But it’s not. St. Paul tells us that God responds to our weakness. He sends the Holy Spirit to teach us “how to pray as we ought.” The Holy Spirit helps us to pray not by putting words on our lips but by changing who we are as we pray, so that we might pray conscious that we are beloved sons and daughters of God crying out “Abba, Father.” He transforms us so that we can live as we pray and confidently follow Jesus along the narrow path, so that we will be confident that all our agony, all are sufferings will be worth it.