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
To listen to an audio recording of tonight’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.31.25_Homily_1.mp3
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.
