Cycle A
21st Sunday in Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on August 26, 1990
Readings: Isaiah 22:15, 19-23; Romans 11:33-36; Matthew 16:13-20
Fr. Healy tells us that he always wanted to be parish priest, despite signing up for the Holy Ghost Fathers who are dedicated to missionary work. He recounts that he had doubts about his ability to remain a priest within the institutional Church. He lets us know that priests and other religious people are often put up on pedestals thereby making it difficult for many religious to deal with their humanity. In these stories, he challenges us to reflect on the role of Peter in today’s Gospel. It is the same Peter who Jesus said, “You are a rock and upon this rock I build my Church” that also denied him three times. He suggests that the religious should come down from the pedestals and be with the people to create the Church.
20th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on August 19, 1990
Readings: Isaiah 56:1, 6-7; Romans 11:13-15, 29-32; Matthew 15:21-28
In this week’s Gospel, a Canaanite woman addresses Jesus and asks for His help. Through her persistence, despite being a non-Jew, Jesus recognizes her faith and heals her daughter. But first, Jesus, in his humanity, rebuffed the woman and, in fact, asked his disciples to get rid of her. In this homily, Fr. Healy invites us to reflect on the humanity of Jesus reflected in today’s Gospel from Matthew. In the first reading, Isaiah tells the Jews, and us today, that salvation is for all peoples. All people are God’s people. We are asked to examine our own lives to see how we’ve practiced exclusion, but then rise to the challenge of overcoming our sins, in the spirit of Jesus’s example.
19th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on August 8, 1993
Readings: Kings: 19:9, 11-13; Romans 9:1-5; Matthew 14:22-33
In today’s readings, we are challenged to see God in our midst. In the Gospel, Jesus appears and approaches his disciples while walking on the water. Peter, in his human frailty, begins to sink when he is invited to walk on the water with Jesus. But Jesus, in a wonderful showing of his humanity, simply reaches out and catches Peter. From our scripture readings today, we know that there are precious few people that see God in all of His splendor. For the remainder of us, God is present in the faces and actions of our sisters and brothers. In this homily, we are reminded of the floods in the Mississippi and the tornadoes in Petersburg, VA not because of the natural disasters themselves, but because of the tremendous response from others who offered their help.
18th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on August 5, 1990
Readings: Isaiah 55: 1-3; Romans 8:35, 37-39; Matthew 14:13-21
This week’s Gospel is the famous story of five loaves of bread and a couple of fish. In this account, his disciples suggest that Jesus disperse the crowd of 5,000 because they couldn’t feed them. But Jesus objects and says, “There is no need for them to disperse. Give them something to eat themselves.” All were fed and many of us, over the years, have marveled at the miracle. But in today’s homily, Fr. Healy asks us to consider the possibility that Jesus was showing us that if we share what we have with our brothers and sisters, there will be plenty for all.
16th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on July 22, 1990
Readings: Wisdom 12:13, 16-19; Romans 8:26-27; Matthew 13:24-43 or 13:24-30
We must resist the temptation to solve complex problems with quick and dramatic solutions. We, as God’s children, must learn to live in the midst of perceived evils because uprooting the bad is always at the risk of destroying what God alone knows to be good. Therefore, we must accept what we perceive as evil because we might be wrong. We must nurture, encourage, and courageously sacrificing and allow God to sort things out later. What we must do then is to call ourselves and others to do good. Through careful, loving cultivation of each individual, can we deal appropriately with the presence of evil? Jesus spoke in parables for us to come to a deeper, fuller understanding of the truth. We must trust in God.
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on July 15, 1990
Readings: Isaiah 55: 10-11; Romans 8: 18-23; Matthew 13: 1-23
In today’s Gospel, Jesus reminds us that those that are really listening, will truly hear God and see God’s hands at work in our lives. From Isaiah, God is likened to a gentle rain. And yet, we also know that God also speaks to us as thunder and lightning. In fact, God is always speaking, but are we always listening? In trying to discern the events of our day, we must know is that God is Love. As Paul spoke to the Romans in today’s second reading, we too are reminded “Creation was made subject to futility, not of its own accord but by him who once subjected it; yet not without hope, because the world itself will be freed from its slavery to corruption and share in the glorious freedom of the children of God.”
15th Sunday of Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on July 11, 1993
Readings: Isaiah 55: 10-11; Romans 8: 18-23; Matthew 13: 1-23
What should we feel in the face of tragedies, such as diseases or natural disasters, in light of the first reading where Isaiah eloquently says that God’s words and actions come down to enrich our lives? Jesus asks us in this day’s Gospel to let God’s words live within us to be the best people that we can be, bringing triumph out of tragedy by being one with our sisters and brothers in their need. We can never understand or control nature, but we can be in harmony with it through our unique giftedness.
13th Sunday in Ordinary Time
Originally delivered on July 1, 1990
Readings: Kings 4:8-11, 14-16; Romans 6:3-4, 8-11; Matthew 1-:37-42
Prophets will always be like us, frail sinners. today’s first and third readings, we hear about welcoming prophets. Indeed, in Matthew’s Gospel, we hear that “he who welcomes a holy man because he is known as holy receives a holy man’s reward. And I promise you that whoever gives a cup of cold water to one of these lowly ones because he is a disciple will not want for his reward.” But what about when God sends a prophet that challenges us? Will we welcome that prophet in our midst? We are always in a struggle to understand what God is telling us through these prophets. But, finally, we must remember that we are each, in all of our human weakness, called to be prophets.
Weekly Homilies 