Jesus – Page 2 – Tony Lusvardi, S.J.

“Eyes fixed on Jesus”: Homily for the 20th Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time (C).

The word “Jesuit” was first used to mock the early followers of St. Ignatius of Loyola. These first members of my religious order, the Society of Jesus, were derided for talking so much about Jesus and were given the name “Jesuit,” condescendingly, by those who apparently thought they had something better to talk about. Those first Jesuits took the criticism as a compliment, and the name stuck.

The letter to the Hebrews tells us to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus, and the Gospel’s hard words make the same point in dramatic fashion. We’ll return to the Gospel in a minute, but I want to start with the striking passage from Hebrews. The letter tells us to keep our eyes fixed on Jesus so that we can “persevere in running the race that lies before us.” Races, by definition, are challenging events. It is possible to lose a race by giving up, by going off course, by laziness, by getting tripped up on some obstacle. Hebrews tells us to “rid ourselves of every burden and sin that clings to us.” Sins are the sort of thing that will slow us down, trip us up, or send us running in the wrong direction. Running a race usually requires training, and Christianity is no different. We aren’t born Christians. Perhaps a century or two ago when our whole society was Christian, it was possible to imagine that we were, that being a Christian was the same thing as being a good citizen or an agreeable person, just going with the flow. That was always an illusion, and it is even more so today when the forces that shape our culture are often hostile or indifferent to Christianity.

Homily for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul

Throughout this month, I’ve been reposting the homilies I wrote for the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. You can check them all out on their site, as well as Friday’s Homily for the Sacred Heart. This feast seems especially joyful this year, coming so soon after the election of Pope Leo XIV.

Homily for the Solemnity of Saints Peter and Paul

Martyrdom of St. Peter (Doors of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome)

Martyrdom of St. Paul (Doors of the Basilica of St. Paul Outside the Walls, Rome)

Peter and Paul were great men. It is common in preaching to hear about Peter’s failures—his weaknesses and false steps, which the Gospels make no attempt to hide. And we first meet Paul, of course, when he is persecuting the Church. Peter and Paul were both flawed men, but nonetheless they are great men.

In fact, one of the things that makes them both great is that they acknowledge their flaws. Practically the first words out of Simon Peter’s mouth in the Gospel of Luke are, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Lk 5:8). In one of his letters, Paul claims to boast in his weakness (2 Cor 12:9).

Yet, in the Acts of the Apostles, Peter raises the dead to life. Paul becomes the most remarkable missionary in history. The faithful of Jerusalem bring their sick into the streets just so that Peter’s shadow will fall upon them. And in today’s Gospel we hear those remarkable words from the mouth of the Lord himself, “You are Peter, and upon this rock I will build my Church, and gates of the netherworld shall not prevail against it.” The greatness of both Peter and Paul comes from Jesus.

Melchizedek, Jesus, and perfect sacrifice: Homily for Corpus Christi

This month I’ve been asked to contribute Sunday homilies to the Homiletic and Pastoral Review. You can find the rest of the month’s homilies there as well. Here’s this week’s contribution:

Homily for the Most Holy Body and Blood of Christ (C)

I thought I’d begin today by saying a word about Melchizedek. I’d wager most of you don’t know much of anything about Melchizedek. It’s a safe wager because nobody knows much about Melchizedek. His biographical details are limited to what you just heard in the first reading. But Melchizedek turns out to be an important figure. In the first reading, in Genesis, he seems to come out of nowhere. It turns out, when we get to the Letter to the Hebrews in the New Testament, that this mysterious origin is what makes him interesting. The New Testament speaks of Melchizedek as a forerunner of Jesus, the great high priest who has neither beginning nor end. Melchizedek, the Letter to the Hebrews says, represents an eternal priesthood — the priesthood of Jesus Christ.

In fact, perhaps it’s surprising that Genesis would mention Melchizedek at all. Even more surprising is that it mentions the sacrifice that he offers — bread and wine. At the time, bread and wine were not particularly impressive sacrifices. In the ancient world, if you wanted to impress, you offered meat. Birds were OK, lamb was better, a bull best of all. Bread and wine were not the sort of sacrifice a king would brag about.

Christ made visible in his martyrs: Homily for the 7th Sunday of Easter

I’m pleased and honored that the Homiletic and Pastoral Review asked me to provide homilies for the Sundays of June this year. You can find the full text of all the month’s homilies here. (Regular readers might note that the homilies may not be as fleshed out as usual since they are meant to be adapted.) Be sure to visit the HPR site and check out the other articles, reviews, and fine catechetical materials they provide. Below, to give you a taste, is a homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (for those places where the Ascension is celebrated on its proper Thursday).

Homily for the Seventh Sunday of Easter (C).

Chapel of St. Stephen, Certosa di San Lorenzo, Padula, Italy

Nowhere is Jesus Christ more visible than in his martyrs. In the Gospel of John, Jesus, who makes the Father visible to the world, prays that his disciples may be in him and he in them. In today’s first reading, we see God become dramatically visible in the life of one of those disciples, the deacon Stephen.

First, however, Stephen gazes on God. He sees Jesus standing at the right hand of his Father in the heavens. This vision is made possible by the action of the Holy Spirit, already present in Stephen’s life. In the first part of the chapter from which today’s reading is taken, Stephen delivers a sermon which is both learned and fiery, retelling the story of Israel from a Christian point of view and leveling a hard judgement against the men of Jerusalem who crucified Jesus.

What to do when you don’t have a pope? Preach Jesus Christ

Homily for Wednesday of the Third Week of Easter.

Brothers and sisters, papam non habemus. We do not have a pope. Not yet.

We live in uncertain and, often, disturbing times. I’m not talking only about the sede vacante in the Church of Rome. The last few years–the last few decades, really–have been a difficult time for the Catholic Church. The Church sometimes seems confused and divided from within, and opposed by powerful forces from without. And today we also live with all the uncertainty of a papal election.

In this uncertain moment, today’s first reading reminds us of a simple but profound lesson: things have been worse. Much worse. Here we see the Church at its very beginning, tiny and persecuted. Stephen, one of the first deacons, has just been killed. The faithful are scattered. Those who persecute the Church are full of zeal, backed by the age’s political powers in all their strength. It seems like a catastrophic moment for the nascent Church, but it becomes a moment of triumph, a moment of growth. The dispersion of the faithful–even if caused by persecution–becomes the condition for the spread of the Word. Soon, we know, even the great persecutor, Saul, will convert and become the greatest missionary in the history of the Church.

Caravaggio, The Conversion of St. Paul, 1600-1

What I most want to emphasize today is the response of the disciples, who transformed this apparent catastrophe into a moment of growth: They continued to preach Jesus. Without panic, without discouragement. They returned and remained steadfast in the most fundamental mission of the Christian: to bear witness to the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ.

Today’s Gospel reading also calls us back to the heart of our Catholic faith: “I am the bread of life,” says Jesus. There is no action more important for the Catholic than to encounter the Lord in the Eucharist, in his true body and in his true blood.

Brothers and sisters, despite our anxieties and our doubts, despite the moments of uncertainty that alternate with moments of glory in the life of the Church, this message remains our rock. If we continue to proclaim it, we cannot go wrong. In a few days we will have a new pope, but our mission will not change. Times change. Popes change. Jesus Christ does not change.

Jesus Christ is the bread of life. Jesus Christ is Lord.

Readings: Acts 8:1b-8; John 6:35-40

(Original: Italian)

May 7, 2025

Gregorian University Chapel, Rome

Those interested can see my interview on the CBS Evening News with Maurice Dubois here.

Entering the tomb: a homily for Easter

This Homily for Easter Sunday comes from 2019 and was given just a few days after the fire at Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris — thus the reference to the rose window at the end. Seems appropriate this year when Notre Dame has been reopened…

Occasionally the most erudite theologians overlook the most obvious things. This morning’s gospel contains a curious detail that has provoked a great deal of discussion among theologians: why do Mary of Magdala and John, the other disciple, not enter the tomb? Mary sees the stone removed from the tomb and returns to the apostles. John, running and perhaps a bit younger than Peter, arrives at the tomb first, but remains outside. Why? Biblical exegetes have explained this event symbolically–maybe John represents prophecy and Peter represents the institutional Church–but in my opinion the reason is simpler.

It’s a tomb. They were afraid.

Sometimes the simplest explanations are also the most profound. We know that Jesus is risen–maybe this announcement has become too familiar and gets taken for granted–but at that moment Mary, John and Peter did not have that advantage. We must imagine their psychological state that morning. Two days ago, they had seen the humiliation and killing of their Lord, teacher and friend at the hands of evil men. We must imagine the darkness of those days, when violence, lies and selfishness defeated the truth.

The Anointing at Bethany and Holy Week’s unsettling beginning

Going through some old files, I came across this homily for the Monday of Holy Week, written, in my younger and more vulnerable years, when I was a novice in St. Paul, Minnesota.

St. Mary Magdalene penitent, Guercino 1622

During the Third Week of the Spiritual Exercises, St. Ignatius asks us to contemplate the suffering and death of Our Lord. This week, Holy Week, the Church, liturgically, asks us to do the same. The Third Week is one of the times in the Exercises when we ask for strange graces—shame, sorrow, confusion.

The Church’s liturgy also evokes these troubling graces, and it does so by, among other things, confronting us with today’s passage from John, the Anointing at Bethany. The shock this passage should provoke in us is perhaps diminished by its familiarity, but if we really deeply consider what is happening here, then we should be confused. We should be confused because part of us is tempted to side with Judas.

Three hundred days wages! Put in contemporary terms this must amount to something like $30,000, $40,000, $50,000—enough for college scholarships for one or several years, or private high school scholarships for several students; in some Third World countries that much money could build a school. And instead it is being spent on a jar of ointment. An expensive perfume. An ostentatious toiletry.

Seeing truly, judging clearly: homily for the eighth Sunday of Ordinary Time

Homily for the 8th Sunday of Ordinary Time (C)

St. Luke, 13th century, Old St. Peter’s, Rome

I have to admit that the opening of today’s first reading, “When a sieve is shaken, the husks appear; so do one’s faults when one speaks,” is not the most encouraging thing to read when one has to give a homily. Both the words of Sirach and Jesus’ sayings in the Gospel of Luke deal with what is inside a person and what becomes visible to others, what we see and what we don’t. The first reading is a warning about putting too much faith in outward appearances. Someone might have all the right credentials, but little wisdom; someone might repeat all the fashionable phrases, but say nothing of substance.

The test that Sirach proposes to separate the trustworthy from the slick shyster is tribulation. “As the test of what the potter molds is in the furnace, so in tribulation is the test of the just.” It is easy to follow Jesus when he tells us what we want to hear, less so when we might lose friends because of what he says. Fidelity doesn’t mean much when it comes without a cost. Imagine marriage vows modified to promise faithfulness “in good times but not bad, in health but not sickness, wherever I find my bliss.” It’s only when the going gets tough that faith, hope, and love show their worth.

Jesus adds another criterion for distinguishing the enduring truth from the well-dressed lie: you shall know the tree by its fruit. You may have heard people say, “It’s really what’s inside that counts.” Jesus pours a bit of cold water on such sentimentalism. If what’s inside produces thorns, then it can’t really be all that good. Again and again in different ways Jesus calls for the unity of what is inside with what is outside, opposing any division between interior and exterior religion—challenging us to confess his name with both our words and our deeds.

Jesus again and again challenges us to purity of heart, which means purity all the way through—in our thoughts and in our words, in what we do, and what we chose not to do. In the Beatitudes, Jesus promises that the pure in heart will see God. Sight, interestingly, is also at the center of today’s Gospel reading. The blind lead the blind into a pit, and we notice the splinter in our brother’s eye but not the beam in our own. But that image showing the absurdity of hypocrisy also comes with an instruction and a promise: “Remove the wooden beam… then you will see clearly.”

Screens & Sacraments: a response

Last week I was pleased to take part in a conference organized by at the Gregorian University’s Faculty of History and Culture and the Institute of Liturgy at the University of Santa Croce entitled L’edificio di culto e gli artisti: A 25 anni dal primo Giubileo degli Artisti (2000-2025). The theme was church architecture and art over the past 25 years. The conference brought together an impressive group of international architects, artists, and theologians.

My own rather modest contribution was to extend the reflection I began in November’s issue of First Things on “Screens and Sacraments.” The talk seemed to produce a good deal of agreement that we need to be more discerning in how we allow technology to intrude on our sacred spaces.

On a related note, I was also happy to read a quite generous response to my article from Kevin Martin of Raleigh, North Carolina in the January 2025 issue of First Things. He reports being “strong-armed against [his] better judgement into Zooming the liturgy during the first year of the pandemic,” but eventually abandoning the practice because it felt wrong for many of the reasons I discussed in my article. He wonders, however, if I do not concede too much by suggesting that it might be OK to continue to broadcast the Liturgy of the Word, while stopping at the Liturgy of the Eucharist.

It’s a thoughtful question. I’d begin by saying that I am by no means arguing that one must broadcast any form of worship, and I have no quarrel with the decision of Rev. Martin’s church to give up streaming altogether. At the same time, I’m not an absolutist when it comes to technology, and some of the goods that people claim from broadcast Masses are real. Sick parishioners in particular can be helped to pray by seeing images of the liturgy online and comforted by the sight of their home church and familiar faces. These might supplement pastoral outreach to the homebound, without replacing it. I’m a little more skeptical about the evangelical or formative value of e-liturgy, since I think its appeal is mainly to those who have already been sufficiently formed by real liturgy.

The uniqueness of Christian Baptism: homily for the Baptism of the Lord

Homily for the Baptism of the Lord (C)

Baptism of the Lord from “Praznicar,” Romanian, 19th century

Today’s readings use some artful cinematography. Today we celebrate the Baptism of the Lord. Our readings give us scenes before baptism and immediately after baptism, but they cut away so that we don’t see the baptisms. This montage of before and after shots nonetheless serves to highlight the uniqueness of Christian baptism. Luke cuts from John the Baptist’s preaching to Jesus praying after his baptism. The Holy Spirit descends like a dove and a voice from heaven speaks to the Lord. The scene is obviously meant to show approval for Jesus’ baptism at the hands of John.

The scene chosen today from Acts of the Apostles is also meant to put the stamp of divine approval on baptism. To understand Peter’s words in the house of Cornelius, we need to remember the whole context of the chapter in which they occur, Acts 10. The scene unfolds in the earliest days of the Church when there was still doubt about who could belong to the Church: was the message of Jesus directed only to Jews or were all people called to Christianity? In Acts 10, the centurion Cornelius—a Roman, not a Jew—receives a vision that prompts him to call Peter to his house. At the same time, Peter receives a vision in which he’s told to eat all of the animals that Jewish dietary laws consider forbidden. The vision was not a marketing ploy for the pork and shellfish industry, but instead it ensured that Peter didn’t hesitate to go to a Gentile’s house when Cornelius’s servants came to find him. At Cornelius’s house Peter preached the message that we hear today. The word was sent to the Israelites, he says, but it was intended, as Isaiah prophesied in the first reading, “to bring forth justice to the nations,” in other words, to extend beyond Israel itself.

What we unfortunately don’t read today is what happens next. As if anyone missed the first several hints, the Holy Spirit descends on the people in Cornelius’s house, who begin to speak in tongues, and Peter says, “Can anyone forbid water for baptizing these people?” (Acts 10:47). God’s will is that baptism should be conferred on Gentiles as well as Jews and that all nations should enter the Church, even Roman centurions.

Now if you were a medieval theologian, who spent your days raising difficulties about sacramental theology, the story of Cornelius’s baptism might provoke another question: if the Holy Spirit had already descended on everyone in Cornelius’s household, why did they even need to be baptized? Isn’t getting the Holy Spirit the whole point of baptism? And once you’ve got the Holy Spirit, doesn’t the ceremony become redundant? If you remember from Matthew’s account of the baptism of Jesus, John the Baptist himself poses a similar question about the baptism of Jesus. “I need to be baptized by you,” he says. “Why do you come to me?” (Matt 3:4).