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
To listen to an audio recording of today’s homily, please click below:
https://traffic.libsyn.com/secure/catholicpreaching/10.29.25_Homily_1.mp3
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.
