Friends, the Gospel of Mark is a fascinating literary work. St. Mark seems to write in a breathless, staccato, even primitive manner, but the deeper you look, the more his Gospel appears iconic. He presents scene after scene in a very concentrated way, telling us some rather deep truths about the faith. Our Gospel for today from the first chapter is a good example of this. We see on clear display here what Pope Benedict described as the three essential tasks of the Church: it worships God, it serves the poor, and it evangelizes.

Friends, the first reading from Deuteronomy today is of signal importance. Moses, speaking to the people before they enter the Promised Land, says, “A prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you from among your own kin; to him you shall listen.” These words haunted the mind of Israel. Moses was the supreme authority; there was no figure in the Old Testament more important. Who could be greater than Moses? We find the answer in the Gospel: Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy One of God, who speaks on his own authority.

Friends, though the book of Jonah is only a few pages long, there is something inexhaustible about it. It’s a biblical commonplace that God speaks to certain people and gives them missions, as he does with Jonah in our first reading. But God also speaks to us all the time, precisely in the voice of our conscience. Do you listen to the voice of God or not? Do you listen to what your conscience is telling you or not? If you do, you become a vehicle of grace for yourself and for all those around you. If you don’t, chaos ensues.

Friends, we commence now with the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, and our first reading is one of my favorites in the Old Testament: the account, in the First Book of Samuel, of the call of Samuel, who as a young man hears the voice of the Lord for the first time. In the history of salvation, in the lives of the saints, occasionally God really does speak in a voice that can be heard, but I think what’s being described here is the word of God in the voice of the conscience, and what to do when we hear it.

Friends, we come to the wonderful Feast of the Epiphany and the great account in the Gospel of Matthew of the journey of the three magi. This marvelous, puzzling story, which has so beguiled the poets, artists, and preachers over the centuries, bears a very profound theological truth, and it has to do with the relationship of the national and the transnational.

Friends, we come to the wonderful Feast of the Holy Family. Over the years on this feast day, I’ve certainly preached on the dynamics of the Holy Family, on Mary, and of course on the Lord, but I don't think I’ve ever focused on St. Joseph. Well, that ends today. Let’s look at four dimensions to the holiness of this greatest male saint in the history of the Church.

Friends, we come to the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, falling this year on the very day before Christmas. And today, the Church invites us in our readings to think about David. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Torah, the fulfillment of the temple, the fulfillment of all of the longings of the prophets and patriarchs of Israel. And he is, perhaps above all, the new and definitive David, the King and Priest who will “rule over the house of Jacob forever.”

Friends, for this Third Sunday of Advent, the Church asks us to focus on John the Baptist, who of course is one of the great Advent figures. It’s as though John stands on a kind of frontier or border: all of the human longing for God, in all its various expressions over the centuries and across the cultures, is summed up in this man. “Among those born of women there has been none greater than John the Baptist.” Yet what does he say? “I am the voice of one crying out in the desert, ‘make straight the way of the Lord.’” At the limit of human religiosity, summing up all that we can bring to the table, this figure looks to another.

Friends, great writers, from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Melville, put a lot into their opening line, which often sets the tone for the whole work. This week we have the privilege of hearing the very opening of the Gospel of Mark, which, by scholarly consensus, is the first of the Gospels written: “The beginning of the gospel of Jesus Christ the Son of God.” In the manner of those great writers, this line matters a lot; in fact, every bit of it matters. And what sounds to us like familiar spiritual language was, in the first century, an edgy proclamation of the true Emperor to the powers that be.

Friends, we come to the First Sunday of Advent—the liturgical new year. I've said this before, but Advent is a time to get back to basics. Can I suggest we start with that familiar Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel”? Until we get into the spiritual space opened up by that hymn, we are not understanding Advent—and more to it, we are not understanding Christianity. We are beggars asking Emmanuel—“God with us”—to come and “ransom captive Israel.” You're in chains; you’re held captive. What can you do to save yourself? Nothing—except to cry out, “Come, come, someone, save me!”

Friends, Christ is the King of all things. His rule is characterized not by totalitarianism or despotism, but rather by loving kindness and sacrifice. He constantly reaches out his hands to defend the weak and sick, going to the limits of godforsakenness to bring back those who have wandered. We can cooperate with our King by being his ministers of mercy to the world.      

Friends, we must develop a theology and spirituality of work. Meaningful labor awakens our desire to collaborate in God’s creativity. Viewing work in this way—as spiritual and moral action—conquers our melancholy, gives us dignity, and brings us into unity with the purposes of the Lord.

Friends, there’s a great temptation for us to turn the Lord into a distant spiritual entity or a difficult moral taskmaster. We incorrectly believe that we have to crawl our way to the divine by our own heroism, merit, and effort. But this is not the case. In actuality, God, in his wisdom, hastens to make himself known. He reveals himself to us, even before we’ve begun to see. In fact, our seeking is predicated upon the fact that we’ve already been found. To understand this is to understand the Bible as the story of God’s quest for us.

Friends, there’s only one real sadness in life—not to be a saint. But what does it mean to follow this path of righteousness? To follow the will of God, and God wills that we habitually direct our actions and thoughts to the good of others. Jesus says blessed are the merciful, the peacemakers, the pure in heart. Following Christ’s Sermon on the Mount leads to our beatitude; living in this way leads to sainthood.

Friends, the Books of Moses teach that the three types of Israelite law—liturgical law, ritual law, and moral law—shape and direct God’s people toward holiness and purity. While the liturgical laws have been carried over and the ritual laws largely set aside, the moral laws remain unchanged, for they represent those great abiding intuitions by which our lives should be structured.

Friends, a great theme of the Bible is that of God’s chosen people. At the same time, we also see that God’s salvific plan has to do with all of humanity—and indeed with all of creation. God chooses Israel—and the New Israel, the Church—precisely for the sake of the whole world. Remembering this helps us keep the delicate balance between bland spiritual relativism and a dangerous religious tribalism.      

Friends, selfishness creates conflict. However, when we put the interests of others higher than our own, we’ll have outbreaks of peace. When we, together, fall in love with the transcendent love of God, we can turn “swords into plowshares.” What will settle the conflict in the human heart? Self-surrendering, alongside our brothers and sisters, to the glory of God.

Friends, in biblical imagery, the vineyard symbolizes the people of God. The Lord nourishes us as our caretaker, but he desires (even demands) that we bear good fruit. The Mass, the Eucharist, the teaching office of the Church, priests and bishops—through these means and through the Church, God cultivates his vineyard.

Friends, our own wickedness and virtue belong to oneself. Though our communities and background stories affect our mind and will, nevertheless, the individual stands alone in the presence of God. We show God and the world who we are by the integrity of our moral acts. What we do defines who we are, and therefore we must cultivate the moral dimension of our life to avoid ethical calamity.

Friends, the parable at the heart of our Gospel today from Matthew 20 is one of those passages in the New Testament that really bothers people. It proves that this parable is not just conveying correct information about God; it is reaching into our souls and doing spiritual work, shining light upon a certain darkness in us that resists him. And in this case, the darkness is a false view of what heaven is all about.

Friends, today in our second reading, 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 many ways, the whole Bible, the whole of revelation, is summed up in this statement. Yet everything in our culture militates against this: it’s all about your life, your choice, finding your voice, asserting your prerogatives. When we live in this little world, we remain stuck in a kind of permanent adolescence; when we live for the Lord, we enter into the adventure of being truly human.

Friends, they say that fools rush in where angels fear to tread. Well, today I’m going to rush in to some stormy waters by looking at the central issue of the Protestant Reformation: this issue of faith and works, or faith and the law. Martin Luther famously said that what he discovered in Paul is that we are justified or saved by faith alone. But why does the same Paul, in our second reading, say that "one who loves another has fulfilled the law"? The witness of the New Testament is richly complex on this question, and the Catholic position honors that richness and complexity.

Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the twentieth chapter of Jeremiah. There is so much spiritual wisdom in Jeremiah, but more than any of the other prophets, we come to know his personality and his life. And in this passage, all the texture of being a prophet is on display: both the terror on every side and a fire burning in the heart—both the opposition of those who refuse to hear the Word and the irresistible desire to announce it.

Friends, I do a lot of debating and dialoguing with agnostics and atheists, and very often, when they attack the faith, it's along the lines of: How could an all-knowing and all-good God allow (fill in the blank)? Why does he allow childhood leukemia, or natural catastrophes, or animal suffering? Much of the objection hinges upon the puzzle that is proposed by the existence of God. And we hear a classic answer from within the heart of our tradition today in our second reading from St. Paul to the Romans.

Friends, our Gospel today from Matthew 15, the famous story of Jesus and the Syrophoenician woman, is one of those Gospels that bothers and unnerves people. How should we read it? It is not that Jesus was grouchy after a tough day of ministry, and this plucky woman speaks truth to power to get what she wants. We are meant to read it in a much more subtle way. This story is driving at an issue that is central to the Bible—namely, the relationship between Israel and the other nations.

Friends, our Gospel for today is Matthew’s account of the calming of the storm and the walking on the water. This is an event that reached very deeply into the hearts and minds of the first Christians: we can find an account of it in all four Gospels. And the iconic representation in the Gospels shows us the theological and spiritual implications of this real event. It is an image of the Church, the barque of Peter, passing through the stormy times of life.

Friends, it’s a wonderful grace that the Feast of the Transfiguration this year falls on Sunday. The first reading the Church gives us from the seventh chapter of the book of Daniel might strike you as curious, but it’s very apropos. Daniel has a vision of four beasts rising from the sea, symbolic of four worldly kingdoms, each one being destroyed in preparation for a final kingdom—the kingdom of God. In Jesus’ time, they read these four kingdoms as Babylon, Persia, Greece, and Rome. If you think this is just wild speculation that had nothing to do with Jesus, think again.

Friends, our first reading is from the First Book of Kings, and it's one of my favorite passages in the entire Old Testament. If you're going on a retreat, spending a Holy Hour, or just wanting to get in touch with the Lord at the end of the day, it's a wonderful little passage to focus on. The setting is the early days of the reign of King Solomon, and the question it raises is this: If you could ask God for anything, what would you ask for?

Friends, we are reading during these weeks of summer from the thirteenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, which contains many of the great parables of Jesus. But I want to focus just on one today because it’s so rich both theologically and spiritually: the parable of the wheat and the weeds. Jesus’ story shows us how evil, by its very nature, is a corruption of the good. It is a parasite—and we need requisite care and patience in dealing with it.

Friends, our first reading and our Gospel today are about the word of God, both from God’s side as he speaks, and then from our side as we receive. God has spoken through creation, the prophets, the Scriptures—and, in the fullness of time, the very Word of God. If you open your mind and heart to the power of God’s word, it will change you.

Friends, the Gospel for this weekend from the eleventh chapter of Matthew contains a passage that has been called “Matthew’s most precious pearl.” “No one knows the Son except the Father,” Jesus exclaims, “and no one knows the Father except the Son and anyone to whom the Son wishes to reveal him.” We are on very holy ground here because we are being invited into the very inner life of God.

Friends, there is no religious figure anywhere in the religions or philosophies of the world who is stranger, more demanding, more relentless, and more unnerving than Jesus. And therefore the religion attached to Jesus is the strangest of them all. Exhibit A is our Gospel from Matthew 10. What Jesus says to his Apostles about himself, no other spiritual teacher would say. And you can’t be neutral about it: you have make a decision about Jesus.

Friends, the readings for today are really magnificent, and they are all about something central to the spiritual life—namely, fear. Years ago, I was on a retreat, and the retreat director said that there are two basic questions always to ask. First; Deep down, what do you want? Second: Ultimately, what are you afraid of? In a way, answering those two questions will tell you everything you need to know about yourself, spiritually speaking.

Friends, as we resume Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about vocations—specifically, vocations to the priesthood. Our Gospel for today from Matthew shows us the call of the priest: to be a shepherd of lost sheep, a warrior against unclean spirits, and a healer of sin-sick souls—one that teaches and preaches and proclaims the kingdom of God. This summons from Christ has been the greatest joy in my life. If you are feeling the call, don’t ignore it; follow it.  

Friends, we come now to the marvelous Feast of Corpus Christi, of the Body and Blood of Christ. What has been on my mind a lot recently is the famous story of the feeding of the five thousand—the only miracle, with the exception of the Resurrection, recounted in all four Gospels. Jesus multiplying the loaves and fishes to the feeding of this great crowd must have made a massive impression on the first Christians. With this feast in mind, let’s look at the earliest version of this story in the Gospel of Mark, because every part of it is worthy of meditation.

Friends, today we come to Trinity Sunday, which has been called “the preacher’s nightmare.” But as you probably know from previous sermons of mine, I don’t agree with that at all. I think every Sunday is Trinity Sunday. The Trinity names what is most fundamental and basic in our whole theology and spirituality, and we should rejoice in talking about it! Today, let’s look at the Trinity through three lenses: the words of Scripture, an analogy from St. Augustine, and the viscerally real “so what” of salvation.

Friends, we come to the great Feast of Pentecost—the feast, par excellence, of the Holy Spirit. A critique of the Western Church is that we don’t speak sufficiently of the third person of the Trinity, and there might be some truth to that. I’d like to follow Vatican II in trying to bring the Holy Spirit very much into the forefront. Our readings today show us the great power of the Spirit—a power that unleashes great saints, fiery speech, and a liberating unity. Surrender your life over to the Holy Spirit, and—trust me—you will tap into this source of power to change things for the better.

Friends, right at the end of the Easter season and in anticipation of Pentecost, we come to the great Feast of the Ascension of the Lord. We should do a theological reflection on this feast—how we should and shouldn’t understand the Ascension, and what it means for Christ’s work in the world—because it is key to understanding the dynamics of the Christian life.

Friends, on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us a kind of foretaste of Pentecost. In all three readings, we hear descriptions of the work of the Holy Spirit—the animating principle of the Mystical Body. What are the signs that the Holy Spirit is at work? Let’s look at five of them.

Friends, there is an enormously important line in our first reading today that we might just pass over: “The number of the disciples in Jerusalem increased greatly; even a large group of priests were becoming obedient to the faith.” Priests were so important in Jewish religious life, and these priests knew that Jesus was the fulfillment of the whole tradition of temple sacrifice. We, all the baptized, do not just admire Christ’s supreme priesthood from afar; we participate in it.

Friends, for this fourth Sunday of Easter, we have a magnificent first reading from the Acts of the Apostles. It’s one of Peter's great kerygmatic speeches—the kerygma means the basic proclamation of the faith—and a master class in evangelization. Christianity has become so commonplace for so many of us; we think being a Christian just means being a nice person. But listen now as this chief of the Apostles, this friend of Jesus, begins to preach with fire. This is the energy that should belong across the ages to Christian evangelical preaching!

Friends, we come to this Third Sunday of Easter, and our Gospel is Luke’s account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus. This masterpiece is a summation of the spiritual life, and it starts with two disciples of Jesus walking the wrong way.

Friends, we continue our celebration of the Easter season on this Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday. Mercy, St. Thomas Aquinas says, is compassion in regard to someone else’s suffering; thus, God’s mercy is his compassion reaching out to us precisely in our suffering. Keep that in mind as we walk through the Gospel passage for this week from John: the extraordinary account of the risen Jesus appearing to his disciples. Christ has been sent into the world as an agent of God’s mercy, answering our sin and woundedness with forgiving love. And the same Christ breathes on us, giving us the Holy Spirit, and sends us into the world with the same mission.

Friends, Happy Easter! Christ is risen—Alleluia, Alleluia! Recently, I had a public conversation with the popular historian Tom Holland. Someone from the crowd asked him, “What’s the call of our time?” and he said, “Let Christianity be weird.” When I was coming of age, there was a tendency to reduce Christianity to just another vague mysticism or moral system. If that’s all Christianity is, who cares? I’m with Tom Holland: let Christianity be weird, because Christianity is weird. And a lot of the weirdness focuses on the thing we celebrate today: the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead.

Friends, on Palm Sunday, the culminating point of Lent, the Church reads from one of the great Passion narratives from the synoptic Gospels. But I want to look at the second reading today—a passage from the second chapter of Paul’s Letter to the Philippians, the heart of which is a hymn or poem. These words go back to the very beginning of Christianity, and they serve as a beautiful summary statement of the faith. Paul is reflecting on the downward trajectory of the Son of God—all the way down into death itself, even death on a cross.

Friends, on this Fifth Sunday of Lent, our Gospel is John’s story of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead. Let’s face it: we are all haunted by death. No matter what we accomplish in this life, we know that it will all be swallowed up in the end. The fear of death broods over the whole of life. But does death have the final say?

Friends, on this fourth Sunday of Lent, our Gospel is one of the most magnificent stories in the Gospel of John: the healing of the man born blind. John is a theological master, of course, but also a literary master, and this story is beautifully crafted as a sort of icon of the spiritual life. This is not only a story about something that Jesus did; at a deeper level, this is a story about all of us.

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we are again getting back to spiritual basics, and the first reading from Exodus and the Gospel from John both focus on the symbol of water. Water in the Bible can be a negative symbol of destruction, but it can also be a positive symbol of life—not just physical life but the divine life of grace. Water for thirsty bodies symbolizes the water of grace for thirsty souls.

The readings for the Second Sunday of Lent brought to mind my good friend Bishop David O’Connell, who was killed last month. He was one of the most Christ-like people I have ever known—a man of deep spiritual conviction, with a profound sense of the power of the Holy Spirit. Like Abraham, he followed the Lord’s call from his homeland of Ireland to serve in the United States, working among the poor and with members of gangs. He called those he served to a deep life of prayer and spiritual transformation in Christ, a mystery revealed in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration.

Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, our preparation for Easter. I've often said that Lent is a time to get back to basics. It’s like when you're starting the football season and have to get back to fundamentals of the game, or when you're getting back to playing golf after a long winter away and have to remember the fundamentals of the swing. So in the spiritual order there are certain fundamental truths, and the readings for this first Sunday of Lent are especially good at getting us in touch with them.

Friends, we continue our reading of the marvelous Sermon on the Mount. We cannot read this sermon as one ethical teaching among many. Everyone from Plato and Aristotle all the way up through Kant and Hegel have a moral philosophy—an understanding of how humans ought to behave. This is precisely the wrong way to read the Sermon on the Mount, because no one—ancient or modern, religious or nonreligious—sounds like Jesus. His radical command to love as God loves, in fact, sounds a little bit crazy.

Friends, we have the privilege of continuing to read from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus himself lays out his basic teaching. What we find today is Jesus as the new Moses. Like Moses, he goes up on a mountain, and he receives and then gives a new, intensified Law. Jesus wants the corrective power of the Law to go beyond merely the behavioral level and to get down to the level of the heart. We are not called to spiritual mediocrity; we are called to be saints!

Friends, we are reading from the marvelous Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. This week, we hear Jesus compare his disciples to three things: the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and a city set on a mountain. What do all three of these things have in common? They do not exist for themselves; rather, they exist for something else. How is your Christianity impacting the world around you—making it better and getting in the way of evil and wickedness?

Friends, our Gospel for this Sunday is one of the great passages of the New Testament—namely, the Beatitudes from the fifth chapter of Matthew. "Beatitudo" just means happiness, and the one thing we all want is to be happy. Well, here is the Son of God telling us how—so let’s pay close attention!

Friends, this liturgical year, we are reading from the Gospel of Matthew, and Matthew is written precisely for a Jewish audience. This is why, over and over again, we find Matthew putting Jesus within an Old Testament context. And in our readings for this weekend, the Church juxtaposes a prophecy from Isaiah with its fulfillment in Matthew: “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen.” This may not mean much to us today, but Matthew’s audience of first-century Jews knew exactly what he meant.

Friends, we return this Sunday to Ordinary Time, and the Church gives us a rather extraordinary reading from the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Seeing Jesus, John the Baptist says something that we repeat at every single Mass: "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." Many Christians don’t know what this phrase means; they think that it has to do with Jesus’ gentleness or innocence. But John is drawing our attention here to who Jesus was—and the Good News of what he did for us on the cross.

Friends, we come today to the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek meaning “intense appearance.” It is something that not only gets our attention but also reveals something of enormous significance. For the wise men of course, it was first the star; but the real epiphany was the baby King. We should be attentive in a similar way to these moments of breakthrough that speak to us of God—and we should respond.

Friends, on this Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, we hear three significant words in the Gospel from Luke: haste, astonished, and treasured. If God has broken into your life in some decisive way, if you’ve been given your mission, then don’t about what the world says: move, act, go. When God manifests himself, the right response is astonishment. And then savor, treasure, reflect upon these astonishing things in your heart. In all these ways, we honor Mary, the Mother of God.

Merry Christmas friends! As you gather today with family and friends, it is likely that someone, at some point, will bring in a newborn. And everybody will want to see the baby. The whole room will stop whatever they are doing to see this child. There is something irresistibly charming about babies; they bring out the best in us and call forth love from us. Well, at the center of our Christmas celebration is a strange, astonishing fact: God became a baby. The all-powerful Creator of the universe, the reason why there is something rather than nothing, became a baby too weak even to raise his own head. This was a stroke of divine genius. Again and again the Hound of Heaven sought us out, and again and again we ran away. But who can finally resist the baby who is God?

Friends, many mythologies and philosophies in the ancient world held that time is cyclical; it just goes round and round. Many people today, on the other hand, hold that time is meaningless; it is just one thing after another. The Bible says no to both of those finally despairing understandings of time. As we see in the readings for the fourth Sunday of Advent, time has a trajectory; it moves toward its fulfillment in Christ, who is Emmanuel—“God is with us.”

Friends, today we come to the third Sunday of Advent, and the great image from Isaiah is that of the blooming desert. Many of us pass through desert times, dry periods of trial and training. But perhaps the Lord has drawn us into desert to awaken a deeper sense of dependence upon him. We must be patient; and in this season of waiting, we look toward Christmas—the great blooming in the desert.

Friends, on the second Sunday of Advent, the Church invites us to go meet the great Advent figure of John the Baptist. All the details of our Gospel—where the Baptist makes his appearance, why people come to him, his great theme, the images he uses—are important to enter into a spirituality of Advent.

Friends, Happy New Year's Day! We come today to the beginning of a liturgical year—the first Sunday of Advent. There is a sort of a permanent Advent quality, a vigil quality, to the Christian life. We are waiting, watching; we want something we don't fully have. And as we prepare for the coming of the Lord, our Advent challenge is this: What is our “highest mountain”? Where do we offer worship? If it is not the mountain of the Lord—if we have fallen into a spiritual sleep—now is the time to wake up and stay awake, to get our lives in order, to stop making excuses.

Friends, we come to the great feast of Christ the King, which is always the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Think of the king coming at the end of a long procession into his palace; this is Christ the King at the end of the great procession of the liturgical year. What I want to do is look at three dimensions of Christ’s kingship, one from each of the three readings today: our unity in Christ, Christ the warrior, and the weapons by which Christ wins the battle with the powers of darkness: his nonviolence and forgiving love.

Friends, as we come toward the end of the liturgical year, we begin to look at the apocalyptic writings in the Bible. What’s indeed revealed is the end of the world in one sense—not so much the end of space-time, but the breaking down of all the frames of reference that we use to understand our lives. Because of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, something new had happened. Our Gospel for today, taken from the section of Luke called “the little apocalypse,” shows the shaking of three worlds: the world of religion, the world of politics, and the world of nature.

Friends, our first reading and our Gospel for this weekend have a special resonance for our time because they both speak clearly about life after death. Our dominant secularist or materialist ideology says that matter in motion is all there is; the world came into being, and eventually it will pass out of being. On the other hand, an awful lot of Christians hold to something more Platonic than biblical, thinking of the afterlife as the soul escaping from the body to a purely spiritual place called heaven. But the biblical hope is for the resurrection of the body.

Friends, our first reading from the book of Wisdom makes an extraordinarily important observation that’s of both theological and philosophical significance—namely, that the very fact that something exists means that it has been loved into being. In light of that, we can read our famous Gospel about Zacchaeus as a story of the infinite love and mercy of God pouring into someone’s life—and the conversion that follows.

Friends, our second reading this week is from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy—one of the last letters we have from St. Paul. Now toward the end of his life, Paul passes on various pieces of wisdom to his young friend, including this: “I have finished the race.” The spiritual life is like a race; it includes different stages, from the promise, energy, and enthusiasm of the beginning to the experience of hitting the wall, where you can’t go on. St. Paul experienced all of those stages, and his hugely inspiring words are for all of us: no matter where you are in the race, finish it.

Friends, our first reading for this Sunday is about a battle between Israel and the Amalekites. To many of us today, this appears to be either an irrelevancy of history or an outrageous story about God sanctioning genocide. But Origen of Alexandria helps us to see that it is neither; rather, it is a story about the battle of the spiritual life. And in the soldiers, Moses, and Aaron and Hur, we see the variegated offices and functions within the Church engaged in that battle.

Friends, our first reading for this Sunday is a section of the marvelous story of Naaman the Syrian from the Second Book of Kings. The spiritual lesson is this: where you stumble, dig for treasure. We all have some leprosy—some ailment or struggle or weakness that embarrasses us or makes us suffer. Precisely because it leads us on the path of humility, this leprosy, this debility, leads us to God.

Friends, this week, our second reading is from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy. From prison, Paul writes to Timothy—the master to the disciple, the mentor to the mentee, the old soldier to the young soldier—and tells him to have courage, but to attach his courage to the weapons of wisdom and love. When one stands courageously, with wisdom, with love, with all the gifts of the Holy Spirit, then one is able to face down the powers of the world. When we try to fight them on their own terms, we try to conquer evil with evil, we make no progress toward the kingdom of God.

Friends, Pope Benedict XVI memorably said that the Church does three essential things: it evangelizes, it worships God, and it cares for the poor. This week, the words of Amos the prophet and Jesus’ parable of Lazarus and the rich man are meant to put us on the hook when it comes to the third task. How much do we care for those who are poor? Are we living lives of self-preoccupation and self-indulgence while our own brothers and sisters are suffering and starving at our gate?

Friends, the first and second readings this Sunday beautifully show both sides of Catholic social teaching: the balance between recognizing political, economic, and social power, and criticizing the abuse of that power. We should not demonize our leaders; we pray for them, and we recognize their importance. But we should not divinize them either; we are deeply aware of the ways that their power can be corrupted.

Friends, in this Sunday’s Gospel, we encounter the infinite, extravagant, radical love of the Creator for his creation. Jesus paints for us, in three parables, a portrait of God: he is, if I can borrow that lovely phrase from Catherine of Siena, “pazzo d’amore”—crazy in love with us, including the lost sheep and the prodigal sons.

Friends, there are a lot of people today who might be intrigued by Jesus. They find him interesting, remember him as a spiritual teacher, or have warm feelings about him. But in today’s Gospel, Jesus is saying to his fair-weather fans—those who are following him because he’s fascinating and charismatic—that being his disciple is not a walk in the park; it is something of supreme spiritual and moral importance.

Friends, at the heart of what St. Ignatius of Loyola teaches in the “Spiritual Exercises” is the idea of detachment. If we are to do the will of God, then we have to become detached from the worldly goods to which we are addicted. A basic principle of this detachment is “agere contra,” which is Latin simply for “to act against.” The idea is simple: if you are attached or addicted to some worldly good, then the best thing is to act against it—to press, aggressively even, in the opposite direction.

Friends, I am admittedly a bit reluctant to talk about the topic of our Gospel for today—namely, this famously controversial matter of how many will be saved. I have talked a lot and written a lot about this issue, and people have very strong opinions about it: everybody will be saved, only a handful will be saved, and everything in between. There is a lot of energy around this question. In this homily, I would like to get at the question in a new and fresh way by looking at Jesus’ answer in the Gospel.

Friends, the readings for this weekend are tough. Here is the principle behind them, one that is simple to state, but difficult to take in: in a world gone wrong, those who come to us speaking and embodying the truth are going to be opposed. In our first reading from Jeremiah and in Jesus’ harsh, challenging message in the Gospel, we encounter the disruptive, burning, cleansing quality of authentic religion.

Friends, Joseph Campbell and, more recently, Jordan Peterson are very interested in the Jungian archetype of the hero's journey. We see it all over the literature of the world and popular culture, from "The Lord of the Rings" to “Star Wars." But it is also on display very strongly in the Bible. In our remarkable second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews, the author reflects on faith as a sense of trust in God and a willingness to follow him on adventure—in short, as accepting the invitation to a hero’s journey.

Friends, all three of our readings Sunday speak of a primordial spiritual truth—namely, the need to detach oneself from the goods of the world. This has nothing to do with a hatred of the world or a puritanical spirituality of flight from the world; rather, it has to do with knowing how to wear the goods of the world lightly. These goods—wonderful as they are—all finally crumble, evanesce, and disappear; they are not our ultimate good, and we are not meant to cling to them as though they were.

Friends, our Gospel for today is St. Luke’s version of the Lord’s Prayer, the Our Father. This prayer, which is probably recited millions of times a day all over the world, includes some of the best-known words on the planet. But what do they mean? It might be good for us to walk slowly through Luke’s version to see what this great prayer is about—and what we are asking for when we pray it.

Friends, the Gospel for this Sunday is the wonderful story of Martha and Mary. But the Church sets this up in a really interesting way by giving us a first reading from Genesis 18—the mysterious story of Abraham being visited by three guests. The two stories together show us that the problem is not hospitality, nor being active as opposed to contemplative; rather, the problem is being focused on many things instead of the one thing necessary, in which everything else tends to fall into the right place.

Friends, the Gospel for this Sunday is one of Jesus’ best-known parables: the story of the Good Samaritan. Karl Barth, who learned it from the Church Fathers, taught that every parable of Jesus, at the deeper level, is finally about Jesus himself. The parable of the Good Samaritan is a good example of this principle; it is fundamentally about Christ healing fallen humanity.

Friends, as we continue now our reading of the Gospel of Luke, we have today a great portrait of the Church—what the Church looks like, what its central concerns are, and what the demands upon it are. The setting is Jesus sending out seventy-two disciples. Put yourself in that position: all of us baptized people are disciples of the Lord, and we're in a relationship with him. He is sending us out on mission.

Friends, I’m going to be blunt with you: today’s Gospel is really challenging. It cuts right to the heart of the ethical implications of the Gospel. There's something of a “be all, end all” quality about Jesus, something of an either/or. As he says, “Whoever is not with me is against me.” What follows from this is what I call the principle of detachment and clarification of motives. If Jesus is unambiguously the center of your life, then everything else has to find its place in relation to him. If the good things of the world become more important than following him, then something has gone off-kilter.

Friends, we come this weekend to the Feast of Corpus Christi, the Body and the Blood of Christ. The Eucharist, as Vatican II famously said, is the source and summit of the Christian life—that from which Christian life comes and that toward which it tends. It's the alpha and the omega of our Christianity. Our three marvelous readings today bring forth three key aspects of the Eucharist: re-presented sacrifice, blood covenant, and spiritual banquet.

Friends, Trinity Sunday has been called “the preacher’s nightmare.” But while the Trinity remains a supreme mystery, Thomas Aquinas used a basic principle that helps us to get at it: beings, at all levels, tend to make images of themselves. The higher you go in the hierarchy of being, the more interior and the more perfect this principle becomes.

Friends, Happy Pentecost Sunday! On this great celebration of the Holy Spirit, the third person of the Trinity, meditating upon the number three will tell us a lot of what we need to know about the Spirit, whose distinctive mark is not oppressive unity, nor conflictual diversity, but unity in diversity. The Church is one Body with many parts, animated by one Spirit manifesting many spiritual gifts.

Friends, on this Seventh Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us the privilege of hearing the very last words of the Bible. If you're reading poetry, a novel, or even a great work of history, the last words are of tremendous importance. We hear today a kind of coda or denouement after the great climax of the biblical story, and it gives us a clue as to the identity of the Church.

Friends, in many ways, the second reading for this Sunday is the climax of the entire biblical revelation. We find a detailed description of the heavenly Jerusalem, the holy city, coming down out of heaven to earth. There is no temple in this city because the whole city has become a temple. What began in the book of Genesis now comes to its fulfillment: the marriage of heaven and earth—the beautiful, integrated place of right praise.

Friends, on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we continue our reading of the book of Revelation, leaping ahead toward the very end of the Bible. Looking at the arc of the whole story—from God’s creation out of watery chaos in Genesis to the sea disappearing and a new creation emerging in Revelation—we see that God's final and definitive rescue operation, in the fullness of time, is his only Son. Jesus was sent all the way down into sin and death that he might rescue us who had fallen into those depths.

Friends, during this Easter season we're reading from the book of Revelation, that marvelous, final book of the Bible. In today's reading, John sees mystically, across space and time, across the Christian centuries, all those people from all over the world who would give their lives for Christ. This army of martyrs compels a choice: Which army do we fight with? The army of the world, or the army of the Lamb, standing as though slain?

Friends, the last stanza of a poem, the last chapter of a novel, or the last lines of a play are of extraordinary significance, but only if you’ve read the whole work up to that point. Similarly, to understand the book of Revelation, the last book of the Bible, we have to attend to the great sweep of the story beginning in Genesis. The thrust of that biblical narrative—that we are meant to give God right praise, and from right praise follows right order—reaches its culmination in Christ, the Lamb who was slain, who brings the whole universe together in right praise.

Friends, Revelation comes from the Latin “Revalatio,” which in turn translates the Greek “Apokalypsis”—which means, literally, “unveiling.” This final book of the Bible, which has fascinated Christians and non-Christians for two thousand years, is not primarily about the end of the physical world; rather, it is meant to unveil something that every generation of Christians needs to see—namely, a new world that God wants to be born out of the ruins of the old.

Friends, a very blessed and happy Easter to you all! The Resurrection of Jesus is the be-all and the end-all of the Christian faith. If Jesus didn't rise from the dead, then all bishops, priests, and Christian ministers should go home and get honest jobs. If he did rise from the dead, then he's the full manifestation of God, and he must be the center of your life. In light of that, I'd like to look at three great lessons that follow from this strange and decisive truth of the Resurrection.

Friends, in the Palm Sunday Gospel reading proclaimed before the procession, the Lord instructs two of his disciples to go into the village and untether a donkey. If there is any protest, they are to say, “The Master has need of it.” This is true of every baptized person: the Master has need of your gifts, of you, of the whole of your life. Once we understand this principle, everything is revolutionized—and we are liberated to be of service to Christ and his people.

Friends, this Sunday, we hear the story of the woman caught in adultery from the eighth chapter of John. René Girard thought that this story was particularly clear in showing the dynamics of what he called the scapegoating mechanism. And in the response of Jesus to the violence of the mob, we see the glory of God, who does not sanction this scapegoating frenzy, but rather meets the misery of our sin with his mercy.

Friends, our Gospel reading for this Fourth Sunday of Lent is one of the greatest stories ever told: the parable of the prodigal son. In a way, this parable about giving and receiving gifts tells us everything we need to know about our relationship to God.

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we have the privilege of reading one of the most important texts in the Bible: God addressing Moses from the burning bush. In this passage, the true God manifests his own identity: he is closer to you than you are to yourself, yet higher than anything you can possibly imagine. And he gives himself a name: “I Am Who I Am”—not a being among beings, but Being itself.

Friends, all three of our readings for the Second Sunday of Lent emphasize the transcendent world, the goal of all our religious striving. St. Paul speaks of how the Lord Jesus “will change our lowly body to conform with his glorified body.” We get a glimpse of what this transformation, this metamorphosis, will be like in the Transfiguration of Jesus.

Friends, we come now to the great and holy season of Lent, a time to get back to spiritual basics. This First Sunday of Lent, we hear Luke’s account of the temptation of Jesus. What Jesus faces in the desert are three classical substitutes for God—three levels of temptation, three types of diversion from the ultimate good. Can we look honestly and directly at those things that will cause us to deviate from the path the Lord has for us?

There are a lot of people claiming to be spiritual gurus, teachers, and guides today. But is the person to whom you’ve entrusted your life spiritually blind? Whom are you going to follow, and why? Toward the end of Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, Jesus—the definitive spiritual guide—offers us important lessons that help us discern our spiritual guides.

Friends, whenever we give or receive a gift, we're always caught in a difficult rhythm of exchange and mutual obligation. The great exception to this rule is God, who is utterly gratuitous in his giving. But in Luke’s Sermon on the Plain, we are invited to share, by grace, in the very way that God exists and that God loves, giving to those in need without expecting anything in return.

Friends, when our heart belongs to anything in this world, we live in an empty and lifeless spiritual space. But when our heart belongs to the Lord, the rest of our life falls into right order around that center. Our readings this week raise a crucial question: To whom—or to what—does your heart belong?

Friends, the spiritual life begins with an invasion of grace out of God's sheer, unmerited love. As we direct our lives toward the light, we become more aware of our sin in order to embark on our mission as vehicles of his salvation for the rest of the world.

Friends, Jesus tells us his messiahship is one of service, not self-interest. As sinners, we have a tendency to understand our religious lives in a self-interested way, but the grace God gives us is meant to be given away.

Friends, our first reading this Sunday reminds us that we need walls to maintain our identity. But our ultimate purpose is not to hunker down behind those walls, but to go out and transform the world. We need both the walls that define who we are, and the bridges that allow us to bring the light of Christ to all the nations.

Friends, this week we resume Ordinary Time, and the Church gives us this extraordinary story of the first sign of Christ’s divinity—the miracle at Cana. Why is the first of Jesus’ miracles turning water into wine at a wedding? Because Jesus himself is the marriage of heaven and earth, who transforms the water of human flourishing into the wine of the divine life.

Friends, when we are baptized, we are grafted onto Christ, who has anointed us all as priests, prophets, and kings. Let's live out that identity.

Friends, the supposed warfare between religion and science is assumed by a lot of young people who disaffiliate from the Church today. But the Magi followed both science and religion, and on the basis of their calculations, journeyed to present Christ with gifts. Their science didn’t lead them away from God but led them toward faith.

Friends, families teach us that we don't always get to choose the people we love, but we're given people that we're then called upon to love. On this Feast of the Holy Family, let's meditate upon the importance of this calling.

Friends, most of us are stuck in the boring and narrow confines of the ego-drama. Mary is not playing an ego-dramatic game; she is playing a theo-dramatic game. We hear of how she sets out "with haste"—the sign of the saints—and it's because she knows her mission and her purpose in God's story.

Friends, on this Gaudete Sunday, we are called to rejoice! Detach yourself from the anxieties of the world and live in the peace and joy of Christ.

Friends, a couple years ago, there was a poll conducted in Great Britain that revealed that the majority of people there feel that Jesus was not a real, historical figure, but rather more of a mythic character. There are all kinds of spiritual systems that trade in mythic language bearing spiritual truths—but that’s not what Christianity is.

Friends, many years ago, in the context of a high school religion class, a very wise Benedictine nun gave me a template for understanding Advent that I’ve never forgotten. It is simply that Advent calls to mind three “comings” of Christ: the first in history, the second now, and the third at the end of time. Meditating upon each of these is a helpful preparation for the holy season upon which we are embarking.

Friends, this Feast of Christ the King encapsulates what the Christian life is all about. All the other celebrations of the year are leading us to this conclusion, and on this last Sunday of the liturgical year, we are asked the question: Is Christ the King of your life?

Friends, there is something dark, threatening, and a little bit dire about the Gospel reading today, but through it, we see that death is not the final word. We’ve listened to the noise of the world for long enough, and now we need a new spiritual guide to lead us out of our complacency: Jesus.

Friends, a connection with God leads to life and flourishing. When we sever that connection, we experience a drought similar to the one in our first reading today. The Lord responds to our needs, so trust in his providence, and he will not abandon you.

Friends, God is not satisfied to be in the background of your life. The Lord your God is the Lord alone, so love him with everything you've got—your whole heart, your whole soul, and all your strength.

Friends, in today’s Gospel, we hear the marvelous story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus—an icon of tremendous power and a sacred picture of the spiritual life and the process of salvation. We all find ourselves, in our need of Christ, in this image, as our own blindness distorts our vision of spiritual reality and the meaning of life.

Friends, power and honor, in and of themselves, are not a bad thing, but we wreak havoc when we ask for them in the wrong spirit. When we beseech the Lord with our desires, let us ask for what God wants for us rather than what our egos have determined to be good.

Friends, in our first reading today, Solomon finds that all the power and wealth of the world are nothing compared to the gift of wisdom—seeing life from the perspective of God. Although this gift seems to help one further amass wealth, in today’s Gospel, Christ teaches us that to use the gifts of the world properly, we must give them away so we can follow him.

Friends, our readings this weekend have to do with biblical anthropology—or who we are in the presence of God—and the Christian understanding of marriage. A basic intuition of the Bible is that we begin not with the individual, but with community. And marriage is the most beautiful and intense form of this friendship God desires for us.

Friends, let us rejoice whenever the grace of God is on display. The point of the sacraments is so that God’s grace may flood the world, but the Lord can operate outside of our formal structures. He desires these gifts for us, but as the creator of them, he is never limited by them.

Friends, when envy takes over our spiritual lives, we sow disorder and disintegration. The life of Jesus is about self-emptying love; it is in this gift of self that we are called to live.

Friends, with our readings from this weekend, we are on very holy ground because we're dealing with the imagery, symbolism, and theology of the suffering servant. Yes, he is the one who will bring God's salvation to all the world, but he will do it by bearing the pain and suffering of the world.

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus travels outside of Israel and heals a man of his deafness. Today, we live in a realm of spiritual deafness. We are bombarded with voices from outside, echoing around us until we are as incapable of hearing as the man from our Gospel. Like him, look to Jesus to heal you so that you might hear the word of God and understand his truth, rather than the lies of the world which surround us.

Friends, the more we revere something, the more we surround it with laws. The most important thing in our lives is to be in harmony with God, and so we follow his divine law. We must, with prudence and wisdom, distinguish between the commandments of God that structure us, and fussy human traditions that distract from our relationship with him.

Friends, today’s Gospel concludes John’s reflection on the Eucharist. At the end of this remarkable chapter, we are faced with a question that defines the Christian faith: Will you follow Christ? May we always answer as Peter does.

Friends, today on this marvelous Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin, we celebrate Mary’s assumption, body and soul, into heaven. But this does not mean that she has gone away; she is a warrior, involved in the struggle against evil from a new vantage point.

Friends, we've all hit points in which we felt we could not go on spiritually, physically, or mentally. In the Gospel today, Christ declares himself the bread that has come down from heaven. If you want to live in the eternal realm, you must eat food that sustains forever.

Friends, the ensemble of this world that God has made is good, and we're meant to enjoy it; however, we hunger for something that transcends this world. Christ is the only good that can satisfy us.

Friends, the sixth chapter of John is one of the most profound reflections we have on the meaning of the Eucharist. Let us pay close attention to our Gospel today, which is John’s account of the miraculous multiplication of the loaves, to form a better appreciation of the miracle we partake in at every Mass.

Friends, our readings today center around the familiar biblical theme of sheep and shepherding. Both human and divine, it is Jesus who has come to lead us, walking in front of his people, alongside us, and behind us as both the God of Israel and the righteous heir of David.

Friends, today's first reading makes it clear that if you are baptized, you are called to bring God's word to others. This week, I share five recommendations as you follow his calling as priest, prophet, and king.

Friends, all baptized Christians are summoned to announce the Word of God. In our Gospel today, we hear the call, like Ezekiel, to share the Good News with all whom we encounter, especially those who have heard but turned away from the faith.

Friends, in our Gospel today, we find two stories tensely intertwined together, and both contain great suffering and great healing. Through this passage, we are reminded that even in the midst of confusion and frustration with God, we are called to trust in the Lord and his timing.

Friends, the book of Job is one of the most profound and most challenging books in the entire Bible. In today’s reading, we see that God does not hand-wave away Job’s suffering. Rather, the Lord places profound hurt and heartache in an infinitely greater context—into his loving providence. We must not narrow our focus on our pain; we must rather open ourselves to ever greater trust.

Friends, in our Gospel today, Christ paints a picture of a growing mustard tree, under whose shade all people are invited to dwell. Jesus speaks here, using a parable, about the reign and rule of God. Even now, the kingdom of God—the kingdom that finally matters and endures—is spreading far and wide across the whole world.

Friends, for this feast of Corpus Christi, today’s readings run red, dripping in sacrificial symbolism. When we gather together for Mass, we are not calling to mind some disconnected historical incident. Rather, we spiritually and physically participate in the re-presentation of Christ’s Body, Blood, Soul, and Divinity.

Friends, Trinity Sunday serves as a wonderful opportunity to unpack the life-giving relationship between the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Every time we make the sign of the cross, we invoke the power of the Trinity, thereby linking ourselves to the love that God is.

Friends, we come today to the marvelous feast of Pentecost, a celebration of the Holy Spirit, the Church, and evangelical preaching. Pentecost reverses the cacophonous confusion at Babel. We see various languages, cultures, and identities come into concordance under God. In the same way, we must find unity in Christ alongside our many distinctions and diversity.

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus makes extraordinary observations about discipleship. He speaks about being enraptured by God, having exuberant joy, accepting scorn from persecutors, and being consecrated into truth.

Friends, with these fabulous readings for the sixth Sunday of Easter, we discover an embarrassment of riches through the exploration of God's care and concern for us. In this sermon, I delve into these marvelous texts and explicate three fundamental truths: - God is love - God has loved us first - We are invited to participate in God's love through our own love and self-gift to him and one another

Friends, in our Gospel passage today, Jesus proclaims that he is the vine and we are the branches. There is give and take in this divine relationship. Not only are we rooted in Christ’s mystical body, but he endeavors to cultivate his love and mercy within our bodies. In this analogy, we find a powerful image of spiritual growth.

Friends, in today’s first reading, St. Peter tells us that there is no salvation outside of Christ. In this homily, I encourage you to let the truth of St. Peter’s statement, which challenges modern sensibilities, sink in—and further explore what this means precisely for both Christians and non-Christians.

Friends, Christ acts as an advocate for our souls through the cosmos-reorienting events of his death and Resurrection, the forging of a connection between heaven and earth. Our brother who walked the same ground and breathed the same air is now seated at the right hand of the Father. Now, in his heavenly advocacy, we find extraordinary hope.

Friends, today’s Gospel reveals the dawning of Christianity. With his wounds bared to his disciples immediately upon his arrival in their midst, Christ shows to us also our greatest sins in those nail and spear scars. God came, and we killed him—but no sin is greater than the Lord’s love, and so he arose, offering us peace and forgiveness beyond all understanding.

Friends, a blessed and peaceful Easter to you! Although grave sites are known to be quiet places of reflection, God, through his sovereign power, overcame the corruption of sin by his Resurrection from the dead this Easter morning. From his empty tomb, we learn that God doesn’t let death have the last word—and thereupon hangs the tale of Easter.

Friends, one of the best known stories in Western culture is the narrative of Christ’s Passion and death. However, this very familiarity can block our understanding of the account. What I want to do in this homily is to draw your attention to three odd details of Mark’s Gospel, each of which packs a punch spiritually.

Friends, one of the most fundamental beliefs of the Biblical Israelites is that God is a covenant-maker. He formed his people through a series of agreements and contracts saying, “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God and they will be my people.” This law comes into our hearts precisely through the Eucharist, which is nothing other than a representation of the cross of Jesus.

Friends, our Gospel for today contains one of the most important lines in the entire Bible: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.” To “believe” here means much more than to accept the truth of an idea; it is to enter into the space opened up by the death of the Son of God. When you do that, you are born again; when you do that, you have eternal life.

Friends, I have often said that Lent is a bit like basic training for the military or summer workouts for a football team—it is a chance to get back to the fundamentals of the faith, namely, the Ten Commandments. In this homily, I look at each of the Ten Commandments, using them as an examination of conscience for this Lenten season.

Friends, if the intention of an author is to convince people to read and think about what he’s written, the author of Sunday's first reading has done his job well. We hear the deeply troubling story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. How do we reconcile God’s love with his asking Abraham to kill his own son? How should we take the fact that Abraham was willing to follow through with it? And what does this mean for how we must order our own lives?

Friends, Lent is a marvelous opportunity to deepen our lives of prayer, to temper our desires for food and drink, and to engage in a graced time of alms giving. Let’s use this season to get our bodies and our behavior patterns in order, to show our love and service in very concrete ways.

Friends, today’s Gospel centers around Jesus’ healing of a leper. Although there aren’t many lepers around today, there are plenty of people that we treat as outsiders or pariahs. We should welcome them as Jesus does.

Friends, in this Sunday's readings, St. Paul highlights the significance of evangelization. The Church, by its very nature, evangelizes, going out to the ends of the world with its good news. And woe to us if we fail to do this! Paul urges us to organize our lives around mission, and to even move out of our comfort zones to do so.

Moses is, without a doubt, the greatest figure in the Old Testament. He heard the voice of God from the burning bush; he was given the Ten Commandments; he was permitted to talk to God as to a friend. But Moses speaks of a prophet who is to come, who is “like himself” and who should be listened to. Jesus is this prophet who has the legitimate personal authority to speak the divine word and bring healing to creation.

In today’s first reading, we find the story of Jonah, a narrative about the acceptance (or rejection) of God’s mission. We are all called to difficult things, and so most of us sinners, most of the time, do everything we can to avoid our mission. In Jonah’s case, it was physical flight, but for many of us it’s choosing to ignore what God has said, a giving in to every other voice, taking the path of least resistance, making excuses, pleading our own sinfulness, settling for spiritual mediocrity. What would happen if every single person in our society commenced to embrace his or her mission from God? One man converted the entire city, from the King to the very animals. Nothing is impossible for God and for those whom God has empowered.

With the whole Church around the world, we return to Ordinary Time. This week, we have a wonderful Old Testament reading from the first book of Samuel having to do with the call of the prophet Samuel, and Eli his mentor helping him discern the voice of God. We know that story as a charming, even sentimental story—and it is that—but it's much more than that. And to see it, we have to get a wider perspective.

The Gospel writers compel us, as it were, to pass through John the Baptist to get to Jesus; all four Gospels give us a version of Jesus’ baptism by John. But this baptism was embarrassing to the early Church, because it was interested in presenting Jesus as the Son of God, and yet people were coming to John as sinners for a baptism of repentance. Why would the incarnate Son of God seek out such a baptism? It is the very embarrassment of the baptism that, in many ways, is the point.

For Epiphany Sunday, we hear the marvelous story from the Gospel of Matthew in which the Magi journey to see the Christ child. This scene has beguiled artists, poets, and preachers for centuries. But we can distill five profound spiritual lessons—about being attentive, taking action, facing opposition, giving Christ what is best in us, and being transformed into new creations—from this perhaps overly familiar story.

The Bible is not particularly sentimental about families. What makes a family holy, as far as the biblical writers are concerned, is its willingness to surrender to the purpose of God. We see this in a number of key figures, including Joseph, Anna, and Simeon.

The dramatic readings for this fourth Sunday of Advent place us right in the heart of a central mystery in the Bible: the mystery of God’s providence. God cares for his world, but often in a way that is confounding to us, because God plays a subtle and long game. God is a God who makes promises, and he is faithful to them. But they often don't arrive just as we’d expect—which is why we have to wait.

The third Sunday of Advent is traditionally called “Gaudete Sunday.” “Gaudete” is a Latin imperative—it’s a command—which means “rejoice.” The Church is telling us to be happy. And in the first reading—a marvelous passage from the sixty-first chapter of the prophet Isaiah, which presents the motif of the “anointed one”—it gives us the reasons why we should rejoice.

In our magnificent first reading from the prophet Isaiah, which is echoed in the words of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel, a voice cries out: “Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low.” Advent is a great time for us to clear the ground, to make level the path, so as to facilitate what God, with all his heart, wants to do.

Advent, like Lent, is properly a penitential season. To enter into Advent, to prepare for the coming of the Savior, is to enter into our need for a Savior. How wonderful that on the First Sunday of Advent, the Church gives us a beautiful reading from the sixty-third chapter of the prophet Isaiah offering a series of images, each one meant to evoke this sense of loss and pain and helplessness. Until we enter into the power of these images, we won't know what it's like to long for the Savior.

Our first reading is taken this weekend from the last chapter of the marvelous book of Proverbs. After ruminating for many pages on different aspects of the wise life, the author concludes with a hymn of praise to a smart, industrious, dedicated, and pious wife. I would like to focus on the theology and spirituality of work implied in this passage. Our work makes us collaborators with God, who gives us the privilege of participating in his good governance of the universe.

Our first reading is taken this weekend from the last chapter of the marvelous book of Proverbs. After ruminating for many pages on different aspects of the wise life, the author concludes with a hymn of praise to a smart, industrious, dedicated, and pious wife. I would like to focus on the theology and spirituality of work implied in this passage. Our work makes us collaborators with God, who gives us the privilege of participating in his good governance of the universe.

Our first reading for this weekend from the book of Wisdom might easily slip past or through your mind, but it shouldn’t. It articulates what is arguably the central principle of biblical revelation: what I would call the primacy of grace. As I have often said, the Bible is not the story of the human quest for God. You can find that in a thousand books of philosophy or spirituality. Instead, the Bible is the story of God’s quest for us. In the spiritual order, it is always God who takes the initiative, God who sets the tone, God who is the master of the conversation.

A careful reading of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, reveals that Israelite identity was determined through three sets of laws: liturgical, ritual, and moral. In Catholicism, the liturgical laws have been sublimated and the ritual laws largely set aside. But what about the moral law? In this case, Thomas Aquinas says, they remain unchanged, for they represent the first principles of the natural law—which is to say, those fundamental instincts that undergird all moral reasoning. In our first reading this week from Exodus, we hear wonderful precepts that continue to this day to shape the moral consciousness of the world.

Our first reading for this weekend is taken from that wonderful middle section of the book of the prophet Isaiah. This particular passage is fascinating and conveys a very important but often unremarked upon biblical truth: Israel is God’s chosen people—of all the nations of the world, God chose the Jews to be his special priestly people—but biblical revelation begins, in fact, with the creation of the world and the whole human race. God chooses Israel to play a priestly and prophetic role for the sake of everyone else and everything else.

Throughout the book of the prophet Isaiah, there are references to God’s holy mountain. In the twenty-fifth chapter of Isaiah, we have still another reference to the holy mountain, and this is our first reading for the weekend. The mountain in question is, of course, Mt. Zion—which is to say, the mountain where the temple of the Lord is situated. The temple is the place where Israel comes together in right praise of God. Now, Isaiah is indeed talking about the Mt. Zion and the Temple that existed in his time, but it’s eminently clear from the language of his prophecy that he is also talking about the mystical Mt. Zion, the definitive temple, the place where the right praise of God has come to full expression.

Our first reading, taken from the fifth chapter of the prophet Isaiah, presents a classic trope within the Israelite tradition: the image of the vineyard as a representation of the people Israel. We hear that the author is going to sing a song of his “friend” and his vineyard. What becomes immediately clear is that the friend is the Lord God and the vineyard is the Lord’s holy people. This song is a love story indeed, but one that stresses the demands of love. 

Our first reading for this weekend is taken from the eighteenth chapter of the book of the prophet Ezekiel—one of the four major prophets, along with Isaiah, Jeremiah, and Daniel. This chapter is worthy of careful attention, for it represents a sort of breakthrough in the moral consciousness of the West. Though some of the prophet’s observations might strike us as obvious, we have to realize how revolutionary this thinking was for the time.

Our very brief first reading is taken from the magnificent fifty-fifth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah. This section of Isaiah—which stretches from chapter forty through chapter fifty-five—is one of the most theologically sophisticated and illuminating passages in the entire Old Testament. Nowhere is Israel’s theology of God more fully and clearly developed. And one of the principal points made in this section is that God is incomparable. Over and over again, Isaiah insists that God is radically other; that he is like no other being, even the most exalted.

Our first reading—taken from the twenty-seventh and twenty-eighth chapters of the marvelous book of Sirach, called in older Bibles the book of Ecclesiasticus—has to do with anger, vengeance, and forgiveness, themes that will figure prominently in the preaching of Jesus. “Wrath and anger are hateful things, yet the sinner hugs them tight.”

The Gospel for today addresses an issue of tremendous practical importance—namely, whether and how we ought to engage in fraternal correction. This is the traditional term for constructive criticism of our brothers and sisters. Over and against the modern liberal etiquette of “live and let live,” the Bible does indeed think we should engage in fraternal correction, and the extremely clarifying Gospel passage for today tells us how.

Jesus in our Gospel for today says, “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross and follow me.” Do you want to save your soul? There’s the formula. Find the path in your life that leads you to more and more self-emptying and self-gift, which conforms you to the love that God is. But then the Lord gets even more specific: “For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.” Saving one’s life means making filling oneself up and making oneself as safe and comfortable and sated as possible—which leads to boredom, disgust, and despair.

In the twenty-second chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, we find the prophet’s only criticism of an individual. The man in the prophet’s crosshairs is a certain Shebna, who is described as “master of the palace.” He is a high-ranking authority in the government of the people. This reading forces us to ask a simple and very hard question: How goes it with the power and authority that you have? Do you spend the capital of your authority on projects meant to burnish your reputation or do you spend it to the benefit of others?

One of the most distinctive (and scandalous) qualities of ancient Israelite religion is the insistence that Israel is the specially chosen people of God. Now, especially today, we have a problem with this sort of language; we much prefer the attitude of inclusivity. Well, this tension is not just a mark of our time; it can be found in the Bible itself. And in point of fact, one of the “places” where the play between particularity and universality is most clearly articulated is in the section of the prophet Isaiah from which our first reading is drawn.

Our first reading for this weekend, taken from the first book of Kings, is one of the most beautiful and memorable passages in the Old Testament. It tells of the prophet Elijah, who heard a tiny, whispering voice, which this was the presence of the Lord.

Our first reading for this weekend is taken from the fifty-fifth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah. The “second” section of Isaiah dates from around the time of the return of Israel from captivity in Babylon, and hence it is filled with the language of hope and salvation. And this passage that we read today, which reminds us of the foundational scriptural principle of the primacy of grace, is one of the most magnificent.

Our first reading for this week is from the first book of Kings, and it has to do with Solomon, the son of David and Bathsheba, the great Israelite king who built the temple, and who eventually became a problematic figure in Israelite history. This passage puts us right at the very beginning of Solomon’s reign, when he was just a young man—untried, inexperienced, likely beset by all sorts of self-doubt. And Yahweh appears to Solomon in a dream and says, “Ask something of me and I will give it to you.” This is an extraordinary moment—and let’s attend with some care to Solomon’s answer.

What a privilege we have this weekend to hear from the book of Wisdom. Scholars contend that this is the last book written in the Old Testament, dating from around the time of Jesus. It is a collection of sayings and aphorisms, all testifying to the multivalent truth at the heart of biblical revelation. As one might expect, a major theme of this book is the wisdom of God. But two others, which figure prominently in our reading for today, are power and love.

This week, we hear from the book of the prophet Isaiah, and the theme of this short passage is the Word of God. How wonderful that we are hearing one of the greatest speakers of the Word precisely on this topic. How central to ancient Israelite religion was the Word! Biblical Israel knew itself to be a people to whom God uniquely had spoken. They savored his Word as it was preserved in the Torah and as it was spoken by the prophets and the sages of their religion. And the divine Word, Isaiah knows, is not a bland description of a state of affairs, but an effective principal. God’s Word makes things happen, changes things, brings life.

Our first reading for this weekend is derived from the ninth chapter of the book of the prophet Zechariah, one of the twelve so-called minor prophets of the Old Testament. The background for the prophecy contained here is that Israel saw itself as the specially chosen people of God, whose mission was to bring the light of the Lord to all the nations of the world. At the time of David, this ambition seemed more realistic, but things fell rather quickly apart. And yet, oddly, they continued to hope. God would cause Israel to fulfill its destiny, precisely by raising up a king like David.

Our first reading for this weekend is taken from the marvelous second book of Kings, and it deals with the prophet Elisha, who was the chosen successor of the prophet Elijah. The narrative is, on one level, very simple and charming, but it also presents a kind of icon of the relationship between priests and their people.

Today I have the special pleasure of preaching on a passage from the prophet Jeremiah, someone that we hear from relatively rarely throughout the liturgical year. Along with Daniel, Ezekiel, and Isaiah, Jeremiah is one of the so-called major prophets of Israel. This means not only that he was a great and influential figure but also that he wrote (or at least inspired) a book of some weight and importance. What was the theme of Jeremiah’s preaching and prophesying? It was terrible—which is one reason why he was known as “terror on every side.”

This is the first celebration of Corpus Christi—the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ—after the Pew Forum study showing that 70% of Catholics don’t believe in the Real Presence of Jesus in the Eucharist. Vatican II said that the Eucharist is the source and the summit of the Christian life—so it is clear that something has gone seriously wrong. Therefore, it is with renewed interest and focus that we should look to the readings for today’s feast.

Today we come to the wonderful Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The Trinity: the strangest and most distinctive of all of the doctrines of Christianity; the preacher’s nightmare; the ultimate Rubik’s cube of theology. The Trinity has been characterized in a number of ways—some good, some bad—and we invoke it every single time we make the sign of the cross. Yet most of us live our practical spiritual lives as if the Trinity didn’t matter at all. So what are we to make of it? The Church sets this up by giving us some interesting readings for today.

On this great feast of Pentecost, I would like to say “happy birthday” to every Catholic listening to me, for we hold, in our traditional theology, that Pentecost is the birthday of the Church. It would behoove us on this our birthday to reflect on the nature of the Church. In the Creed, which we recite every Sunday, we find the familiar phrase, “We believe in one, holy, Catholic, and apostolic Church.” All four of these marks can be seen from the beginning, at that first Pentecost, because all four are gifts of the Holy Spirit.

We come today to the great Feast of the Ascension of the Lord, which sheds so much light on who we are as Christians and what we are supposed to be about as a Church. I want to focus on the Ascension from two perspectives: the “political” and the liturgical. Both are very important to understand what it means to speak of the Ascension of Jesus.

For this sixth Sunday of Easter, I would like to continue with the first letter of St. Peter, which is our second reading for this weekend. Peter says, “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” In many ways, this is the master text for theologians and apologists up and down the centuries to the present day. Something that is distinctive to biblical Christianity is that, from the beginning, it has been very interested in doctrine and expressing doctrine clearly and articulately.

For this fifth Sunday of the Easter season, I should like to return to our consideration of the Acts of the Apostles. Our passage for today is taken from the beginning of the sixth chapter of Acts, and it concerns the Church—its growth, its unity, and its structure—in a way that is compelling for our time.

For this fourth Sunday of Easter, I would like to concentrate on our second reading, which is from the first letter of Peter, a beautiful text that we consult only rarely in the course of the liturgical calendar. It seems eminently clear from the totality of this letter that it was written to a suffering, probably persecuted, Church. Therefore, how to deal with adversity, negativity, even the threat of death was an existential concern of this community. Peter gives his readers an extraordinary and deeply Christian principle: “Beloved, if you are patient when you suffer for doing what is good, this is a grace before God.”

It is my privilege this third Sunday of Easter to preach on one of the most magnificent texts in the New Testament, a masterpiece within the masterpiece: the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. I would like to offer a somewhat novel interpretation, one that takes its inspiration from the style of the Church Fathers and draws a correlation between this narrative with the third chapter of Genesis.

All throughout the Easter season, we will read at Mass from the wonderful Acts of the Apostles, St. Luke’s description of the adventures, challenges, and achievements of the early Christian community. His purpose is to show what “Apostles,” people sent by the risen Jesus, were doing. This is why it is so important that we, their distant spiritual descendants, should pay close attention. Our passage for today is from the second chapter of Luke’s work. We hear this pithy account: “They devoted themselves to the teaching of the apostles and to the communal life, to the breaking of bread and to the prayers.” I have written before of Joseph Ratzinger’s characterization of the three basic tasks of the Church, and they are on evidence here.

Easter Sunday represents God’s great yes to humanity. Throughout history, humanity has turned its back on God, but the Lord has constantly sent rescue operations to bring us back into community with him. The Resurrection of Christ is the definitive rescue operation and is our great hope for salvation.

On Palm Sunday, we are privileged to listen to one of the great Passion narratives. In Matthew’s account, we see Jesus as a still-point in the maelstrom, as God’s fidelity amidst a cacophony of sin. In the course of the Passion, Jesus confronts betrayal, laziness, violence, untruth, abuse of power, self-destruction, and wanton cruelty—the whole panoply of human dysfunction. And he takes away this sin precisely by his obedience and his mercy.

The great Lenten readings for Cycle A move in a kind of crescendo from thirst, to blindness, to death—all metaphors for spiritual dysfunction. This Sunday’s Gospel deals with death through the story of Lazarus who, after four days in his tomb, represents someone who is totally sunk in sin, totally dead spiritually. The voice of Jesus calls Lazarus, and all of us, back to life—no matter what we've done, and no matter how dead we are.

Our first reading for this weekend gives us a glimpse of one of the most powerful texts in the Bible—indeed, one of the truly great literary works that has come down to us from the ancient world. I’m talking about the story that we refer to as first and second Samuel. At the heart of this narrative—rich in theology, psychology, history, politics, human relationships—is the figure of David, who along with Abraham and Moses is one of the most important characters in the Old Testament. And as we look at this passage and meditate upon his story, a number of very important Lenten spiritual themes emerge. 

Our first reading for today is the famous quarreling of Israel by the waters of Meribah in the book of Exodus. We find the chosen people in the midst of the desert—which is to say, in the process of conversion, on the way from the slavery of sin to the freedom of God. But all conversion takes time; those on the way always tend to look back. And so we hear: “Why did you ever make us leave Egypt?” Here in the very middle of Lent—our own season of conversion—are we finding it hard, annoying, frustrating? Would we rather go back? Probably. But this is the decisive moment: Do we head back to Egypt, to slavery? Or do we trust that the Lord is guiding us?

Last week, we looked at the familiar material from the third chapter of Genesis. God’s human creatures fell, precisely in the measure that they stopped listening to the voice of God and listened to the voices of the tempter and their own desires. This week, in chapter twelve, we see the beginning of God’s great rescue operation. And just as the trouble began when God’s human creatures refused to listen to the divine command, the solution began when one human being—a kind of new Adam—listened.

We enter once more into the very holy season of Lent: a time of preparation; a desert time; a time of prayer, fasting, and almsgiving; a time to return to the basics. And so how wonderful that the Church gives us, for this first Sunday of Lent, a passage from the very beginning of the Bible, a story of universal and enduring significance. We hear of the creation and fall of mankind. But we will not properly understand this epic tale until we see that it has to do with us.

As we continue our focus on the Old Testament texts, we turn this week to the nineteenth chapter of the book of Leviticus. As the name suggests, the book has a good deal to do with the Levites, who were the priests of ancient Israel. Accordingly, there is much talk of ritual, sacrifice, taboo, the clean and the unclean, etc. In a word, the book of Leviticus was laying out the practices by which Israel set itself apart from the other nations. But the holiness of Israel was only a function of the supreme holiness of the God of Israel. Israel was meant to be different, because God is different. 

Our first reading for this weekend is taken from a book that we don’t consult that frequently in the course of the liturgical year—namely, the book of Sirach. It is presented as a series of sayings of Jeshua ben Sira, a wise Jewish elder. Our reading is taken from the fifteenth chapter of Sirach, and it has to do with the awful fact of our freedom.

I would like to concentrate on the marvelous passage from chapter 58 of the prophet Isaiah, which is our first reading for this weekend. This final section of Isaiah was written, the scholars tell us, after the return of the captives from Babylon, when Israel was trying once again to find its way. And so we find some very practical spiritual advice about engaging in concrete acts of love.

There is a tendency, I’m afraid, to flatten out and sentimentalize the meaning of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple. We see it as just a charming tale of a little child being entrusted to the protection of God at the beginning of his life. But there is more going on here—a lot more. To understand it, the Church gives us the somewhat enigmatic reading from the book of the prophet Malachi.

Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah and our Gospel are tightly linked, for St. Matthew, in articulating the meaning of Jesus, cites (as is his wont) an Old Testament text—namely, our reading from the eighth and ninth chapters of Isaiah. The prophet speaks of conflict in the land of Zebulon and Naphtali, and then of a great light that shines in that area, signaling the victory of God.

The entirety of this Sunday’s second reading might be seen as so much boilerplate, throwaway lines that a writer used at the commencement of his letter, something like a formal salutation. But in point of fact, almost the whole of Christianity is contained in these lines, if we have but the eyes to see. So take out your Bibles today and revisit the beginning of 1 Corinthians. It will tell you pretty much everything essential that you need to know about yourself and your mission.  

I want to focus this week on the extraordinary passage from the book of the prophet Isaiah, for it reveals a central dynamic of all of biblical revelation, and indeed of the spirituality of every Christian: that the Lord’s election is not for the sake of the elect, but for the sake of the whole world.

The first sacrament one can receive in the Church, Baptism, defines our relationship with Christ. In it, we are reborn as part of his Mystical Body and gifted with the grace of God’s love. Baptism lays the foundation for every other sacrament we are to receive and inextricably links us with the Trinity.

Today’s readings for Epiphany speak of a light that shines on Israel, the chosen people, but that is meant for the whole world, a light that is a beacon summoning all the nations. And that Light is Jesus Christ himself. As the prophets predicted, this Light is the illumination of all the world, the Light to whom all seekers are destined to come.

The point of our Gospel for Holy Family Sunday is to make us see a contrast between Herod, the perfect type of the anti-family man, and Joseph, the selfless protector of Mary and Jesus. Herod’s whole existence was conditioned by and predicated upon what was good for Herod; Joseph’s whole existence and behavior are conditioned by obedience to the Word of God. Herod is out for Herod; Joseph has transcended his own ego. And this makes all the difference!

The Bible turns upside-down the way we think about the God-human relationship. In almost every other religion or philosophy, God or the gods are the powerful forces who have to be supplicated, begged, and prayed to in order for human beings to get what they want. But the Bible presents an entirely different picture. As I have often said, the Bible is not the story of our quest for God; it is the story of God’s quest for us. Both the first reading and the Gospel for this fourth Sunday of Advent make this subversion evident.

On this third Sunday of Advent, we hear for the first time this season of the great figure of John the Baptist. It’s not really possible to understand Jesus apart from his precursor. All four Gospels compel us to come to grips with John. His job is always the same: he points to Jesus. If we’re staring at John, we’re missing the point. Well, in our Gospel for today, John indicates the Lord in a most distinctive manner.

Last week, I spoke of preparing for the coming of the Lord using the great image from the second chapter of Isaiah: the Lord’s holy mountain. How do we make this mountain the highest mountain? On this second Sunday of Advent, I want to follow the Church as she invites us to look at another chapter of Isaiah—namely, the magnificent eleventh chapter, which describes the world that emerges at the coming of the Messiah.

We come once again to Advent, the beginning of the liturgical year and the great season of waiting. Christian life has a permanent Advent quality, for we are always expecting the coming of the Lord. Now, Jesus came, he will definitively come, and he is coming even now—for the risen Lord wants to take up residence in us today. So Advent is, perhaps most immediately, a preparation for that coming; we are getting ourselves ready to receive the Christ who wants, even now, to be born in us. Well, how do we do this? Our readings for this first Sunday of Advent give us some wonderful instruction.

It is extraordinarily significant that the liturgical year ends with the feast of Christ the King. For this great fact—that Jesus Christ is the king of the world—is indeed the culmination of the biblical revelation. It is, in a very real sense, the point of the whole story the Bible is telling.

I’m pretty sure that in thirty years of priesthood, I’ve never preached on this Sunday’s short second reading from Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. And what a little gem it is! Isn’t it fascinating that St. Paul, precisely in the context of a letter to his church on spiritual matters, endeavors to speak of work? When we do authentic work—of whatever kind—we participate in God’s ongoing creation and providence. Don’t follow the instinct to secularize work; rather, see your daily labor, however humble, as part of God’s plan to bring you to joy.

The story conveyed in our first reading from the second book of Maccabees is one that resonates up and down the ages, that still stirs our hearts today. It’s the story of a martyr’s death. We can talk about heaven, we can speculate about it, we can write learned treatises about it, and we can hope for it. But up and down the centuries, it is the martyrs—from the ancient Maccabees to the Christians slain by ISIS—that most vividly witness to the promise of heaven. They literally bet their lives on it.

In Luke’s Gospel we read the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus, as chief tax collector, was considered a very bad man in first-century Israel, but Christ greets him with love. It is the love of God that causes everything to be, and comes before everything we do. God does not love us because we do good; we do good because God loves us.

Our gorgeous and deeply moving second reading this week is taken from Paul’s second letter to Timothy. I wonder whether I might invite especially the elders among us to attend carefully to this letter. It is the letter of an old man at the end of his life’s work, passing advice and authority on to his younger colleague. As he often does, Paul makes a comparison to sporting events. There is something at stake in the Christian life, something worth striving for. It is like a great race, in which we strive to win. We are meant to make it to the goal line—and perhaps the last miles will be the hardest.

The Bible and the great Tradition are massively interested in prayer, especially the prayer of petition. There are many types of prayer—meditation, contemplation, adoration, etc.—but the most basic and most practiced form of prayer is the prayer of petition, of asking God for something. Studies have shown that everyone prays, that even professed nonbelievers pray. It seems to be born of a profound instinct in the human heart. We ask God for things; we beg; we implore; we desire; we long. But what precisely is petitionary prayer, and how does it work? Our first reading and Gospel for this weekend shed a good deal of light on this issue.

I have always loved the story of Naaman the Syrian, which is found in the second book of Kings, as part of the Elisha cycle of readings. It is, on the surface at least, a very simple narrative, but it packs a punch spiritually speaking.

Last week, I plunged for the second time into the world of the Reddit AMA (Ask Me Anything). I can’t tell you how many participants in the AMA posed some version of this question: How could an all-loving God possibly countenance so much violence, suffering, and pain? Most questioners turned up the heat by putting special emphasis on the suffering of children and of the innocent. Every single major theologian has wrestled with the issue, as well as many of our most important artists. And our first reading clearly indicates that people in biblical times wrestled with the very same issue.

When the conclave of 2013 was finishing up, and Jorge Mario Bergoglio was elected pope, Cardinal Hummes of Brazil came up to him and whispered into his ear: “Don't forget the poor.” In emphasizing “a poor Church for the poor,” Pope Francis is continuing an ancient and powerful tradition that stretches right back to the Bible, including our first reading and Gospel for today.

Our first and second readings for this weekend beautifully sum up the Church’s classical attitude toward those in power. I’ve long argued that the most influential philosopher of the nineteenth century was Friedrich Nietzsche. For this very influential and quirky German thinker, power is the fundamental reality—a perspective that has found its way into our cultural and political realms. But the Bible is not in sympathy with either the demonization of—or the exclusive holding up of—power.

Our Gospel for today gives us three classic parables, each one exploring the notion that is at the very heart of the spiritual life—namely, that God is the one who searches for us. Why would God fret over one little soul? Why would he bother? Well, it’s his nature. It’s what he does. More to it, as we see in the coin, the sheep, and the son, recovering a lost soul is what he rejoices in doing.

Our Gospel for today is breathtaking, first for what it says about Jesus and second for what it says about us. Jesus compels a choice the way no other figure does. Either he is who he says he is, or he is a bad man. The bland middle way that he is a great teacher simply won’t do. In the presence of the one who makes such an extraordinary claim, we have to make a decision.

It was a particular joy for me to visit the sites associated with St. Ignatius of Loyola on a recent film trip. But the most moving locale was a little church in Manresa built around the cave where the young Ignatius spent about nine months preparing himself spiritually for his life’s work. What he learned at Manresa is that our attachments to various created goods—money, power, pleasure, and honor—stand in the way of our responding to God’s will for us. 

The topic of the Gospel for today—the question of how many will be saved—stirs up such passionate feelings in people, and there is such enormous disagreement about it. Luke tells us that Jesus is making his way to Jerusalem and someone asks, “Lord, will only a few people be saved?” And the answer comes back, “Strive to enter through the narrow gate.” But before we extrapolate from this exchange and consider the issue very generally, I would like to examine the historical setting of the conversation, which sheds a lot of light on what is really at stake.

Our readings for today develop a theme that is uncomfortable. Authentically religious people, authentically spiritual people, will almost always be opposed. The logic behind this is simple and unanswerable: we live in a world gone wrong, a world turned upside down; therefore, when someone comes speaking the truth to us, we will think that they are crazy and dangerous. Jesus’ word is meant to burn things up, to reduce things to cinders, to clear things out. A get-along attitude is never what Jesus is calling for. I know that we are uneasy with this idea, but the Bible isn’t. To love is to will the good of the other. Therefore, to love necessarily involves passionate opposition to what works evil in the other. Love destroys the false forms of order and community in order for the true community to emerge.

Our readings for today develop a theme that is uncomfortable. Authentically religious people, authentically spiritual people, will almost always be opposed. The logic behind this is simple and unanswerable: we live in a world gone wrong, a world turned upside down; therefore, when someone comes speaking the truth to us, we will think that they are crazy and dangerous. Jesus’ word is meant to burn things up, to reduce things to cinders, to clear things out. A get-along attitude is never what Jesus is calling for. I know that we are uneasy with this idea, but the Bible isn’t. To love is to will the good of the other. Therefore, to love necessarily involves passionate opposition to what works evil in the other. Love destroys the false forms of order and community in order for the true community to emerge.

The Jungian psychologist Jordan Peterson is, in many ways, an early twenty-first century version of Joseph Campbell, and perhaps the central archetype that they both explored is that of the hero’s journey. As both Campbell and Peterson have recognized, the Bible is a treasure trove of hero’s journey stories. But what makes the biblical accounts so distinctive is that God is the one who is drawing and prompting the journey; in fact, the Bible tells the story of God’s own hero’s journey!

The readings for this weekend have a tremendous cohesiveness. They all speak to a truth about our world that is hard to take in, that has to be repeated to each generation afresh, a truth that many older people have an easier time understanding than young people: nothing in this world lasts. 

The Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer, is a request for Christ. As we examine this most famous prayer line by line, we see it's all about Jesus. That He might come and have communion with us is precisely what we hope for when we cry out to "our Abba who art in heaven."

Although the little story of Martha and Mary has been interpreted throughout the centuries as a parable dealing with the “active” and “contemplative” approach to the spiritual life, it can be read as Christ's invitation to all people to partake in his inner circle of discipleship. Christ overturned the social conventions of his time by summoning all people to discipleship. Thus, we must remove all barriers to discipleship for all people.

During the twentieth century, moral relativism was in vogue in elite cultural circles, but now it is the dominant moral outlook of the broader culture. Against this, C.S. Lewis argued for “the universality and inescapability of the moral law.” Although there are subtle moral differences between cultures, if we look close enough, we can discern fundamental moral agreements. The Catholic tradition says that this moral bedrock is a reflection of the Eternal Law in the mind of God. It is the voice of God within us. Listen to that voice.

St. Paul tells us in our second reading that he boasts in the cross of Jesus. To any of his hearers in the first century this would have sounded like madness. Paul can boast in this shameful thing precisely because God has raised Jesus from death and thereby placed the world-the realm of hatred, violence, and division-under judgment. Now we must have the courage to leave the world and enter into the new creation which is the body of Christ.

In the Gospel for this Sunday, Jesus clarifies that all worldly goods find their value in relation to Him. If we believe Jesus is the only Son of God, we must place our grudges, personal desires, and even our most sacred worldly obligations aside in order to walk truly and completely with Him.

The Church comes from the Eucharist for it is the sacrifice that makes saints. The Eucharist is essentially the fullest act of gratitude prefigured in Melchizedek finding its fulfillment in the sacrifice of Christ. Every Mass is a participation in and celebration of this sacrifice, but the feast of Corpus Christi is a time to be especially aware of the gift of the Eucharist.

Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Most Holy Trinity. The Nicene Creed articulates the mystery of the Trinity with the wonderful phrase "begotten not made," meaning that the Son is not a creature but rather shares in the selfsame nature as the Father. The Holy Spirit is then the life-giving love breathed out between the Father and the Son.

Today we celebrate the great feast of Pentecost, one of the truly great moments in the life of the Church. The Holy Spirit comes to give many spiritual gifts, which prepare us to enter into relationship with Christ and embark on mission.

Too often we read the Ascension as the moment when Jesus “went away,” when he left us on our own and went off to heaven, where we hope some day to join him. But the Ascension is not Jesus going away; it is Jesus assuming his position as leader of the Church’s life.

On this seventh and final Sunday of the Easter season, I want to bring to a close my meditation on the extraordinary book of Revelation. With the disclosure of the heavenly Jerusalem, the Biblical narrative effectively comes to a close—and that’s true. But what we find today, in the very last words of the entire Scriptural corpus, is a kind of liturgical coda, a final prayer, a call and response between the Lord and his Church.

On this sixth Sunday of Easter, we are coming to the end of the book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible. We are approaching, in a word, the climax of the Biblical revelation, the point toward which the entire story had been tending. And we hear of the heavenly Jerusalem, a city with no temple—for the city itself, in its entirety, has become a temple, a place of right praise.

We are coming now toward the end of the book of Revelation, which means toward the end of the entire Biblical story. Writers will often draw the beginning and end of their work together; somehow the end is anticipated in the beginning, and the beginning is recapitulated at the end. There is something like that going on in the Bible. God has no intention of giving up on his creation or simply destroying it. The divorce that happened in the garden of Eden is overcome; and now the bride is ready for the Bridegroom.

The book of Revelation is an unveiling of a new state of affairs, the new things that are on offer in light of Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. Though it looks like worldly power holds sway, real power belongs to the army of those who have chosen to follow the crucified and risen Savior. The martyrs have come from all corners of the world, and they have spoken many languages. And this is the army that, up and down the centuries, has undermined the foundations of the fallen world. This is the great fighting force that Jesus has unleashed and continues to unleash.

In today’s reading from Revelation, John is in the heavenly court and he sees angels, elders, and living creatures, countless in number, all standing around the throne and crying out in loud praise. This is a supreme liturgical act, an act of right praise. And whom are they worshiping? Not a mighty prince, not a great warrior, not a cosmic force, but a lamb, one of the meekest and tiniest of animals, who has been slain—Jesus Christ. The Church saw this evening sacrifice as the perfect act of praise—and now the cosmic Church is gathered around it and associating itself with it.

The Church has placed the book of Revelation at the end of the Bible, as the culmination of the entire Biblical narrative—precisely because it has relevance for all Christians of anytime, very much including ourselves. Something of central importance is revealed in this book. Something that was hidden to us and is now unveiled. And it has everything to do with Jesus and his resurrection from the dead—which is why we are reading from this book during the Easter season.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the foundation of the entire Christian faith. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, we should all go home and forget about it. As St. Paul himself puts it: “If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men.” But Jesus was, in fact, raised from the dead. And his resurrection shows that Christ can gather back to the Father everyone whom he has embraced through his suffering love.

In our Gospel reading for the Palm Sunday procession, Jesus sends his disciples into Jerusalem to prepare for his triumphal entry. They are told to untether a donkey, and if there is any protest from the owner, they are to say simply, “The Master has need of it.” Strictly speaking, God has need of nothing, since he is the unconditioned act of existence. God doesn’t need our praise or our good works or anything. But this phrase signals the wonderful truth that God allows us to cooperate with his grace so that we can participate in the work that he wants to do. He gives us what Aquinas called “the dignity of causality.” We are privileged to be instruments in his hands.

In this week's Gospel, we hear the story of the woman caught in adultery, a tale that has beguiled Christians and non-Christians for two millennia. The story displays our constant temptation to use knowledge of God’s law to hurt others, not to liberate them. We gossip, we scapegoat, we blame—and we convince ourselves that we’re just following the divine law in pointing out other people’s problems. But then enters Jesus, who affirms that the law's primary purpose is to make us humble, to draw us to higher attainment. Without denigrating the law in the least, Jesus reaches out in mercy in order to brings sinners back to life.

One the greatest Protestant theologians of the twentieth century, Paul Tillich, made a distinction between heteronomy (law from another), autonomy (law from oneself), and what he called “theonomy” (law of God). This week, we have the privilege to consider what is arguably the most magnificent and spiritually rich of Jesus’ parables—the story of the Prodigal Son—and in this familiar story, you’ll see the dynamics of these three approaches on clear display.

The readings for this second Sunday of Lent awaken a sense of wonder, of a world beyond ours, a mystical consciousness. In the first reading with Abraham and in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration, we encounter mountains, darkness, voices, and dazzling light, all of which signal the breakthrough of a higher world.

Lent is a time of paring down—a time spent in the desert, if you will—as exemplified by Jesus’ forty days of fasting in these arid, barren lands. He was tempted three times by Satan, and rejected each attempt, giving glory to God at every turn. This is the lesson for us: that we make God the center of our lives and not test him. We are here to do his will, which is clarified through our own Lenten sacrifices.

Our Gospel for this weekend comes from the end of the Sermon on the Plain, which is St. Luke’s version, more or less, of the Sermon on the Mount in St. Matthew’s account. Jesus has been operating as the definitive spiritual teacher here, and at the end of his address, he has some strong things to say about false spiritual teachers. Every spiritual teacher and guru is eager to tell you what’s wrong with you. But unless they’ve surrendered to Christ and found salvation in him themselves, they are absolutely in no position to help you. 

The philosopher Jacques Derrida reflected on what he called the aporia or dilemma of the gift. The upshot seems to be that it is virtually impossible truly to give a gift, for gift-giving always locks us into an economy of exchange and obligation. But there is one great exception to the Derridean dilemma, and that is the Lord God. Jesus’ recommendations in the magnificent Gospel for today are not for the natural person, but the supernatural person, who loves with the very love of God.

I would like to focus on the brief but extremely powerful passage from the book of the prophet Jeremiah, which is our first reading for this weekend. It is taken from the seventeenth chapter of the prophet’s book, and the context is a fierce upbraiding that Jeremiah is giving for the idolatry of the people. What we have here is the pithy formula, the simple program, that ought to govern our spiritual lives at the most fundamental level.

There is a wonderful parallel between our first reading and the Gospel this week. The first reading is taken from the sixth chapter of the book of the prophet Isaiah, and it has to do with the call of Isaiah; and the Gospel is from the fifth chapter of Luke, and it deals with the call of the first disciples of Jesus. Both stories, in remarkably similar ways, lay out the essential dynamics of the spiritual life.

This week we hear from St. Paul’s brilliant meditation on love. Everything in religion and theology revolves around love. It is at the heart of everything. Nothing matters without love, because God is love. Putting love at the center is the best way to organize and prioritize our entire lives.

The dramatic scene presented in the Book of Nehemiah presents a people who had forgotten their identity and learned, as if for the first time, who they really are. It is the mission of all those who remain invested in the faith of the Church to give testimony to their brothers and sisters in Christ, reminding all that in Christ, we have received a unique and wonderful identity—and it is only when we know who we are that will be able to find our purpose and accomplish the mission that Christ has given to us.

The communion of humanity and divinity in Christ’s divine person can be likened to a marriage. Sin effects a kind of divorce between God and humanity, a break up of the marriage of God and his people. How wonderful, therefore, when the Messiah offers the first sign of his identity and mission at a wedding. This is an indication that the relationship of God and humanity will be transformed, reconciled, and renewed in Jesus Christ.

Our modern culture suggests a tension between spirituality and religion. But the Magi in today’s Gospel demonstrate that when spirituality is lifted up by revelation—when the Magi are told by the religious leaders where the Messiah is to be born—we find the object of our spiritual longing.

Lots of people today will tell you what makes a family well-adjusted, functional, and peaceful. But in this week’s readings for the Feast of the Holy Family, which center on two exemplary women, Hannah and Mary, the Church wants to tell us what makes a family holy.

The New Testament authors consistently reached to the Old Testament for their categories of understanding. Hence, Jesus is the Torah in person; the new and definitive Temple; the prophet par excellence; the fulfillment of the covenant; etc. But one of the most important of these Old Testament points of reference is the Mashiach, the anointed one, the Messiah—which is to say, the new David.

Like most of the prophets, Zephaniah trades in a fair amount of doom and gloom—but he also dreams of the great day of victory and vindication. The Apostle Paul—the former rabbi Shaul, who had studied the prophets and their works under the great teacher Gamaliel—came to see that in the Paschal Mystery, in the dying and rising of Jesus, the totality of Zephaniah’s message was realized. The destruction that Zephaniah and the others foresaw came massively true in the destruction of Christ’s body on the cross. However, having gone all the way down, God in Christ brought the human race all the way up. Therefore, rejoice! 

In our Gospel for today, Luke invokes the most significant cultural and political players of that time and place; but then, just as he did in the Christmas story, he pulls the rug out from under us. The word of God, the definitive guide to life, came not to one of the major players in their palaces, but to this isolated oddball, this mad prophet wearing animal skins and eating locusts. And this oddball prophet, who speaks the word of God, is ushering in a whole new way of ordering one’s life.

This Sunday is New Year’s Day, in the liturgical sense of the term. With the first Sunday of Advent, we commence the liturgical year of 2019. And New Year’s day is always a good time for resolutions, taking stock, starting over again. I want to interpret our Gospel for this Sunday, which portrays Jesus is full apocalyptic mode, in that spirit.

The liturgical year ends with the feast of Christ the King. This day reminds us what the Christian thing is all about: that Jesus really is the king, the Lord of our lives; that we belong utterly to him; and that we can say, with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

Our first reading for this weekend is from the utterly fascinating book of Daniel. Daniel is an example of apocalyptic literature, and apocalyptic books reveal something of decisive significance. We see that significance when Jesus comes preaching the kingdom of God, by which he was taken to be announcing the fulfillment of the Daniel prophecy. This is the apocalypse, the great unveiling: a new kingdom has come, a dominion that will last forever.

Today’s Scriptures highlight two widows and two very important biblical principles: God reveals himself precisely at that moment of our greatest vulnerability and need, and the grace in your life will increase in the measure that you give it away.

Our first reading for Mass this week contains the defining prayer of the Jewish tradition: the “Sh’ma.” In the Gospel, when asked which commandment is the greatest, Jesus, a pious Jew, recites this prayer from the book of Deuteronomy. We Christians too claim—or better, are claimed by—this great prayer. But what does it mean?

Our first reading from the prophet Jeremiah treats of a theme that is basic throughout the Bible: the motif of the return from exile. Like two great hinges on which the Old Testament turns are the stories of Exodus and Exile. Israel finds itself enslaved in Egypt, but God liberates the people; later, the northern tribes are carried off by the Assyrians; and later still, the southern tribes are carried off by the Babylonians. But exile was also a kind of spiritual metaphor, a trope for having wandered far from the Lord. 

Friends, all three readings for this weekend center around a theme that was very familiar to the ancient audiences who first took them in but that is rather alien to us. I’m talking about the theme of substitutionary sacrifice. A very basic problem that we have when we seek to understand this idea is that we are marked, through and through, by a strong individualism: everyone acts and speaks for himself and takes responsibility for his own actions. But ancient people lived within a far more collective or corporate consciousness.

The first reading for this weekend and the Gospel, which are meant to be read in tandem, are very good examples of what I’ve called principles of spiritual physics. They lay out some ideas and relationships that are fundamental to the spiritual order—laws, if you will. And both readings have a good deal to say about riches. 

Our first reading for this weekend is of pivotal significance in the Bible, for it lays out some of the fundamentals of human anthropology and the Christian vision of marriage. It behooves us to take a careful and attentive walk through this brief but highly significant passage from the second chapter of the book of Genesis.

Our first reading from the Book of Numbers and the Gospel reading from Mark both highlight a very interesting spiritual predicament, one that is presented numerous times throughout the Bible. It might be summed up as the inclination for members of the Church to subvert the mission of the Church because of their own ego-driven desires and preoccupations.

One of the most important doctrines of the Church is the doctrine of original sin, which asserts that something it off with us. We see the effects of it everywhere, and we also see many attempts to solve the problem of sin on our own. The only way to be healed, however, is to give ourselves over to Jesus, like the little child in today’s Gospel reading.

Today's second reading from the letter of James discusses the relationship between faith and love. We need a strong faith, but faith without love is lifeless so we must respond to grace and faith with acts of love.

In this week's Gospel, Jesus heals a man who is deaf and dumb. When we read this account at the spiritual level, we see that he cures those who are deaf to the Word of God and hence unable to speak it clearly. How relevant this message is to our own time!

All of today's readings pertain to law. We Americans are a fairly litigious society. Lawyers are thick on the ground and many of our Founding Fathers were students of law. We have a kind of love-hate relationship with the law, like most people in history. Today's readings offer a key lesson: whenever we reverence something, we surround it with laws. Laws protect the integrity of good things. And for the saints, the law of God is planted within their hearts.

Today's first reading personifies Wisdom as a woman who invites people to a feast, lavishly offering food and wine. In today's Psalm, we echo that invitation: "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord." But to join the banquet of the Lord, we need to turn away from other food. We spend our whole lives eating from troughs that never satisfy our hunger - wealth, power, pleasure, honor. But in John 6, which is today's Gospel, Jesus invites us to feed on himself, Wisdom incarnate, the only food that will ultimately fulfill our hunger.  Mass Readings  Reading 1 - Proverbs 9:1-6 Psalm - Psalm 34:2-7 Reading 2 - Ephesians 5:15-20 Gospel - John 6:51-58

In our first reading today, Elijah is dejected and requests that the Lord take his life. But an angel touches him and orders him to get up and eat. Strengthened by food, he journeys to the mountain of God, Horeb. We're all acquainted with the need for physical food, like Elijah, but we also need spiritual food. If we don't feed our souls, we will become spiritually lethargic and unhealthy. Where do we find that nourishment? The answer comes in John 6, our Gospel reading for today.

In today’s first reading, we see God giving the Israelites mysterious bread on their way to the land of liberation. We need this same food ourselves, to sustain us for freedom, and that’s what the Lord provides in the Eucharist.

The sixth chapter of John's Gospel, from which we will be reading these next several weeks, is a sustained meditation on the meaning of the Mass and the Eucharist. Our passage for today, when read symbolically, illumines the major movements of the Mass.

In today's first reading, God announces that he himself will shepherd his people. Yet a few sentences later, he suggests that he will raise up a righteous human king to reign and govern wisely. So which is it—will God become king or will he establish a human king? The answer, which the Gospel reading unfolds, is both. In the person of Jesus, the divine shepherd, the scattered people of God find their way home.

For many people in the West, liberty seems to trump everything. We avatars of the egodrama, we worshippers at the altar of freedom, say that our choice is supreme. We don't want anyone to constrain our pursuit of money, success, power, influence, safety, or physical health. But what matters in the end is not to place our wills in the position of ultimate concern. Everything in nature, history, science, and our careers is, in the end, summed up in Christ.

This week's Scriptures illuminate the identity and mission of a prophet—a calling that belongs to all the baptized by virtue of our Baptism. God appoints the prophets to a specific mission. This mission is to speak God's word of truth. God's word of truth is not a private or personal opinion, but the Word of God communicated through human words. The prophet speaks God's word of truth to those within and those outside the Church. Prophets do not seek to proclaim a message that is easy to be accepted, but seek to speak God's word of truth, no matter how hard it might be to hear and accept. Christ is the paradigmatic example of the identity and mission of the prophet.

The Book of Wisdom offers us the strange assertion that God did not make death, for he formed humanity to be imperishable. This revelation directs us towards the truth that death is much more than merely the dissolution of the body; it is the full impact of the power of sin over our lives. This power is especially evident in our fear of death. The dormition of the Mother of God offers us a sign that Christ has given to humanity a way that takes us not only beyond our fear of death but beyond death itself. The way of Christ enables us to face the power of death with trust rather than fear.

John the Baptist is one of the most important figures in Christianity, and provides a window into the tradition of the Jewish priesthood and the historical context of the day. John chose the river Jordan to baptize, a conscious move to display the forgiveness of sins against the backdrop of the Jewish history of Exodus and liberation. Yet while he was baptizing in the desert, likely an exercise in protest of the corruption in the Temple in Jerusalem, he was heralding the coming of Christ, one who will "baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire."

Our Gospel for today features one of Jesus’ most beloved parables: that of the mustard seed. How does God tend to work? What does the building up of the Kingdom typically look like? From the very small to the very great—and usually by a slow, gradual process. God, it seems, tends to operate under the radar, on the edges of things, quietly, clandestinely.

In all the literature of the world, I don’t know of a richer account of who we are, what we’re called to be, and what goes wrong with us than the first chapters of Genesis—especially the third chapter, from which our first reading comes. And we see in our Gospel for today that what happens to us in the immediate wake of original sin—alienation, shame, self-centeredness, scapegoating—helps us immensely to understand Jesus and his work.

To truly understand what Jesus did at the climax of his life—and what the Catholic Church does at every Mass—we must understand the importance of blood sacrifice to Judaism in Jesus’ time. Everything that Moses did at Mt. Sinai, and all that was done for a thousand years in the temple, was summed up by Christ’s ultimate blood sacrifice on the Cross, offered for the reconciliation of God and humanity. And this ultimate lifeblood of God, sprinkled by Christ the high priest once for all, is what the Mass re-presents and makes sacramentally present to us.

It's often joked that Trinity Sunday is "the preacher's nightmare." But while the Trinity can be viewed as the most arcane and inaccessible Christian doctrine, it's also the most ordinary and obvious. Every Catholic invokes the Trinity whenever he crosses himself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Moreover, every single baptized person has been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Through baptism we've been sealed by the Trinity, brought within its dynamic, and sent out on mission.

I’m delighted that on this Pentecost Sunday, I can reflect on one of my favorite passages in the New Testament. It is taken from the fifth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Galatians. In this passage, Paul gives those who belong to Christ their marching orders by laying out the works of the flesh—those attitudes and actions that stand against the way of love—and the works of the Spirit.

As the Easter season draws to a close, we hear from one of the most magnificent passages in the Gospel of John—namely, the high-priestly prayer of Jesus the night of the Last Supper. It is by far the longest discourse by Jesus anywhere in the New Testament, and it contains the seeds of Christian spirituality in its entirety.

Today's Gospel presents the distinction between a generic spirituality, which emphasizes our decision for God, and authentic Christian faith, which is the recognition that God has chosen us in Christ. It is God's choice—his election of us in Christ as not only his followers but his friends—that matters most.

I would like to focus my attention this week on the magnificent first reading, taken from the pivotal ninth chapter of the Acts of the Apostles. I say pivotal because this is the chapter in which the conversion of Saul is recounted. Hans Urs von Balthasar refers to Paul as one of the great archetypes in the life of the Church, and so we can benefit from a close study of the spiritual lessons from his life and his manner of discipleship.

Our first reading for today proposes a very serious challenge to the inclusiveness and non-judgmentalism that is taken for granted in our culture today. The chief of the Apostles says, “He is the stone rejected by you the builders, which has become the cornerstone. There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved.” Stay with how uncomfortable this is—because in a way, that’s the point.

On this Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday, we remember the dedication of this day by Saint John Paul II in honor of St. Faustina’s vision of Christ, in which the Lord’s heart radiated forth with divine mercy for the world. But what does mercy mean? It designates the suffering of the heart, a type of compassion, a deep, loving identification with people in their suffering. It is the characteristic of God, for God is love. Nothing in the world would exist if it were not, at every moment, loved into being by God—a great act of tender mercy. How is this love made manifest in us? Precisely through following God’s commands and through forgiveness.

Many people enjoy visiting the graves of famous people, from Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, IL to St. Peter in the Vatican. We feel a sense of peace and finality around graves. But the one thing we would never expect in a cemetery is action. Yet that's precisely what we find at the center of Christianity, as St. John recounts in today's Easter Gospel.

Entering Holy Week, we see numerous stirring examples of Jesus' fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies. From the direction he enters Jerusalem to his mode of transport, we find again and again how he is the one intended to reclaim the temple and prove to the world that he is indeed the son of God, chosen to save us through his revolutionary example of love and forgiveness.

Jeremiah 31:31 contains the great prophecy that the Lord will one day place his law within our hearts. In the Old Testament, God's law was written on stone and often appreciated as an imposition, a burden. But Jesus is the Law incarnate, the Torah made flesh. Therefore, when we eat his body and drink his blood, we take the law into our hearts, and thus we realize the prophecy of Jeremiah.

The Divine Love is the great theme of the Bible, but one of the mistakes we can make is to project onto God our way of being. God’s love is unconditional, not fickle and vacillating. His love is hesed, which means “tender mercy.” This love is visible, par excellence, in the Incarnation.

The Temple, for Old Testament Jews, was everything. But St. Paul, who lived for many years in Jerusalem and knew the rituals of the Temple very well, told the Corinthians that their bodies were temples of the Holy Spirit. The account of Jesus cleansing the Temple in this week’s Gospel, brought together with Paul's insight, provides us with with a wonderful Lenten meditation. Let Jesus swing that whip of cords around the Temple of your body; it’s time for a spring cleaning of the soul!

The story of the Transfiguration of Christ has beguiled the Christian mind for centuries. It is the clearest New Testament evocation of mystical experience, the experience of spiritual things within the ordinary and the keen conviction that the spiritual reality is greater and more beautiful than ordinary experience. "Mystical" means there has been contact with a Person: the person of God.

On this first Sunday of Lent, the Church asks us to meditate on animals and angels. For Christ, in his own person, joins together the disparate elements of creation, the spiritual and the material, angels and wild beasts. There are, of course, angels and wild beasts in all of us. We are all a microcosm of the ethereal and the corporeal, the spiritual and the physical.

Our Gospel this week gives us one of the great scenes of healing in the ministry of Jesus, and as is usually the case, the Gospel writer composes the scene in such a way that it becomes an icon of the spiritual life in general. In our sickness, our weakness, our shame, our sin, our oddness—lots of us feel like this leper. And once we’ve been healed by the Lord, we feel the obligation to tell the world about it. 

It is of particular importance this week that we read the first reading and the Gospel together, for the former sheds enormous light on the latter. In the first reading, Moses assures the people: "The Lord your God will raise up for you a prophet like myself." Moses received the word from God, but this new prophet would be an authority greater than Moses. He would speak with the words of God. And in the Gospel reading from Mark, this is precisely who Jesus is revealed to be: the highest prophet and the Word of God made flesh.

When Christianity is reduced to deism or moralism, we turn the Gospel into a faint echo of the surrounding culture. But today's readings propose something much more substantive than spiritual bromides or ethical directives. They suggest a new world breaking into the old. 

The story of the call of Samuel is illuminating for our time of corruption and cleansing. I argue that the sex abuse scandal in the church should be read through the lens of this narrative.

Our modern culture suggests a tension between spirituality and religion. But the Magi in today's Gospel demonstrate that when spirituality is lifted up by revelation—when the Magi are told by the religious leaders where the Messiah is to be born—we find the object of our spiritual longing.

Our modern culture suggests a tension between spirituality and religion. But the Magi in today's Gospel demonstrate that when spirituality is lifted up by revelation - when the Magi are told by the religious leaders where the Messiah is to be born - that we find the object of our spiritual longing.

The Bible is not particularly sentimental about families. What makes a family holy, as far as the biblical writers are concerned, is its willingness to surrender to the purpose of God. We see this in a number of key figures, including Joseph, Abraham, and Hannah.

The readings for this dramatic fourth Sunday of Advent put us in the heart of a deep and abiding mystery: the mystery of God’s providence. Just when we are tempted to say, “nothing makes sense,” the Bible interrupts us to say, “wait.” God works in subtle ways, and often it takes years, even centuries, for God’s plan fully to be realized.

Our second reading today is taken from Paul’s first letter to the Thessalonians—and it always takes my breath away. He says, “Rejoice always. Pray without ceasing. In all circumstances give thanks.” For Paul, the coming of Jesus changed everything. His dying and rising turned everything upside down, so that the usual ways of thinking and acting are not longer valid. Grace has transfigured nature—and the three recommendations he gives are signs of this transfiguration.

In our magnificent first reading from the prophet Isaiah, which is echoed in the words of John the Baptist in today's Gospel, a voice cries out: “Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low.” Advent is a great time for us to clear the ground, to make level the path, so as to facilitate what God, with all his heart, wants to do.  

Every time Advent rolls around, I remind people to go back to the words of that most famous of Advent hymn, “O Come, O Come, Emmanuel.” We hear, “Oh come, oh come, Emmanuel, and ransom captive Israel, that mourns in lonely exile here, until the Son of God appear.” Until we can move into the spiritual space suggested by those words, we will not catch the meaning of this season.

When Israel begins to long for a new David, the true David and true king of the world, we witness the longing for God. Jesus Christ is precisely this king: the Davidic king, and God ruling his creation. His ministry reveals the nature of his kingship, from the manger to the cross.

Your being increases in the measure that you give it away. That's the law of the gift, and it can be found from end to end of the Bible. One application of this law has to do with faith itself. Your faith will grow only in the measure that you give it away, sharing it with others.

How do we wait? That is the question addressed by Jesus' parable for today. While we wait for the second coming of the Lord, we should keep our lamps stocked with oil, that is to say, we should pray, study, love, do the works of mercy, and keep vigil. In so doing, we are ready for the arrival of the Bridegroom.

Our readings for this weekend are tough for everyone, but especially for those who are in positions of leadership in the Church. I’ve been a priest for 31 years (and now a bishop for going on three), and I will confess that the words we hear from the prophet Malachi and the Lord Jesus about the corrupt religious leadership of their time and place are deeply challenging and unnerving. Mass Readings Reading 1 - Malachi 1:14 - 2:10 Psalm - Psalm 131:1-3 Reading 2 - 1 Thessalonians 2:7-13 Gospel - Matthew 23:1-12

Today's magnificent Gospel should set the tone for your entire life. Trying to trap him, the Pharisees ask Jesus which of the commandments of the law is the greatest. His clear and simple answer is that we should direct all our love toward God, and therefore, love what he loves.

Jesus places everything in its proper relationship to God. But he also chastises those who are involved in power games. God is ultimately in charge and rules over even Caesar.

Many devout believers find the parable of the wedding feast in the Gospel of Matthew difficult to understand. The story is meant to stir us up with its exaggeration, to signal the spiritual destruction that follows from refusing the divine invitation. We are meant to see how valuable an invitation we have received and how odd it is that we would choose to reject it.

Today's readings pose a question: how are we tending the vineyard? We have received so much from God, but are we making the world fruitful? Are we responding to the Lord’s invitation with the works of justice, love, peace, chastity, respect for others? Or are we more or less killing the messengers?

Some skeptics suggest the divinity of Jesus is a myth, or a later invention of the Church, that Jesus was nothing more than an ordinary man or great teacher. But in today's text from St. Paul, an exceptionally early text traced to within a handful of years of Jesus' death, we find a clear declaration of the contrary. Jesus is described as being in the “form of God,” a staggering claim that affirms his divinity. Yet even still, he did not grasp at his godliness, but emptied himself and took the form a slave.

Today's Gospel reading is one of the most confounding. Many people struggle with this parable about the landowner and the workers, but as the old saying goes, where you stumble, that's where you should dig for treasure. The parable offers a powerful reminder to focus on the mission of God's kingdom, not who gets credit for it.

In today's brief selection from St. Paul's letter to the Romans, we learn, “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.” This affirms that your life is not about you! It’s about God and God’s purpose for you. It’s about being drawn out of your comfort zone and into the adventurous space of divine mission. 

If there is one absolute in our secular culture today it is non-judgmentalism. Some people, seeking to defend this point of view from a Biblical perspective, will point to Jesus’ famous enjoinder: “Judge not and you will not be judged.” But what should be clear is that this cannot mean that we never point out moral failures—for Jesus does that all the time. How should we navigate the ways of judgement and love? Our second reading, from Paul to the Romans, is eminently helpful here.

I’ve always loved the prophet Jeremiah, and not just as a literary/spiritual figure, but as a person. He was known as the “weeping prophet” and his nickname was “terror on every side.” Against that background, we listen to him in our reading for today and gain encouragement as we evangelize through struggle.

I want to concentrate this week on our second reading, which is a very brief passage from Paul’s magnificent letter to the Romans. It comes at the end of chapter eleven, which completes the Apostle’s consideration of Israel in relation to the Church. How do we make sense of the ancient Jewish tradition in light of the resurrection? How do we understand gentiles coming to the faith when salvation was supposed to be through the Jews, many of whom were rejecting the Christian faith? Looking into these questions, we learn about the inscrutability of God.

Christians have said for centuries that everything is a grace, that no one deserves anything, and therefore we should never complain about inequities. How can this be fair that some people are clearly chosen by God while others are not? Well, with this dilemma in mind, let’s look at our first reading and our Gospel for today. These passages reveal that Israel is named a chosen people not for their own sake but for the sake of the whole world. The key to understanding grace is that it is given to be given away.

Elijah is a contemplative who has the eyes to see and the ears to listen. God does not appear in the glory of the world. Rather, he appears in a silent way. Weed out of your heart all of those fears and desires that prevent you from discerning the silent presence of God.

The Transfiguration signals the purpose of religion. The first thing we notice is that Jesus' appearance becomes more beautiful. Second, in his transfigured state, Jesus transcends space and time. Contemporary culture attempts to reduce all religion to ethics, but in Jesus' transfiguration we see that the final purpose of our religious devotion is not that we become just nice people, but rather we become transfigured as sons and daughters of God.

Our second reading for this weekend is taken from the end of the eighth chapter of Paul’s magnificent letter to the Romans. In this great book of the Bible, we learn that in Christ, God has disclosed his providential plan whereby he intends to reconcile all things to himself. I don’t know about you, but those words always give me comfort and peace. 

The Gospel for this Sunday is taken from the 13th Chapter of the Gospel of Matthew and it features three marvelous parables of Jesus. How rich are these parables! How inexhaustible in meaning! Take some time to read and contemplate these parables in light of your own suffering and faith as we seek together the Kingdom of God.  

God sows his Word into each of our hearts liberally. He does not solely give his grace to those he knows will bear fruit. He sows the Word in everyone, but it doesn't flourish for each person due to circumstances (secularism, anxiety, the allurement of the world), but strive to counter that by letting the Word open you to the implications of his Lordship. God is always giving himself to you, listen and act.

What is it like to have Christ for a king? All three of this Sunday's readings examine this very question in some way. The answer is to submit to his kingship and accept his yoke upon your shoulders to make your life an offering to his plan.

In our second reading for this week, St. Paul reminds the Christian community in Rome that baptism means an immersion into the dying of the Lord. In his first letter to the Corinthians, he had similarly told his followers that every eucharist is a participation in the dying of Christ. Why this preoccupation with death? Because it is only through this journey into Christ's death and resurrection that we can effectively conquer the fear of death, which tends to cramp us spiritually. Once we have died witih Jesus, we can walk "in newness of life."

As we return to the regular cycle of readings in Ordinary Time, we meet with a bracing spiritual teaching from the Lord Jesus. No matter who is threatening you, who is thundering denunciation, who is coming at you with furious intensity: don’t be afraid! Why? Because in Jesus Christ, you are connected to the very power of God, to that which is here and now creating the universe.

This Sunday the Church celebrates the Solemnity of the Body and Blood of Christ, Corpus Christi in Latin. This feast displays the distinctiveness of Christian religion amongst all the other religions, philosophies, and world views. No other group of people is called upon to eat the flesh and drink the blood of the person they admire. Christianity is the strangest way precisely because we are given this distinct access into the Divine Life.

On Trinity Sunday we contemplate the mystery of God as a play of persons. The Father gives rise to the Son while the Father and Son give rise to the Holy Spirit. God's unity is never compromised because the three are consubstantial, one in being. To begin to consider this mystery we must consider that love is what God is.

If you want the Holy Spirit, you have to declare the Lordship of Jesus. Love is precisely what the Holy Spirit is. Do you want life? Do you want meaning, purpose, the satisfaction of your deepest longing? Then be close to Jesus as he breathes out love. You will have what your heart is searching for. 

This Sunday we celebrate the Ascension of the Lord, perhaps one of the most misunderstood elements within the Christian narrative. The Ascension does not mean Jesus goes "up, up, and away" as if his presence leaves earth, but rather that he assumes the throne of heaven so as to direct matters here on earth.

This Easter season, the Church has asked us to meditate on the Acts of the Apostles. Today Jesus tells us to wait for the coming of the Spirit, which will descend upon them and empower them in their work. It is up to Christians today to continue the work of the apostles and spread the mission of Christ.

Our Gospel for this weekend is taken from the 14th chapter of the Gospel of John, which describes the farewell discourse of Jesus the night of the Last Supper. I believe that the distinctive texture of Christian faith is on particularly powerful display here. I might urge all of you to spend time with this farewell discourse during the Easter season.

Our first reading for this weekend, taken from the second chapter of Acts, conveys one of Peter’s great sermons. If we listen attentively, we can learn a lot about good preaching, but also a lot about the nature of Christianity.

Like the two disciples walking towards Emmaus, a symbol of worldly power and security, and away from Jerusalem, the center of sacrifice, we need to be stopped in our tracks. Christ appears to them, but they do not recognize him. They do not recognize him because they are walking the wrong way. The recognition of the pattern of Christ’s life does come until the Eucharistic act which presents the pattern of sacrificial love. Then they immediately go back to Jerusalem, the place of suffering love.

Jesus has come to bring us the divine life. Under his influence we become peaceful, unafraid, evangelizing, and forgiving. Through the Church, saints are made. This is because Christ is at the very center of the Church.

Our Gospel story for this weekend is the narrative of the man born blind. In the Bible generally and in John particularly, sight is used as a metaphor for spiritual vision or faith. Therefore, the man born blind is every one of us, born in the state of original sin. The Church, through the sacraments, offers us the salve of Christ's Incarnation so we might be converted, healed, baptized, and attending Mass in right praise.

This Sunday we have the great privilege of hearing the story of the woman at the well, the definitive text on Christian evangelization. Take the time this week for a prayerful reading of this story and notice that as this woman seeks, she's already been found! If only we would surrender to the God who is already always pursuing us! Then, we might realize how the Everlasting Lord is the only one who can quench the otherwise unquenchable thirst of our hearts. Make the effort this Lent to clear a path and set down your old buckets so that the water of Christ's divine life can flow through you.

Our magnificent first reading is a short passage from the beginning of the twelfth chapter of the book of Genesis. We see that at this point in the creation story jealousy, rivalry, anger, murder, imperialism, arrogance, drunkenness, indeed a wickedness has spread over the entire face of the earth. So what does God do? He sends a rescue operation! The rescue operation is going to come in the form of a people trained to listen again to the voice of the Lord. During this season of Lent we must also become a people trained to listen so as to be rescued by the Resurrection.

Our Gospel for the first Sunday of Lent covers the three "shortcuts" the Devil offered Jesus to lure him away from his central mission of the cross. The Devil chose these temptations because he knew that Jesus would not be primarily a social reformer, or a wonder-worker, or a political operator. He would be the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world. Knowing who Jesus is and what he is about is indispensable as we commence the Lenten season.  

"Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the rest will be given to you." Make God the center of your life, and you will be spiritually ordered in Christ's image. If you make wealth and security your center, you will be empty. You make the choice: will God be your center?

Each one of this week's readings speaks of holiness, letting the Divine Life enter into you so that you become set apart. To be holy is to love with a divine indifference, shining on the good and the bad alike. What a revolution this is! Think how different your life would be were you to love this way all the time, rather than measuring out your love based on merit. Dedicate your whole life to love and you will be truly holy, set apart, a sanctuary.  

What a privilege we have in this week's readings to hear from the book of Sirach, composed by an ancient sage who was deeply immersed in the Torah, the law, and the rituals of the Temple. As such, he delivers one of the deepest truths of the spiritual life: God so respects our freedom, that he will allow us to experience life or death, good or evil. He will give us what we choose and, more to it, we will become what we choose. Each day, every moment, choose the path of love, and you will become the kind of person fit to live in heaven.

At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compares his disciples to salt, light, and a city set on a hill. All these things exist not for themselves, but for something else. In the same way, Christians are meant to make the world a better place. The Christian responsibility is to affect the culture as salt, light, and a city on a hill.

As we look into the famous “Beatitudes” described in this weeks Gospel, we learn that the Divine Mercy is the path to true joy. The more we allow the Divine Mercy to flow through us the more it grows in us. Once we eliminate the idolatrous rivals of wealth, pleasure, power, and honor and make Christ the priority in our lives we begin to live like saints.

This week's reading from the prophet Isaiah emphasizes God's tendency to bring the best from the worst situations, light from the darkness. Throughout the Bible we see wonderful things come from the most unexpected places, and this is reflected in our own lives as well. Often our greatest goodness can come from the darkest places of our beings.

There are three words that jump out at me from our Gospel reading for today's feast: "haste," "astonished" and "treasured." Each one says something important about the spiritual life. When we know what God wants for us, we should act without hesitation; we should "go in haste." When God breaks into our natural world, we should be astonished. And then, like Mary, we should learn to treasure God's revelation in our minds and hearts.

Our Gospel for Christmas day is, of course, one of the most famous texts in the entire Bible: the Prologue to the Gospel of John. In many ways, it is the entire Gospel, indeed the entire Bible, in miniature. This scripture alludes to a feast day called "Christmas", a name that has rarely been reflected upon, at least in my lifetime. The day is Christmas, because it signals Christ’s Mass. The only fitting way to celebrate is to go to the Mass!

As the Advent season comes to its climax, we are reminded that all of time and history comes to a kind of fulfillment in the Messiah. All of the strands of history are gathered together in him. To use the language of St. Paul, all of space and time is recapitulated in Christ. This Sunday our three readings show a pattern in history that spans seven centuries and calls out to us now two thousand years later: It's all about Jesus.

Our Gospel for this weekend is taken from the eleventh chapter of the Gospel of Matthew, where John the Baptist has been arrested and wonders from his jail cell whether Jesus “is the one or should we look for another?" When this inquiry is conveyed to Jesus, the Lord does not respond theoretically, but rather by pointing to things that are happening, namely, God's grace is making people whole again. “Go tell John what you see and hear".

This week's readings take us to chapter 11 of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah looks back to the garden of Eden and the world in right alignment with God, and then looks forward to the Messiah who will set right what has gone wrong in God's world. Sin interrupts right order, justice, and goodness. The righteous king will restore justice when he rules on his holy mountain. Mass Readings Reading 1 - Isaiah 11:1-10 Psalm - Psalms 72:1-17 Reading 2 - Romans 15:4-19 Gospel - Matthew 3:1-12

This week we enter into the great season of Advent. Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah describes how every nation streams towards God's holy mountain. As you enter the Advent season, think about this holy mountain. Is the mountain of the Lord higher than every other mountain for you? Do you stream toward it with your whole being?

We celebrate, as the very last Sunday of the liturgical year, the Solemnity of Christ the King. Think perhaps of the way that a king would come last in a great formal procession: so this feast comes as the culminating moment of the Church year.What I should like to do in this sermon is to explore three dimensions of Christ’s kingship, one inspired by each of our three readings for today so that we might marvel at the sublimity of what a strange and surprising king he is.

In Luke's Gospel we read the story of Jesus and Zacchaeus. Zacchaeus, as chief tax collector, was considered a very bad man in first century Israel, but Christ greets him with love. It is the love of God that causes everything to be, and comes before everything we do. God does not love us because we do good; we do good because God loves us.

The entire point of religion is to make us humble before God and to open us to the path of love. Everything else is more or less a footnote. Liturgy, prayer, the precepts of the Church, the commandments, sacraments, sacramental—all of it—are finally meant to conform us to the way of love. When they instead turn us away from that path by devolving into a source of pride and pomposity, they have been undermined. Jesus' famous parable about the prayers of the pharisee and the tax collector from this Sunday's readings illustrates precisely this danger of coopting religion for the purposes of our ego.

Our first reading from the book of Exodus is illuminating at so many levels. On the surface, this is a report of an ancient war, more of a tribal dispute really, between two minor peoples. But read with a sensitivity to the multivalence of the Biblical text, this report clues us in to the spiritual warfare that always obtains in a fallen world. We should expect a battle when we walk the path of Christ.

Something I’ve found over the years is that people use the word “Gospel” to mean all sorts of different things. People say, “I’m committed to the Gospel.” “I want preach the Gospel.” “I want to live according to the Gospel.” But what precisely do people mean when they say these things? The word literally means “good news.” But what good news? We have a wonderful text for our first reading today from Paul’s second letter to his disciple and friend Timothy. One of the many things that makes it wonderful is that it contains a very pithy summation of what St. Paul meant by the word “Gospel.” When we unpack this summation, we hold the key to transforming the world.

This Sunday's readings compel us to meditate on the meaning of faith. Paul Tillich, the 20th century theologian, said, "Faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary". Faith is an attitude of trust in the presence of God, which is simple enough to say, yet to live by faith means to surrender your entire life over to God, abandoning your own desires and becoming a servant under the realization that everything you have (including your very existence) is a grace, a gift. As we see in the lives of the saints, amazing things happen when we make this transformation; indeed, that which begins with a mustard seed of faith can grow, by the grace of God, to bless the whole world.

Friends, I have spent the past 12 days in Rome for “baby Bishop school”, and just returned today. As such, I asked my Word on Fire team to reach into our archives for this week’s sermon. I’ll be working on new sermons, articles, and video commentaries in the days and weeks ahead. But in the meantime, I hope that this archived sermon will help you to understand and personally appropriate the Scriptures for this Sunday, which remind us that we cannot remain indifferent to the poor, whom the Lord has determined to be a privileged route of access to his life and presence.

Most of us spur into action when we believe that our financial state is in dire straits. Why don't we act in the same way in regards to our spiritual state? Today people need the same spiritual concern that people had in the past. They need to want to establish a relationship with God, that which is of paramount importance. So wake up, and place God at the center of your life!

This week's Gospel contains one of the greatest challenges Jesus ever offered to his disciples: "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Here Christ is emphasizing the great spiritual principle of detachment. In order to live healthy spiritual lives we must love Christ most of all, with everything else finding its meaning in relation to God.

This week's readings focus on the importance of humility. Humility is the foundation for the whole of spirituality. In order to truly pursue truth and goodness, it is necessary to let go of the ego and realize that everything we have and are is a gift from God.

To gain eternal life is to participate to the fullest degree possible in the very life of God. It is to walk the path of love, surrendering to grace and allowing this grace to flow through you to the wider world. Is this an easy task? No. The Gospel of Luke tells reminds us that the gate is narrow precisely because it is in the very shape of Jesus Himself, and entrance through the gate involves conformity to his state of being. The path of love is traveled by taking up one's cross every day.

God cannot be analyzed scientifically the way one would study the things of the world, but God can be approached through religious reasoning, or Faith. Faith is often criticized as unintelligent tomfoolery. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Catholic tradition reveals that Faith is a rational reaction to God in the religious person. It is the reasoning of the religious mind.

The readings for this weekend have a tremendous cohesiveness. They all speak to a truth about our world that is hard to take in, that has to be repeated to each generation afresh, a truth that many older people have an easier time understanding than young people: nothing in this world lasts. 

The Our Father, the Lord’s Prayer, is a request for Christ. As we examine this most famous prayer line by line, we see it's all about Jesus. That He might come and have communion with us is precisely what we hope for when we cry out to "our Abba who art in heaven."  

Although the little story of Martha and Mary has been interpreted throughout the centuries as a parable dealing with the “active” and “contemplative” approach to the spiritual life, it can be read as Christ's invitation to all people to partake in his inner circle of discipleship. Christ overturned the social conventions of his time by summoning all people to discipleship. Thus, we must remove all barriers to discipleship for all people.  

During the twentieth century, moral relativism was in vogue in elite cultural circles, but now it is the dominant moral outlook of the broader culture. Against this, C.S. Lewis argued for “the universality and inescapability of the moral law.” Although there are subtle moral differences between cultures, if we look close enough, we can discern fundamental moral agreements. The Catholic tradition says that this moral bedrock is a reflection of the Eternal Law in the mind of God. It is the voice of God within us. Listen to that voice. Mass Readings Reading 1 - Deuteronomy 30:10-14 Psalm - Psalm 69:14-37 Reading 2 - Collosians 1:15-20 Gospel - Luke 10:25-37  

St. Paul tells us in our second reading that he boasts in the cross of Jesus. To any of his hearers in the first century this would have sounded like madness. Paul can boast in this shameful thing precisely because God has raised Jesus from death and thereby placed the world-the realm of hatred, violence, and division-under judgment. Now we must have the courage to leave the world and enter into the new creation which is the body of Christ. Mass Readings Reading 1 - Proverbs 8:22-31 Psalm - Psalm 8:4-9 Reading 2 - Romans 5:1-5 Gospel - John 16:12-15

In the Gospel for this Sunday, Jesus clarifies that all worldly goods find their value in relation to Him.  If we believe Jesus is the only Son of God, we must place our grudges, personal desires, and even our most sacred worldly obligations aside in order to walk truly and completely with Him.

Today's Gospel presents Luke's version of the famous conversation that the Lord Jesus had with his disciples concerning his identity and mission. Authentic acceptance of Christ's identity and mission engenders in us a willingness to accept in our own lives the necessity and saving power of the cross.

In today's first reading from 2 Samuel we learn about God's dealings with David, the Israelite king who put himself on a path of sin that culminated in adultery and murder. David is forgiven but also cleansed, purified, and brought back to obedience to God precisely through the suffering unleashed by this double-sin. From David we learn how God's grace is always available, but it is never cheap.

In today's Gospel we learn about Jesus’ raising of the son of the widow of Nain. This is a prime exemplification of a key Gospel truth, namely, that everything Jesus said and did, in one way or another, is an anticipation of his resurrection.

The Church comes from the Eucharist for it is the sacrifice that makes saints. The Eucharist is essentially the fullest act of gratitude prefigured in Melchizedek finding its fulfillment in the sacrifice of Christ. Every Mass is a participation in and celebration of this sacrifice, but the feast of Corpus Christi is a time to be especially aware of the gift of the Eucharist.

Today the Church celebrates the Solemnity of The Most Holy Trinity. The Nicene Creed articulates the mystery of the Trinity with the wonderful phrase "begotten not made," meaning that the Son is not a creature but rather shares in the selfsame nature as the Father. The Holy Spirit is then the life-giving love breathed out between the Father and the Son.

Today we celebrate the great feast of Pentecost, one of the truly great moments in the life of the Church. The Holy Spirit comes to give many spiritual gifts, which prepare us to enter into relationship with Christ and embark on mission.

Too often we read the Ascension as the moment when Jesus “went away,” when he left us on our own and went off to heaven, where we hope some day to join him. But the Ascension is not Jesus going away; it is Jesus assuming his position as leader of the Church’s life.

The Church Catholic is a living thing; an organism rather than an organization. Therefore, it is continually moving, changing, adapting, reacting, answering new questions, and responding to new challenges. That's what we see in today's readings at Mass, which show us the Church in action in its very earliest days, not by itseld but in conjunction with the Holy Spirit.

Throughout the Easter season, we’ve had the privilege of reading from the book of Revelation, the final book of the Bible, the place where the entire Scriptural revelation comes to its climax. Our passage for this Sunday is taken from the 21st chapter, the penultimate chapter of the book. Hence, it is, if you will, the ringing finale of the entire Bible, the terminus ad quem of all of Scripture.

One of the most enduring and endearing images of Jesus is that of the good shepherd who guides and lays down his life for his sheep. We cannot be indifferent in regard to him. We have to give our whole selves to him, without compromise or hesitation. Once we hear his voice, we have to drop everything and follow.

The passage from the Acts of the Apostles, which is our first reading for this weekend, is surprisingly instructive for our time in the life of the Church. It witnesses to something that is essential to Christianity, namely, that we are a relentlessly public religion. This is not a privatized religion we’re talking about. This is a faith and a kingdom meant for everyone on earth.

Our wonderful readings for the second Sunday of Easter speak to us of three apostle, who were three pillars of the Church: Peter, John, and Thomas. Each one functions as an archetype for an essential feature of the life of the Church, and each are needed to balance and complete each other.

The resurrection of Jesus from the dead is the foundation of the entire Christian faith. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, we should all go home and forget about it. As St. Paul himself puts it: “If Jesus is not raised from the dead, our preaching is in vain and we are the most pitiable of men.” But Jesus was, in fact, raised from the dead. And his resurrection shows that Christ can gather back to the Father everyone whom he has embraced through his suffering love.

In our Gospel reading for the Palm Sunday procession, Jesus sends his disciples into Jerusalem to prepare for his triumphal entry. They are told to untether a donkey, and if there is any protest from the owner, they are to say simply, “The Master has need of it.” Strictly speaking, God has need of nothing, since he is the unconditioned act of existence. God doesn’t need our praise or our good works or anything. But this phrase signals the wonderful truth that God allows us to cooperate with his grace so that we can participate in the work that he wants to do. He gives us what Aquinas called “the dignity of causality.” We are privileged to be instruments in his hands.

In this week's Gospel, we hear the story of the woman caught in adultery, a tale that has beguiled Christians and non-Christians for two millennia. The story displays our constant temptation to use knowledge of God’s law to hurt others, not to liberate them. We gossip, we scapegoat, we blame—and we convince ourselves that we’re just following the divine law in pointing out other people’s problems. But then enters Jesus, who affirms that the law's primary purpose is to make us humble, to draw us to higher attainment. Without denigrating the law in the least, Jesus reaches out in mercy in order to brings sinners back to life.

Today we hear the greatest of Jesus' parable, indeed what many people call the greatest story ever told: the Parable of the Prodigal Son. Even after hearing it 1,000 times, it continues to beguile us and draw us in. What's the main spiritual lesson? We're meant to receive the divine life as a gift, but then give it back.

Our first reading for this Sunday presents us with one of the most famous and commented upon texts in the entire Bible, in which God appears in a burning bush, a bush on fire but not consumed. God is present to it in the most powerful way, but nothing of the bush has to give in order for God to work with it and through it. When the true God comes close, things are not destroyed; in fact, they become radiant and beautiful.

The readings for this second Sunday of Lent awaken a sense of wonder, of a world beyond ours, a mystical consciousness. In the first reading with Abraham and in the Gospel account of the Transfiguration, we encounter mountains, darkness, voices, and dazzling light, all of which signal the breakthrough of a higher world.

Lent is a time of paring down — a time spent in the desert, if you will — as exemplified by Jesus' 40 days of fasting in these arid, barren lands. He was tempted three times by Satan, and rejected each attempt, giving glory to God at every turn. This is the lesson for us, that we make God the center of our lives and not test him. We are here to do his will, which is clarified through our own Lenten sacrifices.

This week's reading from the Gospel of Luke shows us that our encounter with Christ is an invasion of grace and that we must be ready to welcome that grace and go out into the depths, and ascend to the heights, at its calling.

This week's reading from the book of Nehemiah provides a reflection on the importance of keeping firm our religious identity and finding strength in our religious identity so we can go out into the world with confidence and grace. By keeping our strength in God we can go out into the world and Christify it.

This week’s reading from the book of Nehemiah provides a reflection on the importance of keeping firm our religious identity, and finding strength in that identity, so we can go out into the world with confidence and grace. By keeping our strength in God, we can go out into the world and Christify it.

The communion of humanity and divinity in Christ's divine person can be likened to a marriage. Sin effects a kind of divorce between God and humanity, a break up of the marriage of God and his people. How wonderful, therefore, when the Messiah offers the first sign of his identity and mission that it as at wedding. This is an indication that the relationship of God and humanity will be transformed, reconciled and renewed in Jesus Christ.

The first Sacrament one can receive in the Church, Baptism, defines our relationship with Christ. In it, we are reborn as part of his mystical body, and are gifted the grace of God's love. Baptism lays the foundation for every other Sacrament we are to receive, and inextricably links us with the Trinity.

Lots of people today will tell you what makes a family well-adjusted, functional, and peaceful. But in today's readings for the Feast of the Holy Family, which center on two exemplary women, Hannah and Mary, the Church wants to tell us what makes a family holy.

In today's readings we see the Theo-drama, the great story being told by God, confronting the ego-drama, which is the self-centered play we attempt to write, produce, direct, and star in ourselves. What makes life thrilling is to discover our role in the Theo-drama. This is precisely what has happened to Mary. She found her role—indeed a climactic role—in the Theo-drama, just as King David had several centuries before.

Our Gospel for this third Sunday of Advent is of extraordinary importance, for it speaks to us of the transformation, the transfiguration of the self, which is unique to Christianity. To be baptized in the Holy Spirit is to be immersed in the ocean of the divine love. When we are dipped into this reality, we become capable of something that neither Aristotle nor Plato nor the Founding Fathers nor the prophets themselves dreamed possible: we can love with the very love of God.

Christianity is not a mythic system. It is an historical religion that makes very concrete historical claims, and the first Christians were intensely interested in the historicity of what they were describing and preaching about. We see an example of this in St. Luke's Gospel today. The evangelist tell us that something actually happened in history, something so strange, unexpected, and rare that it changed everything.

Our Gospel for this first Sunday of Advent begins where the readings for the end of last liturgical year left off, namely, with apocalyptic musings. We're encouraged to look for the Son of Man, coming on the clouds of heaven, which signals the end of the world as we know it. But the Son of man is coming on the clouds of heaven even now in the life of the Church. Even now the true king, the successor of David, is in our midst. But we need eyes trained by the liturgy to see him.

The liturgical year ends with the feast of Christ the King. This day reminds us what the Christian thing is all about: that Jesus really is the king, the Lord of our lives; that we belong utterly to him; and that we can say, with St. Paul, “It is no longer I who live but Christ who lives in me.”

Our first reading for this weekend is from the utterly fascinating book of Daniel. Daniel is an example of apocalyptic literature, and apocalyptic books reveal something of decisive significance. We see that significance when Jesus comes preaching the kingdom of God, by which he was taken to be announcing the fulfillment of the Daniel prophecy. This is the apocalypse, the great unveiling: a new kingdom has come, a dominion that will last forever.

Today’s Scriptures highlight two widows and two very important biblical principles: God reveals himself precisely at that moment of our greatest vulnerability and need, and the grace in your life will increase in the measure that you give it away.

The story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, a section of which is our first reading for this weekend, is a narrative that just keeps generating spiritual significance, the longer you think about it and study it. Two desperate people confront one another, and each is called upon to make an act of faith. In the practically impossible act of double trust that follows, both are benefitted, and they both exemplify the law of the gift: your being increases in the measure that you give it away.

One problem with our great feast day today is that it can make sanctity seem like something that is the special preserve of a handful of spiritual heroes—and not the ordinary goal of the Christian life. But the whole purpose of the Church—priesthood, the Mass, the sacraments, good preaching, the corporal and spiritual works of mercy—is to make saints. There is only one real sadness in life: not to be a saint. Don’t miss the opportunity.

The story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus is a spiritual icon of enormous power. Bartimaeus is evocative of anyone who, aware of his sin, blindness, and incapacity, hears the summons of Jesus to come into the Church, the place where vision will be restored.

When the ego grabs power and honor for itself, things get dangerous and dysfunctional very quickly. The ego will want to use power, not for God’s purposes, but for its own exaltation & defense. In today’s gospel reading, Jesus confronts a misguided desire for power within both James and John so as to direct them to real spiritual power, which offers them — and us — the greatest freedom.

In today's Gospel we hear the story of the rich young man who desires eternal life. We all have a hunger for God and goodness. Jesus teaches us that, in order to attain friendship with God we must be disciplined and must give up the things that keep us from satisfying our desire for God.

This week's readings offer a reflection on human sexuality, love and marriage. These readings show us that sexuality is a good, joyful thing when it is ordered towards, and transfigured by, love.

Our first reading from the Book of Numbers and the Gospel reading from Mark both highlight a very interesting spiritual predicament, one that is presented numerous times throughout the Bible. It might be summed up as the inclination for members of the Church to subvert the mission of the Church because of their own ego driven desires and pre-occupations.

One of the most important doctrines of the Church is the doctrine of original sin, which asserts that something it off with us. We see the effects of it everywhere, and we also see many attempts to solve the problem of sin on our own. The only way to be healed, however, is to give ourselves over to Jesus, like the little child in today’s Gospel reading.

Today's second reading from the letter of James discusses the relationship between faith and love. We need a strong faith, but faith without love is lifeless so we must respond to grace and faith with acts of love.

In this week's Gospel, Jesus heals a man who is deaf and dumb. When we read this account at the spiritual level, we see that he cures those who are deaf to the Word of God and hence unable to speak it clearly. How relevant this message is to our own time!

All of today's readings pertain to law. We Americans are a fairly litigious society. Lawyers are thick on the ground and many of our Founding Fathers were students of law. We have a kind of love-hate relationship with the law, like most people in history. Today's readings offer a key lesson: whenever we reverence something, we surround it with laws. Laws protect the integrity of good things. And for the saints, the law of God is planted within their hearts.

In today's Gospel, we see Jesus' followers reacting to his shocking teaching about eating his flesh and drinking his blood by saying, "This is a hard saying; who can accept it?" To understand Jesus' meaning, we must understand that he's not using symbolic or metaphorical language. He's speaking words of "Spirit and life" which bring into being precisely what they signal.

Today's first reading personifies Wisdom as a woman who invites people to a feast, lavishly offering food and wine. In today's Psalm, we echo that invitation: "Taste and see the goodness of the Lord." But to join the banquet of the Lord, we need to turn away from other food. We spend our whole lives eating from troughs that never satisfy our hunger - wealth, power, pleasure, honor. But in John 6, which is today's Gospel, Jesus invites us to feed on himself, Wisdom incarnate, the only food that will ultimately fulfill our hunger. Mass Readings Reading 1 - Proverbs 9:1-6 Psalm - Psalm 34:2-7 Reading 2 - Ephesians 5:15-20 Gospel - John 6:51-58

In our first reading today, Elijah is dejected and requests that the Lord take his life. But an angel touches him and orders him to get up and eat. Strengthened by food, he journeys to the mountain of God, Horeb. We're all acquainted with the need for physical food, like Elijah, but we also need spiritual food. If we don't feed our souls, we will become spiritually lethargic and unhealthy. Where do we find that nourishment? The answer comes in John 6, our Gospel reading for today.

This week, the Church’s Gospel is again taken from the sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. The principle concern of this Gospel is to provide testimony to the enduring presence of Christ in the Eucharist—a presence which is the fulfillment of the ancient temple of Israel. The ark of the covenant contained the law of God and the manna from heaven, and was surrounded by the mysterious “showbread” or “bread of the presence.” Now, in the true tabernacles found in our churches, we find the living law, the true manna, and the definitive bread of the presence.

The sixth chapter of John's Gospel, from which we will be reading these next several weeks, is a sustained meditation on the meaning of the Mass and the Eucharist. Our passage for today, when read symbolically, illumines the major movements of the Mass.

In today's first reading, God announces that he himself will shepherd his people. Yet a few sentences later, he suggests that he will raise up a righteous human king to reign and govern wisely. So which is it—will God become king or will he establish a human king? The answer, which the Gospel reading unfolds, is both. In the person of Jesus, the divine shepherd, the scattered people of God find their way home.

For many people in the West, liberty seems to trump everything. We avatars of the egodrama, we worshippers at the altar of freedom, say that our choice is supreme. We don't want anyone to constrain our pursuit of money, success, power, influence, safety, or physical health. But what matters in the end is not to place our wills in the position of ultimate concern. Everything in nature, history, science, and our careers is, in the end, summed up in Christ.

This week's Scriptures illuminate the identity and mission of a prophet—a calling that belongs to all the baptized by virtue of our Baptism. God appoints the prophets to a specific mission. This mission is to speak God's word of truth. God's word of truth is not a private or personal opinion, but the Word of God communicated through human words. The prophet speaks God's word of truth to those within and those outside the Church. Prophets do not seek to proclaim a message that is easy to be accepted, but seek to speak God's word of truth, no matter how hard it might be to hear and accept. Christ is the paradigmatic example of the identity and mission of the prophet.

The Book of Wisdom offers us the strange assertion that God did not make death, but formed humanity to be imperishable. This revelation directs us towards the truth that death is much more than merely the dissolution of the body, but is the full impact of the power of sin over our lives. This power is especially evident in our fear of death. The dormition of the Mother of God offers us a sign that Christ has given to humanity a way, that takes us, not only beyond our fear of death, but beyond death itself. The way of Christ enables us to face the power of death with trust, rather than fear.

The story of Jesus calming the storm at sea is an archetypal description of the church down through the ages. We find ourselves in the midst of storms, but as long as Christ sails with us, we can find peace.

Sometimes God does things we can't understand. This is where our need to walk by faith and not by sight comes in play. We trust in God's purpose, and his purpose often manifests itself in the least likely of sources-the mustard seed, for example. A young man on a cross, dying alone and mocked, was the mustard seed out of which a global religion, one billion strong, grew. This is the story of so many other influential Christians, such as Francis of Assisi, Charles Lwanga and Mother Teresa. They could have been easily overlooked, forgotten, ignored, but instead they sprouted into among the most revered in our history. This is a lesson of not giving up. It's a lesson of walking by faith, and not by sight.

It's often joked that Trinity Sunday is "the preacher's nightmare." But while the Trinity can be viewed as the most arcane and inaccessible Christian doctrine, it's also the most ordinary and obvious. Every Catholic invokes the Trinity whenever he crosses himself in the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Moreover, every single baptized person has been baptized in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Through baptism we've been sealed by the Trinity, brought within its dynamic, and sent out on mission.

Today's readings recount the unforgettable events of Pentecost. Language is our primary mode of communication. How wonderful, therefore, that the principle gift of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost is tongues - speech, language - enabling the first disciples to establish heart-to-heart communication with the peoples of the world. The Holy Spirit himself is nothing but communication for the Spirit is nothing other than the love that connects the Father and the Son. When the disciples, filled with Holy Spirit, go out to communicate on Pentecost, they effectively unite the world by gathering what sin has scattered.

We tend to read the Ascension along enlightenment lines, as if Christ has gone to a distant, irrelevant place. The reality point is this: Jesus, in ascending into heaven, has not gone "up, up, and away." Rather, he has gone to heaven to direct operations more fully here on earth. Jesus has not abandoned earth, but rather, he intends to return in order to bring about the full reconciliation of heaven and earth. In the mean time, he has commissioned his follows to begin that work now... within the Church.

Today's Gospel present the distinction between a generic spirituality which emphasizes our decision for God, and authentic Christian Faith, which is the recognition that God has chosen us in Christ. It is God's choice, his election of us in Christ, as not only his followers, but his friends, that matters most.

'I am the Vine, and you are the branches.' Jesus is not simply an inspiring teacher to whom we listen. He is a force in which we participate, a body in which we are cells and molecules, a river in which we swim. There is an organic relationship between Jesus and his creation. That is why Jesus can make the startling statements that he makes in today's Gospel. Our existence, our life, our thought – all of this comes from the Logos, and apart from Him, we can bear no fruit.

Jesus sums up a long Biblical tradition when he says 'I am the good shepherd.' The prophets and the psalmist had yearned for a time when God himself would come to shepherd his people Israel. This yearning is realized in Jesus himself. What makes him good? The Gospel for today specifies two things: his willingness to lay down his life for his sheep, and the fact that he knows his sheep personally, recognizing their voices.

Authentic Christianity does not present Jesus as a ghost, an abstraction, or a disembodied soul. It presents him as risen from the dead, glorified and resurrected at every level. This good news of Easter was strange and unnerving 2,000 years ago and remains so today.

On this Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday, we remember the dedication of this day by Saint John Paul II in honor of St. Faustina’s vision of Christ, in which the Lord’s heart radiated forth with divine mercy for the world. But what does mercy mean? It designates the suffering of the heart, a type of compassion, a deep, loving identification with people in their suffering. It is the characteristic of God, for God is love. Nothing in the world would exist if it were not, at every moment, loved into being by God—a great act of tender mercy. How is this love made manifest in us? Precisely through following God’s commands and through forgiveness. 

Many people enjoy visiting the graves of famous people, from Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, IL to St. Peter in the Vatican. We feel a sense of peace and finality around graves. But the one thing we would never expect in a cemetery is action. Yet that's precisely what we find at the center of Christianity, as St. John recounts in today's Easter Gospel.

The Gospels are passion narratives with long introductions, dominated by Jesus' death and resurrection. On this Palm Sunday, as we near the climax of the Lenten season, we should examine four odd details in St. Mark's account of the Passion of Christ.

The best way to understand the history of salvation is to understand it as the story of covenants between God and his people. In the Old Testament, covenants are typically sealed in blood and sacrifice. In today's first reading, Jeremiah prophesies a new covenant forged by the shedding of blood— Christ's blood on the Christ— which makes the whole world into the New Israel. Through the blood of that covenant, we share in the Divine Life.

The Divine Love is the great theme of the Bible. One of the great mistakes we can make is to project onto God our way of being and our subjectivity. God's love is unconditional, not fickle and vacillating. His love is "hesed," which means "tender mercy." This love is visible, par excellence, in the Incarnation.

Although most of our parents's generation knew the Ten Commandments by heart, few Christians today can recite them. The liturgy today invites us to refocus on these timeless commands, which provide a path to a flourishing moral life.

The story of the Transfiguration of Christ has beguiled the Christian mind for centuries. It is the clearest New Testament evocation of mystical experience, the experience of spiritual things within the ordinary and the keen conviction that the spiritual reality is greater and more beautiful than ordinary experience. "Mystical" means there has been contact with a Person, the person of God.

As Lent commences, the pews will be filled with people escaping the chaos of the modern world and finding a place of peace and order within the ship-like safety of the Church. In today's readings, we hear the peculiar story of Noah in the book of Genesis, which correlates with the Mass. We find in the ark a remnant of God's right order as he remakes the world through the purifying waters of the flood. We, too, are called to preserve the life of the world within the symbolic "ark" of the Church, but only to let that life out for the good of the World.

The strange and unsettling Gospel account of the leper approaching Jesus is the manifestation of the deeply held notions of purity and impurity, notions that were uprooted by the God who entered into every part of our human condition to heal it and make it whole. In the Gospel and today, healing incites a mission. We, like the leper, must share how the encounter with Christ has changed our lives.

Why would an all-powerful and all-loving God allow his people to suffer so much? That's one of the oldest and most difficult theological questions. Our first reading from Job and our Gospel from Mark provide some fascinating answers.

When Christianity is reduced to deism or moralism, we turn the Gospel into a faint echo of the surrounding culture. But today's readings propose something much more substantive than spiritual bromides or ethical directives. They suggest a new world breaking into the old.

The story of the call of Samuel is illuminating for our time of corruption and cleansing. I argue that the sex abuse scandal in the church should be read through the lens of this narrative.

All the baptized participate in Christ. Since Christ is the fulfillment of the priest, prophet, and king that means that all the baptized are those as well. Although this statement may seem odd since we do not naturally think of ourselves this way, we must become more conscious of what it means to be grafted onto Christ. Our baptism grafts us onto the Body of Christ, making us all share in His Person. If his Person is priest, prophet, and king, then so are we.

Our modern culture suggests a tension between spirituality and religion. But the Magi in today's Gospel demonstrate that when spirituality is lifted up by revelation - when the Magi are told by the religious leaders where the Messiah is to be born - that we find the object of our spiritual longing.

The Bible is not particularly sentimental about families. What makes a family holy, as far as the biblical writers are concerned, is its willingness to surrender to the purpose of God. We see this in a number of key figures, including Joseph, Anna, and Simeon.

Adam had a kingly mission. However, he became a bad king. David was meant to restore kingship to its proper form. However, he failed too. But Christ, the Lord, is the King who sets everything aright and restores creation. His kingdom rivals all others.

Christ proclaims himself as the King of everything. This is a bold claim for it puts everything under him. However, he is a very different King than what we typically expect. So with the arrival of this King, we must change all our expectations.

Today we hear the first line of St. Mark' Gospel, which in a sense contains the whole Gospel message. It expresses the euangelion, the good news of Christ the King, whose victory over death brings salvation to God's people. Advent is all about coming under the reign of this newborn king.

The single biggest challenge of the Advent season is to feel our need for a savior. The truth is, we can't solve our problem through an act of the will, because the perversion of the will is the problem. We need help. We need the intervention of a loving God who will shape us anew. We need a savior.

When Israel begins to long for a new David, the true David and true king of the world, we witness the longing for God. Jesus Christ is precisely this king: the Davidic king, and God ruling his creation. His ministry reveals the nature of his kingship, from the manger to the cross.

Your being increases in the measure that you give it away. That's the law of the gift, and it can be found from end to end of the Bible. One application of this law has to do with faith itself. Your faith will grow only in the measure that you give it away, sharing it with others.

Today we celebrate the great Feast of the Dedication of St. John Lateran Basilica, which is the Pope's cathedral church. It's a time to remember that while the Church is, properly speaking, the people of God, church buildings do nevertheless matter. They are meant to recapitulate the Temple, the New Jerusalem, Noah's Ark, and the Mystical Body of Jesus.

Near death experiences, the loss of a loved one, other other out-of-body occurrences point toward the truth that we are meant to be born out of this world into a higher one, even though this transition is often a traumatic one. The reality that our mind wants not just particular truths, but the Truth Itself, indicates our orientation to God. We are our bodies, rooted in this world, but we are more than our bodies. This mysterious capacity within us the Church calls "the soul." And at the end of our earthly lives, the soul is breathed out, not into non-being, but into the hands of God.

Is the Catholic Church a proponent of social justice? Yes, according to this week's readings. They reveal a compassionate God, who hears the cries of the poor and then encourages us to reciprocate his love. Bl. Pier Giorgio Frassati understood this well. The young saint heeded both of Jesus' Great Commandments by loving God and, therefore, loving his neighbor.

Jesus places everything in its proper relationship to God. But he also chastises those who are involved in power games. God is ultimately in charge and rules over even Caesar.

Many devout believers find the parable of the wedding feast in the Gospel of Matthew difficult to understand. The story is meant to stir us up with its exaggeration, to signal the spiritual destruction that follows from refusing the divine invitiation. We are meant to see how valuable an invitation we have received and how odd it is that we would choose to reject it.

At the end of his letter to the Philippians, St. Paul reveals the secret to a peaceful life. Serenity of spirit, born of the confidence that one is linked to God, arrives when we surround ourselves with God's truth, goodness, and beauty.

Today's readings show that one can and should stand before God, individually, and assume spiritual responsibility. That responsibility is not collective but personal. It confronts each of us with the question, “Where I do stand in response to God's invitation?"

The Bible constantly warns against a merely mercenary relationship with God—a friendship of convenience or self-interest. We should not love God simply because doing so will produce many consolations in our life. We must enter a true relationship, where we fall in love not with his benefits, but with him.

When we live in convenient darkness, unaware of our sins, we will never make spiritual progress. We need the light, however painful it is. Once that light reveals to us our sin and dysfunction, then we can rise. That's what we discover on the cross of Jesus. We meet our own sin, and we also meet the merciful savior, who has taken that sin upon himself in order to swallow it up.

Should we address someone who is in the wrong? This week's Gospel cautions against gossip and malicious criticism, but it also explains how to frtuifully correct someone and bring them to the truth.

All must be aware of the possibility of losing one's soul in pursuit of gaining the world. One will inevitably face opposition from the world. Will you give in? Christ's demand of love is difficult and many do not want to follow it because it entails suffering. But in order to follow Christ you must consciously and purposely walk the path of suffering love.

The God of Israel is mysterious and inscrutable and at the same time is totally faithful and loving. Like the children of a loving parent, we might not always be able to understand God's plan but we can rest assured knowing that He always loves us and will always take care of us.

The story of the persistent Canaanite woman has intrigued and puzzled Christians for two thousand years. Why would Jesus treat this pious woman with what seems like indifference, even hostility? Why does he refuse (it seems) to answer our own prayers? The solution can be found in the very Biblical category of testing.

Elijah is a contemplative who has the eyes to see and the ears to listen. God does not appear in the glory of the world. Rather, he appears in a silent way. Weed out of your heart all of those fears and desires that prevent you from discerning the silent presence of God.

Our readings for this weekend are filled with grace, the free gift that God is. Our relationship with God gets off on the wrong foot the moment we see it in an "economic" or calculating way. God, who needs nothing from us, simply wants to share his life with us. And this is why he says, through the prophet Isaiah, "All you who are thirsty, come to the water!"

God says to Solomon in our first reading, "Ask for anything, and I will give it to you." What would you say if you heard that invitation? Solomon asks for wisdom and not for wealth or power or victory. Find out why that answer is so pleasing to God.

Jesus' parables in today's Gospel tell us how and why the Kingdom of God emerges. It does so often through struggle, quietly and clandestinely, and through infiltration rather than direct confrontation.

God sows his Word into each of our hearts liberally. He does not solely give his grace to those he knows will bear fruit. He sows the Word in everyone, but it doesn't flourish for each person due to circumstances (secularism, anxiety, the allurement of the world), but strive to counter that by letting the Word open you to the implications of his Lordship. God is always giving himself to you, listen and act.

What is it like to have Christ for a king? All three of this Sunday's readings examine this very question in some way. The answer is to submit to his kingship and accept his yoke upon your shoulders to make your life an offering to his plan.

This week gives us an opportunity to reflect on the legacies of Peter and Paul, two of the most important figures in the history of the Church. While they were different in various ways—Peter is the archetype of the order and office of the Church, and Paul represents theology and evangelization—they are united in their love of Jesus and are celebrated together for this reason.

All of us are on a spiritual journey from sin to salvation. Like the Israelites longing for a return to Egypt, many of us occasionally desire our old addictions, providing the anxious ego with comfort and security. Far from Egypt, the Promised Land is the spiritual space of complete dependence upon God. But the Israelites are not there yet. They need to eat the manna from heaven. For Catholics, this is the Eucharist. It is the means to getting God’s divine life within us.

Everyone thirsts for the divine life. No one is content without it, even proclaimed secularists. Christ has come to give us that life and he calls us to seek it in him. Although no one will be fully satisfied in this life, the more we partake in the person of Christ, the more we will be fulfilled.

The mysterious and wonderful feast of the Ascension of the Lord which celebrates Christ glorified "at the right hand of the Father". The key to unlocking the marvels of this event is to recover a specifically Biblical understanding of the relationship of heaven and earth.

This Easter season, the Church has asked us to meditate on the Acts of the Apostles. Today Jesus tells us to wait for the coming of the Spirit, which will descend upon them and empower them in their work. It is up to Christians today to continue the work of the apostles and spread the mission of Christ.

This week's readings all have to do with the holy temple in Jerusalem. The temple was the meeting place of divinity and humanity and was the focal point of Jewish life in Israel. We should all be living temples in our own way and bring God to the rest of the world.

Easter Sunday represents God's great yes to humanity. Throughout history, humanity has turned its back on God, but the Lord has constantly sent rescue operations to bring us back into community with him. The resurrection of Christ is the definitive rescue operation and is our great hope for salvation.

This week's Gospel tells the story of Lazarus and how Jesus raised him from the dead. In this story we learn that sin is a kind of death, and that Jesus is the resurrection and the life. Through Jesus, death is not the end.

This week's Gospel from John tells us the story of the man born blind. Jesus offers the blind man healing and the man accepts Jesus and is conformed to him.

The first reading for this week is the section of Genesis which describes the creation of humans and their fall from grace. The readings in the first week of Lent remind us to revisit the spiritual fundamentals. The story of the Fall reminds us to let what belongs to God remain with God and not to set ourselves up in opposition to God.

In this week's Gospel, Jesus intensifies the moral law and raises the bar higher than it ever had been. Christ's goal, and the Church's goal, is to make saints. His moral demands are great, but so is his mercy. He always offers grace and forgiveness when we falter so that we can always have hope in our stuggles for sanctity.

At the beginning of the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus compares his disciples to salt, light, and a city set on a hill. All these things exist not for themselves, but for something else. In the same way, Christians are meant to make the world a better place. Christians are meant to be salt, light, and a city on a hill.

This week we celebrate the feast of the Presentation of the Lord in the Temple. In ancient Israel the Temple was the most important place in the world. It was the dwelling place of the Lord; it was where divinity and humanity embraced. But the nation of Israel had gone away from right worship of God. The Christ child is the divine and human in one and thus brings humanity back on line with God.

This week's reading from the prophet Isaiah emphasizes God's tendency to bring the best from the worst situations, light from the darkness. Throughout the Bible we see wonderful things come from the most unexpected places, and this is reflected in our own lives as well. Very often our greatest goodness can come from the darkest places of our beings.

This week's readings reveal Isaiah and Paul as missionaries, as evangelists. Isaiah's mission is to unite the people of Israel, and then spread the same light the the rest of the world. Paul recognizes that Christ is the fulfillment of Isaiah's mission and offers himself as a servant of that fulfillment.

This week's second reading is the beginning of st. Paul's letter to the Romans. Paul identifies himself as the slave of Jesus. His has given his entire life and will over to Christ. He exists to serve the purposes of Christ, and reminds us that we all share in that mission.

This week's readings take us to chapter 11 of the prophet Isaiah. Isaiah looks back to the garden of Eden and the world in right alignment with God, and then looks forward to the Messiah who will set right what has gone wrong in God's world. Sin interrupts right order, justice, and goodness. The righteous king will restore justice when he rules on his holy mountain.

This week we enter into the great season of Advent. Our first reading from the prophet Isaiah describes how every nation streams towards God's holy mountain. As you enter the Advent season, think about this holy mountain. Is the mountain of the Lord higher than every other mountain for you? Do you stream toward it with your whole being?

As the liturgical year comes towards its end the Church considers apocalyptic Scriptures. This week's Gospel from Luke reveal the full significance of the Resurrection. The Resurrection of Jesus from the dead was a world changing event that altered everything in the human experience from religion to politics to nature.

This week's reading from second Maccabees and Luke's gospel are wonderful meditations on the resurrection of the body. In second Maccabees seven brothers are executed for refusing to violate their religious laws, but they express hope and faith that they will get their bodies back in a glorified state after death. In the gospel Christ upholds the hope for a glorified redemption and resurrection of the body.

The Old Testament is full of violent accounts that seem contradictory to the idea of the merciful, compassionate God of the New Testament: Joshua exterminates the tribes living in the Promised land, Samuel hacks the helpless Agag to pieces, and God orders Saul to kill every living thing when he conquers the Amelikites, to name but a few. The key to interpreting these texts is the figure of Christ as the sacrificed lamb in the Book of Revelations. If we keep Christ in mind then we will know that we have misread the Bible if we read it in such a way that it encourages violence or hatred

This week's reading from 2 Kings 5 contains some wonderful lessons on humility and obedience. We all suffer from some pestilence, whether it be physical, spiritual, or emotional, and we all seek healing. We need to find the humility to accept God's cure for our spiritual ailments, just like the general Naaman does when Elisha orders him to wash in the river Jordan to cure his leprosy.

In this week's reading the prophet Habbakuk questions the ways of God, quite understandably. The evils throughout the world can be discouraging, but even though wickedness can seem unjustifiable and suffering can seem utterly meaningless God is in charge and is working His purpose out. The right response to suffering and evil is faith.

This week's Gospel contains one of the greatest challenges Jesus ever offered to his disciples: "If anyone comes to me without hating his father and mother, wife and children, brothers and sisters, and even his own life, he cannot be my disciple." Here Christ is emphasizing the great spiritual principle of detachment. In order to live healthy spiritual lives we must love Christ most of all, with everything else finding its meaning in relation to God.

This week's readings focus on the importance of humility. Humility is the foundation for the whole of spirituality. In order to truly pursue truth and goodness, it is necessary to let go of the ego and realize that everything we have and are is a gift from God.

Jesus' words from our Gospel this week inspired the name for my program, Word on Fire. Jesus speaks of the divine judgment that will fall like a cleansing fire on the earth. This is not opposed to God's love, but is rather what God's love looks like to a fallen world.

God cannot be analyzed scientifically the way one would study the things of the world, but God can be approached through religious reasoning, or Faith. Faith is often criticized as unintelligent tomfoolery. Nothing could be farther from the truth. The Catholic tradition reveals that Faith is a rational reaction to God in the religious person. It is the reasoning of the religious mind.

Very often we find ourselves drawn towards extremes: puritanism or hedonism, idolizing the world or demonizing the world. The proper Catholic balance involves a balance—a yes and a no—to both extremes. We should enjoy the world we have been given while understanding that it is not as important as the God who gave it.

How central is the Lord's Prayer to Christianity! Basically this prayer is about ordering ourselves to God and letting his way of being order all levels of our lives. But we must not think that we will easily orientate ourselves to God. There are powerful forces that resist this, and we must not be naive about them. The Lord's Prayer is the itinerary for our spiritual journey.

St. Paul tells us in our second reading that he boasts in the cross of Jesus. To any of his hearers in the first century this would have sounded like madness. Paul can boast in this shameful thing precisely because God has raised Jesus from death and thereby placed the world-the realm of hatred, violence, and division-under judgment. Now we must have the courage to leave the world and enter into the new creation which is the body of Christ.

Today's first reading describes the sin of David with Bathsheba, David's attempts to cover up his crime, and the subsequent punishment for his sin. Even God's chosen king fell into terrible sin. Each person must always be on their guard against temptation for although God offers grace, it is not cheap grace.

This week's readings are for the people who feel that they have no hope. Even in the darkest of times, God can create something from nothing and can bring grace back into our lives. In the first reading, the prophet Elijah brings the old widow's son back from the dead; in the Gospel, Christ does the same thing; and in St. Paul's letter, he recounts his conversion from a fierce persecutor of Christianity to its great advocate. In every case God made something from nothing and injected grace back into someone's life, and He can always do the same for us if we are open to Him.

The Church comes from the Eucharist for it is the sacrifice that makes saints. The Eucharist is essentially the fullest act of gratitude prefigured in Melchizedek finding its fulfillment in the sacrifice of Christ. Every Mass is a participation in and celebration of this sacrifice, but the feast of Corpus Christi is a time to be especially aware of the gift of the Eucharist.

This week is the great feast of Pentecost. Christ rules his Church from Heaven by sending his Spirit into the Church all over the world. We participate in the reign of Christ whenever we act in accordance with the Spirit.

In this week's reading from the Book of Revelation the narrator describes the arrival of the Holy City of the New Jerusalem. The visionary sees a great city and notes that there is no temple because the whole city has become a temple, a place of right praise. God created the whole world to shine in the divine light, and the visionary sees the fulfillment of this hope.

Today's reading from the Gospel of John offers a compelling meditation about the importance of Christ for the activities of the Church. Christians are meant to be fishers of men, but when we operate according to our own agendas and efforts we will catch nothing. We must act under the Lord's direction. If we follow Christ we will do great good indeed.

This week's scriptures present the hope of moving forward. All of us have sins and vices in our past. Christ offers us the possibility for forgiveness and a bright future in grace no matter how sinful our pasts are.

In this week's Gospel reading we hear the story of the Prodigal Son. Here, Christ provides a reflection on the nature of love and our relationship with God. God gives us gifts; we must receive them and give them back. Only when we accept grace freely and give it away will we live in a proper relationship with God.

There are moments in life when we sense that there is something more real, important and enduring than anything we normally experience. The story of the Transfiguration is a moment when The More breaks through. In these moments we feel God's presence strongly, and we must be awake when these breakthroughs happen.

We begin Ordinary Time with the wedding at Cana, a rich, spiritual story with great implications for the Church. Both weddings and wine are consistently used symbols in scripture, and each is utilized to a powerful degree to explain the Incarnation, grace, the Sacraments, and the fulfillment of God's love for us.

The greatest and most revered of Israel's kings was David. It is from the family of David that the Messiah would come into the world and to the surprise of Israel and of the world, the Messiah who is born from the House of David, is the God of Israel himself! Mary, the Mother of God, is therefore to be likened to a new Ark of the Covenant, for in her womb, the God of Israel dwells and makes himself not only Israel's Messiah, but in wonder of the Incarnation, he becomes for us a new and everlasting covenant.

At the start of this new liturgical year, we hear Luke's account of Jesus speaking about the end to all we believe to be permanent - the earth, the sky and order will all be disrupted. This isn't meant to scare us, but to remind us of what is permanent, on what we can depend. Jesus is the link to this stability and truth, and in this realization we may find unending peace.

At the end of the liturgical year, we celebrate the feast of Christ the King. But Christ's kingship is different from any with which we're familiar - his kingdom "does not belong to this world." His kingship doesn't demand violence, but truth. Following him brings us closer to God's grace.

Today's readings deal with the end of time and the great cosmic battle. In the Gospels, Christ fights against the powers of darkness, defeats them through the Resurrection, and brings His people together.

Our first reading for Mass this week contains the defining prayer of the Jewish tradition: the “Sh’ma.” In the Gospel, when asked which commandment is the greatest, Jesus, a pious Jew, recites this prayer from the book of Deuteronomy. We Christians too claim—or better, are claimed by—this great prayer. But what does it mean?

This Sunday's Gospel presents the extraordinary story of Christ's healing Bartimaeus. Bartimaeus is blind. Christ gives him not only the ability to see the world, but to see the world anew through the revelation of his Grace. The Christian way of life is best described as a new way of seeing and it is through this vision, illuminated by the light of Christ, that we are invited to know and see the world as God in Christ intends.

In today's Gospel, the apostles James and John ask Jesus to be given positions of glory in Christ's kingdom. Jesus reminds us that His moment of glory is His death on the Cross, and that if we want to partake in this glory we must commit to a self-sacrificing love, not a self aggrandizing ambition.

The danger of jealousy and envy is that it is as much damaging to others as it is to ourselves. When we are envious, or even ambitious for the purpose of outdoing others, it knocks us off our center and we lose our orientation toward Christ. To his disciples, Jesus presented the model of a child - one who thrives under authority, strives for obedience, and lives in the present. Envy lives in the past and the future, but God's grace is available now.

One of the great tensions in the spiritual life is between loving the law and being free of the law. I argue in this homily that learning to swing a golf club is a very good analogy in this regard. Listen and find out why.

The Lord Jesus is not speaking metaphorically about eating his flesh and drinking his blood - he has come to make of his own Body and Blood real food and drink. This revelation was and continues to be a stumbling block for many, but the faithful accept the mystery of the gift of Christ's Real Presence that is given to the Church in the Blessed Sacrament.

Today's Gospel comes again from the sixth chapter of John. Here Christ discusses the necessity and reality of the Eucharist as the Word of God made Flesh.

Today's readings are from First Kings and the sixth chapter of John's Gospel. Our passage for this weekend discusses the Eucharist as the necessary antidote for spiritual exhaustion. We all need the Body of Christ to nourish our souls and keep us in communion with God.

This week, Mark relays the story of Jesus giving the Twelve Apostles their "marching orders," the instructions on how they would go out and spread the word to the world. Notably, he tells them to go "two by two," laying the foundation for the communal nature of the Church. They are to bring nothing but the simple tools to keep them moving forward, and they are be resolute in fighting the demons of the world-injustice, corruption and dysfunction. These were as much instructions for the Apostles as they are instructions for us to fulfill the mission of the Church today.

Saint Paul conveys a unique and powerful perspective on suffering. What he called a "thorn in the flesh," was a suffering so great that it burdened him, prompted him to beg God for relief. But it is in this sort of suffering that we most acutely understand God's love. When all falls away, we have him, we cling to him and we are saved. And when we bear suffering leveled by others and offer it to Christ, we absorb it, we take it out of circulation, and ease the burden for others.

The Book of Leviticus outlines laws, practices and directives of things, people and animals that are unclean and shouldn't be touched. But Jesus decisively touches the unclean, allows himself to be touched, and sets about a new course for those who follow him. The new laws ask followers to believe in him, trust in him, and become a part of his community.

John the Baptist is one of the most important figures in Christianity, and provides a window into the tradition of the Jewish priesthood and the historical context of the day. John chose the river Jordan to baptize, a conscious move to display the forgiveness of sins against the backdrop of the Jewish history of Exodus and liberation. Yet while he was baptizing in the desert, likely an exercise in protest of the corruption in the Temple in Jerusalem, he was heralding the coming of Christ, one who will "baptize you with the Holy Spirit and fire."

To truly understand the significance of the Mass, we must understand the importance of blood sacrifice to Judaism in Jesus' time. On Yom Kippur, the high priest would enter the Holy of Holies and sacrifice a goat, upon which he would symbolically place the sins of the people, and a sheep. The blood would then be sprinkled around the sacred space and over the people. Jesus offering his body and blood at the Last Supper was a deliberate extension-fulfillment-of this offering. He was the sacrificial lamb, the scapegoat, upon which the temple is rebuilt-upon which reconciliation is offered.

The Holy Spirit thrives on the actions we take and decisions we make out of love, joy, peace, patience and more. These aren't abstract ideas that result in an internal satisfaction, they have concrete ramifications, rippling out into the world and affecting real, good change. When we choose light over darkness, participate in the sacraments, the Holy Spirit fill us.

St. Paul illuminates what it means to live in the Holy Spirit, acting and living out of love, and what it means to live outside of it, acting and living out of selfishness, hatred, immorality and impurity. Every step we take to deny the forces outside of the Spirit affirms our home inside of it. And the more we live inside the Spirit, the closer we are to the Kingdom of God.

Jesus was the meeting of heaven and earth. His Ascension returned him to God in order to reign as the world's new king, and his orders to the disciples to build his church were to be done with his leadership and assistance. And this is our mission - much like that of the disciples - finding what it is that Christ wants us to do to continue to build his church.

We are often mistaken in thinking that we have to love God in order for God to love us. That's not the case. God doesn't need our love; his love for us is unconditional. But in order to get more out of God's love, we have to give it away. The more we give, the more we have - "a delightful stream of grace" that spreads joy among us.

St. Peter's impassioned sermon in the temple precincts condemned the people for killing the "author of life", but further explains that Jesus' resurrection means that he is forgiving the people for their sin. His return heralds his rescuing us, if we let him. We are inseparable from God's love, and will be forgiven for our sins.

The resurrected Jesus appears to his disciples, fearful they were to be targeted next, to deliver a message of peace with a mission. This is the mission of the Church, to proceed in spreading the news about Christ imbued with the life-affirming, sin-forgiving power of the Holy Spirit. It's a mission that will connect us to God.

Entering Holy Week, we see numerous stirring examples of Jesus' fulfillment of Old Testament prophesies. From the direction he enters Jerusalem to his mode of transport, we find again and again how he is the one intended to reclaim the temple and prove to the world that he is indeed the son of God, chosen to save us through his revolutionary example of love and forgiveness.

One of the most unsettling accounts in the Bible, that of Abraham being asked by God to sacrifice his son, ironically shows His goodness and love for us. If we put our faith in God, if we listen to God, if we obey God, we will be rewarded. A few of Jesus' disciples witnessed it with the Transfiguration, and we too can witness it if we trust in God's will for us, if we have faith.

Lent begins with a passage about Noah and flood. It's representative of not only sin, but of God's good grace. It's also a fitting entree into Jesus' journey into the desert, also symbolic of sin, and how his presence there infuses a forgotten, desolate place with life and goodness. When we are racked with sin, it is Christ who can infuse us with life and goodness.

This Sunday's Gospel tells the story of the paralytic man whom Jesus forgave and commanded to walk. Paralysis is an effective allegory for sin-how it traps and immobilizes us. God's desire for us is movement, for his love can shatter our paralysis and free us from our sinful past. God is not a "no", but a resounding "Yes."

The leper in Mark's gospel, a feared presence to the ancient Israelites, is made clean by Jesus' benevolent touch. A connection is formed, to each other, to God, that reminds us all of the comforting power of communion, the healing nature of our Creator.

In Mark's gospel, we see find Jesus exorcising an unclean spirit from a man in the temple, doing so as both the messenger and the message. Jesus unites the divided, purges the false, and fulfills the teachings. He is the authority - the truth - we seek.

A divine calling, whether the meaning is revealed in this life or the next, always requires our biblical heroes to do more than they feel they are capable. But all of us must answer, regardless of the call. Jonah provides a very "human" example of how difficult the work may be, and how the result might not be what we anticipate, but that it is always worthwhile and reflects God's will that we enact the purpose that brings our life to its proper fulfillment.

When we witness something beautiful, something important, we desire to share it with others, just as St. John did when he said to his disciples, "Behold the Lamb of God" - and just as those disciples did when they spread the good news of the Messiah. We quest to know God, to follow God, but more important is God's quest for us and our willingness to heed his call.

Herod sees all from the confines of his ego, trying to make the world conform to his plans. The Magi look outside of themselves, looking for an order that they will conform to. By focusing their attention away from themselves, they are spiritually liberated to follow the star of Bethlehem. This is the liberation that Christ grants us. He allows us to escape the jail cell of our egos to join the liberating current of his love, leading us closer to eternal life.

The Prologue of the Gospel of John sums up the whole of the Christian message. It tells the story of a re-creation through the Word made flesh. All will be restored to union with the Godhead. This is the good news Christians continue to proclaim.

Adam had a kingly mission. However, he became a bad king. David was meant to restore kingship to its proper form. However, he failed too. But Christ, the Lord, is the King who sets everything aright and restores creation. His kingdom rivals all others.

Fr. Barron comments on the new Roman Missal. This new translation is more fit for the celebration of the liturgy because it helps us address Christ in language befitting a King.

The great spiritual law is the law of the gift. Although counter-intuitive, it is the way of the Spirit. Giving your life away for love increases life within you. You partake in the flow of the divine life. Hence, happiness is found in loving acts.

Christ calls us to worship the Father, teach and evangelize in his name, and serve and care for him in the poor. The Church is the Body through, in and with which we do these things. But the meaning of this all is placing God at the center of our lives.

Jesus tells the story of a King who is inviting people to the wedding banquet for his Son. Some ignore it. Some actively kill the messengers. But this does not deter the King from inviting all to the banquet. Listen to the invitation of the Lord and actively respond to it. That is a decision you will not regret.

The parable of the tenants is an allegory that presents the relationship of Israel to Christ, but more than this it reveals a necessary truth about the spiritual life: that we are "tenants" in regards to the gifts that God has given us, and when we construe our relationship to God's gifts as being that of "owners", rather than "tenants", the consequences can be quite dire.

The magnificent hymn in the Letter to the Philippians reveals that at the heart of the Gospel is the mystery that the Lord Jesus did not grasp or cling to the prerogatives that properly belonged to him as God, but emptied his divine glory into our humanity so that we might share in his divine life.

Sometimes Christ does not seem fair. The Parable of the Day Laborers evokes this sense of injustice. Those who do not work as long and hard as the others get the same reward. However, Christ wants us to move beyond our sense of justice and see all according to love, God's perspective. Gratitude for the gift transforms our natural disposition to judge who deserves what into a disposition of thanksgiving.

In the eyes of the world, the Christian way of being is strange. All Christians are called out of the world and into a new way: Christ's way. Christians must be very clear about how they are different from the world and confidently proclaim it. They must stop trying to fit into the ways of the world and rather tell the world to conform to Christ. Christ will break down the Gates of Hell and invade all that resist his Love.

The purpose of Jesus' teachings is that we allow the divine life to surge through us so that we become transformed in Christ, making us more like Him. All our knowledge should serve this end. However, some learned people can use their knowledge to puff up their egos and put others down. The "Little Ones" are the people whose entire life is about helping others participate in the divine life so they may fully flourish.

God is Trinity. He is fundamentally a relationship: a lover, a beloved and the love between them. In other words, God is a complete openness and receptivity to the other. He is love. Now, we believe we are made in the image of God. Thus, we become fully alive to the degree that we imitate God.

The Scriptures for this Sunday offer some glimpse of the Holy Spirit in advance of the great feast of Pentecost. The Holy Spirit is the heavenly grace that enlivens the Church in all aspects of its mission.

No man is an island. One of the messages of the Gospel is that all reality is interconnected. Jesus is the Vine and we are the branches. How organic the Bible is! This view of reality is the exact opposite of the American individualism that currently pervades our culture.

God speaks to us in many ways, especially though the conscience. Since God is a Person, his voice will reach our consciences and lure us to conform our lives to the life of his Son, Jesus Christ. In addition to listening to Christ thought the scriptures, through the teachings of the Church, through the lives of the saints, and through the liturgy, listen to Him speaking to your conscience. He will set you free.

Like the two disciples walking towards Emmaus, a symbol of worldly power and security, and away from Jerusalem, the center of sacrifice, we need to be stopped in our tracks. Christ appears to them, but they do not recognize him. They do not recognize him because they are walking the wrong way. The recognition of the pattern of Christ’s life does come until the Eucharistic act which presents the pattern of sacrificial love. Then they immediately go back to Jerusalem, the place of suffering love.

Jesus has come to bring us the divine life. Under his influence we become peaceful, unafraid, evangelizing, and forgiving. Through the Church, saints are made. This is because Christ is at the very center of the Church.

Our first reading for this Easter day is Peter's great kerygmatic speech on Pentecost morning. Filled with the Holy Spirit, Peter addresses the Jerusalem crowd, telling them the impossibly good news that Jesus of Nazareth, a man who moved through their ordinary towns and villages, has been raised from the dead. The Easter faith of the Church is not an abstraction, not a vague claim about God's fidelity or our hope for immortality. Rather, it is the startling assertion that God has brought this man Jesus back from the dead. May we bask in the glow of this still surprising revelation.

Death is not a condition God desires for us . Rather, God wants us to have life. However, death is a reality; but it is not the final word. Christ is the final Word - namely, the life-giving Word. Christ brings Lazarus back to life. He desires to do the same for us.

The healing of a man blind from birth is an archetypal story of coming to spiritual vision. Sin prevents us from seeing clearly. Christ is the light and he wants us to walk in his light. But we resist. Fortunately, if we stop resisting, Christ will enable us, like Adam in Eden, to walk in easy fellowship with God.

The story of Christ's encounter with the Samaritan woman is a kind of template by which we can understand our own encounter with the Lord.

"Seek first the Kingdom of God and his righteousness, and the rest will be given to you." Make God the center of your life, and you will be spiritually ordered in Christ's image. If you make wealth and security your center, you will be empty. You make the choice: will God be your center?

Jesus calls us to love. But few consider the radical nature of this calling. It entails loving the other, even our enemies, regardless of the response of the one who is loved. If you fail, and you often will, turn to God for the grace to live out this strange way of Christ.

Like a good healer, Jesus has not come simply to behaviorally modify us; he has come to heal us at the root of our being, eradicating all dysfunction from our most basic core.

The Beatitudes reveal the true path of joy is found not in grasping at power but in the willing surrender to God's mysterious grace.

All of us want to live to the fullest. However, most of us never find the one thing that will inspire us to dedicate our whole lives to it. It is amazing to hear of how the first people who responded to Christ dedicated their whole lives to him. Their encounter with Christ sent them on a path they never dreamed of. Paradoxically, this path was marked by great joy and suffering; but, nevertheless, they lived life to the fullest.

In Paul's first letter to the Corinthians, he highlights the beauty of baptism and how it sweeps the baptized person into God's great theo-drama. God calls us out of the world of our narrow egos to partake in his redeeming plan of love of which the Church is the vehicle. Follow Christ, and peace will be given to you.

The problem with our world is that most people do not dream big. In experiencing hardship, we have a tendency to assume the worst, thinking narrowly. The Biblical vision is the opposite of this. Biblical figures see the world through the infinite possibility of God - based in their faith in the Lord. Ahaz refused to be surprised by God's possibility. Isaiah was ready to be surprised. This confidence in God allowed him to dream big.

Hope is not this-worldly optimism. In fact, from a purely natural perspective, pessimism is the right attitude. Hope is that supernatural virtue which orders our desire toward heaven and the things of heaven. What Isaiah talks about in our first reading is not an expectation that will be realized here below, but only in a transfigured world on high.

The first step in the spiritual life is simple: you must see your life not as your own project but as a vehicle for God's purposes. However, we are all absorbed in our own lives, forgetting that the road to God is one of self-forgetfulness. This disposition helps us to focus on Christ and his mission. But in order for us to do this we must be cleansed of all attachments and baptized in the fiery love of God.

Thomas Merton once wrote, "Man is not at peace with his fellow man because he is not at peace with himself. And he is not at peace with himself because he is not at peace with God." Only when we are in communion with God will we be in communion with ourselves and our fellowman. This simple formula summarizes Israel's mission of gathering all peoples in right praise to God on Mt. Zion. Although the world is divided in countless ways, Israel's gathering mission is realistic because Christ, the Messiah, is Lord, and all things will be gathered in himself. For this we wait in joyful hope.

Our first reading for Mass this Sunday is taken from the opening chapter of Paul's letter to the Colossians. There is no stronger statement of the absolute primacy, centrality, and importance of Jesus Christ in the entire New Testament. Jesus, Paul tells us, is the beginning and the end, the icon of the invisible God, the one in whom all things exist and for whom they are destined. And then the Gospel shows us this cosmic King nailed to the cross. This wonderful irony is at the heart of the Christian proclamation: the King of the Universe is a crucified criminal, who utterly spends himself in love.

All things pass away. Political and religious institutions, the family, bodily health; nothing lasts. Everything dies. So often we seek our fulfillment and salvation in these things. But Christ is telling us not to. He is telling us to seek the one thing that will last: Himself. So long as we cling to Him will our lives be secure. He is the rock of our salvation.

Today's Gospel reading tells us about the Sadducees trying to lead Jesus into a ridiculous conclusion. To them the Jewish teaching on marriage seems irrational. However, Jesus shows us that not everything that appears cloudy to our intellect is sub-rational. Rather, some times it may be supra-rational - beyond the finite intellect - making it rational, but the rationality of another dimension. The claims of Faith may not be comprehensible to our intellects now, but we believe that they will once we are in his eternal presence.

Zacchaeus is a man who has wandered far from God. But, often enough, people like Zacchaeus come back, again and again, to God because they cannot eliminate their hunger for Him. Once they open themselves to Christ he places himself in the most intimate parts of themselves, living there. Christ does not enter just a fragment of your life; he enters the whole thing! This is salvation. Let Christ shake and transform you.

Religion serves a unitive purpose. In uniting the person to God, religion unites people together. However, many religious people forget religion's purpose. They like to puff up their egos, reveling in their ability to live according to the Law. Seeing themselves as better than the rest, they forget that grace only comes to those who realize they are sinners. The tax collector, realizing he is a sinful man, does not focus on himself, but focuses his gaze and hunger on God - the source of salvation. Justification comes to those who do likewise.

The church militant is the church at war with all the destructive powers that want to undermine its unity. The Israelites battle the people of Amalek, a battle that symbolizes the spiritual warfare that each of us, as members of the church, personally undergoes. There is no escaping this reality, and so we must fight. But our fighting is unusual: we fight with peacemaking, forgiveness, education, etc. Our fighting is only sustained through prayer and the prayers of others. Please pray that the Church is strengthened in its fight against evil in the world.

From the worldly perspective, the worst thing a powerful person can do is admit his/her weaknesses to others. If done so, the person loses his/her position of power. Naaman the Syrian, a man of power, is an example of humility. He does not let embarrassment stand in the way of admitting to his weakness. By doing so, he is healed and offers right praise to God. Like Naaman, admitting one's weaknesses is the first step to proper worship.

Most of us find the homeless to be unnerving and annoying, telling ourselves not to give them money because they might use it for drinks or drugs. But think of the story of Lazarus and the rich man, and did they have different fates! Lazarus was carried to Abraham's bosom and the rich man to the nether world, where he was tormented. The torment for the rich man began by locking himself in his narrow ego, going against his calling to give. As Catholic social teaching remind us, we cannot remain indifferent to the poor. They must always be taken into consideration or else we go to hell.

Most of us spur into action when we believe that our financial state is in dire straits. Why don't we act in the same way in regards to our spiritual state? Today people need the same spiritual concern that people had in the past. They need to want to establish a relationship with God, that which is of paramount importance. So wake up, and place God at the center of your life!

The God Jesus describes does not operate according to the same logic we do. In fact, He seems to be crazy. If God is supposed to be like the Shepherd who abandons the ninety-nine to find the lost one and the woman who diligently searches her whole house for a penny, then he must be crazy. But that is not so. God operates according to the logic of grace, defying our logic of justice. Being a Christian is learning how to operate according to God's logic.

The Letter to the Hebrews is a sustained reflection on the Mass as the source and summit of the Christian life and the pivot around which history turns. Writing from a developed understanding the Temple, the author of the Letter to the Hebrews shows how Christ's sacrifice on the Cross is the sacrifice that has and will restore the communion between God and creation. As a re-presentation of this act, the Mass makes present to us our final destiny: communion with God through Christ.

To gain eternal life is to participate to the fullest degree possible in the very life of God. It is to walk the path of love, surrendering to grace and allowing this grace to flow through you to the wider world. Is this an easy task? No. The Gospel of Luke tells reminds us that the gate is narrow precisely because it is in the very shape of Jesus Himself, and entrance through the gate involves conformity to his state of being. The path of love is traveled by taking up one's cross every day.

In contrast to our conventional view of the Virgin Mary as a shrinking violet, the book of Revelation presents her as a warrior who has brought into the world a new way of dealing with worldly power: Christ (i.e. Love itself). If we do not approach the world as a battlefield between love and violence, we will become spiritually blind. But the Virgin Mary, as warrior, helps us see this reality while assuring us that her Son has already conquered.

In the twelfth chapter of the Gospel of Luke, Christ assures us not to be afraid. Fear is a spiritual state that causes us not to trust in the lordship of God and to play master of our lives. However, with the awareness that God has given all to us, we'll realize that we are basically a gift. Gifts are meant to be given, so confidently give yourself away. Do not fear that you will become nothing by giving yourself away for by doing this the divine life fills you anew.

Maturity comes in facing the reality of death and the transient nature of the world. In this regard, the Book of Ecclesiastes is full of wisdom: "Vanity of vanities, all is vanity"; Everyone who thinks they are going to find their happiness in possessing the goods of the world will eventually have to face the truth that they will not. All passes away. Therefore, spend your time building a good spiritual disposition for you never know when your life will be demanded of you. My advice: devote yourself to love.

Although the little story of Martha and Mary has been interpreted throughout the centuries as a parable dealing with the "active" and "contemplative" approach to the spiritual life, it can be read as Christ's invitation to all people to partake in his inner circle of discipleship. Christ overturned the social conventions of his time by summoning all people to discipleship. Thus, we must remove all barriers to discipleship for all people.

During the 20th century, moral relativism was in vogue in elite cultural circles, but now it is the dominant moral outlook of the broader culture. Against this, C.S. Lewis argued for "the universality and inescapability of the moral law." Although there are subtle moral differences between cultures, if we look close enough, we can discern fundamental moral agreements. The Catholic tradition says that this moral bedrock is a reflection of the Eternal Law in the mind of God. It is the voice of God within us. Listen to that voice.