Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, for the wokeist philosophy that dominates today, empathy—feeling the feelings of the other and not harming those feelings—is treated as a supreme value. But while empathy is perfectly good and decent, the Bible teaches that love, not empathy, is the supreme value. And love does not mean, primarily, feeling the feelings of the other or not hurting those feelings; it means willing the good of the other—and that can be, as Dostoevsky said, “a harsh and dreadful thing.”

Friends, for this Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, I want to begin with our very brief second reading from Paul to the Romans. It opens, “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Here we see Christ’s cross and resurrection—the supreme sacrifice fulfilling all the offerings of the temple—extended to all the baptized. The Church is now the place where divinity and humanity are reconciled.

Friends, for this Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church brings us once again, with Jesus and the disciples, to Caesarea Philippi, and to a famous question: “Who do you say that I am?” The main characters in this endlessly fascinating scene are Jesus and Peter, and whenever the focus is on Peter, we’re talking about ecclesiology, the study of the Church. So we learn something very important here about both Jesus and the Church, and it has to do with the Rock upon which the former builds the latter.

Friends, for this Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we hear the story of the Syrophoenician woman. Jesus famously puts off this woman—first by ignoring her, then by dismissing her, and finally by insulting her—and she offers one of the most famous comebacks in literary history. A common reading of this story is that Jesus is cranky from a tough day of ministry, and a plucky woman from Syrophoenicia straightens him out. But this turns Jesus into a sinner—and the whole structure of Christianity falls apart. The Church Fathers had a much better, more convincing, and spiritually more helpful interpretation.

Friends, in my evangelical work online, I often encounter people who are skeptical of religion and dismissive of its claims. I usually ask them: How do we explain the intelligibility of the world or our ability to understand it? How about objective values and our ability to recognize them? Our first reading from 1 Kings reflects, I think, a great breakthrough in Western consciousness about how we’re able to identify right and wrong—just as we’re able to identify patterns in the physical world.

Friends, on this Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I want to focus on the Second Reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The eighth chapter of Romans represents the culmination of an argument Paul’s been making, and the reading for today is the rhetorical high point of that conclusion. This is the first great theologian of the Church naming what is essential to Christianity—so we have to pay attention!

Friends, we come to the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, and we’re going to finish our reading of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, which deals with the parables. Jesus’s parables cut to the heart of the matter and convey the truth of the kingdom, and the two we hear today—the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl—are really good examples. Both are about the summum bonum, the highest good, and therefore about what’s most fundamental in the spiritual life. Indeed, this is life itself; this is what it’s all about!

Friends, we continue this weekend reading from the thirteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, which is dedicated to the parables of Jesus. Today I want to focus on the thought-provoking and theologically rich parable of the wheat and the weeds. A man sows good seed on his field, and while he’s asleep, an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. But the man resists the impulse to pull them up, as it might uproot the wheat too: “Let them grow together until harvest.” This parable is getting at something very deep, and it has to do with the presence of evil in our world—and why God permits it.

Friends, on this Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we continue our reading of the Gospel of Matthew. In chapter 13, Jesus gives a series of seven very memorable parables, the first four having to do with the growth of the kingdom of God. The first of these, which we’re reading from today, is the parable of the sower. What do we hear? That it’s never a question of God being reticent or holding back his grace. The problem comes from our side: We block the Word of God, setting up obstacles to it that prevent it from taking root. There’s the drama, if you want, of the spiritual life.

Friends, on this Fourteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our first reading is from the prophet Zechariah, who is a very important figure for the Lord Jesus. The prophet predicts the arrival of a king, meek and riding on a donkey—a king who will “proclaim peace to the nations” and extend his dominion “to the ends of the earth.” This strange text from the ancient world has been fulfilled in our hearing and in our sight.

Friends, we’re reading this week again from the tenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, and Christ’s teaching here is—as always—astonishing: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” Jesus says to his apostles, “and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” There are points of overlap with Jesus’s teachings in all the great religions of the world—but there’s nothing like this.

Friends, Jesus cannot be reduced to just one ethical teacher among many. But this doesn’t mean that his teaching isn’t important or astonishing—because it is! And I want to focus this week, and next, on our Gospel readings from the tenth chapter of Matthew. As Jesus sends his disciples on mission, he gives them, and us, a wonderful instruction in the spiritual life. What we hear, as I say, is astonishing—and if you allow it to sink in, it will change your life.

Friends, on this Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Gospel is about Jesus sending the Twelve on a mission. Whenever we hear about the Twelve, it’s the Church in seminal form. And here’s what I want to focus on: Whom does Jesus call to be his apostles? Not the best and brightest people of his time but fairly ordinary and even compromised characters. Yet Jesus sees something in every one of them—some gift, virtue, or capacity needed in the life of the Church.

Friends, we’ve come to the great Solemnity of Corpus Christi—a celebration of the Body and Blood of Christ in the Eucharist. Our first reading mentions the “manna” that fed the Israelites in the desert—a mysterious bread from heaven described in the book of Exodus. This is then correlated to the Eucharist, the bread from heaven that Jesus gives us, in our Gospel from the sixth chapter of John. I want to explore four dimensions of this relationship between manna and the Eucharist.

Friends, we’ve come to Trinity Sunday, one of my favorite Sundays of the year. The Trinity is not just a little puzzle for theologians; it’s the heart of the matter, in many ways. Indeed, it’s central to the way we pray: Whenever we make the sign of the cross, we’re invoking the Trinity. It matters that we come to understand this doctrine more plainly, so that we might understand the meaning of our redemption.

Friends, we’ve come to the great Solemnity of Pentecost, which is, along with Christmas and Easter, one of the most important feasts of the Christian year. It is the celebration par excellence of the Holy Spirit. It is also the birthday of the Church—and we are meant to see ourselves in the readings for today.

Friends, today is the great Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, which is situated between Easter and Pentecost. The Ascension is when Jesus definitively moves into the higher dimension of heaven. And while we no longer have experiences like the disciples had of the risen Lord, we experience him through his Holy Spirit, who equips us to continue Christ’s work in the world.

Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, which means we’re coming to the end of the Easter season—and coming toward the Solemnity of Pentecost. After Christmas and Easter, this great feast of the Holy Spirit is the most important of the Church year. And in our three readings for today, we see five signs—in the Church broadly speaking and in your own life—that the Spirit is present and moving.

Friends, on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, there’s a somewhat hidden theme that runs like a golden thread through the readings, and that theme is the temple. To understand the New Testament texts, we have to see the importance of the Jerusalem temple for ancient Israelites. It was the focal point of Jewish life—the political, cultural, and of course religious center of the country. It was seen, in almost a literal sense, as the dwelling place of God on earth.

Friends, all during the Easter season, we read from the Acts of the Apostles, and this Sunday, we hear part of Peter’s oration on Pentecost morning. His bold proclamation is, in a way, the mother of all sermons; it is the essence of authentic Christian preaching. Peter, filled with the excitement of the Gospel, names the problem of sin, declares Jesus as Lord and Christ, and cuts his listeners to the heart. Then there comes naturally a question in response: “What are we to do?”

Friends, for this Third Sunday of Easter, we read once again the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus—a literary masterpiece, yes, but above all, a spiritual masterpiece. This story is not just about something that happened long ago; it's also about the Church now, and in all times. And it tells us who Jesus is and how to recognize him.

Friends, peace be with you—an echo of the words of the risen Jesus in our Gospel for the Second Sunday of Easter, also called Mercy Sunday. Christ gives his disciples the gift of shalom (peace). But there’s an exceptionally important juxtaposition here: He also shows them his wounds, a sign of humanity’s own sin and dysfunction. It’s not one or the other, his peace or his wounds; it’s both. To get this wrong is to get a lot of Christianity wrong.

Friends, Happy Easter! We’ve come to the high point of the Church’s liturgical year, the reason why we’re Christians at all. If Jesus didn’t rise from the dead, Christianity is a waste of time; the resurrection is the hinge point, the standing or falling point, of our faith. Taking Easter seriously is the source of our joy and our hope. Everything else is secondary to the great declaration of our Easter faith. In light of that, I want to talk to you today about earthquakes.

Friends, we come now to Palm Sunday, also called “Passion Sunday” because we read, in its entirety, one of the Passion narratives from the Synoptic Gospels. This year, we hear Matthew’s version, and one of the distinctive qualities of Matthew’s account is his stress on Judas—and more precisely, on the deep regret that Judas felt over his betrayal of the Lord. We’re challenged here to contemplate the radicality of God’s mercy and his relentless pursuit of even the worst of sinners.

Friends, this Lent, we’ve been journeying through some marvelous stories in John: the woman at the well two weeks ago, the man born blind last week, and now the climactic story of the raising of Lazarus. The great miracles of Jesus in John’s Gospel are referred to as “semeia” in Greek—“signs.” They’re indicators of God’s power and manner that teach us great truths about our spiritual lives. And the raising of Lazarus teaches us about the ways of God amid our suffering. Why do these things happen? Why doesn’t God act?

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, we hear the incomparably rich story of the man born blind, which has beguiled Christians up and down the centuries. We are meant to identify with this man: All of us are born into a world that has been infected by cruelty and violence and hatred. Original sin blinds us; it takes us out of the light. But Christ declares himself “the light of the world”—the one who will heal and illumine the eyes of us all.

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we hear the story from John’s Gospel of the woman at the well—a kind of master class in evangelization. What is evangelization all about? It’s about telling starving people where to find bread; it’s about telling people dying of thirst where to find water. Every one of us sinners seeks life in this way; thus, this story, so rich in its dynamics, is a story about all of us.

Friends, on this Second Sunday of Lent, our first reading about Abraham and Matthew’s account of the Transfiguration orient us to a basic biblical principle. God has made us to go out from ourselves, to experience the splendor of reality. The more we let go of ourselves and our prerogatives—and the less we try to grasp and hang on to things—the more alive we become. Salvation, therefore, has a lot to do with adventure.

Friends, we commence the holy and wonderful season of Lent, the time of preparation for Easter. I always think of Lent as something like spring training for baseball players, or like the end of the summer workouts for football players. It’s a time to get back to spiritual basics, to reacquaint ourselves with the elemental things in the spiritual life that we might get ourselves ordered to Christ. So the Church, in our first reading from Genesis, brings us back to the beginning.

Friends, this Sunday, right before the commencement of Lent, the Church is giving us something of great moment to reflect on—namely, the centrality of freedom and choice for the good at the center of the spiritual life. As Thomas More puts it in A Man for All Seasons, “God made animals for innocence and plants for their simplicity. But Man He made to serve Him wittily, in the tangle of his mind.” God wants us to give him glory in a particular way: through our intellect and will—our search for truth and our love for him.

Friends, a great professor of mine at Mundelein Seminary, Dr. Richard Issel, once said, “If you want to be happy, stop worrying about being happy and get on with becoming fulfilled.” We find something similar in Jordan Peterson’s observation that “self-consciousness is equivalent to misery.” In short, we’re most unhappy when we’re turned inward, fussing about ourselves. If you want to be psychologically healthy, forget about yourself and move out toward others. I always think of this when I come across our Gospel for today from the great Sermon on the Mount.

Friends, for the next several weeks, we’re going to be reading in our Gospel from the primal teaching of Jesus: the Sermon on the Mount. And we begin today with a kind of overture to it, which we call the Beatitudes. “Beatitudo” in Latin means “happiness”—the one thing we all want, no matter who we are or what our background is. Jesus, the definitive teacher, is instructing us on what will make us happy—and so we listen.

Friends for this Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, our first reading from the prophet Isaiah and our Gospel from Matthew both have a section that’s a little weird. While most preachers skip over these sections to get to the better-known and understandable parts, I want to dwell, on purpose, on the strange parts—and they have to do with the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali.

Friends, we return now to Ordinary Time, and the Church asks us again to think about the baptism of the Lord, this time in light of Saint John’s distinctive account. John the Baptist sees Jesus coming toward him on the banks of the River Jordan, and the Baptist says, “Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.” You recognize that line from the Mass, when the priest holds up the consecrated elements and repeats John the Baptist’s words. This declaration is of absolutely decisive significance, for John is giving us the interpretive lens by which we see and understand Jesus.

Friends, we come to this wonderful feast of the baptism of the Lord. And the first thing to know is that this was a profoundly embarrassing event for the first Christians. Jesus is the son of God, the sinless Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. So why is he going to John the Baptist to seek a baptism of repentance? Jesus begins his public ministry with a kind of embarrassing, humiliating act—and, in a way, that is the point of it.

Friends, why has the story of the Epiphany—the three wise man paying homage to the Christ child—so captivated us over the centuries? I think, in some ways, it tells the whole spiritual life: our infinite longing that will never be satisfied here below; the following of beautiful but ambiguous signs in our quest for God; and the revelation that the one we seek has all along been seeking us—and, in the fullness of time, has come in person to meet us.

Friends, the great feast of the Holy Family follows immediately upon Christmas—a very interesting juxtaposition with a deep theological significance. The Savior came as a little baby who required the protection of a family, and from the beginning, he was opposed by forces both seen and unseen. Christmas is finally about the birth of Jesus in us—a life that might begin as something very vulnerable and that the dark powers don’t want flourishing. What do we need to protect that Christ life within?

Friends, our readings for the fourth and final Sunday of Advent are all about maybe the central motif of the spiritual life. Our culture today is so self-oriented: It’s all about me and my choice. But that attitude is directly repugnant to the Bible; in fact, the Bible is constantly trying to move us out of that space and into a different space—namely, one of surrender to the higher purpose of God.

Friends, our readings for this Third Sunday of Advent help us understand what to do while we wait for the Lord. An Advent spirituality of waiting is part of Christian life; our entire life, in a way, is waiting. We pray, “Come, Lord Jesus,” waiting for Christ to come back. But this is not just a passive stance; there is a lot to do while we wait.

Friends, our first reading for this Second Sunday of Advent, taken from Isaiah 11, describes the Messiah’s arrival: He “shall sprout from the stump of Jesse,” and “the spirit of the LORD shall rest upon him.” The Messiah, we hear, will come bearing seven gifts of the Holy Spirit, gifts that come to full expression in him. The Advent season is a time of longing for these gifts—watching, waiting, and praying for them.

Friends, we come to the New Year celebration of the liturgical year: the First Sunday of Advent. This is the season of sacred waiting—four weeks of looking, hoping, and watching, with a kind of joyful anticipation, for the adventus (coming) of the Savior. If you’re like me, you rather hate to wait. Yet waiting is all over the Bible, and at the heart of it is the painful process of decentering the ego.

Friends, we come to the final weekend of the liturgical year and the celebration of the Solemnity of Christ the King. Now, our country was formed in rebellion against a king, and kingship as a political reality is far removed from us. But what does kingship mean for us spiritually? In a word, everything. If you’re baptized, you’re a king, because you’re conformed to Christ, who is priest, prophet, and king. And your job, wherever God puts you, is to order things—first and foremost in your own soul—toward the end of God’s kingdom.

Friends, we come to the Thirty-third Sunday in Ordinary Time, which means that next Sunday is the final Sunday of the liturgical year. During this time, the Church always gives us apocalyptic readings, and our Gospel today is from “the little apocalypse” in the Gospel of Luke. Apokalypsis in Greek does not mean “end of the world”; it means “unveiling”—taking away the kalyptra, the veil. This is why, when apokalypsis is rendered in Latin, we get revelatio, revelation—taking the velum, the veil, away. So apocalyptic literature is all about the showing forth of a new world. But that has to be preceded by a sort of shaking of the old world.

Friends, this Sunday we’re celebrating, with the whole Church, the dedication of the great cathedral of Rome: the Lateran Basilica. You could argue very persuasively that this see church of the pope is the most important of the four major basilicas in Rome; it is the great temple of Catholicism worldwide. This is why the readings for today are all about the temple, this place of right praise where God and his people meet—and find union.

Friends, All Souls Day, November 2, falls on a Sunday this year, so we can really spend some time reflecting on this wonderful feast, which means so much to Catholic people. Why do we pray for the souls in purgatory? I wonder if I could begin by reflecting on why we speak of the “soul”—this higher principle breathed into us by God that survives the death of the body.

Friends, for this Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time, we are treated to the wonderful and deeply challenging parable of the Pharisee and the publican from Luke 18. We are meant to see in this deceptively simple story a basic and clarifying principle in the spiritual order—namely, that the ego is meant to revolve around God, not God around the ego. And this might not be immediately clear: Sometimes the people that look the most religious actually aren’t very religious, and the people that look a million miles from God are actually in the right spiritual space.

Friends, when something tragic happens and people offer their prayers, you’ll often hear now, “I've had it with thoughts and prayers. We have to act.” In some extreme cases, people of prayer are mocked, as though prayer is just something completely ineffectual that we should leave behind in favor of action. We’re the first generation in recorded human history ever to feel this way. Human beings, across cultures, have always believed in the power and efficacy of prayer. Our first reading this week from Exodus 17 beautifully displays this power—and the fact that prayer, far from undermining action, sustains and supports it.

Friends, in our second reading this Sunday, Paul writes to Timothy, “Remember Jesus Christ, raised from the dead, a descendant of David: such is my gospel.” The Gospel is not the ethical teachings of Jesus or the doctrinal teachings of Saint Paul; the Gospel is Jesus himself. And Christianity is not a noble spiritual path or a set of ideas; it’s a relationship to Jesus. All those other things are great and follow from him—but it’s about him!

Friends, this Sunday, I want to talk to you once again about faith. As I’ve said before, faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. And both the first reading and the Gospel today shed very interesting light on the nature of faith, which is not a kind of superstition—believing in any old nonsense—but rather an attitude of humble trust in the ways of the Lord.

Friends, Pope Benedict XVI memorably told us that the Church does three essential things: It worships God, it evangelizes, and it serves the poor. This week, the first reading from the prophet Amos and the Gospel parable of the rich man and Lazarus bring that third task vividly to mind—and they are meant to bother us. Are you indifferent to the sufferings of the poor? What are you doing, concretely, to help them?

Friends, for this Twenty-fifth Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to focus on the first and second readings. When read together, they give us a very good sense of Catholic social teaching in regard to the question of power. The Church’s position here is a subtle one. It doesn’t demonize political and economic power; after all, God is described as all-powerful, so power can’t, in itself, be a problem. But it is very much concerned with how we use that power.

Friends, this year, the Feast of the Exaltation of the Holy Cross falls on a Sunday, so we have the great privilege of reflecting a bit more deeply on this marvelous and, frankly, disconcerting and odd feast. The Roman cross was a horrific, terrifying symbol of tyrannical power. And yet the first Christians emerge exalting the cross of Jesus. They don’t hide it or pretend he died some other way; on the contrary, Saint Paul says, “I resolved to know nothing while I was with you except Jesus Christ, and him crucified.” How do we begin to explain this?

Friends, for this Twenty-Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, we’re reading from the fourteenth chapter of Luke—and it is very serious spiritual business. A lot of us sinners are satisfied with a low-level spirituality of following the commandments. But in this extraordinary Gospel, Jesus challenges us to move into the upper levels of the spiritual life: “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.” This is meant to be a kind of shock therapy—a deeply challenging message about what serious discipleship entails.

Friends, for this Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about a very important theme—namely, pride and its antidote. I don’t know a spiritual teacher who doesn’t say that the fundamental problem we have is pride; it is the most deadly of the deadly sins. The opposite of pride is humility—and whereas the proud person is caved in around himself, the humble person leaves the black hole of self-regard and enters into reality. In our Gospel for today, Jesus tells us a great story that’s right to this point.

Friends, I want to focus this week on the second reading, which is from the marvelous Letter to the Hebrews. It addresses a very important and very controversial topic—namely, the divine punishment. You would be hard-pressed to say that this is not a motif in the Bible. That’s simply not the case; in fact, it’s a rather major motif. How do we make sense of this theme of divine punishment without falling back into a terrible view of God as an arbitrary, capricious tyrant? This little passage from Hebrews gives us the interpretive key.

Friends, the title of my ministry, Word on Fire, came from our Gospel for today. Jesus says to his disciples, “I have come to set the earth on fire, and how I wish it were already blazing!” This is not the lighting of a cozy campfire. This is closer to, if you want, Sodom and Gomorrah—to fire and brimstone. It is a dangerous and divisive fire. Christ is the light of the world, the divine luminosity—but to the degree that we are still in darkness, we will experience that light as something difficult, off-putting, even torturous.

Friends, on this Nineteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our second reading from the Letter to the Hebrews offers us a great biblical description of faith. I stand with Paul Tillich, the Protestant theologian, who said that faith is the most misunderstood word in the religious vocabulary. Critics of religious say that faith is accepting things on the basis of no evidence; it’s believing any old nonsense; it’s naïveté; it’s superstition. But this has nothing to do with what the Bible means by faith.

Friends, George Harrison once sang, “All things must pass; all things must pass away.” Almost every major religious figure and philosopher the world over has intuited this great truth about our world. It’s good, and there are good things in it—a beautiful sunset, an enjoyable meal, a great conversation—but they don’t last. With that in mind, let’s turn to our readings for this Eighteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, which are about the theme of detachment.

Friends, we have the great privilege this week of reading, in our Gospel, Luke’s account of the Lord’s Prayer. This is a very sacred moment: Jesus himself—not just a spiritual guru or someone we admire, but the very Son of God—teaches us how to pray. And we become so familiar with the Our Father that we forget its spiritual power.

Friends, on this Sixteenth Sunday of Ordinary Time, our Gospel is the Martha and Mary story, and in my years of preaching, I’ve found that it tends to bother people a lot. With the first reading about Abraham in mind, we can better understand what this passage means—and doesn’t mean. Rather than playing one sister off the other, we should read Martha and Mary together: When we focus on the “unum necessarium,” the one thing necessary, all the many things that preoccupy us find their proper place.

Friends, in our first reading from the book of Deuteronomy this week, Moses says to the people, “For this command that I enjoin on you today is not too mysterious and remote for you. . . . No, it is something very near to you, already in your mouths and in your hearts; you have only to carry it out.” This is a master text for what we call in the Catholic tradition “the natural law.” It means that there is within us a kind of deep moral intuition by which we know the right thing to do; there are intuitions of value that give us a sense of meaning, purpose, and direction in life.

Friends, as we resume Ordinary Time, it’s appropriate that we’re looking at a portrait of the Church, because we’re coming back, if you want, to the ordinary work of the Church up and down the ages to the present day. Our Gospel from the tenth chapter of Luke gives us our marching orders—from going on mission together and staying rooted in prayer, to trusting in providence and supporting the work of the Church, to curing the sick and proclaiming the kingdom of God.

Friends, this year, the feast of Saints Peter and Paul falls on a Sunday, and I want to spend some time reflecting especially on Saint Peter. Around the year 64, Shimon Bar Yonah, a fisherman from Galilee, was put to death brutally in the Circus of Nero. But while the Roman Empire is long gone and the successor of Nero doesn’t exist, the empire of this fisherman, Peter the Apostle, is everywhere, and in May, his 266th successor walked out onto the loggia of Saint Peter’s Basilica, built over the very spot where he was buried.

Friends, every year we have Trinity Sunday followed by today’s wonderful Solemnity of Corpus Christi—two of the highest theological mysteries of our faith, the Trinity and the Eucharist, back to back. As we reflect today on the Body and Blood of Jesus, I want to explore the deep connection between temple sacrifice, the altar of the cross, and the Mass.

Friends, today is Trinity Sunday—one of my favorite feast days of the year because I can put my old theologian’s cap on. Looking first at one of the greatest of the medieval theologians, Saint Bonaventure, and then at maybe the greatest figure in Western theology, Saint Augustine, I’d like to reflect with you on the dynamics of the Trinitarian life—the very matrix into which we’re inserted through baptism.

Friends, this is the great feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. In the First Reading, the Spirit manifests himself as a strong driving wind, and while you can’t see the wind directly, you can see its effects. The text I want to reflect on today is not in the readings but is one of my favorites: Galatians 5:22–26, when St. Paul talks about “the fruit of the Spirit.” And it’s precisely to this same point: What are the signs that the Holy Spirit is operative in us?

Friends, getting the Ascension of the Lord right is very important for understanding many aspects of the Church’s life. So I want to dwell on that a little bit with you today, and I want to do so under two headings: the first I’m going to call more political, and the second more liturgical. They are both hinted at in the great statement in the Creed that we recite week after week: “He ascended into heaven and is seated at the right hand of the Father.”

Friends, we come to the Sixth Sunday of Easter, and as the Church readies us for Pentecost, the readings begin to talk about the Holy Spirit. In today’s Gospel, Jesus, speaking to his disciples the night before he dies, says, “The Advocate, the Holy Spirit, whom the Father will send in my name, will teach you everything and remind you of all that I told you.” In the beginning was the Word, and the Word became flesh. But God spoke his Word into human minds that take it in, mull it over, and look at it from different angles, the idea developing across space and time. And so we need a divine interpreter of the divine Word.

Friends on this Fifth Sunday of Easter, we have an extraordinary Gospel that is at the heart of the Christian thing. Jesus, at the beginning of a lengthy and incredibly rich monologue he gives the night before he dies, says to his disciples, “I give you a new commandment: love one another. As I have loved you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another.” This is not a sentimental or psychological banality. To understand Jesus here, we have to understand what a strange thing love is—and the way the word is being used.

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Easter, we have this marvelous, short but very punchy reading from the Gospel of John: Jesus referring to himself as the good shepherd. This is a remarkably apt metaphor for how God reaches out to us—knows us personally—and how we are able to discern and follow his voice. But how do we hear the voice of the shepherd? In a lot of ways—but I wonder if the clearest way isn’t through the conscience, which John Henry Newman called the aboriginal Vicar of Christ in the soul.

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Easter, we have the magnificent Gospel from the very end of the Gospel of John, chapter twenty-one, which is so rich theologically. We see here, on full display, what it means for us—who are all ambiguous characters—to stop resisting the cross of self-denial and love and to walk the way of the Lord.

Friends, we enter now into the Easter season, and here is the thing I want you to know: We misunderstand Easter dramatically when we think primarily of spring festival time, the weather getting nicer, and Easter bunnies and bonnets. All of that is great; but if you don't understand Easter as a revolution—as an earthquake that has changed the entire world—you have not understood it.

Friends, happy Easter! Many of you probably know that I’ve spent much of my life reading philosophers and spiritual writers—Plato, Aristotle, Confucius, Cicero, Marcus Aurelius, Anselm, Aquinas, Kant, Hegel. What all those figures have in common is a kind of calm, musing detachment as they talk about high ideas. Well, there’s all of that—and then there’s the Gospel, the “Good News.” Yes, the Gospels have inspired philosophers and spiritual teachers, but at their heart, they’re not abstracted philosophical musing; they’re the urgent conveying of news. Something happened—and I need you to know about it!

Friends, we come to Palm Sunday, which is also called Passion Sunday because we always read at Mass the Passion narrative from one of the synoptic Gospels. This year, we hear from Saint Luke, and I want to look at two elements unique to his particular version, both of which have to do with forgiveness.

Friends, we come to the Fifth Sunday of Lent, and I want to reflect today on our second reading from the Letter of Paul to the Philippians. It is a passage of both literary genius and spiritual power, one that uses the language of conversion—of letting go of the way I understood and defined my life and turning toward an entirely new way.

Friends, this Fourth Sunday of Lent gives us marvelous readings: the First Reading from the book of Joshua, the Second Reading from Paul’s Second Letter to the Corinthians, and the Gospel reading, which is the magnificent parable of the prodigal son from Luke. The correspondences between these three readings I think are quite striking, and they have to do with the Eucharist and divinization.

Friends, we come to the Third Sunday of Lent, and we have the extraordinary privilege during Cycle C of reading this account, in the third chapter of the book of Exodus, of Moses’s encounter with the burning bush. It’s one of the pivotal texts in all of Scripture; so much of our great tradition refers to and flows from it, and it sheds light in every direction, telling us profound truths about God, about the spiritual life, and about our relationship to the Lord.

Friends our Gospel for the Second Sunday of Lent this year is Luke’s account of the Transfiguration. And it opens up something that is marvelous and confounding; there is sort of an aching and a longing associated with this text. It speaks to us of these moments when reality becomes incandescent or transparent to something more—something that lies beyond our ordinary experience.

Friends, we come to the holy season of Lent. Pascal said that most of us go through life diverting and distracting ourselves so that we don’t come to terms with the big questions: God, meaning, purpose, eternal life. The Gospel for this week, Luke’s marvelous account of the temptation of Jesus, invites us to wrestle with three questions in particular.

Friends, for this Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church gives us the opportunity, in our second reading from 1 Corinthians 15, to reflect on the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead. It was the Resurrection that Paul correctly took as the hinge, the central teaching, of Christianity. But what do we mean by “Resurrection”? How do we theologize about it?

Friends, our Gospel for today is from the Sermon on the Plain, which is Luke's version of Matthew's Sermon on the Mount, and it’s not only saying something about the moral life; it’s also saying something very profound about God. It has to do with what a number of philosophers in the twentieth century called the aporia—the difficulty or even impossibility—of the gift. Can we give a gift that’s truly a gift, with no strings attached?

Friends, on this Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we have the first reading from the prophet Jeremiah in tandem with the Gospel from Luke’s Sermon on the Plain. And both readings draw out a basic feature of biblical spirituality—namely, the ordering of the heart, that deepest organizing principle of one’s entire life, to the Lord.

Friends, for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church gives us a wonderful pairing of readings: the first reading from the sixth chapter of Isaiah and the Gospel from the fifth chapter of Luke. They both speak to what I think are three key moments in the Christian spiritual life: first, the breakthrough of grace; then, the acknowledgement of sin; and finally, being sent on mission.

Friends, it’s easy enough to sentimentalize the Feast of the Presentation. But we oughtn’t to, because this story is getting at, if I can put it this way, a hard truth. And the clue is given to us in the first reading, which is from the prophet Malachi: “And suddenly there will come to the temple the LORD whom you seek.”

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about walls and bridges. There is a tendency today to be simplistic and one-sided about walls and bridges: walls are bad and keep people out, while bridges are great and establish connection. But you need both walls and bridges—both identity and relevance, both the Word and the Word proclaimed—to live the Christian thing correctly.

Friends, we return now to Ordinary Time, and this Sunday, we hear the marvelous story of the wedding feast at Cana from the Gospel of John. It's as though, as we commence the ordinary liturgical year, we're meant to see everything through the lens of this reading. The Church sets it up with our first reading from the prophet Isaiah, who speaks of God’s desire to marry his people. Jesus, in his own person, is the marriage of divinity and humanity, and therefore it’s appropriate symbolically that the first of his signs would take place at a wedding.

Friends, the Feast of the Baptism of the Lord is exceptionally important. All four Gospels talk about it, and John the Baptist is a kind of door we have to go through to understand Jesus properly. What was John the Baptist doing in the desert? Why did the Messiah, the Lord, go to him for a baptism of repentance? And why do we still spend time with this strange, puzzling, and even embarrassing event?

Friends, we’re all familiar with the story of the three wise men, which has been depicted in thousands of Christmas cards. And there is something romantic and charming about it. But on this great Feast of the Epiphany, I want to develop an important angle of the story very much on the minds of many people today—namely, the whole problem of religion and science.

Friends, I always love preaching on the Feast of the Holy Family because I think the biblical message here is very surprising. We say the Bible is associated with family values, and indeed it is, but they're probably not the ones we would automatically think of. We see this in the two stories that the Church brings to our attention today: the story of Hannah leaving Samuel at the temple in Shiloh, and the story of Mary and Joseph finding Jesus at the temple in Jerusalem.

Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Advent, we come to the Advent figure par excellence: the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God. What I want to do in this homily is to look at some of the Church’s classical titles of Mary. These are not simply pious exclamations, but rather very substantive insights into her role in bringing Christ to birth—both in history and in us today.

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Advent, called Gaudete Sunday, I want to draw attention to our second reading, which is from St. Paul to the Philippians. These lines about joy, anxiety, prayer, and peace can run right through our minds, but they’re actually breathtaking, and they open up something at the very heart of the spiritual life.

Friends, in our readings for the Second Sunday of Advent, there is a lot of talk about building highways. In the Bible, both Old Testament and New, we find the theme of exile. Very often, Israel finds itself sent away from its own Promised Land, and a great hope is that one day, the exiles will return home on a highway that God has built. This is a symbol of spiritual exile—and to meet the highway that God has prepared, we have to do some preparation ourselves.

Friends, we come to the First Sunday of Advent, which is the commencement of the new liturgical year. “Adventus” in Latin means arrival or coming, and one way to look at Advent is to see three comings of Christ. There is the coming of Christ in history in Bethlehem, the coming of Christ now as he approaches our hearts, and the coming of Christ someday in the future. All three of these dimensions belong to our Advent preparation.

Friends, we come to the end of the liturgical year with the Feast of Christ the King, where we meditate upon the kingly reign or rule of Christ. Now, we in the modern liberal West have a hard time with kings; we like democratic polities. The United States emerged out of a great rebellion against the king. But we should get over this modern hang-up, because kingship—from Adam all the way up to Christ—is a basic biblical idea. And the importance of today’s feast is that it forces a decision about which king we follow.

Friends, we're coming toward the end of the liturgical year, and as is typical, the Church gives us readings of an apocalyptic nature dealing with the end times. “Apocalypse” means “unveiling,” and what’s being unveiled in our readings is the emergence of a new world—not so much in the literal, cosmic sense as in the sense of how we navigate and understand the world. Something has fallen apart; the old world has given way.

Friends, our first reading is that wonderful story of Elijah and the widow of Zarephath, which is a kind of hidden gem in the Old Testament. Like so many of the stories in the Bible, it is very understated, but chock full of spiritual meaning. And it has to do with how we respond—and the strange and surprising ways God might respond to us— when things are toughest.

Friends, the readings for this Thirty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time take us to very holy ground. In the first reading, taken from the sixth chapter of Deuteronomy, we hear the “shema,” a prayer fundamental to Jewish theology and spirituality. And in the Gospel, when one of the scribes asks Jesus which is the greatest commandment, the Son of God, the Torah made flesh, recites the same prayer. We can’t get any more sacred or any clearer indication of how we should govern our lives.

Friends, all three readings for this Thirtieth Sunday of Ordinary Time have a golden thread running through them, which is the idea of the call—of the primacy of God’s action in the life of salvation. Whenever we start thinking that this is our own ego project and that we are in command, we are ipso facto on the wrong path.

Friends, our Gospel this Sunday is taken from the tenth chapter of Mark, and it is high-octane spiritual business. Something pivotal is being laid out for us in this passage, and it has to do with power, suffering, and a willingness to go where Jesus goes.