Homily

The Wedding of Heaven and Earth

When Jesus appears at the Wedding Feast of Cana, he signals the marriage of heaven and earth. When God moves into our experience, he transfigures humanity, elevating art, philosophy, science and politics into bearers of the sacred. He changes the water of earth into the wine of heaven.

Surely This Man Was the Son of God!

Another homily from Fr. Robert Barron and Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

A Ransom for the Many

What does it mean to say that Jesus died for our sins? How precisely does his cross save us? The first Christians saw sin as a sort of imprisonment, like being held for ransom, and in the dying and rising of Jesus, they experienced freedom. What freed them was God’s solidarity with them in their fear, even their fear of death. How do you experience the power of Jesus’ death on the cross? How does...

Feast of Christ the King

The final Sunday of the Liturgical year is dedicated to Christ the King. One of the earliest forms of Christian proclamation was “Jesus is Lord.” This was meant to be provocative, since Caesar was customarily described as Lord of the world. The first Christians were saying that Jesus is the one who must in every sense command, direct, and order our lives. Is Jesus truly the King of your life? That’s the hard question which...

The Cross is Our Peace

We continue our reading of Paul’s extraordinary letter to the Ephesians. We hear that the cross of Jesus has broken down the wall of enmity which divided Jews and Gentiles. At the very center of Christianity is the conviction that the death of Jesus on the cross represented God’s victory over all the dark forces that divide us. What looked like ultimate defeat was in fact God’s triumph over the power of division.

The Voice of Ambition

James and John want to sit at Jesus’ right and left when the Lord comes into his glory. What they don’t realize is that his glory is the moment of his crucifixion. To be at his right and his left at his enthronement is, therefore, to be crucified with him, to be willing to give oneself totally away. Be careful what you ask for!

Breaking, Singing, Pulling Away

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.

Good Friday

Every year on Good Friday, we read St. John’s account of the Passion from John 18-19, together with Isaiah 52-53 and Psalm 31. One of the themes that runs through these reading is the Priesthood of Christ.

Luke’s Story of the Passion

“Look down upon me, good and gentle Jesus, while before Thy face I humbly kneel…” So begins a traditional prayer of the Catholic Church, the “Prayer Before a Crucifix.” What is the image of Jesus you see when you kneel before a crucifix? Is it a simple, bare bones image of Christ in his pain? Or a gentler image that evokes tenderness with tears? Or is there an element of the glory to come in...

By Way of the Cross

Today’s gospel is demanding. It is demanding because it makes us think about ourselves at a deep level, and because it makes demands on us. As Christians we are disciples of Christ, we take our most fundamental identity from being in him. Baptism, we believe, can never be undone and it changes us at a level so fundamental that it can be described as ontological. By baptism we die to our former selves and enter...

Looking Through

The Gospel points back to the time of the Great Exodus, when the Israelites were instructed to seek salvation from the pestilence of fiery serpents by raising their eyes to a bronze serpent, fashioned by Moses. Investing hope in works of art is a perilous business, as the Israelites would have remembered well from the incident with a golden calf. It was, after all, Moses himself who discovered this outbreak of idolatry as he returned...

Gripped by Fear

Christ crucified is the one thing we have to preach, yet this one thing encompasses all. Fr. Matthew (Matty) Rigney O.P. once told me how as a young priest he was terrified to preach his first sermon. One of the older priests in his community helped him to overcome his fears; yes, preaching is terrifying, no one wants to tell people they have to be crucified with Christ. This is what we preach. Only by...

Cleaving the Darkness

For early Christians, the thought that their Lord had himself undergone baptism was disturbing, embarrassing and even scandalous. Could the Immaculate Lamb, the altogether holy Jesus, really have submitted to an act of ritual purification? Could he have admitted by implication that he too was part of unclean, guilty, sinful, humankind? It says a great deal for their honesty that they did not attempt a cover-up, but left this seemingly controversial episode as it stood...

Accomplished in Christ

Chapter 13 of St Mark’s Gospel begins with Our Lord foretelling the destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem. The disciples ask him when “all these things are to be accomplished”. Instead of giving a straight answer, Jesus warns them against people who will make false claims to divine status. He predicts wars and natural disasters, persecution and betrayal, and the preaching of the Gospel to all nations. He repeats his prediction of the Temple’s desecration...

Love's Response

I could never be a secular humanist. I have friends who are. I respect them, and can accept that they hold their views after thoughtful consideration but I cannot share their views and particularly their view of human progress.

When I Am Lifted Up

Now today on Good Friday as we venerate the cross in the liturgy we may ask ourselves how in fact is the world redeemed, how are we saved? If Jesus was to heal the broken human world which we experience every day then he had to confront it and take it on at a profound level.

Facing The Cross

When the first high rise flats were built in Britain, it soon became apparent that among the many signs of negligence in their design was that the lifts were too small to take coffins. To this day, undertakers often have to stand guard at the base of lifts, while the body is taken out in a body bag and hastily transferred to a coffin at the bottom. I think this was a significant oversight. Not...

A Disciple

In this Gospel we have Jesus talking in an unusual way to an unusual man. When we hear Jesus speaking, usually to crowds, it is loud and clear, even if he speaks always in parables. These are puzzles, simple stories, that we won't forget, but we have to grow to understand. John must have remembered this conversation with such an important person. The other occasion John remembered was the Last Supper discourse.

The Triumph of the Cross

This is a day of fasting and abstinence. A day of silence and desolation. And when we arrive at its hour of glory, we witness the drama of a coronation.

'Good' Friday

When the evangelists write about the Passion of Jesus they are quite discreet. They do not go into any detail about the horrors of crucifixion and the terrible sufferings that it brings with it. Nor do they write simply that ‘Jesus died’. They write that he ‘breathed forth his spirit’. Then, at that moment, ‘the veil of the temple was torn in two from top to the bottom’. Not the outer veil but the inner...

Keeping Company with the Lord

Jesus is near his end in the gospel of today. The acclamation of Palm Sunday is over and the crowds melt away. Jewish plotting for his arrest is stealthily working. What precipitates his words, 'Now the hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified', is the approach for the first time in his ministry of Greeks (Gentiles) seeking him out. It was 'to gather into one the dispersed children of God' that...

We Beheld His Glory

One of the most important words in St John's Gospel is 'glory'; right at the beginning we read that 'the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we beheld his glory, the glory as of a father's only son…' Jesus Christ is the revelation of the glory of the Father. And that glory is beheld especially when Christ is 'lifted up' on the cross. The kind of exaltation - of lifting up, of glorification...

The Promise of Eternal Friendship

Jesus’s death has saved us. But how? A single, neat explanation cannot exhaust something so awesome. Scientists use several models for an ordinary thing — an electron or an economy — since we cannot understand it through and through. The extraordinary event of God’s death in the flesh must defy comprehension!

Banishing the Shadows

Why did Jesus die? That’s a question that arises for us all today of all days. Often I think it gets its charge from a piece of mistaken thinking, as we’ll see in a minute, but there’s a good honest question at the heart of it which faces us with some uncomfortable but ultimately saving truths about ourselves, so let’s see if we can find at least part of the answer.

Rulers of the Kings of the Earth

As we come to the end of the Church’s year we are given a vision of Christ as the universal king. He is, as Revelation tells us, ‘The Ruler of the kings of the earth’. But then it adds that we too share in his kingship for he has made us ‘a line of kings, priests to serve his God and Father’. So what is the connection between Christ’s kingship and ours? Is there any...

The Glory of Calvary

The end of the world has happened. The news is good. It is Good News. Christians are accustomed to understanding the history of salvation as a drama in four parts. Act One is from Creation to Jesus; Act Two is the life of Jesus; Act Three is the time of the Church and Act Four is the Glory of Christ and the Victory of God. Christians are less inclined to appreciate that Act Four comes...

What Happened on Good Friday?

Anyone who has been at a public reading or a dramatization of the Passion of Jesus Christ knows just how many separate parts there are. At the liturgy on Good Friday we will hear the Passion narrative according to St John, and of course the other Gospels give their own accounts of the Passion.

The Royal Way

Palm Sunday is a mass of contradictions! It begins with a joyful procession of pilgrims, coming to Jerusalem to celebrate the Passover. That feast commemorated God delivering his people from slavery in Egypt. In each annual celebration God renewed his commitment to rescue his people from evil, and they renewed their commitment to him. In one such group of pilgrims the crowd proclaimed Jesus to be the son of David, who had come in the...

The Silent Cross

The liturgy of Good Friday is one of the most ancient and the most stark of all of the Church’s ceremonies. Traditionally, there is no homily given on that day. Is that because on this penitential day the patience and ascetic spirit of the people of God is not to be tried by the kerygmatic enthusiasm of the clergy? Or is it rather that there are no words which can frame the mystery we celebrate:...

The Whole Story

One can hardly ignore the existence of Mel Gibson’s film of The Passion, and though it is by no means a perfect film, it does serve to highlight something about the suffering and death of Christ that is easily overlooked: it divides the world in two.

The Sign of the Star

Our Christmas Crib is now complete: a star has risen in the east, and the magi have followed this sign, until it came to rest over the place where the child Jesus lay. The magi have come and worshipped the one who has been revealed to them as the new-born ‘King of the Jews’. It all makes a very picturesque tableau.

Behold, your King!

The other day I saw what comes pretty close to the abomination of desolation. It was a singing Christmas tree. I was walking through a respectable department store when I noticed the bow in the middle of a plastic Christmas tree transform itself into a pair of lips and begin to sing Jingle bells in a harsh metallic voice.

The Necessity of the Cross

Today the Church gets rid of the cross for a while. When we come to church the cross is veiled or even removed from the sanctuary.

Parody or Reality?

The desire to be met with acclaim seemingly runs deep - to be hailed as liberators, the streets of Basra or Baghdad lined with cheering crowds. Across the centuries those who wield power also want the glory. Roman governors and emperors long ago made an art form of their entry into the cities of the empire. You can still see on the arch of Galerius at Thessalonika how the civic notables lined up outside the...

Stand Upright

In the last few weeks many people’s lives in England have been disturbed by floods, bringing chaos to their lives. In the time of Jesus ‘the roaring of the sea and the waves’ symbolized the collapse of our ordered world, the unleashing of destruction. Our worlds may collapse for many reasons. Our marriage may breakdown; we may lose our jobs, discover that we have cancer, become estranged from our children. In all of these situations,...