Homily

Homily

Come To Jesus

She saves Herself by Trusting

CONSPIRE 2018: Iona Liturgy Homily

Two different starting points

There is Only One suffering/Only One happiness

Non-Training for Servanthood

Easter Sunday 2012

The Downward Momentum of the Son of God

The Word entered into our flesh in order to bring the love and justice of God even to the darkest places. Jesus stands shoulder to shoulder with sinners in the waters of the Jordan, and, at the end of his ministry, he goes into the pain and anguish of death itself in order to save us.

The God of the Nations

Though the Enlightenment taught us to privatize and interiorize our religion, the Bible has a robustly “political” sense of God’s activity. God’s will is revealed in the movements and struggles of the nations. National sin (like personal sin) results in divine judgment. This deeply Biblical intuition is revealed in Lincoln’s reading of the Civil War and in Karl Barth’s interpretation of the First World War.

Perseverance Produces Character

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

Living Bread

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

The True Davidic Messiah

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

Christ the High Priest

For the past several weeks, we have been reading from the extraordinary letter to the Hebrews, the principal theme of which is the priesthood of Jesus Christ. Jesus can be the ultimate bridge-builder between God and us, precisely because in his own person he reconciles divinity and humanity. True God and true man, Christ is true priest.

Dealing With the Mess

Life is grim. It is marked by conflict, division, inextricably difficult situations. And brooding over all of it is the fact of death. How do we deal with this mess? We can’t, but God can. In Christ, he takes on the dysfunction and sin of the world and takes it away through the divine mercy. Walk through the Passion narrative with this idea in mind.

Remaining Attentive to the Lord

The first reading for this Sunday is taken from the Old Testament Book of Kings. In this reading we are introduced to the Prophet Elijah, who is nearing the end of his mission. This particular scripture has much wisdom to share with us in regards to our own passage through the mid point of our lives and the necessity of remaining attentive to the Lord and open to his purposes.

The Suffering Servant

This Sunday’s readings highlight the idea of redemptive suffering. The revelation of Christ changes our disposition towards the difficulties of life, filling these experiences with the potential for goodness. In his Incarnation, Christ did not evade the often harsh realities of human experience, but he accepted them, knowing that he would be with us in all things. The challenge for us is that in the face of the inevitable challenges of life is this: will...

A Thorn in the Flesh: Why We Suffer

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...

The Bread of Life, The Body of Christ

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.

True Ambition

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 Spirituality of Pain

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.

Substitutionary Sacrifice

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...

Why is Life So Full of Suffering?

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.

God Suffers for Us

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.

Tough Skin and Tender Heart

St. Therese of Lisieux is a doctor of the Church, not for her Summa Theologica, but for her Little Way of Love, described here in her autobiography. She was a very Victorian young woman who often expressed herself in ways foreign to our modern perspectives, but both her autobiography and historical research show that her love was as tough and strong as Jeremiah’s in the first reading or Jesus’ in the Gospel. No matter how...

The suffering Servant and the saving power of God

Suffering is an inevitable part of human existence. In itself suffering is bad, and God does not desire that man should suffer because it was not in his original plan. But it takes a different dimension when it is lived with faith in God. Jesus suffered not because it is good to suffer but because it is a necessary path to the redemption of man who brought suffering and death upon himself through sin. While...

The Paradox of Discipleship

We have been getting a number of rousing challenges from Jesus in the past several weeks, as our readings have followed the progress of his ministry, and Jesus repeatedly makes clear that following him is not going to be easy in any way. This Sunday we get another challenge from Jesus to “fish or cut bait” in our relationship with him. Paradoxically, however, if we think we are going to preserve our lives and comfort...

Offer It Up

When I was a kid I often heard my Mother, Grandmother and Aunts say something like “Offer it up to God” if something went wrong or I was having a problem. I am not sure they knew what it meant. It was more of one of those Catholic “throw-away” lines that people used because it sounded like a good thing to say to someone who was having difficulties.

Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

“Put up or shut up.” “Does she walk the talk?” Daily we use these phrases to ask whether people are sincere. Do we follow through with what we say? “What good is it, my brothers and sisters, if someone says he has faith but does not have works?” We all are familiar with this question from St. James in the second reading. Is the Judeo-Christian tradition of faith a litany of verbal values that move...

Third Sunday of Easter

I call my mother every day—every morning around 5:30 a.m, to be more precise—which is around 12 noon (of the previous day!) where she lives. We usually speak for about ten minutes. Actually, I speak and mum listens. My mother has suffered from a degenerative neurological disease for over a decade and in the last couple of years she has not been able to speak more than a couple of words at a time. Most...

Palm Sunday

Today’s liturgy offers a preview of the week’s events, beginning with Jesus entering Jerusalem amid admiration and acclamations for his miracles and success. We then move to the stab of betrayal, to abandonment by most of his closest human contacts, to his condemnation by deceit-ridden power structures, and finally ending in death by crucifixion, one of the most heinous and cruel capital punishments ever invented.

Twenty-ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

The young mother’s face beamed as she held her week-old baby in her arms. It was clear that this was the joy of her life. The mother’s entire world was focused on her newborn. The scene exuded joy, contentment, and fulfillment.

The power of God versus human weaknesses

Today’s readings introduce Jesus as a prophet and explain how prophets and other messengers from God inevitably suffer rejection. The readings challenge us to face rejection and hardship with prophetic courage.

He calms our storms

We can always triumph if we rely on the supreme power of God over destructive forces. John Newton used to be among the captains of the cargo ships carrying slaves from Africa to America. He never worried whether slave trade was right or wrong. It brought money, and that was just enough. One night during their sail, a raging storm blew hell at the sea.

The Kenosis of Christ

The evangelists did not report the passion and death of Jesus just to stir our emotions rather they presented us Christ who gave up his life so that we might be saved. On this day, the Holy Mother, the Church celebrates the sixth Sunday of Lent known as both Palm Sunday and Passion Sunday. It is the beginning of what we traditionally know as the Holy Week. The week-long celebrations are meant to re-present to...

My God! Why Have You Forsaken Me?

How could the Messiah die? Despite a few mysterious prophetic texts that seemed to intimate this possibility, the idea that the Messiah could arrive and subsequently be killed was radically counter-intuitive to most first-century Jews. Yet the conviction of the early Christians, based on Jesus of Nazareth’s own teachings about himself, was that the radically counter-intuitive impossibility was actually prophesied, if one had the eyes to see and the ears to hear it in Israel’s...

God and the Suffering Humanity

What conclusion do we usually draw when we reflect on the ‘whyness’ of human suffering? Naturally nobody desires suffering. It is scary to cohabit with it. It humiliates. This was the experience of Job in today’s first reading. However, the reading challenges us to avoid Job’s pessimistic and desperate view of life as a chain of pain and sufferings and to accept life with hope and optimism as a precious gift from God, using it...

Is Life a Drudgery?

Life is difficult, but it is neither helpful nor virtuous to utter expressions of stoic fatalism. The true virtue, the true courage, is to maintain hope (and also love and joy) in the face of what can sometimes look and feel like an ocean of darkness. This Sunday’s readings raise the problem of the great sorrows of life, the reverses, difficulties, and especially illnesses that can seem to sap life of all joy. Yet in...

Belief in His Mercy

Uncertainty. Isolation. Hurt.

Just Have Faith

These are wise words from the book of Wisdom today. So often we witness or experience bad things in the world, or suffer from afflictions and we may ask, “How can God let this happen?” Similarly, I remember a story about a tornado a couple years back and someone mentioned on Facebook how thankful they were to God that they and others were OK and did not get hit by the tornado.

Calming the Global Storm

As I am writing this, we are sitting in the aftermath of another mass shooting and murder here in America. Nine people were killed in brutal fashion yesterday in Charleston, S.C., in their church of all places, conducting a peaceful and loving bible study. They were the victims of a hate crime, and an act of terrorism. Pure and simple.

Into the Darkness

When Judas had gone out, it was night. Judas walked out into the entangled darkness of those who rejected Jesus and who plotted his death. Judas walked away from the one who is the light of the world. When we think of this thirteenth chapter of John’s Gospel, we think of the foot washing and of how that extraordinary gesture symbolised Jesus giving his life for us on the cross. We think, too, of how...

Hope and Realism

As Christians, when we face difficulties we may well ask God to remove them. But God’s loving providence could have other plans for our lives. So in addition to praying that God’s grace will put an end to some difficulty or suffering we may need to pray for God’s grace in our struggles with those difficulties and that suffering. St Paul pleaded three times with the Lord that the thorn in his flesh might be...

Hope of the Innocents

Sitting at a desk in a safe place, I am painfully aware that from where I live a mere two and a half hours away by aeroplane, in Ukraine, many innocent people are suffering grievously. Today’s Gospel passage, in which Jesus raises the difficult question of why bad things happen to innocent people, makes especially challenging reading at times like these.

More than Worth the Cost

For generations the liturgy has presented the suffering servant of Isaiah as a prophecy of Christ. We find this today in our mass where the first reading from Isaiah is proclaimed in preparation for the Gospel of Mark and Jesus’s third prediction of his suffering. Such an interpretation of Isaiah appears to be as old as the first preaching of the good news (cf. Acts 8:30-35); and we can imagine that part of Christ’s risen...

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...

Tossed by the Waves

When medieval artists and icon painters of the Eastern Christian tradition portrayed Jesus about to be baptised by John the Baptist, they often portrayed all sorts of strange and menacing sea creatures in the waters in which Jesus stood. This symbolised that, in accepting baptism, Jesus was acting in solidarity with the human condition, not least what threatens us.

Simplify My Heart

‘Unless a wheat grain falls on the ground and dies, it remains alone.’ This mini-parable from Christ about the grain that dies, about losing our life in order to save it for eternity, forebodes his own impending death on the Cross. But how is it that we must die to avoid being alone? Isn’t it precisely death that makes us most completely alone?

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...

God Is.

Bad news travels fast. The tower at Siloam in Jerusalem fell killing people. Shoddy building work? Perhaps? Some disturbance in the temple? Pilate’s solution as colonial ruler was to kill a few people – keep the locals in order by fear. Disasters happen and people, good and bad alike, get killed. We should plan to minimise known risks, although building regulations may be costly to enforce, and adequate policing expensive. The news of the terrorist...

Future Proof

There’s little doubt about it: life can sometimes be hard. No matter how much we try to avoid difficulty and suffering on a day to day basis, whether through our attempts to live a healthy life, the material comforts we surround ourselves with, however many prayers we may say, we can’t completely ‘future proof’ ourselves against suffering. We live in a fallen and finite world, and we know that any efforts to keep ourselves from...

Learning to Obey God

Today’s Gospel sets the scene for the forthcoming drama of Holy Week. Jesus is, in effect, telling his disciples both that his work of preaching is over and also – something difficult to grasp – that a final cosmic battle with Satan is about to begin. This battle will involve his death, but that death will be unimaginably fruitful in defeating evil and granting his followers access to eternal life.

Light in the Darkness

Saint Peter must have felt relief by his experience of the Transfiguration. A few verses before in Mark’s Gospel he had really been deflated by Christ’s words to him. Why? Peter in a moment of revelation had publicly acknowledged that Jesus was the Messiah. And no doubt he had seen the implications of this announcement for himself. He could see himself as Christ’s right hand man in a thriving Kingdom of God. But then Jesus...

Poor Old Job!

Poor old Job! You can't help feeling sorry for the man. Despite all his protestations and prayers, God seems to be ignoring his requests! Why, I wonder, does the Church introduce us to Job's suffering so early in this year's Liturgical Calendar, and so close to the beginning of Lent in ten days time? A reading from the prophet Job only appears once in the Sunday scripture readings, so why now? If my memory serves...

No Clichés in Christ

When it comes to clichés, perhaps one of the most archetypal of all is the cliché 'life is just one damned thing after another.' A cliché of course is a common expression that has lost all its freshness and meaning through overuse, and this is certainly true of the 'one damned thing' saying. Through frequent repetition over the last hundred years, this saying has become very dull, but what's more, repetition and dullness seem to...

Daily Conversion

The Holy Week liturgies of the passion which we will celebrate in a few weeks time include the reading and singing of the passion narratives. And when we hear those passion stories we get quite an insight into the character of Pontius Pilate. In particular, we see him as the unjust coward, who didn’t have the guts, or perhaps even the inclination, to do the right thing. But other sources from that time show that...

Poison and Antidote

John's Gospel is building to a show-down. You can feel the rising tension. The Pharisees are watching for an opportunity to attack Jesus. And as they complain in the verse immediately preceding our passage, Jesus is increasingly the focus of wider attention: 'the world has come after him'. At Cana, at the outset of his public ministry, Jesus told his Mother that his 'hour' had not yet come. Now, he tells us, it is here....

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.

A Tortured Relationship

'If anyone wants to be a follower of mine….' To me this is one of the most crucial statements in the whole of the Gospels. It forces me to ask myself how much it means to me to be a follower of Jesus. Am I prepared to give what it takes? We have read of Jesus asking his disciples, 'You, who do you say I am?' Peter's replied, 'You are the Christ!' with the title...

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...

The Coming of the Son of Man

This is just one of several grim scripture passages that we read at Mass at this time of year. It may seem strange to be doing this when we are beginning to look forward to Christmas. But it is also the low point of the year, the time of darkness, cold and sickness, and that may remind us how we often think pessimistically of the future of the world as an impending disaster. In the...

Do You Not Care?

Some years back, just a few weeks after being ordained a priest, I found myself chaplain for a month at one of the London hospitals. One day I was called to the bedside of a young boy dying of cancer. His parents were there and we all sat together for the last few hours of his life.

A New Sabbath

In his grief Job takes a grim view of our lot. Genesis told how Adam and Eve had been created in God's image, to share in his rule, to co-operate freely in the creation. But now Job sees life as servitude. Sitting among the ashes of his past good fortune, he has come to see the world through the eyes of Israel's pagan neighbours and enemies. It was they who thought the gods made human...

So great was their joy

When we became believers - we could say also for some of us, when we were invited to follow in the footsteps of St Dominic - it was not in order to follow a rule of life, however holy. It was to taste this joy. It was to be set free from the darkness that overshadows human living, set free to share a joy, a joy that no one can take from us. If we...

A Sermon that Heals

Suffering, loneliness, illness are things that nobody wants. We do our best to get rid of them. Doctors, nurses, researchers, social workers, people with clear religious commitment and people with none, faith-healers, rationalists – all strive to rid the world of its problems. It is an effort which unites so many people from different places and backgrounds, although there are plenty of squabbles along the way about whose method is best.