Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

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?