Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

On the feast of the Trinity, we reflect on the uniquely Christian definition of God: God is love. Love is not something that God does, or an attribute that God has; love is what God is. This means that God must be a play between lover, beloved, and love--between Father, Son, and Holy Spirit.

All the Jews in Jerusalem for the feast of Pentecost heard the disciples preaching in their own languages. This miracle of the Spirit is the reversal of the Tower of Babel, when God scattered the nations and confused their languages. The Holy Spirit is the solution to the spiritual problem of the one and the many. In God alone can the many come together fruitfully as one.

This week I discuss two more themes that emerge in the Da Vinci Code: the Gnostic Gospels and anti-Catholicism. Much of the storyline of the Da Vinci Code flows from the controversial Gnostic tellings of the life of Jesus. These are, in fact, far less historically reliable than the canonical Gospels--not to mention less theologically sound. And the book as a whole should be classed in the genre of anti-Catholic screed. We shouldn't be hysterical about American anti-Catholicism, but we also shouldn't be naive about it. I promise that this is my last word about the Da Vinci Code! Next week we're back to the Scriptures.

I don't like departing from the Scriptures in these homilies, but the appearance of the movie based upon the wildly popular novel The Da Vinci Code warrants a response. The central claim of the book--that Jesus is not divine--stands directly opposed to the central and defining claim of the Church. The Da Vinci Code argues that the divinity of Jesus was a fourth-century invention. Nothing could be further from the truth. This week and next, I will address this question and some others that arise from the Da Vinci Code.

Jesus Christ is infintely more than a moral ideal, a saint whom we admire from afar. In accord with the image from the Gospel for today, he is the vine upon which we have been grafted like branches. This means that he is our life blood, the very energy of our existence. Therefore we should read our lives this way: Jesus Christ is living his life in us.

Luke paints a fascinating portrait of the risen Jesus in our Gospel for today. He stands in the midst of his disciples, gathering them as the new Israel; he shows them that he is densely, physically real, even going so far as to eat a piece of fish in their presence. Jesus is not a phantom or a dream or a disembodied ideal; he is a living person in whom we find peace.

Graves are usually places of peace, repose, and meditation. We sit by a gravesite or we stroll through a cemetery in order to reflect on lives well lived or on the mystery of death. But there is nothing peaceful or meditative about the grave of Jesus, and there never developed within the Christian tradition a cult of the tomb of the Lord. This is because this grave has been robbed--and by the most intriguing grave-robber of all: the living God.

The donkey upon which Jesus rides into Jerusalem is a wonderful image for discipleship. He is a simple, humble, unassuming creature--and he is pressed into service because the Master has need of him. We like to organize our lives according to our projects and plans, but the key is allowing ourselves to be used according to Christ's needs and purposes. The whole point is to become, like the humble Palm Sunday donkey, a Christopher, a Christ-bearer.

God sometimes expresses his anger at his people Israel. This is not an emotional snit into which God falls; rather, it is a way of expressing his passion to set things right. So God permits the destruction of the Temple and the carrying off of Israel into exile in order to purify and cleanse. When catastrophe befalls us, we should trust in the strange providence of God. God is always about the business of enhancing life.

For a Jew of Jesus' time, Moses and Elijah would symbolize the Law and the Prophets, the two major divisions of the Scriptures. Jesus' conversation with them during the Transfiguration symbolizes something that is emphasized throughout the New Testament, namely, that Jesus fulfills, brings to completion, both the Law and the prophets. He fulfills the promise implicit in the Old Testament.

Our readings for the first Sunday of Lent highlight the cosmic and universal nature of God's redemptive purpose. The covenant of Noah was made, not just with Noah and his family, but with "all living things." We see this universality on iconic display in the Gospel. Jesus goes into the desert and he is "waited on by angels and accompanied by wild beasts." Jesus' redemption affects all dimensions of creation, seen and unseen.

The new wine that Jesus speaks of is the Gospel itself, the Good News that God has joined our human condition. In order to take in such a message and to conform our lives to it, we must expand. If we remain in the narrow confines of the old self, we won't be able to handle the richness and fullness of the Gospel message. So change! Conform yourself to the love that Christ is. Become like new wineskins.

In the wonderful Gospel story for today, the paralytic gets to Jesus only because there are four friends willing to carry him to the Lord. Are there people around you--friends, co-workers, family-members--who are, for various reasons, paralyzed in regard to their relationship to Christ and the Church? And are you willing to carry them? That is the evangelical question that this Gospel poses.

In our second reading, St. Paul tells us to do everything--even such simple acts as eating and drinking--for the glory of God. We should make sure that the light shines, not on us, but on God. And here's the wonderful paradox: since God needs nothing, whatever we give to him comes back magnified to us. This is why the saints shine with a special radiance, a luminosity greater than anything they could have produced on their own.

St. Paul tells us in our second reading that preaching the Gospel is not a matter of choice for him; it is a compulsion, a necessity. In the homily for this week, I talk about St. Peter and St. Edmund Campion, two Christians who, 15 centuries apart, felt that same pressing obligation to proclaim Jesus Christ. Do we have it?

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

The familiar theme of detachment runs right through all three of our readings for this week. Paul tells the Corinthians who are married to carry on as though they were not married and those who buy and sell as though they were not buying and selling. The point is that one should orient one's life totally to the absolute good who is God. When that orientation takes place, everything else—from spouses to material goods—can be let go, can be seen in proper spiritual perspective. This detachment is, I argue, the conversion that Jesus speaks of in his inaugural address, which is our Gospel for today.

Jesus Christ is God's love made flesh, a gift to all the nations. As such, he transcends the disputes and squabbles that so often characterize the relationship between nations, cultures, and peoples. This boundary-transcending quality of Christ is expressed beautifully in the story of the journey of the Magi.

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

Recently, I read an interview with Bono, the lead singer of the group U2. Asked about his religious beliefs, he replied, "I think that there is a love and a logic that lies behind the universe. So I believe in God. I also see, as an artist, the poetic appropriateness of that unspeakable power manifesting itself as a baby born in straw poverty. And that's why I'm a Christian." My sermon for today is just an elaboration of Bono's wonderful Christmas sermon.

For the fourth Sunday of Advent, the Church asks us to juxtapose stories of David and Mary. David decides that he wants to build a temple for the Lord, but God does not favor his plan; Mary hears what God wants to do through her, and she acquiesces. It is always a matter of following the promptings of the divine will and not our own desires, even when we are convinced that those desires are good and holy. Thomas Merton said, "Lord, the fact that I think I'm following your will doesn't mean that I am in fact doing so..." That acknowledgement takes great humility and spiritual perception.

Our first reading for this Sunday is an especially sacred one in the Christian tradition, for it was precisely this passage from Isaiah that Jesus chose to comment upon when he first rose to speak at the beginning of his public ministry. Using Isaiah's imagery, Jesus spells out for us the meaning and purpose of his work: to heal the brokenhearted, to declare liberty to captives, to announce a year of favor from the Lord.

In the very first line of his Gospel, St. Mark tells us that he is going to share with us Good News, Glad Tidings, about Jesus, the Son of God. In many ways, the rest of the text is but a playing out of the implications of that statement. In this homily, I explore the meaning of the phrase "Good News" in connection with Jesus.

Lent is, of course, a penitential season, but Advent is as well. We get in touch with our sinfulness during Advent precisely because we want to prepare ourselves for the coming of a Savior. If there is nothing to be saved from, then there is no point in rejoicing at the arrival of Jesus the Lord. The prophet Isaiah offers us a number of powerful images for sin in our first reading for this Sunday. It behooves us, as an Advent spiritual exercise, to meditate on them.

Peter Maurin, the co-founder of the Catholic Worker Movement, took Jesus' words in our Gospel for today with consummate seriousness. He felt that the corporal and spiritual works of mercy constituted a sort of socio-economic program. Following the exhortation of Jesus, Maurin wanted to create a society in which "it is easier for men to be good." His example is still a challenging and compelling one today.

All of us believers have been entrusted with a treasure: our faith. What do we do with this treasure while we await the return of the Lord? We must make it grow, precisely by giving it away. We must evangelize. The very worst thing that we can do is to bury it away in the secrecy of our hearts, endeavoring to "keep it safe." Privatizing the faith is the key to losing it. A challenging message for all of us this week!

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

At its best, religion orients our lives to God and moves us away from the terrible preoccupation with our own egos. But at its worst, religion reinforces the ego and actually blocks our access to God. In his great polemic against the pharisees, Jesus warns us against this dysfunctional side of religious belief and practice.

"You shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, all your soul, and all your mind--and your neighbor as yourself." This is the way that Jesus summed up the law and the prophets. Finally, it is a matter of love, and the love of God and neighbor are tightly intertwined. I try to illustrate this principle by telling the life of Rose Hawthorne, a woman who loved God precisely by loving some of the most ostracized people of her time.

God the Father has prepared a wedding banquet for his Son, and we are all invited. That is the poetic summary of salvation that can be found in the parable that Jesus tells this week. The urgent point is this: we must respond to the invitation, and we must don the proper wedding garment. Failure to do one or the other means we miss the celebration.

In this striking parable of the vineyard, Jesus lays out both God's vision for the world as well as his plan of redemption. The Lord wants us to be fully and dynamically alive, and to assure that this happens, he gives us his only Son as a redeemer. In the course of my homily this week, I try to "decode" this wonderful story.

Our second reading, from Paul's letter to the Philippians, contains one of the oldest texts in the tradition, a "hymn" that Paul received and adapted for his purposes. It speaks of a fully divine Jesus who was, nevertheless, willing to empty himself utterly and become a slave on our behalf. All of the drama, poetry, and power of Christianity is contained in that paradox.

The parable that Jesus tells in our Gospel for today is one of his most disturbing and confounding. Giving the same wage to those who worked for one hour and those who labored the whole day just seems unjust. The story is meant to place a question in our minds: what exactly is divine justice and how does it differ from our conception of justice?

Our capacity to forgive others is tightly linked to our realization that we have been forgiven by God. When we try to justify an ethic of radical forgiveness on purely humanistic grounds, we will fail. But when we know in our bones that our sins have been eradicated through the cross of Christ, then we are able to forgive one another even seventy times seven times.

Paul tells the Christians in Rome to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice of praise. I suggest that this Pauline image provides a very good context for thinking about the moral life. We want our bodies--our lives--to be pure offerings to the Father. We don't want to give the Lord lips that have spoken calumny, hands that have reached out in violence, feet that have walked away from the poor and needy. The moral life should be seen not primarily in a legal framework--but a liturgical one.

The idea of testing faith is a common one in the Bible. Abraham's faith was tried on Mt. Moriah, as was Jacob's and Joseph's. The Gospel story of the Syro-Phoenician woman is a New Testament instance of this dynamic. Why is Jesus so resistant to the reasonable and loving request of the woman? He wants, not to frustrate her, but to bring out her faith in all of its breadth and depth.

Often in the Bible, water functions as a symbol of chaos and sin: the waters at the beginning of creation, the waters of the Red Sea, the waters of Noah's flood, etc. Just as the Spirit of God hovered over the abyss in the beginning, so the Son of God walks on the waves. This signals God's lordship over all of the forces of destruction that confront us. As long as we look to Jesus, we can walk on those same waters with him.

It all begins with grace, and it all ends with grace. Bernanos' country priest summed up Christianity with the phrase "Toute est grace," everything is grace. God gives graciously, gratuitously, superabundantly--and then we are called to respond with a similar exuberance. The more we give back to God, the more we get, and then we must give that back again, so as to get even more in return. This is the loop of grace which is spoken of from beginning to end of the Bible. And all of our readings for today touch on it specially.

At the conclusion of chapter 13 of Matthew's Gospel, the chapter of parables, Jesus says, "the scribe who is learned in the Kingdom of God is like the householder who brings forth from his storehouse both the old and the new." The one who is wise in the ways of God escapes the ideologies of both left and right--the idolatry of both the new and the old. Focused on God alone, he is able to see the value in both novelty and tradition.

In our Gospel for today, we hear the parable of the wheat and the tares. Jesus speaks of the mysterious, and often frustrating, intertwining of good and evil. Don't be too eager, he says, to tear out the weeds, for you might, in the process, compromise the wheat. Listen, as I try to search out the meaning of this important and complex parable.

Our first reading, from the prophet Isaiah, shows that God's word is not so much descriptive as creative: it produces what it says. In the very intelligibility of the material world, we can sense this reality-producing power. We can also sense it in the Biblical word, an invitation into divine friendship. But we encounter it most powerfully in the Word made flesh, Jesus Christ. To what extent do we permit this reality-changing Word to take root in us? That is the challenge of our readings for today.

We hear in our first reading from the prophet Zechariah. This post-exilic figure is trying to reassure the people that their Messiah will come and will restore their fortunes. But then he specifies the nature and quality of this hero: he will enter Jerusalem, not on an Arabian charger, but on the foal of a donkey--and he will effectively disarm the nation, destroying horse and chariot! What could this possibly mean? No one really knew until a young rabbi, some five hundred years later, rode into Jerusalem on the foal of a donkey and mounted the victorious throne of a Roman cross.

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

"Who or what are you most afraid of?" is, I submit, a very important spiritual question. To answer it honestly is to know how and why your life is structured the way it is. The simple message of the the Gospel for this week is that one should fear, above all, the loss of friendship with God. More than the loss of money, health, power, the esteem of others, life itself, one should be afraid of losing intimacy with God. If that is truly your greatest fear, you are not far from the Kingdom of Heaven.

In our first reading from the book of Exodus, we hear the wonderful promise of God to Moses and his people that they would constitute a holy nation, a nation of priests. For the first Christians, this promise was fulfilled in Jesus and in the twelve apostles that he gathered round him. Peter, James, John, Thomas and their companions--with all of their faults--became the core of the renewed Israel. We the baptized are, in turn, their spiritual decendants, and we have, accordingly, the same purpose: to bring the whole human race into friendship with God.

Our Gospel for this week is a literary and theological masterpiece. It subtly yet powerfully tells the story of the conversion of Matthew from tax collector to disciple. The call, the response, the rising up to a new form of existence, the radical re-creation of a human being, the primacy of grace, the introduction into a life of celebration: all of it is on display. Enter into this story, for it is yours.

On this feast of Corpus Christi, I would like to reflect on the sacred liturgy, the central prayer of the Church. According to Msgr. Francis Mannion, good liturgy is the result of a balanced play between priest, people, and rite. When the first becomes exaggerated, we find the clerical abuse of the liturgy; when the second is overstressed, we encounter the congregationalist abuse; and when the third is exaggerated, we have the ritualistic problem. What counts is the balance!

In my course on the Trinity here at the seminary, I have, for many years, been using Joseph Ratzinger's book Introduction to Christianity. In the pages of that text, our new pope presents the Trinity in terms of three theses: God's transcendence of the unity/diversity polarity; God's radical personhood; and the metaphysical primacy of relationality. In this sermon for Trinity Sunday, I will spell out briefly the meaning of each of these assertions.

On this great feast of Pentecost, we reflect on the charismatic gifts of the Holy Spirit. God's Spirit has given to each baptized person some gift for the upbuilding of the church. When one finds that gift, he should center his entire life around it. There are three paths to the discernment of one's charismatic gift: prayer, listening to the church, and the stirring of the acorn. To find out what that last one means, listen to the sermon!

This week I continue my exploration of the life, career, and work of our new Pope, Joseph Ratzinger. In the years after the council, a split occured in the ranks of the Conciliar progressives, some calling for deeper and broader reform and others calling for a more careful appropriation of Vatican II. Joseph Ratzinger, along with Henri de Lubac, Hans Urs von Balthasar, and Karol Wojtyla, belonged to this latter group. The commonality between Ratzinger and Wojtyla led to John Paul II's choice of Ratzinger as his Prefect for the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith.