Episodes
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Friends, weâre getting very close to Pentecost, the great feast of the descent of the Spirit. And on this Sixth Sunday of Easter, the Church gives us three readings that are hinting at the Holy Spiritâa kind of foretaste of that descent.
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Friends, the Lord Jesus Christ is not a teacher from a distant age, not someone from long ago we remember fondly, not a moral exemplar; rather, he is a field of force. We donât just listen to him or imitate him; we live in him. Our Gospel for this Fifth Sunday of Easter gives us one of the most beautiful and powerful images for this truth: Jesus is the vine, and we are the branches. But there is a dark side to this wonderful organic imagery: the Father is the vine grower, and he is going to prune away all that is in us that is preventing the life of Christ from manifesting itself.
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Friends, we come to the Fourth Sunday of Easter, known as Good Shepherd Sunday. Jesus says in the Gospel, âI am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.â What is it about that image that sings to us across the ages, from the pages of the Bible to the present day? What I want to do is reflect on this image of the shepherdâfirst, in relation to Jesus, then second, in relation to leadership in the life of the Church.
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Friends, this week, on the Third Sunday of Easter, we have a passage from that magnificent twenty-fourth chapter of Lukeâone of the appearances of the risen Christ to the Apostles. When weâre talking about the Resurrection, weâre talking about the central point of Christian faith, the hinge upon which the whole of Christianity turns. So to understand what weâre dealing with here is exceptionally important. What I want to do is reflect on the different views about what happens to us when we die that were floating around the eastern Mediterranean in the first centuryâand how none of them is on offer here.
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Friends, on the Second Sunday of Easter, we have the inexhaustible reading from the twentieth chapter of Johnâone of the accounts of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus. These are in many ways the core texts of our Christian faith, so it behooves us to spend some careful time looking at them. This week, I want to reflect on the shalom (peace) that the risen Christ offers his disciplesâand the struggle of one disciple, who was not present, to believe.
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Friends, a very happy and blessed Easter! We come to the climax of the Churchâs year, the feast of feasts, the very reason for being of Christianity. Everything in Christian life centers around the Resurrection. And the Church gives us, every year, the account of Easter morning from the Gospel of John. I want to bring out just one feature that John especially draws attention toânamely, the burial cloths left behind in the tomb. These strange and wonderful cloths that opened the door to faith long ago could perhaps do the same thing today.
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Friends, we have the great privilege on Palm Sunday of reading from one of the Passion narratives, and this year, we read from the Gospel of Markâthe very first one written. But what I want to do today is something a little bit different: instead of putting the focus on Jesus, I want to focus on a series of people around him as they react in different ways to the events of the Passion, putting ourselves in the scene. Who do we identify with in this story as Jesus comes toward his death?
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Friends, on this Fifth Sunday of Lent, we hear one of the most pivotal passages in the Old Testament: Jeremiah 31:31. Jeremiah knew the long Israelite history of covenant and blood sacrifice, but he prophesies, âThe days are coming, says the LORD, when I will make a new covenant with the house of Israel and the house of Judah.â This passage will find its fulfillment about six centuries later at a Passover supper, where a young rabbiâthe covenant in personâoffers his own lifeblood for his people to drink.
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Friends, the Gospel on this Fourth Sunday of Lent includes one of the most famous verses in the Bible: âFor God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal lifeâ (John 3:16). In many ways, this verse is the Gospel in miniature. But we can isolate this line too much and miss the real import of it when we donât attend to what happens right beforeânamely, Jesusâ reference to the serpent in the desert.
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Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, the Church asks us to look at one of the great texts in the Old Testamentânamely, the Ten Commandments from the book of Exodus. Lent is a time of getting back to basics spiritually, and walking through the Ten Commandments is a great way to do it. Go back to this text in Exodus, commit the Commandments to memory if you havenât, and use them to examine your conscience.
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Friends, we come now to the Second Sunday of Lent, and weâre on both dangerous and very holy ground with the first reading from the twenty-second chapter of Genesis. The ancient Israelites referred to it as the âAkedah,â which means the âbindingâ: Abraham binds and is ready to sacrifice Isaac at Godâs command. Itâs hard to imagine another text in the Old Testament that has stirred up more puzzlement and opposition. I am with SĂžren Kierkegaard: if you donât experience âfear and tremblingâ having read this text, you have not been paying attention. And itâs naming something of absolute centrality in the spiritual life.
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Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent. The Gospel for this First Sunday of Lent is Markâs laconic version of the temptation of Jesus in the desert. Mark does not give us the details we find in Matthew and Luke, but we do hear this mysterious observation: âHe was among wild beasts, and the angels ministered to him.â We are given here a kind of icon of the union of the spiritual and the material, the soul and the body, in the human beingâboth the glory and the agony of human life. And a really good way to pray through Lent is reflecting on our own struggles in light of that icon.
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Friends, this week, our Gospel is the marvelous passage from Mark about Jesus curing a leper. These moments of healing stayed so deeply in the imaginations of the first Christians. What do we make of this particular healing of a leper? Letâs look at it from three angles: life on the margins of society, the shame of our own sin, and the absence from right worship.
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Friends, the Gospel of Mark is a fascinating literary work. St. Mark seems to write in a breathless, staccato, even primitive manner, but the deeper you look, the more his Gospel appears iconic. He presents scene after scene in a very concentrated way, telling us some rather deep truths about the faith. Our Gospel for today from the first chapter is a good example of this. We see on clear display here what Pope Benedict described as the three essential tasks of the Church: it worships God, it serves the poor, and it evangelizes.
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Friends, the first reading from Deuteronomy today is of signal importance. Moses, speaking to the people before they enter the Promised Land, says, âA prophet like me will the LORD, your God, raise up for you from among your own kin; to him you shall listen.â These words haunted the mind of Israel. Moses was the supreme authority; there was no figure in the Old Testament more important. Who could be greater than Moses? We find the answer in the Gospel: Jesus of Nazareth, the Holy One of God, who speaks on his own authority.
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Friends, though the book of Jonah is only a few pages long, there is something inexhaustible about it. Itâs a biblical commonplace that God speaks to certain people and gives them missions, as he does with Jonah in our first reading. But God also speaks to us all the time, precisely in the voice of our conscience. Do you listen to the voice of God or not? Do you listen to what your conscience is telling you or not? If you do, you become a vehicle of grace for yourself and for all those around you. If you donât, chaos ensues.
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Friends, we commence now with the Second Sunday in Ordinary Time, and our first reading is one of my favorites in the Old Testament: the account, in the First Book of Samuel, of the call of Samuel, who as a young man hears the voice of the Lord for the first time. In the history of salvation, in the lives of the saints, occasionally God really does speak in a voice that can be heard, but I think whatâs being described here is the word of God in the voice of the conscience, and what to do when we hear it.
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Friends, we come to the wonderful Feast of the Epiphany and the great account in the Gospel of Matthew of the journey of the three magi. This marvelous, puzzling story, which has so beguiled the poets, artists, and preachers over the centuries, bears a very profound theological truth, and it has to do with the relationship of the national and the transnational.
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Friends, we come to the wonderful Feast of the Holy Family. Over the years on this feast day, Iâve certainly preached on the dynamics of the Holy Family, on Mary, and of course on the Lord, but I don't think Iâve ever focused on St. Joseph. Well, that ends today. Letâs look at four dimensions to the holiness of this greatest male saint in the history of the Church.
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Friends, we come to the fourth and final Sunday of Advent, falling this year on the very day before Christmas. And today, the Church invites us in our readings to think about David. Jesus is the fulfillment of the Torah, the fulfillment of the temple, the fulfillment of all of the longings of the prophets and patriarchs of Israel. And he is, perhaps above all, the new and definitive David, the King and Priest who will ârule over the house of Jacob forever.â
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