Bishop Robert Barron’s Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

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.