Bishop Robert Barron’s Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

God's ways are not our ways; God's thoughts are not our thoughts. How is God's love playing itself out in the world? It isn't always easy to see, for there are so many injustices, so much innocent suffering, so much out of balance. But the dispensing of grace is God's business, not ours, and so we should ask the question "why?" not in a spirit of rebellion, but in an attitude of awe.

Last week we heard of the grace by which Peter correctly confessed the identity of Jesus. This week, we hear of his weakness. Opposing the cross, he becomes an ally of the dark powers. The Church is infallible and the Church is made up of sinners. When we forget one or the other, we fall into trouble.

The Church of Jesus Christ is governed, not by popular opinion polls, nor even by the holiness of the saints, but by the strange grace that comes to the successors of St. Peter. Hardly the brightest or holiest of Jesus disciples, Peter was nevertheless the one who saw and understood.

The Syro-Phoenicean woman stands for all those who are marginalized, ostracized, ignored, set aside. Through her persistance and cleverness, she obtains what she wants from Jesus. The Church must be that body of people who listen to the persistant cries of the poor and the forgotten.

The compassion of Jesus creates the Church. We are the instruments of the Lord's love for the world. How do we cooperate with him? By giving him even the little that we have and waiting for him to multiply it!

The Kingdom of God is like a treasure that we miraculously find; it is like a pearl for which we diligently search; it is like a net that will gather us in. Jesus offers these three great images for God's reign.

One of the most mysterious and yet practically applicable of Jesus' parables is at the heart of today's Gospel. The wheat and the weeds are allowed to grow together until the harvest, just as, strangely, good and evil are allowed to exist side-by-side in the affairs of the world. Why is his true? Because God deigns to bring good out of evil.

God is a farmer who sows the seed of his love liberally, on good and bad soil, to saint and sinner alike. There is no limit to God's willingness to save. If we are the least bit cooperative, the grace of God will cause life to spring up in us thirty, sixty, or a hundred fold.

There is nothing anti-intellectual about the Catholic tradition. It has reverenced great minds from Augustine to John Henry Newman. But the Lord reminds us that the mind can easily become arrogant, self-important, bullying. Thomas Aquinas, one of the greatest geniuses who ever lived, had, by all accounts, the soul of an innocent child.

Jesus tells his followers that those who love their mothers and fathers more than him are not worthy of him. This shocking claim is not meant to encourage hatred of one's family! It is meant to force us into a clear prioritization of values: God must be first, without condition, compromise or cavil.

The Christian disciple is truly free in the measure that he is not afraid. Thomas More couldn't be compromised, precisely because he couldn't be frightened by the loss of earthly goods. Jesus tells his disciples not to be afraid even of those who can kill the body. In faith, we are connected to that power which transcends space and time, life and death.

In describing the pity that Jesus felt for the crowds, Matthew uses a distinctive Greek term that means, literally, "his guts were moved." God's compassion for the world is a gut-wrenching, visceral desire to address human suffering. The instrument that Jesus chooses to express this compassion are the twelve apostles, prototypes of the Church.

One of the great conversion stories in the New Testament is the account of the call of St. Matthew. Jesus summons the worldly tax-gatherer and Matthew rises from his post to follow the Lord. In the symbolic language of the Bible, this "rising" evokes the elevation to a higher and richer life: intimacy with Jesus.

On this feast of Corpus Christ, we reflect on the inexhaustibly rich theme of the Eucharist. The particular motif I pursue in this homily is that of the eucharist as food for eternal life. Eating the body and drinking the blood of Jesus fits us for the rarified atmosphere of a heavenly existence.

In his letter to the Galatians, Paul enumerates the fruits of the Holy Spirit, the concrete results of living the life of the Trinity. These include love, joy, peace, patience, kindness, gentleness and self-control. Is someone living "in Christ," or "in the Holy Spirit?" Watch for these particular signs.