Friends, on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, our Gospel is one of the most magnificent stories in the Gospel of John: the healing of the man born blind. John is a theological master, of course, but also a literary master, and this story is beautifully crafted as a sort of icon of the spiritual life. T...

Friends, on this Third Sunday of Lent, we are again getting back to spiritual basics, and the first reading from Exodus and the Gospel from John both focus on the symbol of water. Water in the Bible can be a negative symbol of destruction, but it can also be a positive symbol of life—not just phy...

Friends, the readings for the Second Sunday of Lent brought to mind my good friend Bishop David O’Connell, who was killed last month. He was one of the most Christ-like people I have ever known—a man of deep spiritual conviction, with a profound sense of the power of the Holy Spirit. Like Abraham...

Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, our preparation for Easter. I've often said that Lent is a time to get back to basics. It’s like when you're starting the football season and have to get back to fundamentals of the game, or when you're getting back to playing golf after a long win...

Friends, we continue our reading of the marvelous Sermon on the Mount. We cannot read this sermon as one ethical teaching among many. Everyone from Plato and Aristotle all the way up through Kant and Hegel have a moral philosophy—an understanding of how humans ought to behave. This is precisely t...

Friends, we have the privilege of continuing to read from the Sermon on the Mount, where Jesus himself lays out his basic teaching. What we find today is Jesus as the new Moses. Like Moses, he goes up on a mountain, and he receives and then gives a new Law. But Jesus intensifies the Law of Moses;...

Friends, we are reading from the marvelous Sermon on the Mount in the Gospel of Matthew. This week, we hear Jesus compare his disciples to three things: the salt of the earth, the light of the world, and a city set on a mountain. What do all three of these things have in common? They do not exist...

Friends, our Gospel for this Sunday is one of the great passages of the New Testament—namely, the Beatitudes from the fifth chapter of Matthew. "Beatitudo" just means happiness, and the one thing we all want is to be happy. Well, here is the Son of God telling us how—so let’s pay close attention!

Friends, this liturgical year, we are reading from the Gospel of Matthew, and Matthew is written precisely for a Jewish audience. This is why, over and over again, we find Matthew putting Jesus within an Old Testament context. And in our readings for this weekend, the Church juxtaposes a prophecy...

Friends, we return this Sunday to Ordinary Time, and the Church gives us a rather extraordinary reading from the first chapter of the Gospel of John. Seeing Jesus, John the Baptist says something that we repeat at every single Mass: "Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world." ...

Friends, we come today to the Feast of the Epiphany. The word “epiphany” comes from the Greek words meaning “intense appearance.” It is something that not only gets our attention but also reveals something of enormous significance. For the wise men of course, it was first the star; but the real e...

Friends, on this Solemnity of the Blessed Virgin Mary, the Mother of God, we hear three significant words in the Gospel from Luke: haste, astonished, and treasured. If God has broken into your life in some decisive way, if you’ve been given your mission, then don’t worry about what the world says...

Merry Christmas, friends! As you gather today with family and friends, it is likely that someone, at some point, will bring in a newborn. And everybody will want to see the baby. The whole room will stop whatever they are doing to see this child. There is something irresistibly charming about bab...

Friends, many mythologies and philosophies in the ancient world held that time is cyclical; it just goes round and round. Many people today, on the other hand, hold that time is meaningless; it is just one thing after another. The Bible says no to both of those finally despairing understandings o...

Friends, today we come to the third Sunday of Advent, and the great image from Isaiah is that of the blooming desert. Many of us pass through desert times, dry periods of trial and training. But perhaps the Lord has drawn us into desert to awaken a deeper sense of dependence upon him. We must be ...

Friends, on the Second Sunday of Advent, the Church invites us to go meet the great Advent figure of John the Baptist. All the details of our Gospel—where the Baptist makes his appearance, why people come to him, his great theme, the images he uses—are important to enter into a spirituality of Ad...

Friends, Happy New Year's Day! We come today to the beginning of a liturgical year—the First Sunday of Advent. There is a sort of a permanent Advent quality, a vigil quality, to the Christian life. We are waiting, watching; we want something we don't fully have. And as we prepare for the coming o...

Friends, we come to the great feast of Christ the King, which is always the last Sunday of the liturgical year. Think of the king coming at the end of a long procession into his palace; this is Christ the King at the end of the great procession of the liturgical year. What I want to do is look at...

Friends, as we come toward the end of the liturgical year, we begin to look at the apocalyptic writings in the Bible. What’s revealed is breaking down of all the frames of reference that we use to understand our lives. Because of the Resurrection of Jesus from the dead, something new had happened...

Friends, our first reading and our Gospel for this weekend have a special resonance for our time because they both speak clearly about life after death. Our dominant secularist or materialist ideology says that matter in motion is all there is; the world came into being, and eventually it will pa...

Friends, our first reading from the book of Wisdom makes an extraordinarily important observation that’s of both theological and philosophical significance—namely, that the very fact that something exists means that it has been loved into being. In light of that, we can read our famous Gospel abo...

Friends, our second reading this week is from Paul’s Second Letter to Timothy—one of the last letters we have from St. Paul. Now toward the end of his life, Paul passes on various pieces of wisdom to his young friend, including this: “I have finished the race.” The spiritual life is like a race; ...

Friends, our first reading for this Sunday is about a battle between Israel and the Amalekites. To many of us today, this appears to be either an irrelevancy of history or an outrageous story about God sanctioning genocide. But Origen of Alexandria helps us to see that it is neither; rather, it i...

Friends, our first reading for this Sunday is a section of the marvelous story of Naaman the Syrian from the Second Book of Kings. The spiritual lesson is this: where you stumble, dig for treasure. We all have some leprosy—some ailment or struggle or weakness that embarrasses us or makes us suffe...