Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Jesus sums up a long Biblical tradition when he says 'I am the good shepherd.' The prophets and the psalmist had yearned for a time when God himself would come to shepherd his people Israel. This yearning is realized in Jesus himself. What makes him good? The Gospel for today specifies two things: his willingness to lay down his life for his sheep, and the fact that he knows his sheep personally, recognizing their voices.

Authentic Christianity does not present Jesus as a ghost, an abstraction, or a disembodied soul. It presents him as risen from the dead, glorified and resurrected at every level. This good news of Easter was strange and unnerving 2,000 years ago and remains so today.

On this Second Sunday of Easter, Divine Mercy Sunday, we remember the dedication of this day by Saint John Paul II in honor of St. Faustina’s vision of Christ, in which the Lord’s heart radiated forth with divine mercy for the world. But what does mercy mean? It designates the suffering of the heart, a type of compassion, a deep, loving identification with people in their suffering. It is the characteristic of God, for God is love. Nothing in the world would exist if it were not, at every moment, loved into being by God—a great act of tender mercy. How is this love made manifest in us? Precisely through following God’s commands and through forgiveness. 

Many people enjoy visiting the graves of famous people, from Abraham Lincoln in Springfield, IL to St. Peter in the Vatican. We feel a sense of peace and finality around graves. But the one thing we would never expect in a cemetery is action. Yet that's precisely what we find at the center of Christianity, as St. John recounts in today's Easter Gospel.

The Gospels are passion narratives with long introductions, dominated by Jesus' death and resurrection. On this Palm Sunday, as we near the climax of the Lenten season, we should examine four odd details in St. Mark's account of the Passion of Christ.

The best way to understand the history of salvation is to understand it as the story of covenants between God and his people. In the Old Testament, covenants are typically sealed in blood and sacrifice. In today's first reading, Jeremiah prophesies a new covenant forged by the shedding of blood— Christ's blood on the Christ— which makes the whole world into the New Israel. Through the blood of that covenant, we share in the Divine Life.

The Divine Love is the great theme of the Bible. One of the great mistakes we can make is to project onto God our way of being and our subjectivity. God's love is unconditional, not fickle and vacillating. His love is "hesed," which means "tender mercy." This love is visible, par excellence, in the Incarnation.

Although most of our parents's generation knew the Ten Commandments by heart, few Christians today can recite them. The liturgy today invites us to refocus on these timeless commands, which provide a path to a flourishing moral life.

The story of the Transfiguration of Christ has beguiled the Christian mind for centuries. It is the clearest New Testament evocation of mystical experience, the experience of spiritual things within the ordinary and the keen conviction that the spiritual reality is greater and more beautiful than ordinary experience. "Mystical" means there has been contact with a Person, the person of God.

As Lent commences, the pews will be filled with people escaping the chaos of the modern world and finding a place of peace and order within the ship-like safety of the Church. In today's readings, we hear the peculiar story of Noah in the book of Genesis, which correlates with the Mass. We find in the ark a remnant of God's right order as he remakes the world through the purifying waters of the flood. We, too, are called to preserve the life of the world within the symbolic "ark" of the Church, but only to let that life out for the good of the World.