Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, a blessed and peaceful Easter to you! Although grave sites are known to be quiet places of reflection, God, through his sovereign power, overcame the corruption of sin by his Resurrection from the dead this Easter morning. From his empty tomb, we learn that God doesn’t let death have the last word—and thereupon hangs the tale of Easter.

Friends, one of the best known stories in Western culture is the narrative of Christ’s Passion and death. However, this very familiarity can block our understanding of the account. What I want to do in this homily is to draw your attention to three odd details of Mark’s Gospel, each of which packs a punch spiritually.

Friends, one of the most fundamental beliefs of the Biblical Israelites is that God is a covenant-maker. He formed his people through a series of agreements and contracts saying, “I will place my law within them and write it upon their hearts; I will be their God and they will be my people.” This law comes into our hearts precisely through the Eucharist, which is nothing other than a representatio...

Friends, our Gospel for today contains one of the most important lines in the entire Bible: “For 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 life.” To “believe” here means much more than to accept the truth of an idea; it is to enter into the space opened up by the death of the Son of God. When you do that, you are...

Friends, I have often said that Lent is a bit like basic training for the military or summer workouts for a football team—it is a chance to get back to the fundamentals of the faith, namely, the Ten Commandments. In this homily, I look at each of the Ten Commandments, using them as an examination of conscience for this Lenten season.

Friends, if the intention of an author is to convince people to read and think about what he’s written, the author of Sunday's first reading has done his job well. We hear the deeply troubling story of Abraham’s willingness to sacrifice his own son, Isaac. How do we reconcile God’s love with his asking Abraham to kill his own son? How should we take the fact that Abraham was willing to follow thro...

Friends, Lent is a marvelous opportunity to deepen our lives of prayer, to temper our desires for food and drink, and to engage in a graced time of alms giving. Let’s use this season to get our bodies and our behavior patterns in order, to show our love and service in very concrete ways.

Friends, today’s Gospel centers around Jesus’ healing of a leper. Although there aren’t many lepers around today, there are plenty of people that we treat as outsiders or pariahs. We should welcome them as Jesus does.

Friends, in this Sunday's readings, St. Paul highlights the significance of evangelization. The Church, by its very nature, evangelizes, going out to the ends of the world with its good news. And woe to us if we fail to do this! Paul urges us to organize our lives around mission, and to even move out of our comfort zones to do so.

Moses is, without a doubt, the greatest figure in the Old Testament. He heard the voice of God from the burning bush; he was given the Ten Commandments; he was permitted to talk to God as to a friend. But Moses speaks of a prophet who is to come, who is “like himself” and who should be listened to. Jesus is this prophet who has the legitimate personal authority to speak the divine word and bring h...

In today’s first reading, we find the story of Jonah, a narrative about the acceptance (or rejection) of God’s mission. We are all called to difficult things, and so most of us sinners, most of the time, do everything we can to avoid our mission. In Jonah’s case, it was physical flight, but for many of us it’s choosing to ignore what God has said, a giving in to every other voice, taking the path...

With the whole Church around the world, we return to Ordinary Time. This week, we have a wonderful Old Testament reading from the first book of Samuel having to do with the call of the prophet Samuel, and Eli his mentor helping him discern the voice of God. We know that story as a charming, even sentimental story—and it is that—but it's much more than that. And to see it, we have to get a wider pe...

The Gospel writers compel us, as it were, to pass through John the Baptist to get to Jesus; all four Gospels give us a version of Jesus’ baptism by John. But this baptism was embarrassing to the early Church, because it was interested in presenting Jesus as the Son of God, and yet people were coming to John as sinners for a baptism of repentance. Why would the incarnate Son of God seek out such a...

For Epiphany Sunday, we hear the marvelous story from the Gospel of Matthew in which the Magi journey to see the Christ child. This scene has beguiled artists, poets, and preachers for centuries. But we can distill five profound spiritual lessons—about being attentive, taking action, facing opposition, giving Christ what is best in us, and being transformed into new creations—from this perhaps ove...

The Bible is not particularly sentimental about families. What makes a family holy, as far as the biblical writers are concerned, is its willingness to surrender to the purpose of God. We see this in a number of key figures, including Joseph, Anna, and Simeon.

The dramatic readings for this fourth Sunday of Advent place us right in the heart of a central mystery in the Bible: the mystery of God’s providence. God cares for his world, but often in a way that is confounding to us, because God plays a subtle and long game. God is a God who makes promises, and he is faithful to them. But they often don't arrive just as we’d expect—which is why we have to wai...

The third Sunday of Advent is traditionally called “Gaudete Sunday.” “Gaudete” is a Latin imperative—it’s a command—which means “rejoice.” The Church is telling us to be happy. And in the first reading—a marvelous passage from the sixty-first chapter of the prophet Isaiah, which presents the motif of the “anointed one”—it gives us the reasons why we should rejoice.

In our magnificent first reading from the prophet Isaiah, which is echoed in the words of John the Baptist in today’s Gospel, a voice cries out: “Every valley shall be filled in, every mountain and hill shall be made low.” Advent is a great time for us to clear the ground, to make level the path, so as to facilitate what God, with all his heart, wants to do.

Advent, like Lent, is properly a penitential season. To enter into Advent, to prepare for the coming of the Savior, is to enter into our need for a Savior. How wonderful that on the First Sunday of Advent, the Church gives us a beautiful reading from the sixty-third chapter of the prophet Isaiah offering a series of images, each one meant to evoke this sense of loss and pain and helplessness. Unti...

Our first reading is taken this weekend from the last chapter of the marvelous book of Proverbs. After ruminating for many pages on different aspects of the wise life, the author concludes with a hymn of praise to a smart, industrious, dedicated, and pious wife. I would like to focus on the theology and spirituality of work implied in this passage. Our work makes us collaborators with God, who giv...

Our first reading is taken this weekend from the last chapter of the marvelous book of Proverbs. After ruminating for many pages on different aspects of the wise life, the author concludes with a hymn of praise to a smart, industrious, dedicated, and pious wife. I would like to focus on the theology and spirituality of work implied in this passage. Our work makes us collaborators with God, who giv...

Our first reading for this weekend from the book of Wisdom might easily slip past or through your mind, but it shouldn’t. It articulates what is arguably the central principle of biblical revelation: what I would call the primacy of grace. As I have often said, the Bible is not the story of the human quest for God. You can find that in a thousand books of philosophy or spirituality. Instead, the B...

A careful reading of the Torah, the first five books of the Old Testament, reveals that Israelite identity was determined through three sets of laws: liturgical, ritual, and moral. In Catholicism, the liturgical laws have been sublimated and the ritual laws largely set aside. But what about the moral law? In this case, Thomas Aquinas says, they remain unchanged, for they represent the first princi...

Our first reading for this weekend is taken from that wonderful middle section of the book of the prophet Isaiah. This particular passage is fascinating and conveys a very important but often unremarked upon biblical truth: Israel is God’s chosen people—of all the nations of the world, God chose the Jews to be his special priestly people—but biblical revelation begins, in fact, with the creation o...