Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, our Gospel for this Twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time is the familiar story of Peter asking the Lord how many times he should forgive his brother: “As many as seven times?” Jesus responds, “Not seven times but seventy-seven times.” I want to get at this passage by looking at the second reading, taken from the Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans, which sheds distinctive light on it. When we are clear about our mission—when we know that we belong to the Lord—we can let go of resentments and harms done to us, and get on with the business of our lives!

Friends, for the wokeist philosophy that dominates today, empathy—feeling the feelings of the other and not harming those feelings—is treated as a supreme value. But while empathy is perfectly good and decent, the Bible teaches that love, not empathy, is the supreme value. And love does not mean, primarily, feeling the feelings of the other or not hurting those feelings; it means willing the good of the other—and that can be, as Dostoevsky said, “a harsh and dreadful thing.”

Friends, for this Twenty-second Sunday in Ordinary Time, I want to begin with our very brief second reading from Paul to the Romans. It opens, “I urge you, brothers and sisters, by the mercies of God, to offer your bodies as a living sacrifice.” Here we see Christ’s cross and resurrection—the supreme sacrifice fulfilling all the offerings of the temple—extended to all the baptized. The Church is now the place where divinity and humanity are reconciled.

Friends, for this Twenty-first Sunday in Ordinary Time, the Church brings us once again, with Jesus and the disciples, to Caesarea Philippi, and to a famous question: “Who do you say that I am?” The main characters in this endlessly fascinating scene are Jesus and Peter, and whenever the focus is on Peter, we’re talking about ecclesiology, the study of the Church. So we learn something very important here about both Jesus and the Church, and it has to do with the Rock upon which the former builds the latter.

Friends, for this Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we hear the story of the Syrophoenician woman. Jesus famously puts off this woman—first by ignoring her, then by dismissing her, and finally by insulting her—and she offers one of the most famous comebacks in literary history. A common reading of this story is that Jesus is cranky from a tough day of ministry, and a plucky woman from Syrophoenicia straightens him out. But this turns Jesus into a sinner—and the whole structure of Christianity falls apart. The Church Fathers had a much better, more convincing, and spiritually more helpful interpretation.