Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel today contains this marvelous story of the healing of blind Bartimaeus. It's an icon of tremendous power. What I mean is it's a sort of sacred picture of the spiritual life, of the process of salvation, all of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I love the Gospel for this weekend because it's so challenging. And I'll tell you the truth, this Gospel often comes to my mind when I'm doing my holy hour in the morning, and I'll tell you why. In those moments, when I [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading from the book of Wisdom and our Gospel are meant to be read in tandem. And they articulate such an important principle of what I'll call spiritual physics. So anybody interested in the dynamics of the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our readings for this weekend are of extraordinary importance. They have to do with, to give it its technical term, Christian anthropology, that is to say, who we are in the presence of God, and the Christian [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is taken from the wonderful book of Numbers. Now, the book of Numbers is one of the five books of the Pentateuch or the Torah, the most sacred part of the Old Testament. I might urge [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, how prominent a role jealousy plays in the great literature of the world. Think for example of Shakespeare's Iago. Think of Melville's great story "Billy Budd," which focuses on the effects of envy. Think in the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, with our readings for this weekend, we are on very holy ground, because we're dealing with the imagery, symbolism, and theology of the suffering servant. It's an image of extraordinary importance in our great tradition. [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I love this Gospel for this weekend, the story of Jesus healing the man with the speech impediment who can't hear. It operates at so many different levels, and they're all beautiful. Here's a first thing to notice about [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we have the great good fortune this year that August the 15th, the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Virgin, falls on a Sunday. So we can reflect with a bit more attention on this marvelous feast, this marvelous [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I don't like puritanism in any of its forms. What I mean here is the kind of fussy, dualistic system of religious thought that says we should just fly away from the goods of this world. I've always been with Hilaire [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we have a great privilege now this week and the following three weeks: we're going to read from the extraordinary sixth chapter of the Gospel of John. It's a wonderful way to meditate upon the Eucharist. Can I recommend [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading and our Gospel center around this familiar biblical theme of sheep and shepherding. So it's an ancient symbol for leadership, the shepherd and the sheep. Our first reading is from the book of the prophet [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is a very simple, very brief passage from the book of the prophet Amos. But it has, I think, a rather extraordinary significance for us and for our time. We don't even really know for sure when the book [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our marvelous first reading for this weekend is taken from the second chapter of the book of the prophet Ezekiel. And it recounts Ezekiel's prophetic call, the moment when the Lord summoned him to prophesy. So it's a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this weekend is a marvel. It's from the fifth chapter of the Gospel of Mark, and it's a theological gem, but it's also something of a literary masterpiece because Mark manages to sandwich one very dramatic [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I'm always delighted when the Church gives us the opportunity to reflect on the book of Job. The book of Job is one of the profoundest, most difficult, challenging books in the entire Bible. I might encourage you to read [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, with this Sunday, we return to Ordinary Time. And I want to return to my consideration especially of the first readings from the Old Testament. And so it brings us today to the book of the prophet Ezekiel, which is one of [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come today to this wonderful feast of Corpus Christi, the Body of Christ. But the full title of this feast is the Solemnity of the Body and the Blood of Christ. I wonder at times if we put a hyper-stress on the Body [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come to Trinity Sunday. It's been called the preacher's nightmare. I've never agreed with that. I think Trinity Sunday is wonderful and a wonderful opportunity for preaching. Look, the Trinity is easy. It's one God. [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to the marvelous Feast of Pentecost, the feast of the Holy Spirit. The Holy Spirit, who is the lifeblood of the Church. He’s the soul of the Mystical Body of Christ. I submit to you that the Holy Spirit is [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come now to the very end of the Easter season: the seventh Sunday of Easter. Next Sunday is Pentecost Sunday. I mentioned how, in the first weeks of Easter, we sort of focus on the radicality of the Resurrection, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come now to the sixth Sunday of Easter, and boy, do we have magnificent readings for today. I'm going to focus on the first reading and the Gospel. First reading from that First Letter of John. Might I recommend, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we’ve come now to the fifth Sunday of Easter. So we're entering the sort of end of the Easter season, these Sundays five, six, and seven. And if the first Sundays of Easter gave us a chance to meditate upon the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this fourth Sunday of Easter, our first reading is from one of the magnificent early kerygmatic sermons of St. Peter. The "kerygma" means the basic proclamation. So here's Peter, in the earliest days, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this third Sunday of Easter, I'm going to harp on something. I'm going to harp on it because: the Bible harps on it a lot, and because our culture, I think, often misses it. What I'm going to harp on is the very [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, on the second Sunday of Easter, Mercy Sunday, we read from the magnificent twentieth chapter of John's Gospel. St. John, of course, is a theological and spiritual genius, but also a literary genius. And all his powers are [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to Palm Sunday and therefore to the beginning of the holiest week of the year. It's the Church's custom, as you know, on Palm Sunday, to read the entire Passion narrative from one of the synoptic Gospels, [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this fifth Sunday of Lent is taken from the thirty-first chapter of the book of the prophet Jeremiah. And there's a passage I want to draw your attention to at the very beginning here, which is super [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this fourth Sunday of Lent contains one of the most important lines in the entire Bible. And I'll get there. But first, I want to provide a little context. Our reading is taken from that marvelous third [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the third Sunday of Lent. We continue this journey through the holy season of Lent. I've often said that Lent is a bit like basic training for the military, or it's like two-a-day workouts before the [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, for this second Sunday of Lent, the Church gives us the awful reading from the twenty-second chapter of Genesis about the binding of Isaac by his father Abraham. In Hebrew called the "akeda". It's at the very [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the holy season of Lent, one of the most important periods of the liturgical year. During Lent, the Church asks us to do three things. It's really activity-oriented. We're asked to pray, to fast, and to [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our Gospel for this weekend is that marvelous story from the Gospel of Mark, of Jesus healing a man with leprosy. But to get the visceral power of this story, we have to follow the Church's recommendation and read this [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, I want to focus this weekend on our second reading, which is taken from St. Paul's magnificent First Letter to the Corinthians. By the way, if you're starting with St. Paul, it's not a bad place to start. You'll find it [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading is from the book of Deuteronomy, the last book of Pentateuch, the last book of the Torah, Deuteronomy from "deuteros nomos," meaning "second law". Deuteronomy really is just a series [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, our first reading for this weekend is from the marvelous book of the prophet Jonah. I am always delighted when I have the opportunity to preach on Jonah. One of the shortest books in the Bible. It's maybe three pages in [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we've moved now through the Advent and Christmas season and with the whole Church around the world, we return to Ordinary Time. And what I want to do is pick up my sermonizing on the Old Testament text. And we have a [...]

Peace be with you. Friends, we come today to this great Feast of the Baptism of the Lord, Jesus baptized by John. Here's the first thing to realize. The Gospel writers compel us as it were, to pass through John to get to Jesus. What I mean is, all [...]

Peace, be with you. Friends, the readings for this fourth Sunday of Advent are very dramatic. And they place us right in the heart of a central mystery in the Bible, which is the mystery of God's providence, that God cares for his world, but often [...]

When, let's say, one corporation or a conglomeration of corporations monopolizes an aspect of the economy, it's bad. They can set prices at their whim. They eliminate competition. They exclude people from free participation in the market. They drive [...]