Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Though the Enlightenment taught us to privatize and interiorize our religion, the Bible has a robustly "political" sense of God's activity. God's will is revealed in the movements and struggles of the nations. National sin (like personal sin) results in divine judgment. This deeply Biblical intuition is revealed in Lincoln's reading of the Civil War and in Karl Barth's interpretation of the First World War.

In cleansing the temple and announcing its destruction, Jesus shows that he himself is the new temple, the authentic dwelling place of God on earth. In the measure that we are grafted onto him, we too become temples of the Holy Spirit.

Abraham's willingness to sacrifice his beloved son Isaac is a foreshadowing of God the Father's willingness to sacrifice his Son for the salvation of the world. Both reveal the terrible and wonderful law of the gift: the more you give away what you love, the more your being is enhanced.

Mark tells us that Jesus went into the desert and there was ministered to by angels while he lived among the beasts. One of the marks of sin is an aliention of the body and the spirit, the animal and the angelic in all of us. Jesus represents the proper balance between the two.

Christ is the bridegroom and we the church are his bride. He wants to affect a union with us that is as intimate as a husband's and wife's. If we are to take in the new life that Jesus offers us, we must be transformed from within. New wine (God's life) can only be received by new wineskins.