Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

The structures of the Catholic religion are deeply rooted in the tradition and flow, ultimately, from the will of God. They are the ordinary channels through which the divine grace flows. However, as the Gospel for today clearly indicates, God is not restricted by the institutions and structures that he himself established, and so his grace can operate even outside of the official church. Whatever is good, true, and beautiful in culture, society or other religions is, indirectly related to Christ and thus should not be suppressed or despised.

Children are like plants, rocks, and flowers in this sense: they don't know how to be something that they are not. They haven't yet learned to lie, dissemble, pretend, or to seek to be someone they are not meant to be. We are all, right now, being created by God for God's purposes. Childlike joy returns to us the moment we put aside all our games of self-promotion and self-deception and live in accord with God's deepest desire for us.

Today's feast, the Triumph of the Cross, is one of those remarkable Christian paradoxes. To describe an unspeakably brutal execution as a "triumph" seems either a bad joke or plain madness. But we Christians delight in this odd juxtaposition of agony and ecstacy, because we know the deepest truth of the cross is God's swallowing up of even the greatest sin. And so like Paul we glory in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ. How have you perhaps sensed the triumph of the cross in your own life?

Our Gospel story today concerns a man who is deaf and dumb. He is symbolically evocative of an Israel that had grown deaf to God's word and, accordingly, unable to speak God's truth clearly. We are meant to identify with him, for we too often allow God's voice to be drowned out by other sounds, and we too are frequently incapable of articulating our faith in a compelling way. The solution is to be plugged into Jesus, to listen to him and to allow him to speak through us.