Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Paul tells the Christians in Rome to offer their bodies as a living sacrifice of praise. I suggest that this Pauline image provides a very good context for thinking about the moral life. We want our bodies--our lives--to be pure offerings to the Father. We don't want to give the Lord lips that have spoken calumny, hands that have reached out in violence, feet that have walked away from the poor and needy. The moral life should be seen not primarily in a legal framework--but a liturgical one.

The idea of testing faith is a common one in the Bible. Abraham's faith was tried on Mt. Moriah, as was Jacob's and Joseph's. The Gospel story of the Syro-Phoenician woman is a New Testament instance of this dynamic. Why is Jesus so resistant to the reasonable and loving request of the woman? He wants, not to frustrate her, but to bring out her faith in all of its breadth and depth.

Often in the Bible, water functions as a symbol of chaos and sin: the waters at the beginning of creation, the waters of the Red Sea, the waters of Noah's flood, etc. Just as the Spirit of God hovered over the abyss in the beginning, so the Son of God walks on the waves. This signals God's lordship over all of the forces of destruction that confront us. As long as we look to Jesus, we can walk on those same waters with him.