Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

The Passion Narrative of Mark's Gospel

The Gospels are passion narratives with long introductions, dominated by Jesus' death and resurrection. On this Palm Sunday, as we near the climax of the Lenten season, we should examine four odd details in St. Mark's account of the Passion of Christ.

United in the Blood of Jesus

The best way to understand the history of salvation is to understand it as the story of covenants between God and his people. In the Old Testament, covenants are typically sealed in blood and sacrifice. In today's first reading, Jeremiah prophesies a new covenant forged by the shedding of blood— Christ's blood on the Christ— which makes the whole world into the New Israel. Through the blood of that covenant, we share in the Divine Life.

Hesed All the Way Through

The Divine Love is the great theme of the Bible. One of the great mistakes we can make is to project onto God our way of being and our subjectivity. God's love is unconditional, not fickle and vacillating. His love is "hesed," which means "tender mercy." This love is visible, par excellence, in the Incarnation.

The Ten Commandments

Although most of our parents's generation knew the Ten Commandments by heart, few Christians today can recite them. The liturgy today invites us to refocus on these timeless commands, which provide a path to a flourishing moral life.

The Mystical Transfiguration of Christ

The story of the Transfiguration of Christ has beguiled the Christian mind for centuries. It is the clearest New Testament evocation of mystical experience, the experience of spiritual things within the ordinary and the keen conviction that the spiritual reality is greater and more beautiful than ordinary experience. "Mystical" means there has been contact with a Person, the person of God.