Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Lots of people today will tell you what makes a family well-adjusted, functional, and peaceful. But in today's readings for the Feast of the Holy Family, which center on two exemplary women, Hannah and Mary, the Church wants to tell us what makes a family holy.

In today's readings we see the Theo-drama, the great story being told by God, confronting the ego-drama, which is the self-centered play we attempt to write, produce, direct, and star in ourselves. What makes life thrilling is to discover our role in the Theo-drama. This is precisely what has happened to Mary. She found her role—indeed a climactic role—in the Theo-drama, just as King David had several centuries before.

Our Gospel for this third Sunday of Advent is of extraordinary importance, for it speaks to us of the transformation, the transfiguration of the self, which is unique to Christianity. To be baptized in the Holy Spirit is to be immersed in the ocean of the divine love. When we are dipped into this reality, we become capable of something that neither Aristotle nor Plato nor the Founding Fathers nor the prophets themselves dreamed possible: we can love with the very love of God.

Christianity is not a mythic system. It is an historical religion that makes very concrete historical claims, and the first Christians were intensely interested in the historicity of what they were describing and preaching about. We see an example of this in St. Luke's Gospel today. The evangelist tell us that something actually happened in history, something so strange, unexpected, and rare that it changed everything.