Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, for this Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time, we hear the story of the Syrophoenician woman. Jesus famously puts off this woman—first by ignoring her, then by dismissing her, and finally by insulting her—and she offers one of the most famous comebacks in literary history. A common reading of this story is that Jesus is cranky from a tough day of ministry, and a plucky woman from Syrophoenicia straightens him out. But this turns Jesus into a sinner—and the whole structure of Christianity falls apart. The Church Fathers had a much better, more convincing, and spiritually more helpful interpretation.

Friends, in my evangelical work online, I often encounter people who are skeptical of religion and dismissive of its claims. I usually ask them: How do we explain the intelligibility of the world or our ability to understand it? How about objective values and our ability to recognize them? Our first reading from 1 Kings reflects, I think, a great breakthrough in Western consciousness about how we’re able to identify right and wrong—just as we’re able to identify patterns in the physical world.

Friends, on this Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, I want to focus on the Second Reading from Saint Paul’s Letter to the Romans. The eighth chapter of Romans represents the culmination of an argument Paul’s been making, and the reading for today is the rhetorical high point of that conclusion. This is the first great theologian of the Church naming what is essential to Christianity—so we have to pay attention!

Friends, we come to the Seventeenth Sunday in Ordinary Time, and we’re going to finish our reading of the thirteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, which deals with the parables. Jesus’s parables cut to the heart of the matter and convey the truth of the kingdom, and the two we hear today—the parable of the hidden treasure and the parable of the pearl—are really good examples. Both are about the summum bonum, the highest good, and therefore about what’s most fundamental in the spiritual life. Indeed, this is life itself; this is what it’s all about!

Friends, we continue this weekend reading from the thirteenth chapter of Matthew's Gospel, which is dedicated to the parables of Jesus. Today I want to focus on the thought-provoking and theologically rich parable of the wheat and the weeds. A man sows good seed on his field, and while he’s asleep, an enemy sows weeds among the wheat. But the man resists the impulse to pull them up, as it might uproot the wheat too: “Let them grow together until harvest.” This parable is getting at something very deep, and it has to do with the presence of evil in our world—and why God permits it.