Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

Friends, we’re reading this week again from the tenth chapter of Matthew’s Gospel, and Christ’s teaching here is—as always—astonishing: “Whoever loves father or mother more than me is not worthy of me,” Jesus says to his apostles, “and whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.” There are points of overlap with Jesus’s teachings in all the great religions of the world—but there’s nothing like this.

Friends, we commence the holy and wonderful season of Lent, the time of preparation for Easter. I always think of Lent as something like spring training for baseball players, or like the end of the summer workouts for football players. It’s a time to get back to spiritual basics, to reacquaint ourselves with the elemental things in the spiritual life that we might get ourselves ordered to Christ. So the Church, in our first reading from Genesis, brings us back to the beginning.

Friends, a great professor of mine at Mundelein Seminary, Dr. Richard Issel, once said, “If you want to be happy, stop worrying about being happy and get on with becoming fulfilled.” We find something similar in Jordan Peterson’s observation that “self-consciousness is equivalent to misery.” In short, we’re most unhappy when we’re turned inward, fussing about ourselves. If you want to be psychologically healthy, forget about yourself and move out toward others. I always think of this when I come across our Gospel for today from the great Sermon on the Mount.

Friends for this Third Sunday in Ordinary Time, our first reading from the prophet Isaiah and our Gospel from Matthew both have a section that’s a little weird. While most preachers skip over these sections to get to the better-known and understandable parts, I want to dwell, on purpose, on the strange parts—and they have to do with the lands of Zebulun and Naphtali.

Friends, we come to this wonderful feast of the baptism of the Lord. And the first thing to know is that this was a profoundly embarrassing event for the first Christians. Jesus is the son of God, the sinless Lamb of God, who takes away the sins of the world. So why is he going to John the Baptist to seek a baptism of repentance? Jesus begins his public ministry with a kind of embarrassing, humiliating act—and, in a way, that is the point of it.