All shall be well

Eighth Sunday in Ordinary Time – February 27, 2011 – St. John’s, Goshen

The passage we have just heard from the Sermon on the Mount is among the most familiar and the most beautiful in all the Bible. We can see the Lord Jesus pointing to the birds in the sky and to the lilies of the field in order to assure his disciples, that is, to assure us, that our heavenly Father surely has even greater care for us than for those fine and fragile creatures of this earth.

How is this possible?

Seventh Sunday in Ordinary Time – February 20, 2011 – St. John’s, Goshen

With today’s Gospel we hear the last two of the solemn statements in which Christ explains what the greater righteousness is that will be required if one is to enter the Kingdom of Heaven. Once again, he goes beyond the minimum that a commandment might require and demands instead the maximum that love may desire.

As he began by commanding that we not simply refrain from murder, but also not be angry or insult our brothers and sisters, so he ends with these two statements today.

“But I say to you…”

Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time – February 13, 2011 – St. John’s, Goshen

When we hear this powerful Gospel, with those repeated and challenging words of Jesus: “But I say to you,” we could think it an understatement when St. Paul says, in our second reading, that the wisdom we Christians speak is “not a wisdom of this age,” so much does Christ’s teaching, like his Cross, differ from what the world considers power and success.

Jesus is explaining what he means when he says that he did not come to abolish the law and prophets but to fulfill them, to bring them to completion, what that greater righteousness is that is needed in order to enter the kingdom of heaven.