Jesus’ apparently passive responses in today’s Gospel have a message for both ancient and modern readers. By telling His followers to turn the other cheek, Jesus calls on us to resist tendencies toward punishment. Implicitly, Jesus introduces the idea of reconciliation rather than retaliation. Jesus does not want His followers to be abused and taken […]

Jesus “did not come to abolish the law.” Instead, He perfects and fulfills it. The scribes’ and pharisees’ mistake wasn’t that they strove to keep the letter of the law. Most problematic was the spirit in which they kept the law. In the Gospel for this Sunday, Jesus poignantly prompts us to ponder our behavior […]

Salt brings taste, zest, and joy to life. We are asked to liven things up by allowing the joy of our faith to spill over into the lives of others. Once we are able to develop a sincere and deep relationship with God, it will define us and flow out of us. Because of that […]

This feast Day and this story has got to make all of us think, how much is God a part of our lives every single day? We don’t all have to come to the Temple every day, like Simeon and Anna did. And yet shouldn’t there be some acknowledgement of God every day in our […]

Just like He called the apostles, Jesus calls us wherever we are. He breaks into our world through our ordinary daily lives and activities. Jesus has not stopped calling people to follow Him. Today we are the ones He looks at, calls by name and says, ‘Come follow Me’. Those in the Gospel dropped everything […]

The Gospel today is all about how to deal with a neighbor who has wronged us. But we can also look at this from the other side where we are the one wronging someone else. It works both ways. The challenge is: how to bring about reconciliation with a deep awareness of the truth of […]

At Jesus’ baptism, God affirms His Son’s mission for salvation. God announces his pleasure with Jesus and, in Matthew’s Gospel, announces to all that, “This is My beloved Son”. With this affirmation, Jesus is able to resist the temptations described next in Matthew’s Gospel and to begin His public ministry. As brothers and sisters in […]

The Feast of the Epiphany lifts our eyes from the family celebrations and demands so we should include in our vision “all the ends of the earth”. Like the three wise men, we should have the courage to follow the light of the star we have seen, however hazardous the journey; that the light of […]

We all struggle with the choices of this world – whether we orient ourselves to the temporal and material, or whether we put the Lord first at the center of our hearts and our lives. We put ourselves on the path of destruction by paying homage to the material and the temporal, craving those to […]