The Third Sunday of Easter [A]
Acts 2:14,22-33  +  1 Peter 1:17-21  +  Luke 24:13-35
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 19, 2026

St. Luke the Evangelist explains at the start of today’s Gospel passage that it’s set on “[t]hat very day, the first day of the week”.  This is another way of saying that today’s Gospel passage is set on the day of Jesus’ Resurrection.

On that original Easter Sunday, “two of Jesus’ disciples were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus”.  These two disciples symbolize you and me.  Like these two disciples, you and I at times wander away from God.  In the Gospel passage, the two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem.  They are walking away from the scene of Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  In other words, they’re moving on with their lives.  Though they’ve heard some rumor that Jesus was still alive, they have not put any faith in the story.  After all, they’re walking away from Jerusalem:  away from any chance of encountering this Jesus who supposedly had risen from the dead.

So we need to ask:  how often are we like these two disciples?  Rather than holding fast to our faith and making it the center of our lives, we walk away from opportunities to encounter Jesus.  In today’s Gospel passage, we hear that these two disciples were “conversing and debating… about all the things that had occurred” the past several days.  In other words, they’re talking about Jesus, but they’re also walking away from Jesus.

Yet while these two doubting disciples were walking away from Jerusalem, what happened?  “Jesus Himself drew near and walked with them”.  Here we see Jesus acting as the Good Shepherd.  Next Sunday we will hear Jesus describe Himself as the Good Shepherd who seeks out those who have wandered away from Him.  But today, we see Jesus living out this mission.  We see Jesus acting as the Good Shepherd.

Now, to put what Jesus is doing here into perspective, consider:  when the events of today’s Gospel Reading start, how many thousands of Jesus’ flock are dwelling within the gates of Jerusalem?  Yet here is Jesus, walking seven miles out of His way in order to bring these two wandering sheep back through the Sheepgate, and back into the fold.

Reflecting upon today’s Gospel passage, we ought to take comfort if we ourselves sometimes wander away from Him and His teachings.  We can take comfort in the fact that the patience, compassion, and love which Jesus shows to these two doubting disciples are the very same patience, compassion, and love that He has for each of us.  It does not matter where or how far we might wander away.  He seeks us out.

In today’s Gospel passage, the Good Shepherd asks these two straying sheep, “What are you discussing as you walk along?”  These disciples do not recognize their Good Shepherd, or know His voice.  So they recount to Him what their hope had been:  “that Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel.”  

Here’s a key point.  The doubting disciples believe that their hope has been shattered.  They believe this because Jesus had died.  The death of Jesus shattered their hope.  It seems obvious to these doubting disciples that someone who has died can do nothing for anyone. 

Against their false belief about their shattered hope, Jesus speaks harshly:  “Oh, how foolish you are!  How slow of heart to believe….  Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory?”  Jesus is directing His disciples’ attention to one of the most important truths of the Gospel.

The Cross—the death of Jesus—cannot destroy our hope.  Instead, the Cross of Jesus IS our hope.  That is why we put the crucifix on display in our homes, in our workplaces, and above the very center of our sanctuaries.  The crucifix is the visual expression of the truth that’s at the heart of our Catholic Faith:  that Christ’s death is our life.

So then Jesus goes through the entire body of Jewish Scripture with these doubting disciples.  He “interpreted to them what referred to Him” in the Old Testament.  He showed them that the Christ would have to suffer death in order to be “the one to redeem Israel”, and not only Israel, but—in time—the entire world.

The doubting disciples, now starting to believe, invite this man—still unknown to them—to stay with them once they reach their goal.  But this man, the Risen Lord, has another goal in mind.  He stays with them, but “while He was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them.” 

These four actions of Jesus—taking bread, saying the blessing over it, breaking it, and giving it to the disciples—might sound like ordinary actions.  However, when we compare this verse from today’s Gospel passage to St. Luke’s account of the Last Supper, we see that the language is the same.  St. Luke, in describing Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper, uses these same four phrases.

This connection between the Eucharist that Jesus instituted at the Last Supper and His actions at Emmaus in today’s Gospel passage is made even more clear by the last sentence of today’s Gospel passage:  “the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”  This same phrase—“the breaking of the bread”—also occurs in the fifth book of the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles.  In Acts of the Apostles, the phrase “the breaking of the bread” describes the early Church’s celebration of the Eucharist.  St. Luke the Evangelist, the author of today’s Gospel passage, was also the author of Acts of the Apostles.

So when Jesus towards the end of today’s Gospel passage takes bread, says the blessing, breaks it, and gives it to the disciples, we reach the goal of today’s Gospel passage.

“With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him”.  They recognized Jesus in the Eucharist.  Here is the sacrament that is the center of our Catholic Faith.  In the Holy Eucharist, God is with us in the Flesh.  In the Holy Eucharist, the Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross is made present in our midst.

However, if you recognize Christ in the Eucharist, who is it exactly that you consider Him to be?  Is Christ only a good shepherd, drawing you closer to His side for comfort and protection?  He wants to be even more for you.  Is Christ only a teacher, interpreting the Scriptures for you?  He wants to be even more for you.  The Messiah who suffered and died for you on the Cross is also your Lord and your God.  He is the One who created you, and the One who wants to lead you along His Way.

How often do we wonder during the week if God is with us?  How often during the week do we feel like God has abandoned us?  In fact, He is always there for us:  we simply do not recognize His Presence in our midst.  How often do we feel weak and unable to live up to the demands of our Christian Faith?  Here in the Eucharist is the greatest source of all our spiritual strength.  Jesus wants us to worthily receive His Body and Blood, in order to receive the graces that we need to be loving during the week both to God and neighbor, loving with the same depth of love with which God loves each of us.

The Second Sunday of Easter — Divine Mercy Sunday [A]
Acts 2:42-47  +  1 Peter 1:3-9  +  John 20:19-31
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 12, 2026

Why is the Second Sunday of Easter celebrated as Divine Mercy Sunday?  Why not celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday on the fifth Sunday of Easter?  Or, for that matter, the second Sunday of Lent?  Or the twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time?  This Sunday’s Scriptures answer the question.  Consider first today’s Responsorial Psalm, and then today’s Gospel passage.

“Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love is everlasting.”  This is the refrain for today’s Psalm:  it is Psalm 118, verse 1.  This is one of the verses of Scripture that you can end up scratching your head over, if you consult different Catholic translations of this verse into English.  If you look up this verse in one Catholic translation, the last phrase of this verse is:  “His steadfast love endures for ever.”  But if you turn then to another Catholic translation of Psalm 118:1, in the last phrase you hear this:  “His mercy endures forever.”

These different translations reflect an important truth of our Catholic Faith.  God’s mercy is His love.  We might even go so far to say that that’s the message of Divine Mercy Sunday:  God’s mercy is His love.

Of course, we need to make a distinction.  God’s love does sometimes take other forms.  Mercy is only one of the forms that God’s love takes.

After all, “in the beginning”, before Adam and Eve and their Original Sin, there never had been any mercy because there never had been sin.  Mercy exists only in the face of sin.  From all eternity, before God created anything, there was not mercy, because there was only God Himself, and God is love.  But when sin entered the world, God responded by bestowing His love in the form of mercy.

+     +     +

So with that in mind, consider today’s Gospel passage.  This beautiful passage from the 20th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John gives us the origin of the Sacrament of Confession.  One of the most important truths that this passage reveals is that it was on the very night following His Resurrection that Jesus gave the Sacrament of Confession to His Church.

This timing is definitely not a coincidence.  This is a providential part of God’s plan of salvation history.  The Sacrament of Confession is the Christian’s key to unlocking his or her potential for holiness, and so also his or her potential for sharing his faith in Jesus’ Divine Mercy.

To understand this better, keep in mind that Jesus gave His disciples a simple message about His Gospel.  He explained that what God wants from His followers can be summed up in two commands:  love God, and love your neighbor.

So, if God’s mercy is His love, what does that tell us about God’s two commands to us?  Today’s Scriptures reveal to us that to love God is to accept His divine mercy, and to love our neighbor is to bestow His divine mercy.  Think of an image from your student days in science class:  the simple electrical circuit.  No matter how much juice is in storage, ready and able to give power, if the circuit is open, you break the flow of electricity.  That open circuit reflects what happens when we’re willing to accept God’s divine mercy, but not to bestow it on others.

You can think of this in terms of the prayer that Jesus taught us:  the Our Father.  The Our Father ends with several petitions that we make to the Father.  Most of us don’t realize how dangerous one of these petitions is.  We beg God the Father in these words:  “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”.  That tiny word “as” is like the switch in the electrical circuit:  with it we either open or close the circuit of mercy.  If we do not forgive those who trespass against us—if we harbor grudges and are unwilling to reconcile with our sibling, spouse, parent, or any other neighbor—then every time we pray the Our Father, we are petitioning God not to forgive us.  Why would we ask God not to forgive us?  It does not make sense?  Neither does asking God to show mercy towards us, when we are unwilling to show mercy to others.

At the end of the Sacrament of Confession, in one of the optional conclusions the priest says, “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good”:  those words are the start of today’s Psalm refrain.  It’s up to the person going to Confession to conclude that verse in both his words and actions:  “for His mercy endures forever.”

Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
Acts 10:34,37-43  +  Colossians 3:1-4 [or 1 Corinthians 5:6-8]  +  John 20:1-9
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 5, 2026

Tomorrow if you go to Walmart, you’re likely to see the store decorated for the Fourth of July.  In most of the secular world, there is an attention deficit.

But God wants us to enjoy this celebration of Our Lord’s Resurrection.  God wants us to celebrate this Easter joy the way that we enjoy the best meal we’ve ever eaten; the way that we enjoy the best evening of conversation we’ve ever had.  God wants us to enjoy Easter by luxuriating in it.  God wants us not to turn the page tomorrow and forget about the mystery of Jesus rising from the dead.

God wants us to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus for fifty days:  seven weeks plus one more day.  The last day of this season of celebrating the Resurrection will fall on Sunday, May 24 (the day before Memorial Day).  Between today and May 24, God wants us to “rest” in the joy of Jesus’ Resurrection.

Consider this word “rest”.  This word “rest” means a lot of different things to a lot of different persons.  To a three-year-old, the last thing he wants to do is take a nap, and he’ll let you know that.  To someone older, whose hair is a different color than when in school (or who doesn’t have as much hair as when in school), rest is something prized, sought after, and even snuck in wherever and whenever possible.  Then again, there’s the “rest” that we wish upon our dearly departed:  we pray that they will “rest in peace”.

In contrast to all of those kinds of “rest”, there is the rest that God is calling us to during these fifty days of Easter.  What is this kind of rest?

To see what this “Easter rest” is, we have to go back to “the beginning”:  not to the day of Jesus’ Resurrection, but many thousands of years before, “in the beginning”, when God created the heavens and the earth.

In six days God created the heavens and the earth.  Then, on the seventh day, God rested.  We might be tempted to think that God on that seventh day acted like we would if we were in His divine shoes.  But God does not rest as we rest.  When God “rests”, He delights, He rejoices, He exults.  On the seventh day, God rested in His creation, He was like a grandparent spending a day surrounded by children and grandchildren, delighting in the goodness of those lives:  that creation.  On the seventh day God rested in His creation, because He found it good, and very good.

Another way to consider this sense of “rest” is connected to the word “arrested”: not in the sense that a policeman arrests a criminal, but in a more personal sense. Imagine that you go on pilgrimage to Rome, and in visiting the Sistine Chapel, your attention is “arrested” by the fresco of the Last Judgment. It’s almost as if you are within the scene portrayed. The artistry transports you, and you “rest” within that sacred work.

This helps us understand the rest into which God is calling us.  He wants us to rest with Him, in His Presence, and in fact, within Him.  He wants us to enter into His rest [cf. Ps 95:11 and Heb 4:11].  We enter into His rest by placing faith in Christ and His power over sin and death:  by letting Him live His life within us, instead of us making our lives about ourselves and our own works.

During these fifty days of the Easter Season, we do not just celebrate over and over for fifty times Jesus rising from the dead.  We celebrate what Jesus chose to do after rising from the dead.  For forty days He appeared to His disciples to prepare them for what was coming next.  After forty days, the Risen Jesus ascended to Heaven, to sit at the Father’s Right Hand.  After ten more days, God the Father and God the Son sent down from Heaven their Holy Spirit.

This Holy Spirit, who is the Love of the Father and the Son, is what makes us sinners like Christ.  This Holy Spirit is the Gift whose Life destroys the power of sin and death.  This Holy Spirit is what allows Christ to live within us, and to live through us.  So ask God during these fifty days to open your heart further to the grace of the Holy Spirit, to make your life more like the life of Jesus Christ, who has risen from the dead so that you can rest in the beauty of God’s merciful Love.

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord
Matthew 21:1-11  +  Isaiah 50:4-7  +  Philippians 2:6-11  +  Matthew 26:14—27:66
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
March 29, 2026

Jesus became a slave to sin for the sake of mankind.  Jesus, like His Mother, never committed sin, or inherited Original Sin.  Yet Saint Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians states something even more profound about Jesus.  St. Paul writes that God the Father “made [Jesus] to be sin who did not know sin” [2 Corinthians 5:21].  We heard that in the Second Reading on Ash Wednesday.  It’s in the light of this truth that today, on Palm Sunday, we need to look on Jesus as a slave to sin.

Here’s the difference between Jesus and us:  Jesus freely accepted the yoke of the Cross.  On the other hand, sinful human beings—stretching from Adam and Eve to us—always accept slavery freely.  In other words, by sinning we lose our freedom.  The devil whispered to Eve, “You shall be like gods!”  Had he spoken the truth he would have told them “You shall be slaves!”

Jesus, however, “though he was in the form of God, / did not regard equality with God / something to be grasped. / Rather, he emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave….”  Consider those words—from today’s Second Reading—in the light of today’s Gospel passages.

This is the only Sunday when there are two Gospel passages proclaimed at Sunday Mass.  The first we heard before the Entrance Procession.  It’s a very optimistic, hopeful passage, proclaiming the triumphal entrance of the Messiah into Jerusalem.  For century after century the Jews had longingly waited for the coming of the Messiah, and now Jesus seemed to make clear, by His entrance into the royal city, that He was the One.

But very soon after He arrived, things began to go downhill.  The second Gospel proclamation on Palm Sunday stands in contrast to the first:  not only in length, but also in tenor.  The optimistic triumph of Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem stands in contrast to the spite-filled mockery of Jesus’ recession out of Jerusalem to the top of Calvary.

Jesus’ descent into slavery is progressive.  We can hear this progress—or rather, regress—in our own words.  That is, when you see the Passion in the format shown in your hand missal or in the parish missalette—divided into spoken parts like the script of a play—the crowd’s words reveal Jesus’ descent.  These words reveal the fickleness of the heart held slave to sin.

Jesus, although He was and is God, did not save Himself from the Cross.  In this, He reveals to us what life is all about.  Life is about love.  Love is about an other, not about my self.

The Fifth Sunday of Lent [A]
Ezekiel 37:12-14  +  Romans 8:8-11  +  John 11:1-45
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
March 22, 2026

There’s an interesting word in the last sentence of today’s Gospel passage.  Listen to this sentence again:  “Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what he had done began to believe in him.”  The word in this sentence that’s especially interesting is “began”:  they “began to believe in him.”

There are many different English translations of this verse.  The translation used at Holy Mass is the only translation I could find that uses the word “began” in this sentence.  Most of the other translations simply say that they “believed in him.”

You might not think that that’s a significant difference.  But in God’s Word, small things can point to large truths.  In this case, the translation we heard a few moments ago highlights the truth that believing in Jesus is a journey.

Having faith in Jesus is a journey with a beginning, middle, and end.  Along the way there are many potholes, speedbumps, detours, and forks in the road, with no Google Maps to guide you.  Faith grows and diminishes.  At times it’s weak and at others, it’s strong.  Some on the journey don’t make it to the end.

Consider some of the people Jesus interacts with in today’s Gospel passage.  In terms of faith, they range across a spectrum: each represents yourself at a different point in your spiritual life. In each case in this Gospel passage, there’s confusion in what people say about Jesus and Lazarus, even people who might be expected to have a lot of faith.  There’s even some confusion because of what Jesus does and says.  All of these show us that even people with faith who are following Jesus face challenges along the way, including both from their own lack of faith at times, as well as from the challenges that Jesus throws at them.

+     +     +

Consider first some people at the short end of the spectrum.  These were people who did not know much about Jesus.  Towards the end of the passage, after Jesus weeps over the death of Lazarus, some of the Jews ask, “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”  They’re questioning what Jesus did; or to be more exact, what Jesus did not do.  Their question is reasonable, and reflects your own life as a disciple.  It’s important that you ask questions about your faith—about what God is or is not doing in your life—even if it seems like you’re challenging God and His ways (after all, God has big shoulders:  He can handle your questions and your doubts).

So now shift a bit down the spectrum of faith-bearing, and consider some people who certainly did know something about Jesus.  Toward the start of the Gospel passage, Jesus’ own disciples are confused.  Jesus speaks about Lazarus’ death, yet the disciples think that Jesus is speaking about ordinary sleep.

This sort of confusion is common in St. John’s account of the Gospel.  There’s often in John confusion—on the one hand—about the spiritual realities that Jesus speaks about, and—on the other hand—the earthly understanding that others ascribe to Jesus’ words.  The most famous example is likely the conversation that Jesus has with Nicodemus in John 3.  Jesus is wanting to teach Nicodemus about being “born again”, but Nicodemus understands Jesus in earthly terms.

The confusion that’s illustrated by Nicodemus and—in today’s Gospel passage—by Jesus’ own disciples, reflects something in your own life as a disciple.  At times you confuse the spiritual with the earthly.  At times you confuse the importance of the spiritual with the importance of what’s earthly.  Granted, if you have a family, there’s a true need to be concerned with earthly affairs:  if you didn’t, you would fail to honor the sacred vows you made at the altar when you were married.  Nonetheless, each of us, when we’re honest with ourselves, have to admit that sometimes we give earthly matters more attention than they’re due.  Sometimes this is because we confuse earthly “wants” with “needs”.  Sometimes this is because it’s easy to rest on our laurels, and enjoy the comforts of earthly life, setting aside the difficult work of following Jesus in faith.

+     +     +

Then again, to be fair—both to yourself as a disciple, and to those in today’s Gospel passage—it is true that Jesus sometimes says and does things that don’t at first seem to make sense.  For example, in today’s Gospel passage, when Jesus hears that Lazarus is ill, instead of rushing to be with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, Jesus remains for two days in the place where He was:  in other words, at a distance from the suffering of those He loved.  Later, Jesus declares to His disciples, “Lazarus has died.  And I am glad for you that I was not there.”  It would be hard to blame the disciples if they scratched their heads in confusion.  Sometimes we ourselves wonder why God does—or does not—act in our lives as we want, or as we think He ought.

Still, we might argue that these disciples were not among His closest friends, like Martha and Mary.  Here we shift further on the spectrum of those who bear faith.  In this passage, Jesus speaks at greater length with Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. The evangelist tells us that Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  After the death of Lazarus, Martha and Mary were heartbroken.  However, they had faith in Jesus, just as they trusted in Jesus’ love for them and their brother.

Martha and Mary in their interactions with Jesus in this passage reveal something to us about our own spiritual lives at deeper levels of both greater closeness to Jesus, and greater suffering because of loving Him, and having greater expectations of Him.

It’s understandable that Martha and Mary, at separate points in today’s Gospel passage, say exactly the same words to Jesus:  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Still, their words express a lack of faith and understanding.  Of course it is in fact true that if the Lord Jesus had been there, their brother would not have died.  Yet Martha and Mary, like yourself at times in your own spiritual life, do not see the Lord’s larger purpose.  They do not understand what Jesus meant when He said:  Lazarus’ “illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

We might wonder about Jesus saying that Lazarus’ illness was not to end in death, because Lazarus’ illness did result in death.  It just didn’t end there.  It ended with something more powerful than death.  Jesus brought Lazarus from death to life on earth again, not just for Lazarus’ sake, but also for the sake of those around Lazarus, so that they might grow in faith.  Jesus worked this miracle to help them, and yourself, to believe that the Lord’s power is more powerful than any suffering in your life.  If you remain steadfast to following the Lord in faith, He will lead you to an end that is eternal and without suffering of any kind.

The Fourth Sunday of Lent [A]
I Samuel 16:1,6-7,10-13 + Ephesians 5:8-14 + John 9:1-41
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
March 15, 2026

Every year, the Fourth Sunday of Easter is called “Good Shepherd Sunday”.  But today, on this Fourth Sunday of Lent, we also hear about the Good Shepherd.  The most obvious image of the Good Shepherd in today’s Scriptures is in the Responsorial Psalm:  that is, the 23rd Psalm.

But when we first reflect upon how all of today’s Scriptures fit together, the 23rd Psalm might not seem to connect with the other three Scripture passages.  It’s true that in today’s First Reading, the young man David is described as “tending the sheep”.  David is plucked from this role to be anointed the king—that is, the shepherd—of God’s People.  Nonetheless, for the most part, today’s Scripture passages seem to focus on another theme:  blindness.

However, if we look closely, we can see a connection between the two Lenten themes of the Good Shepherd and our blindness as sinners.  This connection can help us to con-fess our own blindness more willingly, and to pro-fess our willingness to follow the Good Shepherd wherever He might lead us.

+     +     +

Today’s First Reading is a good place to start looking for the connection between our blindness and the Good Shepherd.  Consider something that happens early in the passage.  Samuel searches for the Lord’s anointed from among the sons of Jesse.  Samuel does eventually find him, but it takes him eight tries to do so.  What is it that hinders Samuel’s search?  It’s Samuel’s blindness.  Yet Samuel’s blindness is not physical blindness, like the man whom Jesus heals in today’s Gospel Reading.

Samuel judges wrongly.  Why?  Samuel judges wrongly because he is blind to what God’s shepherd ought to look like.  The Lord explains this to Samuel plainly, saying:  “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.”  This is a profound statement.  In fact, this blindness that the Lord exposes lies at the root of each of your own sins.  So this is a key point for our reflection during Lent.  But we have to be careful, because in the Lord’s words to Samuel, the Lord is not just making a general statement about looking beyond surface appearances.

The Lord here in our First Reading is condemning something more specific.  The Lord is condemning the blindness that keeps you from recognizing your Good Shepherd.  Again:  the Lord is condemning the blindness that keeps you from recognizing your Good Shepherd.  With that in mind, consider the blindness on display in today’s Gospel Reading.

+     +     +

In fact, we see several types of blindness in this Gospel passage from the Gospel according to St. John.  The first is more apparent because it is a physical blindness, which naturally is hard to hide.  So the man born blind takes up our attention at the beginning of the Gospel passage, before we encounter those suffering from the far worse types of blindness.

This man born blind is the object of the disciples’ accusations.  They don’t ask if the man’s blindness was caused by sin.  They presume this, asking instead whose sins caused his blindness.  Jesus has to clarify the matter by explaining that “[n]either he nor his parents sinned”.  Rather, the man was born blind “so that the works of God might be made visible through him”.  These “works of God” are the works of the Good Shepherd.  When Jesus and the man born blind meet, the two themes of blindness and the Good Shepherd come together.  But what is the result of this meeting?

After Jesus restores the sight of the man born blind, Jesus faces accusations from those who cannot see Him as the Good Shepherd.  Here’s where the deeper level of the passage comes into focus.  Jesus meets those who, like Samuel in the First Reading, cannot see the Good Shepherd for who he is.

The Pharisees say about Jesus:  “This man is not from God, because he does not keep the Sabbath.”  Then there are others who give a command to the man given sight:  “Give God the praise!  We know that this man[, Jesus,] is a sinner.”

But as Jesus’ enemies scorn Him, the man given sight by the Good Shepherd speaks more boldly.  At first this man only reports the facts of what Jesus had done for him.  A little later, he says of Jesus that “He is a prophet.”  Soon after that, he speaks out against the religious authorities, insisting that “[t]his is what is so amazing, that you do not know where he is from, yet he opened my eyes. … It is unheard of that anyone ever opened the eyes of a person born blind.  If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.”  The man given sight sees Jesus for who He is:  the Good Shepherd.  The man given sight sees truly.

Yet moments later, he acts truly.  When Jesus seeks out this man to whom He had given sight, the healed man confesses that he sees Jesus as Lord, and he worships Jesus.

+     +     +

Now this event—the man given sight worshipping Jesus—would make a beautiful end to today’s Gospel passage.  It would wrap up the story nicely with a pretty bow.  However, after the man given sight worships Jesus, the story continues.  It turns again to the Pharisees.

We need to look at these Pharisees, and ask whether today’s Gospel passage is a mirror, through which we can see ourselves in the Pharisees.  This is important to do, because like the Pharisees, if we don’t see as ourselves as the sinners we truly are, we won’t be able to recognize our Good Shepherd for who He truly is.

The Pharisees in fact bear several kinds of blindness.  Not only are they spiritually blind.  They are also blind to the fact of their blindness.  At least the man born blind knew he was blind!

But Jesus sees into the Pharisees’ hearts, and seeing their blindness, He loves them from His Sacred Heart.  On Good Friday, from the Cross, the Good Shepherd offers His life for the sake of the Pharisees as much as for the Blessed Virgin Mary, St. John, St. Peter, and His other disciples.  Through His death, light shines in order to illuminate, heal, and strengthen sinners.

+     +     +

In these last three weeks of Lent, we must work at overcoming all three forms of blindness.  First, we need to see the sins that regularly darken our lives, as much as we like to turn a blind eye to them.  In addition to seeking forgiveness in the Sacrament of Confession, we need to carry out works of penance that target these sins:  for example, against sins of pride, works of humility; against sins of lust, serious fasting; against sins of wrath, praying Rosaries for those we despise; against sins of envy, praying Rosaries for those we falsely put above ourselves; against sins of sloth, good works on behalf of the poor.

Second, we need to recognize the sins we do not see.  Each of us is well aware of certain persistent sins in our lives.  But each of us also suffers from sins that we don’t even recognize.

But how can we get outside ourselves, so to speak, in order to see what these sins are?  Well, you could ask the most charitable of your friends to pray with you, and then speak to you about a sin that you yourself do not see within your life.  Or you could pray a Novena to the Holy Spirit, asking Him to enlighten you about the sins of which you are blind.

Third, we need to see our Good Shepherd for who He truly is.  This might seem the easiest of the three, but in fact it’s the hardest.  It’s easy to pray the 23rd Psalm.  It’s easy to call upon our Good Shepherd when we’re struggling within “the valley of the shadow of death”.

But it’s very difficult to see our Good Shepherd for who He truly is.  Why did eleven out of the twelve apostles not stand on Calvary during Jesus’ Passion and Death?  Those eleven apostles could not stand to face Jesus during His Crucifixion because they could not see their Good Shepherd in that man hanging on the cross.  They could not understand—they could not see—that Jesus’ Passion and Death are God’s revelation of His love for us, and something we need to embrace as the price of our salvation.

In these last three weeks of Lent, on Tuesdays and Fridays pray the Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary slowly, and at the start of each decade, spend a minute in silence, imagining the scene which that decade focuses upon.  Watch the movie titled The Passion of the Christ, and watch it with those in your family who are junior high age or older.  Each day of Holy Week, pray the Stations of the Cross at home.  Ask Jesus to open your mind and heart to see more clearly the depth of His love for you, and the depth of His suffering for the sake of your salvation.

CLICK HERE FOR THE NOVENA TO THE HOLY SPIRIT.

The Third Sunday of Lent [A]
Exodus 17:3-7  +  Romans 5:1-2,5-8  +  John 4:5-42
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Wellington, KS
March 8, 2026

This year on the Third, Fourth, and Fifth Sundays of Lent, our Gospel passage comes from the Gospel according to Saint John.  Saint John’s Gospel account differs from Matthew, Mark, and Luke in many ways.  One of the unique things about John, which we will notice during these three Sundays, is that John often expresses double meanings through Jesus’ words and actions.

For example, when Jesus cures a blind man, the evangelist goes out of his way to show how that cure—besides being a physical healing—is also a sign that Jesus can cure a person’s spiritual blindness.  Also, in John Jesus speaks with Nicodemus late at night about being “born again”, which Nicodemus misunderstands.  Nicodemus goes on and on thinking that Jesus is talking about being physically “born again”, when Jesus is talking about being spiritually born again.  In fact, most of the double meanings in John occur when people confuse the worldly and the heavenly.  To be honest, that’s a lot like our lives as sinners:  we confuse the worldly and the heavenly, putting our focus and attention in life in the wrong place.  St. John is trying to shift our attention in the right direction.

So in today’s Gospel passage, St. John the Evangelist describes Jesus as He’s approaching the Samaritan town where Jacob’s well is found.  Jesus is “tired from His journey”, and so He sits down at the well.  The evangelist also notes that “it was about noon”, implying that Jesus—in His sacred humanity—was tired and hot and thirsty.  Jesus is like us in all things but sin.  His human body needed water just as yours does.  That’s why on Good Friday as He was dying on the Cross, Jesus cried out, “I thirst”.[1]  Only St. John the Evangelist records Jesus as saying that on the Cross:  Matthew, Mark, and Luke do not.  For St. John, Jesus saying “I thirst” on the Cross ties into the other teachings that the evangelist records in his Gospel account, especially today’s Gospel Reading.

Jesus, through His human need for water, leads the Samaritan woman to see that she also needs something.  Here’s where the double meaning in this passage starts to unfold.  Only a few verses at the start of today’s Gospel passage are a discussion about a drink of water for Jesus’ physical thirst.  After those first few verses, Jesus shifts the attention away from Himself, and away from His physical need.  He shifts the attention towards the Samaritan woman, and toward her spiritual need.

The spiritual thirst that Jesus describes is one that only He can provide water for.  The spiritual water that Jesus offers, He calls “living water”.  In the physical world, water is not “living” in the way that a plant or animal is.  Nonetheless, the spiritual water that flows from Jesus does bear life.  This spiritual water flows from Jesus through two of the sacraments that Jesus gave as gifts to His Church:  the Sacrament of Baptism, and the Sacrament of Confession.  The Sacraments of Baptism and Confession are similar in many ways, all of which can help us appreciate the Good News that Jesus is sharing with the Samaritan woman in today’s Gospel passage.  Both Baptism and Confession cause three changes in the person who receives them devoutly.

+     +     +

In both the Sacrament of Baptism and the Sacrament of Confession, the person is first of all washed clean of sin.  In Baptism, the waters wash away all sin:  both Original Sin, and (if the newly baptized is older than the age of reason) any actual sin committed by that individual.

Unfortunately, many people—even many baptized Christians!—only think about Baptism in terms of having sins washed away so that they can get to Heaven.  They stop there when they think about Baptism.  They think of Baptism only in terms of getting to Heaven.  Getting to Heaven, of course, is one part of why we’re baptized:  in fact, it’s the ultimate reason; but it’s not the only reason.  That reduction of Baptism is what led many in the early Church to delay their own baptism until they were on their deathbed, so that they could be more sure of getting into Heaven!

It’s easy to see how self-focused this kind of thinking is:  that I receive God’s grace for me, in order to get me into Heaven.  But Jesus did not give His life for us, so that we would make our spiritual life about our self.  Instead, Jesus gave His life for us, so that we would give our lives for others.  Thinking that Jesus gave His life for us, so that we could make our life about our self is how the world thinks.  Jesus is trying to shift our attention to the heavenly way of thinking:  so that we would live by Christ’s words that, “whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, [while] whoever loses his life for [Jesus’] sake…will save it”.[2]

Similar to the Sacrament of Baptism, in a sincere, valid Confession, all personal sins—mortal and venial—are washed away.  Yet many Catholics reduce the practice of Confession to only one aim:  just getting to Heaven, or even just staying out of hell.  That’s why many Catholics only go to confession when they’ve committed a mortal sin.  But is Confession only for washing away past sins?

+     +     +

The second change in the person who receives the Sacrament of Baptism or Confession is a preparation for the future.  Not just our future in Heaven, but also our future on earth:  however many days, months, and years that might remain for us here on earth.  In both Baptism and Confession, God washes something away from our souls:  namely, sin.  But He also infuses graces into our souls, for the sake of a stronger life on earth.

At the moment of your baptism, when God washed sin away from your soul, He put in your soul the graces of the three supernatural virtues:  faith, hope, and charity.  God gave these to you not only to help you get to Heaven, but also to change the shape of your earthly life.

Similarly, in Confession,  when God washes sin away from your soul, He infuses into your soul the divine gift that the Church calls “sacramental grace”.  The graces from Confession give you, in the words of the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “an increase of spiritual strength for the Christian battle”.[3]  What does the “Christian battle” involve?  Consider just two its demands.

One of the more challenging demands of the “Christian battle” is standing strong in the face of temptation.  The Gospel Reading on the First Sunday of Lent described Jesus spending forty days in the desert being tempted.  We are like Jesus in facing temptation, but we are much weaker than Jesus Christ.  However, the graces from the Sacrament of Confession strengthen us for that “Christian battle” against temptation.

Another challenging demand of the “Christian battle” is forgiving others in a Christ-like manner.  When someone has deeply wronged us—especially someone in our family—there’s a temptation to whitewash over it.  We’re tempted to just mouth the words “I forgive you” without really meaning it in order to avoid dealing with the problem in a serious way.  Often we do this because it’s just too demanding to get into the weeds and really face everything involved in both the sin that caused the problem, and the reconciliation that’s truly needed.  So we just punt, and mouth the words “I forgive you.”  That’s not how Jesus forgave on the Cross.  He put His entire Self into the reconciliation of God and man, and the graces from Confession strengthen us to forgive others in the way that Jesus did on Calvary.

This latter example of the “Christian battle” leads into the third change that Baptism and Confession bring about.  This change is also illustrated in today’s Gospel Reading.  This passage is not just about the two persons engaged in dialogue, although at first the Samaritan woman might think so, just as you and I might think that our lives as Christians are about our selves.  This passage is also about those whom the evangelist mentions at the end of this Gospel Reading:  those who “began to believe in [Jesus] because of the word of the woman who testified.”

+     +     +

Those words at the end of today’s Gospel passage illustrate the third change that Baptism and Confession bring about within the Christian soul.  The third change relates to being part of something larger than your own self.  In Baptism, this took place through God the Father’s adoption of you, which joined your life to the lives of your brothers and sisters in Christ.  In Confession, you are reconciled with both your God and your neighbor.  In the life of the Samaritan woman, this took place through the testimony that she gave to others because of the “living water” that she drank.

So here we can see the problem with “deathbed baptisms”.  What if the Samaritan woman in today’s Gospel passage had avoided Jesus all her life, and had waited until the end of her earthly life to drink of that “living water”?  How many people around her never would have heard her testimony, and therefore never would have come to Jesus?  The longer we wait to allow Jesus’ living waters into our lives, the longer it will be before we can be an instrument of God’s grace, helping others who may have no other way of learning more about Jesus except through our words and actions.

---

[1] John 19:28;  cf. Psalm 69:21.

[2] Mark 8:35.

[3] Catechism of the Catholic Church 1496.

The Second Sunday of Lent [A]
Genesis 12:1-4  +  2 Timothy 1:8-10  +  Matthew 17:1-9
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
March 1, 2026

The Transfiguration is one of the Luminous Mysteries of the Rosary because it “sheds light” upon who Jesus truly is.  Who is Jesus? Part of Jesus’ identity flows from His divinity.  This is the more obvious aspect of the scene of the Transfiguration.  The glory of Jesus’ divinity shone just for a moment on Mount Tabor before Peter, James and John.

But why was the glory of the Transfiguration only momentary?  The answer to that question explains why we hear this Gospel passage during Lent, and also explains the other part of Jesus’ identity, which is His sacred humanity, which He offered in sacrifice on the Cross for our salvation.  How these two go together—on the one hand, the everlasting glory of Jesus’ divinity, and on the other, the temporary suffering of Jesus in His humanity—is the heart of today’s Gospel passage.

One of the greatest modern works of Catholic devotional reading is a work titled Divine Intimacy.  The author—Father Gabriel—was a 20th century Carmelite friar.  In one of his meditations in this work, Father Gabriel notes that the glory of Jesus’ divinity, which shone forth at the Transfiguration, would have shone fully from His birth onwards, had Jesus allowed it to do so.  But He did not allow that, just like what He does not allow at the end of today’s Gospel passage after the Transfiguration is over: Jesus charges the three apostles, “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son of Man has been raised from the dead.”  Throughout His earthly life, Jesus wanted to resemble us sinners as much as possible by appearing “in the likeness of sinful flesh”[1], as Saint Paul put it in his Letter to the Romans.

However, we need to back up. Right before the events of today’s Gospel passage, Jesus had predicted to His apostles His Passion and Death.  St. Peter refused to accept this, declaring, “God forbid, Lord!  No such thing shall ever happen to you.”  Jesus did not take this lying down, but instead replied, “Get behind me, Satan!  You are an obstacle to me.  You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.”[2]

Jesus’ harshness, which He considered justified given the importance of the point, is reinforced by what Jesus says next:  “Whoever wishes to come after me must deny himself, take up his cross, and follow me.  For whoever wishes to save his life will lose it, but whoever loses his life for my sake will find it.”[3]  That leads right into today’s Gospel passage, and the glory of the Transfiguration.

Jesus followed His difficult message—both about His own impending Passion and Death, and the need for His disciples to give up their lives For Him—by revealing one glimpse of His glory to Peter, James, and John.  But as heavenly as this glory appeared to Peter, who wanted to pitch tent and rest there, Jesus was making a larger point.  Father Gabriel in Divine Intimacy makes two interesting connections between the Transfiguration on Mt. Tabor and the Crucifixion on Mt. Calvary.  “Moses and [Elijah] appeared on Thabor on either side of the Savior”[4], just as on Calvary two thieves appeared on either side of Him.  And as the thieves on Calvary spoke with Jesus about His death, so St. Luke in his account of the Transfiguration tells us that Moses and Elijah talked with Jesus about His approaching Passion.[5]

So what’s the first point that Jesus is trying to get across to us by His Transfiguration?  Jesus “wished to teach His disciples… that it was impossible… to reach the [eternal] glory of the Transfiguration [in Heaven] without passing through suffering.”  We might say that these two are intertwined:  eternal glory and temporary suffering.  “It was the same lesson that [Jesus] would give later to the two disciples at Emmaus [on the day of Jesus’ Resurrection]:  ‘Ought not Christ to have suffered these things and so to enter into His glory?’ What has been disfigured by sin cannot regain its original supernatural beauty except by way of purifying suffering.”[6]

Today’s Gospel’s first point is that we cannot avoid suffering if we’re going to follow Jesus. The second point is about how the glory of the Transfiguration is part of our ordinary Christian lives in the 21st century.  This point has to do with what theology calls “spiritual consolations”.  You could describe spiritual consolations as small gifts of grace that God gives whenever He chooses.  Spiritual consolations are above and beyond the graces we receive through the sacraments and private prayer.  These spiritual consolations may take many different forms, and God gives them for various reasons, but He always gives them as pure gifts.  They’re sort of like a husband giving his wife roses, not on her birthday, and not on their anniversary, but on a random Tuesday, “just because”.

Father Gabriel in his work Divine Intimacy explains that “[s]piritual consolations are never an end in themselves, and we should neither desire them nor try to retain them for our own satisfaction. … To Peter, who wanted to stay on Thabor in the sweet vision of the transfigured Jesus, God Himself replied by inviting [Peter] to listen to and follow the teachings of His beloved Son.”[7]  And what had that Son just taught?  That Son had just taught Peter and all His disciples that He—Jesus Himself—must suffer and die, and that each of them, and each of us, must deny himself, take up his own cross, and follow Jesus to Calvary.  That’s the only way to the glory of Heaven.

Father Gabriel continues:  “God does not console us for our entertainment, but rather for our encouragement, for our strengthening, for the increase of our generosity in suffering for love of Him.”  Then Father Gabriel turns back to today’s Gospel passage.

“The vision [of the Transfiguration] disappeared; the apostles raised their eyes and saw nothing [except] Jesus alone, and with ‘Jesus alone’, they came down from the mountain.  This is what we must always seek and it must be sufficient for us:  Jesus alone…  Everything else—consolations, helps, friendships (even spiritual ones), … esteem, encouragement…—may be good to the extent that God permits us to enjoy them.  He very often makes use of them to encourage us in our weakness; but if, through certain circumstances, His divine Hand takes all these things away, we should not be upset or disturbed.

“It is precisely at such times that we can prove to God more than ever… that He is our All and that He alone suffices.  On these occasions the loving soul finds itself in a position to give God one of the finest proofs of its love:  to be faithful to Him, to trust in Him, and to persevere in its resolution to give all….  The soul may be in darkness, that is, subject to misunderstanding, bitterness, material and spiritual solitude combined with interior desolation.  [When you reach this point, the] time has come to repeat, ‘Jesus alone’, to come down from Thabor with Him, and to follow Him with the Apostles even to Calvary ….”[8]

---

[1] Romans 8:3.

[2] Matthew 16:22,23.

[3] Matthew 16:24-25.

[4] Divine Intimacy, 309.

[5] Luke 9:30-31.

[6] Divine Intimacy, 310, quoting Luke 24:26.

[7] Ibid.

[8] Ibid., 310-311.

CLICK ON THE COVER BELOW FOR MORE ABOUT DIVINE INTIMACY.
Please note that Father Gabriel lived before the Second Vatican Council. His meditations are arranged according to the liturgical calendar used during his life.

The First Sunday of Lent [A]
Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7  +  Romans 5:12,17-19  +  Matthew 4:1-11
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
February 22, 2026

The word “sacred” is not used much anymore.  As Catholics, we know instinctively that certain persons, places, and things are sacred, but what does that mean?  Being clear on the meaning of the word “sacred” will help us appreciate today’s Gospel Reading.

Consider some examples of sacred objects.  What would you think if you visited a neighbor, and noticed that he propped his back screen door open with a bible?  When you ask your neighbor why he’s doing that, he replies that that particular bible is just the right size to fit under the door, to hold it in place.  None of the other books in his house would do the trick.

Then the next day you go over to your cousin’s house for supper.  She tells you that you’re having chicken soup for dinner.  The smell is delicious.  But when it’s time to start serving, your cousin takes an old chalice, and uses it to ladle the soup.  When you ask why she’s doing that, she says that her old ladle broke, and she had this chalice laying around because a deceased uncle was a priest and bequeathed it to her.

In both cases, you would likely be shocked.  But when you tell your neighbor and cousin that they were doing something wrong, they ask you “Why?  Why is it wrong?”  How would you answer them?

The answer would boil down to the meaning of the word “sacred”.  The word “sacred” means “set apart for God”:  set apart from others of the same for God.

Think back to your neighbor using his bible to prop open his door.  He said that the bible is “just the right size” for keeping his door open.  He thinks the bible is fitting for that purpose.  But a bible is sacred.  It is a book bearing the written Word of God, in order to be read (whether liturgically or devotionally).  This book is not to be used as a doorstop, or a paperweight, or any other purpose, even if it seems well suited to other purposes.  Any other use is an act of sacrilege.  The sin of sacrilege is using something sacred for a purpose other than its divine purpose.

What about your cousin using her uncle’s chalice to ladle chicken soup?  She might argue that the chalice serves well as a ladle.  But a chalice is sacred.  Each chalice, before it’s used for the first time, is consecrated by means of prayer.  It’s consecrated for the purpose of bearing the wine that is changed into the Precious Blood of Jesus.  The chalice must not be used as a ladle, or as a cup for drinking beverages, or for any other purpose.  Any other use is sacrilege.

+     +     +

Now this might seem obvious to anyone brought up Catholic.  But we don’t live in a world today that understands the meaning of the word “sacred”.  Our day and age doesn’t get the notion of “consecration”.  The world that surrounds us does not believe that there is anything called “sacrilege”.  The motto of the modern world is “anything goes”.  Or to use a more technical word, the modern world believes that every thing, and every person in this world is nothing more than “secular”.  That is to say:  the only meaning of any thing or any person is the meaning that it has in this world.  There is no world beyond this world that sheds further meaning on any thing or any person.

The challenge for you as a Christian comes from the fact that it’s not just a printed bible and a consecrated chalice that are sacred.  There’s something else in your life that’s sacred, which in fact you carry with you everywhere you go, including to the store, the workplace, on vacation, and so on.  That is your very self.

Your very self—your body, your mind, and your soul, all united as the person who is you—is sacred.  At the moment of your baptism, you as a person were consecrated to God and for God.  Of course, that begs a question:  for what purpose were you “set aside” as sacred?  If a bible’s purpose is to let God’s Word be revealed, and if a chalice’s purpose is to let God’s Precious Blood be consumed, then what is the purpose for which you yourself were consecrated at your baptism?  Or course, there are different vocations within the Church—married persons, priests, and consecrated religious—but God gives every Christian the same overarching goal.  The different Christian vocations all reach for the same end.

The end for which you were consecrated as a Christian person is to love:  to love your God and to love your neighbor, and—what’s more—to do both as Jesus Christ loves.

God calls you to love in this way not only in church on the weekend, but also in the midst of the world every day.  This is a difference between a sacred chalice and you as a baptized Christian.  The chalice is used only within the sanctuary of the church, while you can live out the Gospel anywhere in the world.  Every day, and in every place, Jesus calls you—as He proclaimed in His Sermon on the Mount—to be “the salt of the earth” and “the light of the world” [Matthew 5:13,14].

Today’s First Reading is about the corruption of God’s plan for the human family to share fully in God’s love.  But the Gospel Reading is about Jesus starting to set things back on course.  In this passage from Matthew, Jesus helps us appreciate the challenge that each of us received on the day of baptism:  the vocation to be loving in all of our thoughts, words, and actions towards both God and neighbor, as Jesus loves.

More specifically, today’s Gospel passage is about one specific roadblock to loving in a Christ-like manner.  This roadblock is called temptation.  Today’s Gospel passage is about the different ways in which we’re tempted not to be loving, or rather, to love in ways that are not Christ-like.

+     +     +

Consider, then, the insights of one of the Church’s spiritual masters:  St. Francis de Sales, who was the bishop of Geneva (in what today is Switzerland) in the early 1600’s.  In commenting upon today’s Gospel passage, St. Francis de Sales points out that “many prefer the end of today’s Gospel to its beginning.”  In other words, people are happy to be with Jesus when He’s surrounded by angels who bring Him comfort and consolation.  But are we willing to be with Jesus in the trials of the desert?  St. Francis explains that we will never be invited to His heavenly “banquet… if we [do not share in] His labors and sufferings”.[1]

St. Francis de Sales continues by pointing out that in the here and now, we should “busy ourselves in steadfast resistance to the frontal attacks of our [moral and spiritual] enemies.  For whether we desire it or not[,] we shall be tempted.”[2]

St. Francis de Sales forcefully denies the common misconception that the more dedicated we are to God, the less we will experience temptation.  He explains that just the opposite is to be expected:  “it is an infallible truth that no one is exempt from temptation [once] he has truly resolved to serve God.”[3]

This is clearly illustrated by today’s Gospel Reading.  The divine Son of God was tempted by the devil just before the start of His three years of public ministry.  The devil sought out Jesus at this point because Jesus was ready to start His earthly mission, putting behind Him thirty years of living quietly with His family in the home at Nazareth.

So if you take up this season of Lent with strong resolve, expect pushback from those who do not want you to become more like God.  With this expectation in mind, there are two more points from St. Francis de Sales about what it means for a Christian to experience temptation.

First, St. Francis points out “that although no one can be exempt from temptation, still[,] no one should seek it[,] or go of his own accord to the place where it may be found”[4]:  that place is called “the near occasion of sin”.

Second, given the fact that every Christian will face temptation, it’s “a very necessary practice to prepare our soul for temptation.”  This is one of the most important works of the Christian spiritual life:  to prepare oneself to battle against temptations.  St. Francis de Sales puts it like this:  “we ought to … provide ourselves with the weapons necessary to fight valiantly in order to carry off the victory, since the crown is only for the combatants and conquerors.”[5]

In saying this, he’s echoing the language of Saint Paul the Apostle, who frequently throughout his New Testament letters describes the Christian virtues using metaphors of military gear.  It’s only modern thinkers who falsely claim that military language has no place in the Christian life.  Modern thinkers take for granted that we enjoy the blessings of modern life only through the blood, sweat and tears of those who went before us.  As the bumper sticker puts it, “freedom isn’t free”.  Freedom comes at a price, even if you are not the one who had to pay it.

The same is true in the Christian spiritual life.  Jesus Christ paid the ultimate price to open the gates of Heaven for you.  Only Jesus Christ—as the only-begotten divine Son of the Father—could accomplish that.  Yet every Christian must follow Him there on the same Way.  Every Christian must reject the temptation to wander off the Way of the Cross that leads to Heaven.  Certainly, following Christ faithful along this Way is often a battle.

That truth is reflected in the opening prayer of Holy Mass on Ash Wednesday.  Listen again to the words of this prayer, and ask Jesus for the grace to fight temptation, in order to be faithful to your sacred call to be loving as Jesus is loving:  “Grant, O Lord, that we may begin with holy fasting / this campaign of Christian service, / so that, as we take up battle against spiritual evils, / we may be armed with weapons of self-restraint.”  Amen.

---

[1] St. Francis de Sales, The Sermons of St. Francis de Sales for Lent (Rockford, Ill.:  Tan Books, 1987), 31.

[2] Ibid., 32.

[3] Ibid., 15.

[4] Ibid., 15.

[5] Ibid., 17.