15th Sunday in Ordinary Time: How Can We All Proclaim Christ to All the World?

Jesus sends out the apostles on a trial mission, with very specific instructions. To begin, they are to travel two by two. Having a companion adds a sense of protection and support, but also adds an element of accountability. The disciples are also not to take with them food, money, or other supplies. In our contemporary cultural context, travelling so lightly might seem irresponsible. But the disciples are to rely on the hospitality code of their culture, whereby people were expected to receive travelers into their homes and provide for their needs.

Not traveling with money and possessions also puts the apostles into the lowest social hierarchy of their society, which ensures that they are to be received not because of their status or their resources but because of what Christ had entrusted them to share -- the Good News of the Gospel and his healing grace. They can offer no payment or material gift to their hosts. But they preach repentance, helping people turn away from their sins and experience the transforming forgiveness of God.

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14th Sunday in Ordinary Time: Finding God's Grace in Our Weakness

Every year, thousands upon thousands of Americans and visitors from many other parts of the world tour the beautiful churches of Europe. Pilgrims and tourists alike show admiration for the sacred buildings they had travelled so far to see. The only ones who tend not to be impressed by those amazing sites are the locals who live around them. They just don't care. They do not appreciate the invaluable treasures that are their heritage. Familiarity, as the saying goes, breeds contempt, or sometimes just plain indifference. Or perhaps the problem is the lack of true familiarity.

The people who are so uninterested in the wonders surrounding them have, for the most part, lost touch with the true value and deep history of it all. American pilgrim groups will travel thousands of miles to experience sites that the locals will not walk a few blocks to see.

But we should examine our own lives as well. Do we, like those indifferent Europeans and the residents of the home village of Jesus in this Sunday's Gospel, fail to see the grace of God in our midst? A personal story comes to mind.

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13th Sunday in Ordinary Time: God Resolves Our Impossible Situations

The Gospel reading for this Sunday deals with two seemingly impossible situation. The woman afflicted with hemorrhages has struggled with her condition for twelve years. She has given all her money to doctors, who have not only not helped her, but her illness has gotten worse. In the context of Israelite culture, her situation would also result in social isolation. Israelites were very cautious when the membrane between the body and the external world was compromised or when people had discharges of blood or uncontrolled flow of bodily fluids. In those situations, the Mosaic Law would require that the person suffering from the condition be considered ritually impure and the person in question would have to isolate from the community for certain periods of time.

Since the woman in today’s Gospel passage has had the condition for twelve years, she has not had any respite from her social seclusion. Nevertheless, she braves going among people despite the rules in order to find healing. She believes that if she could at least touch even the garment of Jesus, she would be cured. Her decision to touch Jesus is, in her cultural context, a very bold choice. She is considered ritually unclean, and by touching Jesus, she would make him ritually unclean too, just when he is on the way to the house of the synagogue official to tend to his sick daughter. If her action were to be found out and Jesus would share in her ritual uncleanness, he would, according to the law, not be allowed to enter the house of the official himself.

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12th Sunday in Ordinary Time: What Today's Faithful Might Miss About the Calming of the Storm

When Jesus preforms miracles involving water in the New Testament, today's audiences are likely to miss the true import of his acts. We need the context of the Old Testament to get a more complete picture. As God revealed himself more and more throughout Old Testament history, the Israelites came to a deeper and deeper understanding of who God is and how he interacts with his creation.

One such development was the question of how God created the world. Early on, the Israelites conceptualized the creation of the world as God subduing the forces of chaos, which were represented by water. In this understanding, God defeated chaos and pushed back the waters to make room for the dry land. Only much later, toward the end of the Old Testament period, did the Israelites come to the full understanding that God created the world out of nothing.

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11th Sunday in Ordinary Time: How Our Labors Come to Fruition

In the Middle Ages, some cathedrals took centuries to build. Most of the people who worked on them never saw the completed edifice. But they labored on tirelessly to do their part. So must we keep working as we build the Kingdom of God.

As Catholics, we believe that Christ founded the Church and sent the Holy Spirit to empower the members of the Church to continue his mission. The Church exits to share the Gospel of Christ with all of humanity, both geographically and generationally. Our task is to take the Good News to every single person in the world.

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10th Sunday in Ordinary Time: The Spiritual Trap of Self-Sufficiency

Once when I was a young adult, I told my father that I wanted to be self-sufficient. He responded rather harshly: "That is the blasphemy against the Holy Spirit that will not be forgiven in this life or the next." Needless to say, I was taken aback. But after reflecting on his response, I came to appreciate the wisdom of his words.

At the heart of Catholic theology is the concept that God is love and that he created us out of love in order to share his love with us. As human beings, we are fundamentally incomplete on our own. We have an inner hunger that nothing and no one in the created realm can fully satisfy. The deep spiritual hunger that is in all of us can only be satisfied by God's infinite, eternal love. Only when we accept God's love for us and give ourselves in love to him can we find true peace and fulfillment.

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Corpus Christi: What Is the Eucharist?