Category: Bible Reading & Meditation

“Let Your kindness come to me, O Lord.” –Psalm 119:41 In today’s first eucharistic reading and Gospel passage, the Galatian Christians and the Pharisees are admonished by St. Paul and Jesus, respectively. These two groups seem to have been unable to grasp that God prefers to work through merciful love and loving-kindness rather than through religious practices motivated by attempts to justify ourselves with the Lord. Jesus challenged the Pharisees – and us, too – to “go and learn the meaning of the words, ‘It is mercy I desire and not sacrifice’ ” (Mt 9:13; see also Hos 6:6). Let...

“Jesus answered: ‘I give you My word, there is no one who has given up home, brothers or sisters, mother or father, children or property, for Me and for the gospel who will not receive in this present age a hundred times as many homes, brothers and sisters, mothers, children and property – and persecution besides – and in the age to come, everlasting life.’ ” –Mark 10:29-30 We will either give up our lives for love of Jesus, or we will give up hope. We will either abandon ourselves to Him or we will despair as life becomes impossible....

“All of you who have been baptized into Christ have clothed yourselves with Him.” –Galatians 3:27 Being clothed with Christ means: living “honorably as in daylight” and making “no provision for the desires of the flesh” (Rm 13:13, 14), putting “on that new man created in God’s image, whose justice and holiness are born of truth” (Eph 4:24), being clothed “with power from on high” (Lk 24:49), that is, the Holy Spirit (see Acts 1:8), clothing ourselves “with heartfelt mercy, with kindness, humility, meekness, and patience” (Col 3:12), clothing ourselves with humility in our “relations with one another” (1 Pt...

“The result is that the last state of the man is worse than the first.” –Luke 11:26 The worst and sometimes last state of a human being is to be repossessed by a devil and newly possessed by several other devils (Lk 11:26). The first step of the road to this worst state is to be possessed by a devil. Most people think that very few people are in the first or last state. However, in the second letter of Peter, the Lord refers to the first state not as the unusual situation of being demon-possessed but as simply our...