Join Your Life to the Light - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

Join Your Life to the Light - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

Join Your Life to the Light

Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon 

Friends, this liturgical year, we are reading from the Gospel of Matthew, and Matthew is written precisely for a Jewish audience. This is why, over and over again, we find Matthew putting Jesus within an Old Testament context. And in our readings for this weekend, the Church juxtaposes a prophecy from Isaiah with its fulfillment in Matthew: “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen.” This may not mean much to us today, but Matthew’s audience of first-century Jews knew exactly what he meant. 

Daily Gospel Reflection

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time 

Bishop Robert Barron 

January 22, 2023 

Third Sunday in Ordinary Time 

Gospel: Mt 4:12-23 

When Jesus heard that John had been arrested, he withdrew to Galilee. He left Nazareth and went to live in Capernaum by the sea, in the region of Zebulun and Naphtali, that what had been said through Isaiah the prophet might be fulfilled: Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the way to the sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles, the people who sit in darkness have seen a great light, on those dwelling in a land overshadowed by death light has arisen. From that time on, Jesus began to preach and say, “Repent, for the kingdom of heaven is at hand.” 

*United States Conference of Catholic 

Bishop Robert Barron

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus begins his public ministry and calls his first disciples.

When Jesus emerged publicly and began preaching the kingdom of God, he was taken to mean something very specific—namely, that the tribes of Israel, scattered by sin, were being gathered. The Israelite hope was that, in the Messianic era, Israel would become a godly nation gathered around the common worship of the true God at the temple on Mount Zion, and that this united Israel would become, in turn, a beacon to the other nations of the world. Jesus’ entire preaching and ministry should be read under this rubric of the great gathering. 

Jesus gathered around himself a band of Apostles whom he shaped according to his own mind and heart and whom he subsequently sent on mission. Priests down through the centuries—from Augustine and Aquinas, to Francis Xavier and John Henry Newman, to John Paul II—are the descendants of those first friends and apprentices of the Lord.

They have been needed in every age, and they are needed today, for the kingdom of heaven must be proclaimed, the poor must be served, God must be worshiped, and the sacraments must be administered.