1st Sunday of Advent, Year A

The First Sunday of Advent is here! No matter how hard we strive not to be affected by all the commercialism, it can be such a busy, distracting time of year. This beautiful reading from a sermon by St. Aelred of Rievaulx may help set your minds on “the things that are above” (Col. 3:2):

How beautifully at this season the Church provides that we should recite the words and recall the longing of those who lived before our Lord’s first advent! Nor do we commemorate that desire of theirs for a single day, but share it so to speak for a long period of time, because when something we greatly love and long for is deferred for a while it usually seems sweeter to us when it does arrive.

It is our duty then to follow the example and recall the longing of the holy fathers and so inflame our own souls with love and longing for Christ. You must understand that the reason why this season was instituted was to inspire us to remember the desire of our holy fathers for our Lord’s first coming, and through their example learn to have a great longing for the day when he will come again. We should consider how much good our Lord did us by his first coming, and how much more he will do for us by his second. This thought will help us to have a great love for that first coming of his and a great longing for his return.

32nd Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

Here's part of a talk Pope Francis gave on this Gospel in St. Peter's Square:

This Sunday’s Gospel ([Luke 20: 27-38) sets before us Jesus grappling with the Sadducees, who deny that there is a resurrection.... It is not this life that will serve as a reference point for eternity, for the other life that awaits us; rather, it is eternity — that life — which illumines and gives hope to the earthly life of each one of us! If we look at things from only a human perspective, we tend to say that man’s journey moves from life to death. This is what we see! But this is only so if we look at things from a human perspective. Jesus turns this perspective upside down and states that our pilgrimage goes from death to life: the fullness of life! We are on a journey, on a pilgrimage toward the fullness of life, and that fullness of life is what illumines our journey! Therefore death stands behind us, not before us....

The Anastasis fresco, Chora Museum

Before us stands the final defeat of sin and death, the beginning of a new time of joy and of endless light. But already on this earth, in prayer, in the Sacraments, in fraternity, we encounter Jesus and his love, and thus we may already taste something of the risen life. The experience we have of his love and his faithfulness ignites in our hearts like a fire and increases our faith in the resurrection. In fact, if God is faithful and loves, he cannot be thus for only a limited time: faithfulness is eternal, it cannot change. God’s love is eternal, it cannot change! It is not only for a time: it is forever! It is for going forward! He is faithful forever and he is waiting for us, each one of us, he accompanies each one of us with his eternal faithfulness.

31st Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

Behold, Lord, the half of my goods I give to the poor. Zacchaeus, the wealthy tax collector, declares this to Jesus in today's gospel (Luke 19:1-10). And if I have defrauded anyone of anything, I restore it fourfold. The faith of Zacchaeus is rewarded: Jesus responds, “Today salvation has come to this house, since he also is a son of Abraham. For the Son of Man came to seek and to save the lost.”

Here's part of the commentary on this passage by Philoxenus (c. 440-523), bishop of Mabbug (Hieropolis):

Zaccheus in the Sycamore Tree, unidentified icon

All who were called by the Lord obeyed his summons at once, provided love of earthly things did not weigh them down. For worldly ties are a weight upon the mind and understanding, and for those bound by them it is difficult to hear the sound of God’s call. 

But the apostles, and the righteous people and patriarchs before them, were not like this. They obeyed like people really alive, and set out lightly, because no worldly possessions held them bound as though by heavy fetters. 

For faith’s only possession is God, and it refuses to own anything else besides him. Nothing can bind or impede the soul that senses God: it is open and ready, so that the light of the divine voice, each time it comes, finds the soul capable of receiving it.