Cycle A Sunday Resources

The feast of Christ the King offers us three different visions of the final days. The first, from the prophet Ezekiel, suggests that, at the end of the world, God will finally appear as the good shepherd to rescue the lost and forsaken.

Our Scriptures were formed through a process of experience, reflection and oral tradition that was eventually written down, all under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Keeping that in mind, we might listen to today’s readings as if hearing the oral tradition, as if we were younger disciples listening to our predecessors.

What Jewish father in Jesus’ day would ever even consider letting his daughter camp out waiting for a groom to arrive for a wedding celebration? That was a worse idea than an unsupervised sleepover! Some smart-aleck in the crowd must have told Jesus, “The foolish ones were the families who let their daughters go out alone at night!”

There used to be a billboard on Interstate 70 that said: “Don’t make me come down there!” It was signed, “God.” That just might sum up the first reading and Gospel we hear this week.

Life often demands focus on what we deem important, how we spend our time, what sacrifices we are willing to make and how much it will cost. The rules and resolutions we make are often good indicators of what we consider central to our livelihood.

The money of the United States bears the official national motto: “In God We Trust.”  It’s a curious and sometimes contentious part of our history. Apparently, the motto first appeared on coins during the Civil War, a not so subtle assertion that God was on the side of the Union.

In ancient Peru, long before the days of the marauding Spaniards, the Inca’s preferred method of conquest was to overcome people with kindness.

Today’s parable of the landowner and tenants used a situation familiar to the audience. A wealthy landowner wanted his due, the tenants rebelled and got the crazy idea that if they eliminated the owner’s servants and son, they would be the winners taking all.

While we may have never tried to draw God’s picture, we all have implicit images of God, some of which we have articulated, some of which are all the more powerful for not having been brought to consciousness. 

Isaiah quotes God as saying, “My thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways.” There’s probably no sincere believer who would claim to understand God. 

Sometimes it’s hard to figure out if the Lectionary addresses us as a philosophy class or as kindergarteners. Our reading from Sirach offers a little philosophy mixed with psychology, all under the heading of wisdom. 

The Lord told Ezekiel: “I have appointed you watchman for the house of Israel.” It would be one thing if that simply meant that Ezekiel was to tattle on the people.

Today we see Jeremiah at his best and bordering on blasphemous. He accuses God of seducing him into a life that has brought him nothing but hardship and rejection. 

Experts in spirituality, at least in the mainstream Catholic tradition, will tell us that we don’t pray to change God’s mind but to grow in relationship with God and learn how to conform ourselves to God’s will. 

While he was at prayer, the storm went to sea and Jesus knew how that tended to terrify his group of followers. When he thought about his frightened friends, what did he do? He headed out to help them the only way he could.

Today’s reading from the Book of Daniel is apocalyptic literature, a type of writing designed for people under great stress. It assures them that no matter how powerful the forces of evil seem, no matter how much suffering enemies inflict, God will win in the end, so there’s nothing to worry about.

Sometimes our sacred authors share an “Alfred Hitchcock” moment with us: Just as the famous director suddenly appeared in his movies, they appear in their writings. 

Were there weeds in the Garden of Eden? The day I heard that there is such a thing as dandelion wine I started to question the either/or classification of plants as good or weed. Who are we to judge?

"I give praise to you, Father ... for although you have hidden these things from the wise and the learned, you have revealed them to little ones.” 

”Get over yourself!” Nobody has probably said that more radically than Jesus in today’s Gospel. “Whoever loves father or mother more than me ... whoever loves son or daughter more than me is not worthy of me.”

What is a prophet? A prophet is someone called by God to read the signs of the times in the light of the Gospel. 

The author of this Sunday’s selection from Deuteronomy (we’ll assume he was a man, because women didn’t have the leisure time to learn to read and write) was writing history in the form of a homily he attributed to Moses. 

 ”God so oved the world that he gave his only son.” Who is this God? One of the images of God that has most captured the Christian imagination comes from Michelangelo’s depiction of the creation of Adam. 

A little noticed detail in the Pentecost accounts is that the Spirit descends on community groups, not individuals.

One of the unique features of today’s Gospel is that Jesus speaks for the first time of the disciples’ love for him. Previously he’s told his disciples that he is the way, the bread of life, the light of the world — all descriptions of himself that speak of what he wants to offer them. 

Today’s Gospel begins with Jesus asking his disciples to have faith in him. It ends with his astounding statement that those who do so will accomplish even greater works than he did himself. That combination should be understood as a foundational principle of the Christian community. 

When a tradesman of Jesus’ times passed his craft on to his child, the process began early and continued until the son was ready to take over the father’s tools. By then he had so mastered the art of imitating his father’s gestures, angles, and grip that the worn grooves of the tools fit his hand like a glove. 

John’s Gospel gives us two accounts in which Jesus becomes present in the midst of a group of his disciples, appearances neither Mark nor Matthew even mention and which Luke presents as a single incident. 

The readings for Easter Sunday seem to be a letdown from the no-holds-barred celebration of the Vigil that took us from creation through Christ’s resurrection, punctuated with the new fire, bells and all those alleluias. 

The beginning and the end of Jesus’ life are the times most prominently portrayed in Christian art. While we may not think about it often, each depiction, all the nativity scenes, sets of Stations of the Cross and images of the Last Supper have great power to communicate an implicit theology, one that, like our hymns, subtly forms our spirituality and thus our way of living our faith.

When the Gospel of John contrasts walking in the day to walking at night, we know it refers to more than getting home before curfew. What may surprise us in today’s readings is that the story of the raising of Lazarus is designed to lead us to examine our own faith as disciples. 

Doesn’t it seem strange that the man who was transformed in today’s Gospel passage said nary a word until after he was healed? He didn’t ask Jesus for a cure nor did he tell his tale of being relegated to begging as the odd-one-out in a world he had never seen. In the beginning, he was just there, the object of other people’s judgment. He was just there for Jesus to see.

Doesn’t it seem strange that the man who was transformed in today’s Gospel passage said nary a word until after he was healed? He didn’t ask Jesus for a cure nor did he tell his tale of being relegated to begging as the odd-one-out in a world he had never seen. In the beginning, he was just there, the object of other people’s judgment. He was just there for Jesus to see.

Behold!” That’s a key word in today’s story of the Transfiguration. It means more than “Look!” or “OMG!” It’s more like “Take a very good look, and then look again, because there is more here than you can grasp.”  

Our Lent starts with stories that take us from the garden to the desert — symbolically as well as geographically. We begin with Adam and Eve in God’s good garden.

One day God told Moses to assemble the entire community of Israel for an important message. So Moses did as he was told and God said: “Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.” What on earth did that mean?

Our attitude toward the law depends on the reasons we see for it and on our feelings for those who have formulated it.

Did you ever try to un-salt what you were cooking? It’s nigh well impossible. Once salt has permeated the food it’s there; the only solution is to try to dilute it.

It’s easy to forget that the majority of people to whom the biblical prophets proclaimed Yahweh’s word never listened to that word, much less carried it out, some even tried to kill God’s mouthpieces.

As Jesus was walking by the Sea of Galilee, he saw Peter and Andrew and said to them, “Follow me, and I will make you fishers of men.” 

Today’s psalm response offers us a challenging mantra for the coming week. After the first reading we will repeat, “Here I am, Lord, I come to do your will.”

If you are presiding at the liturgy on January 1, try this: Ask the assembly what we are celebrating today. 

We know that the expectation of a Messiah had a long, long history. The downtrodden people of God yearned for the savior God would send them.  

“O come, O come, Emmanuel!” Each Advent season we hear it sung, sometimes in such beautiful chant that we think for a minute that it might be nice to live in a monastery and sing like that all the time. 

We tend to think that the trial of Jesus happened only at the end of his life before the rulers of the people, Pilate and Herod. In reality, Jesus was on trial for the entirety of his earthly mission. Every time he did or said something it raised implicit questions from “Who does he think he is?” to “Is this the one to come?”

Look at your Advent Calendar. Can you spot John the Baptist with his 100% organic outfit and odd, non-vegetarian diet? Although he hardly fits the cute calendar images, he’s a key character of the Advent season. 

First Sunday of Advent: We begin the season of Advent with readings that direct our gaze to the ultimate and the immediate realities of our lives. The first Sunday of Advent always looks to history's end.

Most of us celebrate our birthdays. Some among us also celebrate our feast day or patron saint day, but how many of us celebrate the day of our baptism? In his book Christianity: The Making of Christians, Mark Searle reminds readers that for many centuries it was customary in the church to celebrate the pascha annotinum or the anniversary of baptism (Kevin Mayhew Ltd., London: 1979).

The readings chosen by the church to celebrate the feast of the Holy Family leave us with difficult questions. By what standards do we evaluate family relationships, and why? Whom do we include or exclude as family members?