Friends, on this Third Sunday of Ordinary Time, I want to talk to you about walls and bridges. There is a tendency today to be simplistic and one-sided about walls and bridges: walls are bad and keep people out, while bridges are great and establish connection. But you need both walls and bridges—both identity and relevance, both the Word and the Word proclaimed—to live the Christian thing correctly.
Watch You Can’t Give What You Don’t Have - Bishop Barron Sunday Sermon here
GOSPEL
Third Sunday in Ordinary Time
Luke 1:1–4; 4:14–21
Friends, today in the Gospel, Jesus declares that he has fulfilled the prophecy of Isaiah: “The Spirit of the Lord is upon me, because he has anointed me to bring glad tidings to the poor.”
Jesus came preaching the kingdom of God. The deaf hear, the blind see, the lame walk, the dead are raised to life, the poor have the Good News preached to them, enemies are forgiven. And ultimately, in the Resurrection, Jesus’ followers saw that the old world—the world predicated upon death and the works of death, the world that had done Jesus in—was now defeated. God had definitively declared his opposition to that world and his support of the new one.
So awed were they by the Resurrection—and you can sense it in every book and letter of the New Testament—that they awaited the imminent arrival of the new state of affairs, the return of Jesus and the establishment of God’s kingdom. Though Jesus did not immediately return, the old world was over, broken, compromised, its destruction now just a matter of time.