In today’s first reading we read from the Book of Wisdom which was written about fifty years before the coming of Christ, likely in Alexandria. That places the author in a deeply Hellenistic environment, where Jewish communities were immersed in Greek language,...
The connection between the first reading and the Gospel becomes much deeper when we notice how the Servant imagery in Isaiah quietly anticipates the way Jesus speaks about Himself in John’s Gospel. I think the two connections are especially striking. Isaiah 49 belongs...
We should certainly hear an echo of the Lord’s Prayer in today’s gospel: ““Lord, if my brother sins against me, how often must I forgive him? As many as seven times?” Jesus answered, “I say to you, not seven times but seventy-seven times.” The mention of “forgiveness”...
I am a bit troubled by today’s readings. The gospel is this uncomfortable sequence in which Jesus, for the third time, has told his disciples “Son of Man will be handed over to the chief priests and the scribes, and they will condemn him to death, and hand him over to...
Both readings today speak with a sharpness that may unsettle us but it is the sharpness of a physician’s scalpel, not a weapon. God is not condemning for the sake of condemning. He is calling His people back to integrity, back to a faith that is lived and not merely...
