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Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries. Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization, using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and his church. The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today we invite you to join Bishop Robert Barron as he preaches the Gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.
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Peace be with you. Friends. We come to this fifth Sunday of Lent, and I want to continue maybe a little bit of an offbeat style here, not looking at the gospel for today, the wonderful story of the woman caught in adultery, but rather our second reading, from Paul to the Philippians. I think it speaks of something so elemental to the Christian life. So it's really good for us as we come toward the end of our Lenten journey to meditate on it. This letter is very interesting. And again, when you have a chance, get out your Bibles and you can read it in one sitting easily. Paul to the Philippians. But he had a special affection for the people of Philippi. It was a city, you know, in northeastern Greece, present day Greece. And it's very important because when Paul made his way from Asia Minor across to Europe, it represents the beginning of European Christianity. And Philippi is the first city in Europe in which Paul founds a church. So in a way, everyone in Europe and all the colonial descendants of Europeans who are Christians, because of that, this is the beginning. This is where it started. And Paul, as I say, had a very great affection for the people there. You can sense it in his letter. He wrote this letter from prison. Now, people speculate it could have been in Ephesus, maybe even in Rome, but he was in chains in prison when he wrote with great affection back to the Philippians. We're reading in this passage from the third chapter, which is a pivotal chapter. And before we get to our reading, I want to read a little section from chapter three that precedes it. Listen now as Paul speaks, circumcised on the eighth day of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew, of Hebrew parentage, in observance of the law, a Pharisee in zeal, I persecuted the Church in righteousness, based on the law, I was blameless. So this is a little bit of Pauline autobiography. It's a precious passage in the great tradition because here's Paul telling the Philippians and us who he is. And see here's what we need to understand about that passage. That is one impressive resume. He's laying out his life and you're meant to say, wow, this is one impressive guy from a Jewish perspective. So look, he's circumcised on the eighth day of the race of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew of Hebrew parentage. He's saying, I got the lineage. I mean, I'm a blue blood. I'm like a Brahmin. I'm a high level person. No one can doubt, you know, my heritage, my background. I always think here of Henry Adams book, you know, his autobiography. He's a member of that great American family going back to John Adams and John Quincy Adams. And he says, you know, I was baptized in the great North Church of Boston. I was held in the arms of my grandfather, John Quincy Adams, who was the son of the second president, John Adams. What he was saying was, I am it, man. I'm American aristocracy. I'm from like the highest level of Protestant American society. Well, in a way, that's what Paul's doing here. He's telling them, look, I'm at the highest level of Jewish society. And then he goes on, in observance of the law, a Pharisee. Okay, so not only is he a high born, full blue blooded Hebrew, more than that, he's a Pharisee. Now mind you, we who've been reading the Gospels for 2000 years look down on the Pharisees. We say the Pharisees are bad guys, but not. See, for Paul's audience to say you were a Pharisee meant you were someone who took the law with utter seriousness. Pharisees weren't bad guys. On the contrary, they were good guys. They were people who were, you know, living this life as seriously as possible. Put this like in a Catholic framework. If someone's saying, you know, I was born of Catholic parents and Catholic grandparents and they came over, you know, at the beginning of the Republic. And as to my Catholicism, I was a priest, I was a bishop, I was a Trappist monk. I mean, I was living the Catholic life in the full sense. That's what he's saying when he mentions that he's a Pharisee. And then he keeps piling on in zeal. I persecuted the church. Well, look, the church in the early days is this little ragtag group of rogue Jews who were claiming that a crucified carpenter was the Mashiach, was the Messiah of Israel. The clearest sign you weren't the Messiah of Israel was that you were crucified by the enemies of Israel. This uneducated in the faith, in the law, this carpenter from Nazareth who died at the hands of the Romans, he can't be the Messiah. And so this, you know, high level Hebrew who's a Pharisee and loves the tradition of his people, persecutes this crazy little group that adds to his resume. He's not ashamed of that. He would have been proud of that right. He goes on in righteousness based on the law. I was blameless, wow. The hundreds of laws, they govern Jewish life and they stretch back to the Old Testament and they come up through the rabbis and they're in the Torah and so on. Paul's saying, I was such a good Israelite that in terms of the law, I was blameless. I don't think he's lying. I don't think he's bragging here, he's just stating a truth. He took his Jewish faith with utter seriousness. This resume, wow, impressive. If he's applying for like a religious position in the Jewish world, you'd say, yeah, he's my guy. You can't do much better than this. That's what we're meant to see here, that's what we're meant to hear. But then, as we expect, Paul is going to pull the rug out from under us. I consider all of this, everything I've just laid out to you, I consider all of this as loss. I like some translations here. Rubbish, rubbish, garbage. Because of the supreme good of knowing Christ Jesus, my Lord, for his sake, I've accepted the loss of all things. Well, here it is. And I consider them so much rubbish that I may gain Christ and be found in him. Can you catch everybody? The drama of this, the psychological and spiritual drama of it. See, think of someone who's spent his whole life either in business or you're in finance, or you're in sports or whatever you're into and you spent your whole life building up your resume. You know, I've had to put together a resume for different reasons and you know, you want it to be long and impressive and all the things I've done in my education and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And you love that, you live for that. My resume. Look at what I've accomplished. And so Paul lays it out to us and then he says, I now think of all of that as so much rubbish. Imagine taking your, you know, sterling silver resume, lighting a match, burning it, throwing it in the trash. What in the world, I mean, what in the world happened? Well, we know this fellow with this tremendous resume, this Shaul of Tarsus, who was trained at the feet of Gamaliel, the leading rabbi of the time in Jerusalem, working around the temple, knowing the traditions of his fathers. This guy, at the height of Jewish society, he met Jesus. He met him on the road to Damascus. He's so impressed. I mean, he describes it three separate times in the letters, in the Acts of the Apostles. He met him. He met him, this Jesus whom he was persecuting. Who are you? I'm Jesus, whom you are persecuting. He's blinded for time. Remember the story. And then Ananias is sent to him and the scales fall from his eyes and he says, I want to be baptized. And he becomes the apostle to the Gentiles. And now in light of that, everything that he had taken with utter seriousness, he now thinks of worthless. It's just rubbish. But see, mind you, he's not falling into depression over this. It's like a magnificent liberation. Do you know how, again, think in terms of resume, that it can be this tremendous burden, that I'm trying to establish my reputation, I'm trying to impress everybody with how much I've accomplished. And my resume can feel like this burden on me. It was like the resume fell apart, it fell away. And now what? This supreme knowledge of Christ Jesus and finding a righteousness in him that he did not find in his resume. See, what are we all looking for? We all want righteousness in this sense. We want to be set right with God, our lives to be in order. And how do most of us do it? We do it through this clinging to our resume, to what we've accomplished in the moral order, the religious order, what we've received from our family, whatever it is. And we say, that's where I'm going to find my security. And Paul is able to throw all that off in a great liberating move and say, I don't find my security in any of that, but I find it in him. Listen now, not having any righteousness of my own based on the law, and I'll use my word based on my resume, but that which comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God depending on faith to know him, and the power of his resurrection. Now watch everyone. This is the language of metanoia or conversion. It's letting go of the way I understood and defined my life and turning toward an entirely new way of orienting my life. It's not resume based, it's not achievement based. It's now based on a surrender. See, faith Faith means trust. Trust, trusting in the power of Christ living in me. The same Paul says, it is no longer I who live, but Christ who lives in me. That's what I'm talking about. The resume stuff is, that's me. I, I'm a Pharisee. I'm righteous. I followed the law. I'm a son of Benjamin. I am of the tribe. I, I, I'm finding my righteousness in my own accomplishments and inheritances and achievements. No, no, no, no, no, no, no. That's all rubbish. Now. It's Christ living in me. My faithful surrender to his energy and power that I now find my joy. Listen, as he goes on, it's not that I've already taken hold of it or have already attained perfect maturity. What's he talking about there? But the it is the life of Christ. So he's accepted it in faith. He's accepted the power of Christ living in him. He's not at perfect maturity yet. But listen, I continue my pursuit in hope that I may possess it, since I've been taken possession of by Christ Jesus. You want conversion? Language. That's it. See, Prior, it was. Paul is taking possession of things through his own accomplishment. No, I've been taken possession of by Christ, and I'm increasingly surrendering to his power working in me. Same. Paul, there's a power already at work in you that can do infinitely more than you can ask or imagine. Same thing. That's the same thing. How about when he introduces himself to the Romans? I, Paul, a slave of Christ Jesus. Same idea, right? He's taken possession of me. It's not my stupid resume that's fallen away. That's rubbish. But now it's allowing Christ through faith, to live in me more fully. Look, I'm forgetting what lies behind. Paul says that's the resume I'm straining forward to. What lies ahead. What is it? The prize of God's upward calling in Christ Jesus. That's terrific stuff, isn't it? I mean, just the literary genius of this, but the spiritual power of it. Let go of the resume, everybody. It's rubbish. Finally surrender to Christ in faith. And now strive to live that life moving ever upward toward the Lord. And God bless you.
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Thank you for listening to this week's homily from Bishop Robert Barron. For more resources from Bishop Barron, please visit wordonfire.org.