Fr. Mike's Gospel Reflection for - Sunday, March 29, 2026

Today begins our celebration of Holy Week.  The week culminates in the Easter Vigil Mass which anticipates the great feast of Easter.  However, before we get to Easter, we must pass through some seriously dark and disturbing moments in the life of Jesus and His disciples.  These last five days of His earthly life are filled with moments of both great joy and moments of unimaginable pain and sorrow.

Our first Gospel reading, which is read just before mass begins, tells of Jesus riding into Jerusalem on a donkey.  His entry is that of a humble servant, yet the adoring crowd is shouting, “Hosanna to the Son of David.”  Even though He prefers not to be praised or acclaimed, the crowd repeatedly shouts: “Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord.”  If these words sound familiar, it is because we proclaim them at each mass in the “Sanctus” immediately before the Eucharistic Prayer.  This phrase is taken directly from Psalm 118. That Psalm praises a king who is triumphantly entering a city after a victory.  We remember this moment in every mass because the triumph of Jesus is an hour which does not pass away.  As one of my Theology professors wrote, “we are standing within that same hour, and we are standing in that hour because he is coming to us now.  Blessed is he who comes!”

Unfortunately, within a few short days, the adoring crowd will shift from shouting out “Blessed is He!” to “Crucify Him!”  How could they reject Him so quickly after praising Him?  We might ask ourselves a similar question.  How can we leave mass and then criticize the music or the man in the third pew?  How can we say, “Amen!” when receiving the Body of Christ and then intentionally sin later that day?  How do we participate in bible study and then gossip about the woman who was seated at our table?  Each day, our thoughts of “Blessed is He” turn quickly to “Why do I continue to crucify Him with my thoughts, words, and actions?”  As a child, I was told that my sins were like the nails that held Jesus to the cross.  During this very sacred week, let’s all firmly resolve to move from crucifying to blessing Our Lord.

Fr. Mike

Fr. Mike's Gospel Reflection for - Sunday, March 22, 2026

The shortest verse in the Bible is John 11:35: “Jesus wept.” Those two words tell us everything that we need to know about Jesus.

Jesus wept at the tomb of his friend Lazarus after speaking with Lazarus’s grieving sisters, Martha and Mary, and seeing all the mourners. While weeping certainly seems like a natural reaction, Jesus knew that He had come to Bethany to raise Lazarus from the dead. He knew that in a few short minutes this weeping would turn to astonished joy, and then tearful laughter, and then worship. So, one would think that Jesus would be confident, even joyful in that storm of sorrow. But he was “greatly troubled,” and he wept. Why?

One reason is simply the deep compassion that Jesus felt for those who were suffering. To be “compassionate” means to suffer with. At this moment Jesus is suffering with his friends.  Yet, Martha pointedly tells Him that He is the cause of the suffering because He was not there to prevent Lazarus’s death.  Nonetheless, Jesus truly feels her and her sister’s pain.  He bears that pain and is overwhelmed with their sadness.  In His divine nature, He knew that He would raise Lazarus and glorify His heavenly Father.  He knew that moment would cause many more to believe in Him.  His reasons were good and merciful and glorious. But this did not mean Jesus took lightly the suffering it caused.  In his humble humanity, Jesus wept.

Jesus wept because death had consumed every human being God had created. It had taken Lazarus, and it would take him again.  Jesus was about to suffer and die to overcome the sting of death. Perhaps He wept because of the cost that He was about to pay to purchase not only Lazarus’s short-term resurrection, but his everlasting life. Jesus knew that raising Lazarus would actually cause the religious leaders to finally take action to put him to death as John points out later in the passage.  Tears of anger and longing were mixed with Jesus’s tears of grief.

As Jesus wept at Lazarus’s tomb, we can see the man that He was and the God that He is.  We see that He desires to share, and ultimately bear, our pain and suffering.  We clearly see His great love for us.

Fr. Mike

Fr. Mike's Gospel Reflection for - Sunday, March 15, 2026

This weekend’s Gospel reminds us that many of us suffer from a lack of sight. In the passage, the man was “born blind,” the disciples were blind, the man’s neighbors were blind, and the Pharisees were blind.

When Jesus encounters the man “born blind,” he was both physically and spiritually blind. By the end of the passage, Jesus had cured both forms of blindness. Jesus doubles the meaning of the verb, “to see,” recalling both physical sight and inward illumination. The spiritual cure occurs when Jesus reveals Himself to the man: “You have seen him, the one speaking with you is he.”

The disciples are blind to the love of God. They immediately assume that the man’s blindness is the result of sin – either his sin or the sin of his parents. They believe that God punishes sinners with bad circumstances. Jesus does not follow their line of reasoning. Instead, he directs them to the work that God has sent Him to perform and to the glory that God receives from that work. Jesus makes it quite clear that God does not make an instrument out of suffering, making it somehow necessary.

The community was blind to the man. He was nobody to them. They only saw his condition, not him. After his cure, they couldn’t even recognize him as the same man. They questioned his cure because they, like the Pharisees, were blind to the possibilities that Jesus could achieve.

The Pharisees were blinded by their pride, doubt, and anger. They ignored the evidence; they doubted the identity of the man and that he was born blind; and, they denied God’s action in the healing. The truth upset them so much that they threw the formerly blind man out of the temple. When he encountered Jesus after his banishment from the temple, Jesus again “opens his eyes” by revealing His identity. The man who had been blind exclaims: “Lord, I believe!” and he worships Jesus.

As we contemplate this Gospel story, let’s ask Jesus to cure our spiritual blindness which prevents us from seeing others as God sees them. Let’s think about those times in our lives when we allow our pride to blind us, when we prefer our inner blindness to the truth, and when we close our eyes to the reality of God’s love.

Fr. Mike