Suffering for Doing Good

04/29/20 • 14 min

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Bishop Barron’s Sunday Sermons - Catholic Preaching and Homilies

For this fourth Sunday of Easter, I would like to concentrate on our second reading, which is from the first letter of Peter, a beautiful text that we consult only rarely in the course of the liturgical calendar. It seems eminently clear from the totality of this letter that it was written to a suffering, probably persecuted, Church. Therefore, how to deal with adversity, negativity, even the threat of death was an existential concern of this community. Peter gives his readers an extraordinary and deeply Christian principle: “Beloved, if you are patient when you suffer for doing what is good, this is a grace before God.”

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Emmaus and Genesis

It is my privilege this third Sunday of Easter to preach on one of the most magnificent texts in the New Testament, a masterpiece within the masterpiece: the story of the two disciples on the road to Emmaus. I would like to offer a somewhat novel interpretation, one that takes its inspiration from the style of the Church Fathers and draws a correlation between this narrative with the third chapter of Genesis.

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An Icon of the Church

For this fifth Sunday of the Easter season, I should like to return to our consideration of the Acts of the Apostles. Our passage for today is taken from the beginning of the sixth chapter of Acts, and it concerns the Church—its growth, its unity, and its structure—in a way that is compelling for our time.