I’m Andrew, Peter’s brother. We’ve met, remember? I’m with Jesus. I like to tell people that I was the first one to know him. You remember? I used to be with John, the Baptizer, until he sent us looking for someone greater, remember, someone to finally set things to rights, settle with our Roman friends …
Category Archives: Homilies
Sunday Week 4 of Lent Year B
What’s worse than being ill? … being ill at night! You’re huddled there, sweating and shivering and aching. You feel like death—in fact you half wish that death would at least get it over with—you feel like death and there in the middle of it all you find yourself wishing the light would come, wishing …
Sunday Week 1 of Lent Year B
It’s all a question of knowing where we are going. The first two readings set it up very clearly—in Lent we are heading once more to the Baptismal waters of Easter—but, to paraphrase Eliot, do we go all that way for a birth or a death? … It’s all a question of knowing where we …
Ash Wednesday
Why do we come here on Ash Wednesday? Why do we come now in greater numbers than on Easter? Why do we inconvenience our work day just to get a blackened brow that will embarrass us and confuse our colleagues? It’s not obligation that brings us—there is none. It may be custom, or habit, or …
Sunday Week 5 Year B
Stories, like ours, can reveal our own selves to us. Stories draw us in. Stories awaken in us a sense of who we are and what we desire. They tell us what is changing in us. That’s why we read the scriptures at Mass and not the catechism: because we want to be changed. That’s …
Sunday Week 3 Year B
In recent weeks we’ve been wondering what it’s like when God comes among us as a human being: as a tiny child at Christmas, as an adult now in these weeks of Ordinary Time. It’s a great gift given to us to meet the maker of the universe dwindled to infancy, vulnerable and frail. But …
Sunday Week 2 Year B
This year epiphany pursues us. In these weeks each gospel speaks about the way God is discovered in our lives. Today the epiphany takes the form of an awkward encounter. In an unexpected question: “What are you looking for?” In a question given instead of an answer: “Where do you stay?” In an answer that …
Baptism of the Lord Year B
Thirty years have flashed by in a week. Thirty years framed by two great epiphanies. Between the howling baby adored by shepherds and scientists and the silent figure coming to John at the Jordan—between them there is a lifetime of mystery. Somehow that helpless, demanding, fragile, noisy, tiny baby becomes a kid under his mother’s …
Sunday Week 3 of Advent Year B
Since Peter McGrath’s not here today it safe to let you in on a secret. In cynical circles, Jesuits are not known for their liturgical awareness. In fact, there’s a joke. How do you tell a good Jesuit liturgy? —No one gets hurt. Advent is a good example. In my house of 11 men, we …
Sunday Week 1 of Advent Year B
The first of December! No sooner are the turkeys all eaten than the Christmas trees are being sold. Why is it that December seems the shortest month? Once Thanksgiving hits and the dishes are all washed up you know that it’ll be no time at all before its January. However long November seems with its …