Homilies & Thoughts

Before sunrise on a December morning, an ordinary man walked the road toward mass on the hill of Tepeyac. He was not a governor, not a soldier, not a spokesman for a cause. Juan Diego was simply faithful—poor, overlooked, living in a world torn open by conquest, suspicion, and fear.

That is precisely where Our Lady chose to appear.

Guadalupe does not arrive as a badge for one side. She comes as Mother—Madre de Dios—for a wounded, divided society. Her presence says: you are not merely rivals, classes, or camps. You are children. One Mother, many peoples. She speaks to Juan Diego in a way he can receive, and she sends him back into the conflict with a task larger than himself.

By candlelight, these four Advent reflections trace a path from wakefulness to repentance, from fragile faith to renewed trust. Beginning with Jesus’ warning to stay awake, they move through John’s call to bear fruit, Christ’s assurance that grace is truly at work, and the quiet courage of Joseph. Together they invite us to let God enter ordinary life, weakness, and uncertainty, so the light of Emmanuel can be born anew.

Many of us might admit that this Jubilee Year of Hope has passed quietly by. It is on the Church’s calendar, but not always on our minds. Yet the very idea of a Jubilee is to interrupt ordinary time, to shake loose the dust that settles over our faith, and to let God do something new within us.

Into that same kind of spiritual drowsiness steps John the Baptist. He does not arrive gently. He is rough, strange, even unsettling: camel hair on his shoulders, the dust of the desert on his feet, wild insects for food. God chooses this man precisely because he cannot be ignored. His very presence is a question: have you grown too comfortable in your faith?

Advent arrives like an alarm clock in the dark. The world keeps moving at its usual pace—work and meals, holidays and travel, screens glowing late into the night—yet the Lord gently shakes our shoulder and gives a single, urgent command: “Therefore, stay awake!”

When Jesus speaks of the days of Noah, he does not describe spectacular sins. He speaks of people eating and drinking, marrying and giving in marriage. Ordinary life. Good things, but lived as if God were unnecessary. People so absorbed in what was immediately in front of them that they never lifted their eyes to what was coming toward them. The flood did not surprise them because it was hidden; it surprised them because they were spiritually asleep.

The throne of our King does not look like a throne. It is a cross planted outside the city, with a crude sign nailed above his head and a handful of people watching while the crowd mocks and walks away. The rulers scoff, the soldiers make jokes, even a dying criminal joins in. It looks like weakness and failure.

Yet this is the moment when the true King of the Universe is revealed. The eternal Son of the Father has emptied himself, born of a woman, obedient even to this shameful death. And precisely here, when every earthly measure says he has lost, he begins to reign. One man sees it. One man, condemned justly by his own admission, looks at the crucified Jesus and recognizes a King. He turns and says, “Jesus, remember me when you come into your kingdom.”

A cathedral on Rome’s Lateran Hill—St. John Lateran, the cathedral of the Bishop of Rome—bears the name “Mother and Head of all churches in Rome and in the world.” Today the Church celebrates the dedication of that cathedral. Strange, perhaps, to keep a feast for a building. Yet the Church asks us to do so because what we dedicate in stone reveals what God desires to do in us. Walls and doors cannot contain God. He fills heaven and earth. Still, he gives us a place set apart so our scattered hearts can be gathered, our senses focused, our lives reoriented toward him.

A single desire pulses beneath every distraction, every ambition, every fear: to be loved and to love in return. God did not fashion us because he lacked company; the Trinity is eternal communion. He wanted creatures who could share the joy he is. We were made for love—real, infinite, unexhausted.

Yet reaching for that desire is not easy. Sin crowds the heart. Pride distorts. Greed narrows. Selfishness turns us in on ourselves until we confuse appetite for love. Seeing this, the Father sent the Son to reopen the way home. Jesus shows that love is not a feeling we hoard but a life we receive and learn to give. He conquers the very sins that steal what we most long for and offers grace so we can begin again and again. Holiness, for most of us, is not a clean sprint; it is a long walk with stumbles, hand in hand with mercy.

Sometimes we can become too focused on sin. That might sound surprising, because it seems like the world around us is not focused on sin at all—and there’s truth in that. Yet even within the Church, we can fall into the opposite error: we can make sin and morality the entire focus of our faith, reducing Christianity to a system of rules.

Faith, however, is far more than moralism. Even if we somehow managed to live our entire lives without committing a single sin, that alone would not make us perfect. It would not make us true imitators of Christ. Christ did not simply avoid sin—he went far beyond that. He lived a life of perfect charity, of complete self-giving love. He lived as those in heaven live, fully united to the love of God.

There is a certain comedy to the Pharisee’s prayer. He speaks as if heaven should applaud his résumé, as if the problem with the world is everyone else. We know that swagger. We have seen it, maybe even felt it tug at us. Yet Jesus does not waste time telling us simply not to be that person; he turns our gaze to the other figure in the doorway—the man who cannot raise his eyes.

At the city gate, the dust never settles. Merchants haggle, travelers shout, carts rattle by. Here the courts meet in the open: respected elders and judges sit from morning to evening, hearing disputes where anyone may step forward. A widow has no husband to represent her; she must speak for herself before neighbors and strangers alike. There—at the busiest spot in town—a widow appears again. She stands where everyone can see. She is not proud. She is not powerful. She simply returns, day after day, to plead for justice.

Mercy always costs somebody something. Sometimes it costs time. Sometimes pride. Sometimes the ache of being taken for granted. The ten lepers cry out, and the plea is familiar to our lips at the start of every mass, in a slightly different translation: Lord, have mercy. Their illness has pushed them to the edges—forced to live apart, forced to warn others away. They are not simply unwell; they are unwelcome.

The request from the apostles is disarmingly simple: “Increase our faith.” Yet the response they receive is startling—vivid images and a story with a demanding master. At first hearing, the tone feels harsh. That is on purpose. Jesus leans on exaggeration to uncover an essential truth: the Christian life is not a part-time hobby. It is non-stop. It is all-consuming. It touches everything we do because it is about everything being made new in Christ.