When I was a kid, a friend at my home parish told me, “If you get to Mass by the Gospel reading, it counts!” As a lifelong late-arriver, it’s something I have told myself many times, especially in my earlier years as a Catholic. If the “it counts” is justifiable on a pathetically minimal scale of liturgical legalism, then the Gospel reading today shows how insanely wrong-headed it is, and how helpful it is to re-think the Mass in its light.

Today is Divine Mercy Sunday. It’s a day to revisit our idea about who God is. I believe there are some people who still imagine that God’s standard for holiness is very unreasonable. People who think God is more interested in finding faults in us than in seeing our efforts to love and please Him. People who think God enjoys it when people end up in hell. The truth is all these perceptions about God is very false. Until we rid ourselves of these ideas, we will never come to a place of true love and friendship with God.

Up, down, up, down, left, right, left, right A, B, A, B, select then start. When I was a kid, if you pressed those buttons at the beginning of a Nintendo game called, “Contra”—you would receive unlimited lives. Then, when I was playing the game, everything was different. Suddenly, I was not afraid to lose a life, because I knew I would receive another one.

The story of Jesus saturates the metanarrative of the Bible, and prophecies of His first coming are found throughout the Old Testament. In His life, Christ fulfilled over 300 Old Testament prophecies. Palm Sunday, the event we celebrate today, is one of those. This reflection therefore will show how events in Old Testament predicts that when the Messiah appears, He will show up in a very dramatic way in Jerusalem.

When I was a child, they would put missing children on the side of milk cartons. It was to bring awareness to the problem of missing children and to empower you if you saw one of them in public to call the authorities. Question—what would you put on the side of a milk carton today because you think it is “missing” from the world? It can be anything, even something abstract, like justice. For me, and I am following the lead of the last few popes of the 20th Century and into the 21st, the world needs above all “joyful missionary disciples.”

We are almost halfway through Lent. For some of us, the journey has been fruitful, yet for some others it has been a real challenge. The recognition that we often take two steps forward and one step backward can be discouraging. We are at the point where we are questioning our own sincerity. The fact is that we must repeat and renew our choices over and over again.

As Americans, we tend to love freedom. Many of us hold dear our fundamental freedoms enshrined in the 1st Amendment—the right to free speech, to assemble, to freedom of religion, etc. But we often find today people on opposite sides of an issue invoking freedom as to why their position is correct. This begs the question—what is true freedom?