Recently, I attended a gathering of mostly Protestant pastors and ministry leaders (I was one of two Catholics in the room) to talk about the “evangelization temperature” of the city, i.e. how we are doing in proclaiming the Gospel to Phoenix and the surrounding cities. During the event, we heard a few speakers explore the theme of evangelization from various angles. One idea that I found inspired was a practice the first speaker said she did at her Church in Florida.

“The Holy Spirit will guide you into all truth” (John 16:13).

According to Dr. John Bergsma, “The story is told of the little boy whose father asked him, “what is faith?” the boy replied, “It’s when you believe things you know aren’t true.” This sums up the popular attitude toward the Christian faith in modern Western Culture. Both outside the Church and many inside as well, think the faith consists in clenching one’s teeth and believing things that are probably false. But that is not the teaching of Jesus. Jesus taught what is true and taught us to seek the truth. It is not the Church but the culture that believes things that are not true.”

Everyone wants to know “who they are.” It’s the reason why children who have been adopted, when they get older, have often a deep desire to meet their birth parents. They may love their adopted parents and be grateful that their biological parents chose life and had the courage to put them up for adoption—but still, they want to meet their biological parents to know who they come from, and the insight that gives them to who they are today.

In today’s Gospel Jesus says, “Love one another as I have loved you.” This command is foundational to the entire Christian life. It is simple and yet difficult. Most of us find it much easier to love an invisible God than a neighbor who is often in the way of our preferences, sensibilities, and personal rights. Loving others just seem to be the most difficult part of being a Christian. But if you have been baptized, know that you have all it takes to love others because you are connected to the source of love, the Holy Spirit. In Romans 5:5 St. Paul says, “God’s love has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.”

Dear Family of God,

This weekend we will be reminded by Jesus remain in Him and we can do nothing without Him, like a branch that withers when cut from the vine. So, how do we remain in Him?

How do we remain in Jesus? St. John has the answer: “Those who keep His Commandments remain in Him, and He in them, and the way we know that He remains in us is from the Spirit, He gave us.” To remain in Jesus is to keep His Commandments, “and His Commandments is this: we should believe in the name of His Son, Jesus Christ, and love one another just as He commanded us.”

Today is called “Good Shepherd Sunday”. One of the remarkable qualities of a good shepherd is his willingness to lay down his life for his flock. Christ did that for us. He laid down His life for us on the cross. At every mass, He continues to lay down His life for us.

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?