The Call to Holiness: Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Last Sunday we celebrated the feast of the baptism of Our Lord, the feast that marks the inauguration of the public ministry of Our Lord, and the start of ordinary time. Within the space of a few weeks we will enter into the holy season of Lent, and already, as we emerge from the feasting of Christmas, in today’s Gospel our eyes are directed towards the Cross of Our Lord.

Behold, the Lamb of God, who takes away the sin of the world.

But the Gospel also directs our attention towards another figure whose passion is important, that of St. John the Baptist. Not only does the Gospel direct our attention towards this last, and greatest, of the prophets, but it does so that we may imitate him wholly and completely; so that our entire lives may, like that of the Baptist, be a holocaust dedicated to the Lamb of God who takes away the sin of the world.

What are the markers of the Baptist that we should contemplate and integrate into our lives?

Now the LORD … formed me as his servant from the womb,
that Jacob may be brought back to him
and Israel gathered to him;

Baptised into Christ, our only job is to proclaim Him so that the world may be brought back to Him. As the prophet Isaiah prophesies in the first reading today

You are my servant,
Israel, through whom I show my glory.

It is not just through preaching with our lips that we permit ourselves to show the glory of the Lord, but via our every action: the way we raise our children, the way we conduct ourselves at work, the way we bargain in the bazaar, the way we drive and behave in traffic! In all these little ways, our actions should be such that we articulate the glory of the Lord.

The Baptist, of course, distinguished his life by a rigorous asceticism, something that we too should contemplate, now as we prepare ourselves for the Lenten penitence and abstinence that will come. We will be able to achieve this rigour, if, and only if, like the Baptist, we actively pursue holiness. This is the message St.Paul preaches to us today in the extract from his first letter to the Corinthians:

you who have been sanctified in Christ Jesus, [are] called to be holy,
with all those everywhere who call upon the name of our Lord Jesus Christ, their Lord and ours.

The pursuit of holiness, my dear brothers and sisters, is not simply an option for those who, through baptism, have been sanctified in Our Lord; it is an obligation. With Christians everywhere, we are called to be holy.

How exactly we pursue this holiness is laid out for us in the psalm we sing today.

In the written scroll it is prescribed for me,
to do your will, O my God, is my delight,
and your law is within my heart!

Too often, we know the commandments, and we know the teachings of the Church, but we hesitate, grumbling that we have to act in such a way. The prohibition against the use of contraception, or masturbation for example. We know that these are practices are fundamentally opposed to life, and yet we grumble against them. Holiness is finding in our hearts the capacity to delight in fulfilling the law of Our Lord and His Church.

Too often, perhaps because of the way he is represented in film, the Baptist is thought to be a sullen, rancourous man. Holiness, my dear brothers and sisters, is not about dull and boring lives, but it is about delight. Think of the Baptist leaping for joy at the Visitation! Holiness is about joy, and singing. Listen to these words from the psalm:

I have waited, waited for the LORD,
and he stooped toward me and heard my cry.
And he put a new song into my mouth,
a hymn to our God.

The cry of our solitude, of our being resigned to the darkness is heard by Our God, and from the moment of baptism he puts a song and a hymn into our mouths. Brothers and sisters, from the moment of our baptism holiness is the norm. It is the norm from which we may sometimes fall, but we can always repent and return to this norm through  recourse to the sacraments – confession and the Eucharist. And no matter the trials in our lives, the love of God gives us the capacity to sing. No more the sullenness and unhappiness of sin!

When we truly get in touch with this truth, my dear brothers and sisters; when we are joyful in holiness, joyous in understanding the truths of our faith and the joy that comes from its practice, there is nothing that can constrain us. As the psalm sings:

I announced your justice in the vast assembly;
I did not restrain my lips, as you, O LORD, know.

Our joy frees us, and there are no more restraints, no matter the situation in which we find ourselves.

For those who, like John the Baptist, are faithful to the call to holiness, Our God makes an extravagant promise:

It is too little, the LORD says, for you to be my servant,
to raise up the tribes of Jacob,
and restore the survivors of Israel;
I will make you a light to the nations,
that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth.

A few days ago we celebrated the feast of St. José Vaz, who was, as all Goans should be, a light to the nations. Calling on his prayers let us petition for the grace of the Holy Spirit to grow in holiness, and be a light to the nations among whom we live.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful in the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 17 January 2026.)

(Image reference: St.John the Baptist, Lucas Cranach the Elder, 1550 – 1552, Museo Poldi Pezzoli, Milan.)

Non Clamor Sed Amor: Homily for the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord

he shall bring forth justice to the nations,
not crying out, not shouting,
not making his voice heard in the street.
a bruised reed he shall not break,
and a smoldering wick he shall not quench,
until he establishes justice on the earth;

My dear brothers and sisters, these words from the Prophet Isaiah chosen for the first reading on the feast of the Baptism of Our Lord offer us an image of a reformer unlike anything we are accustomed to. Isaiah assures us that the Messiah who will come will bring forth justice and be successful in doing so, but he will not do so by the methods that we are familiar with. No shouting in the street, no violence, no roughing up, or the smashing of heads.

This method must seem very strange for us, born after the French revolution, after the revolutions that have come since then, and who are used to the rousing anti-colonial nationalisms of the early twentieth century. It must seem strange to us who are used to the slogans of Inquilab zindabad (long live the revolution) and who are used to overturning, and killing, kings and setting others on the throne and seats of power.

And why will the Messiah not do this? In 1984, the Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith issued an instruction on Liberation theology a paragraph of which caught my eye, which I offer you in its entirety:

Nor can one localize evil principally or uniquely in bad social, political, or economic "structures" as though all other evils came from them so that the creation of the "new man" would depend on the establishment of different economic and socio-political structures. To be sure, there are structures which are evil and which cause evil and which we must have the courage to change. [However,] Structures, whether they are good or bad, are the result of man's actions and so are consequences more than causes. The root of evil, then, lies in free and responsible persons who have to be converted by the grace of Jesus Christ in order to live and act as new creatures in the love of neighbor and in the effective search for justice, self-control, and the exercise of virtue. To demand first of all a radical revolution in social relations and then to criticize the search for personal perfection is to set out on a road which leads to the denial of the meaning of the person and his transcendence, and to destroy ethics and its foundation which is the absolute character of the distinction between good and evil. Moreover, since charity is the principle of authentic perfection, that perfection cannot be conceived without an openness to others and a spirit of service.

There we have have it! It is, “the spirit of service;” which is the spirit of one who will not crush a reed, nor quench a wick. One could well call it caritas or love. Our Lord knows that setting up new kings, and beheading old ones, throwing away old systems in favour of new ones is not the solution. Rather, if we are to establish justice, it is the transformation of the heart that is called for. And what needs to be rooted out of the heart is nothing other than sin.

He went about doing good 
and healing all those oppressed by the devil, 
for God was with him.

These words from the Acts of the Apostles, offered for our second reading today, teaches us that we need to realise who the enemy is, and then choose our weapons accordingly. The enemy is not the various persons whose actions are definitely a part of the problem. Rather, the enemy is the devil, and it is with him that we must be ready to do battle. It is with the devil that Our Lord came to do battle, and he understood that the way to do this is to break with sin and introduce grace into the world.

This grace is available for us through the seven sacraments that have been instituted for us by Our Lord. Today we celebrate the institution of the sacrament of baptism – the first of the sacraments that lead us into the way of love, and provide us with the grace necessary to do battle with the devil.

Through baptism we are washed clean of original sin, made sons of God and fused into the mystical body of Christ, so that He may assist us to do battle with the devil against whom we will not succeed without the gift of grace. Grace abounds in the sacraments, and it is to this fountain – especially the sacrament of reconciliation – that we must rush toward if we wish to assist Our Lord in establishing justice on the face of the earth.

Give to the LORD, you sons of God,
    give to the LORD glory and praise,
Give to the LORD the glory due his name;
    adore the LORD in holy attire.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria on 10 Jan 2026.)

(Image reference: Triptych of the Mystic Bath, Jean Bellegambe, first third of the 16^th cent., Palais des Beaux Arts de Lille.)

Todos! Todos! Todos! Homily for the feast of the Epiphany of the Lord

Since at least the latter parts of the nineteenth century, and into the twentieth, the Christian revelation has been done great disservice by interpretations of the scripture that are literalist, and – to make it worse – ideologically driven. For example, these interpretations consistently limit the poverty of those in scripture to their material poverty; and ignore the fact that a symbolic, mystical, or spiritual reading of the scripture would emphasize that the poverty that the Bible refers to is that of our poverty before God.

The problem with these readings is that it has produced Christians, Catholics even, who restrict their pastoral care to only those who are materially impoverished and either ignore, or actively discriminate against, those who are materially, or fiscally, rich. The preferential option for the poor, which is a wonderful direction for Christian charity, has, as a result, become a preferential option to ignore, and worse discriminate against, the rich and the privileged. This is a grotesque perversion of the Christian message, and we should examine our hearts to inquire if this is what our projects of Christian charity are motivated by, or perhaps result in.

The feast we celebrate today, the Epiphany, the adoration by the Magi, should help correct this tendency since we see that the rich, privileged and powerful too, have a role to play in the proclamation of the Gospel. Not only does Christ love them, and permit them to adore Him, but He actively reveals Himself to them. Indeed, He revealed Himself to them via the star, meaning he knew of the kind of knowledge they possessed – a knowledge born of a surplus of time, spent not in hard labour, but in contemplation. In so revealing Himself, He chose that they too should play a role in His revelation to humanity. His message was not restricted to Israel alone, but was directed towards all people. As St. Paul says to the Ephesians in today’s reading from the epistles:

it has now been revealed
to his holy apostles and prophets by the Spirit: 
that the Gentiles are coheirs, members of the same body,
and copartners in the promise in Christ Jesus through the gospel.

Indeed, those who privilege a restricted reading of the scriptures, can be compared to Herod in the Gospel episode we read today. Reflecting on this episode, Pope St. Gregory the Great points out that Herod serves as a symbol of false devotion. St. Gregory points out what should be obvious, that Herod here represents a ruler who focused completely on the mundane, and forgetful of the transcendental realities we live in, seeks to protect his earthly, or material, kingdom from Him whose kingdom is not of this world. This must operate as an indictment of Christians who to the exclusion of all else, focus on social justice alone, and berate those who focus on the mystical, and transcendental.

An anonymous ancient Christian commentator reflecting on Herod observes that when the wicked want to do serious harm, they paint treachery in the color of humility. There is much false humility that abounds in the Catholic church today, and this false humility is, in part, the result of literalist, or materialist, interpretations of scripture, that encourage hate, and a false piety.

One extricates oneself from this situation by looking anew on the scriptures. The adoration of the kings, or the Magi, offers us rich reflections.

Then you shall be radiant at what you see,
your heart shall throb and overflow,
for the riches of the sea shall be emptied out before you,
the wealth of nations shall be brought to you.

First, the privileged have a contribution to make to the Church, not only in the propagation of the Christian message, but in the reception of pastoral care. Secondly, not only is Our Lord worthy of worship by the privileged, but He wishes to be honored as kings are honored – with precious gifts of gold, and incense and myrrh. This is to say, our formal acts of worship must be solemn and accompanied by precious, and high-quality, offerings. Silks, gold, silver. These are not just acceptable, but worthy of inclusion in our worship. We must bear in mind that finesse in products and services is often the product of patronage by the privileged. The products of their surplus, leisure and contemplation, like those of the Magi, must be offered to Our Lord, for their, and our, own good. Our Lord loves and esteems the shepherds, but he loves and esteems kings and members of the elite classes too.

In his message to the youth at World Youth Day, Pope Francis emphatically emphasized that in the Church there is room for everyone, “Todos, todos, todos” (everyone, everyone, everyone). "And when there isn't, please, let's work so that there is."

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria on 4 January 2026.)

(Image reference: The Adoration of the Magi, Gentile da Fabriano, 1423, The Uffizi, Florence.)