My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, we have a very rich passage from St. Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians to reflect on today; a passage which offers many learnings for all of us who are called to preach the Gospel.
When I came to you, brothers and
sisters,
proclaiming the mystery of God,
I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.
Right at the very start St. Paul is clear that he does not come with words of human wisdom. No! All he has before him, that is, all that he reflects on and contemplates, is:
Jesus Christ, and him crucified.
In other words, what guides St. Paul’s preaching is the Cross of Our Lord, which earlier in the same letter he clarified was:
a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles
It is this mystery to the world that guides the teachings that St. Paul brings to the people whom God has chosen for His own.
I did not come with sublimity of words or of wisdom.
…
I came to you in weakness and fear
and much trembling,
and my message and my proclamation
were not with persuasive words of wisdom,
but with a demonstration of Spirit and power,
so that your faith might rest not on human wisdom
but on the power of God.
My dear brothers and sisters, the priest of our times is faced with a very grave threat to his priestly vocation. This threat stems from the wisdom of the world that demands that he be charismatic, popular, a good speaker, and worse, that his homilies and his preaching should be stimulating and attract our attention. This worldly wisdom, as St. Paul teaches us in Corinthians is foolishness, but so great is the pressure, that many a priest attempts to fulfill these requirements and then falls in his priesthood. His preaching is often not about pious teachings of the Church but about worldy wisdom, in some cases forgetting these teachings to urge social activism alone! The delivery of his homily is not restrained, but a passionate exercise in public speaking which may get the faithful excited, but fails to invite them to contemplate the fruits of his reflection. Oftentimes, we priests are encouraged to approach the pulpit not “in weakness and fear and much trembling” but with “persuasive words of [worldly] wisdom”, working in such a way that the faith of the people we are called to lead rests not “on the power of God” but “on human wisdom.” In other words, the priest, the alter Christus, is invited not to present the Cross of Christ, but offer his personality!
It falls on you, my dear brothers and sisters, to reassure the priest that you are not interested in performance, but in drinking deep from the font of the teachings of Our Holy Mother Church. Human nature, my dear brothers and sisters in Christ, is dialogical, we respond to what persons demand of us, and we need to demonstrate that we want our priests to be persons who contemplate the cross of Christ, who come to the pulpit empowered by a relationship with the Spirit.
St. Paul’s words of advice extend also to liturgical animators, particularly to those animators who are often heard to say proudly, “I wrote the liturgy”, or worse “I directed the liturgy.” My dear brothers and sisters, strictly speaking, the introduction to the Mass, the various other introductions that happen during the Mass, are not part of the liturgy. They are additions to it. They are at best aids to the liturgy. Listen to the words of the venerable Cardinal Robert Sarah – who was the Prefect of the Congregation for Divine Worship and the Discipline of the Sacraments – in a recent book The Song of the Lamb: Sacred Music and the Heavenly Liturgy:
In its fullest Christian sense…. The liturgy emerges not as human creation or activity, but as “opus Trinitatis” – the work of the Trinity – permeating the life of the Church at large. We must be careful not to reduce the liturgy to a mere human endeavour, as if we were the creators of the liturgy. [The liturgy] serves the people not as something crafted by them, but rather as a divine offering of the Son to the Father on behalf of Christ’s spouse, the Church, making possible our participation in the divine reality.
What is called for, therefore, is a great amount of humility on the part of the liturgical animators and priests. There is a need to restrain our words, so that attention is directed not to ourselves, but to the great sacrifice of the Mass that they must support, and priests lead. In the Gospel today Our Lord says to us:
You are the light of the world.
Light we are, and shine we must. But we must shine, not to gain the admiration of people, but, as the Gospel teaches us today, so that people:
may see your good deeds
and glorify your heavenly Father.
The words from psalm 115:1 must serve as a caution to both priests and animators:
Non nobis, Domine, non nobis,
sed nomini tuo da gloriam
Not to us, O Lord, not
to us, but to your name give glory
(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 7 February 2026.)
(image reference: St. Charles Borromeo with two angels contemplating the Cross, Antiveduto Grammatica, Worchester Art Museum.)
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