Reconcile Yourselves! Homily for the Sixth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Therefore, if you bring your gift to the altar,
and there recall that your brother
has anything against you,
leave your gift there at the altar,
go first and be reconciled with your brother,
and then come and offer your gift.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, these words from today’s Gospel selection, offer us an opportunity to appreciate the importance of the sacrament of reconciliation, or confession. More appropriately, it teaches us of the relationship between this sacrament, and the great sacrifice of the Mass that we are participating in.

I recollect that as a child there were, and in some churches even today, there are priests sitting for confession whilst mass is on-going. Thus, if you should recollect a sin that you have not confessed, one is afforded the possibility at that moment to be reconciled, and then participate in the sacrifice that is being offered. Confession is that important! Our Lord is quite clear, do not complete your sacrifice, if you are not reconciled, with your brother. You cannot be reconciled with God, this is the purpose of the sacrifice, if you are not first reconciled with your brother.

Yet how many of us, dear brothers and sisters, dare to approach the altar, and partake of communion, without having first made a good confession? Too many of us commit an even greater mortal sin, by having consumed the Eucharist without having prepared our souls for this encounter.

The command to reconcile is, in fact, deeper than it appears at first. St. Jerome, the great Biblical scholar points out, that Our Lord, did not say, “If you have anything against your brother” but “If your brother has anything against you.” In other words, the sacrament of reconciliation is required when we have done something to offend, or hurt, our brother. He then goes on to comment, “As long as we are unable to make peace with our brother, I do not know whether we may offer our gifts to God.”

So great is the wisdom of Our Holy Mother Church, my dear brothers and sisters, that She recognizes that sometimes it is impossible to make peace with a person who has been hurt. Or that confessing our sin to the person we have sinned against may make the possibility for reconciliation impossible. It is for this reason that she offers the person of the priest, acting in persona Christi, i.e. acting as Christ, to confess our sins, to own our sins – to use more contemporary language – and then receive forgiveness.

St. Augustine, offers an analogy from the domestication of animals to understand how and why God intervenes himself, through a human being, for the sake of taming our wild, and unruly souls.  Animals, do not tame themselves, he begins,

So too a man does not tame himself. In order to tame a horse, an ox, a camel, an elephant, a lion and a snake, a human being is required. Therefore God should be required in order for a human being to be tamed.

It is only after the wildness of our hearts has been tamed, that we can then proceed to the altar to offer our gifts and consume the gift that Our Lord offers us in return, the gift of His Body and Blood. A gift which slowly, but surely, begins to transform our body so that we may eventually enter bodily enter heaven.

The verses following this command to reconcile before we sacrifice also have much to offer those who are serious about the spiritual life.

Settle with your opponent quickly while on the way to court.
Otherwise your opponent will hand you over to the judge,
and the judge will hand you over to the guard,
and you will be thrown into prison.
Amen, I say to you,
you will not be released until you have paid the last penny.

Reading these verses metaphorically, we must ask the question, who is our opponent? Surely not our brother. In fact, our opponent is the devil, who wishes to place a barrier between ourselves and our home in paradise. As the book of Revelation (12: 10) teaches us, Satan is:

the accuser of our brothers…
    who accuses them day and night before our God

My dear brothers and sisters, in this life we are all headed in one direction, that of the heavenly court of Christ. It is the desire of the Devil that on the day of judgement, when Our Lord will come as judge, he carry off as many as he can with himself to hell. In this context, we can read multiple meanings into the figure of “the guard.” On the one hand, the guards are the angels of the Lord, who will accompany Him on the day of judgement (Mt 25: 31) and who will gather up the evildoers of this earth and cast them into the fiery hell where they will spend all eternity (Mt 13: 41-42). That the angels of Our Lord will fulfill the role of the guard by preventing any escape is clear enough. What we should also realise, however, is that the devil jealously guards his own, doing all he can to keep them with him and away from reconciliation with their brothers, and through this with Our Lord. Note, therefore, what happens at the sacrament of reconciliation: we reject - we settle with - the Devil who traps us, and we hand ourselves over to Christ.

We do not know the moment of our deaths, my dear brothers and sisters, and we can repent for our mortal sins only while here on earth. Which is why Our Lord asks us to settle with the opponent quickly! A moment after death and it will be too late! Turn to Christ, therefore, my dear brothers and sisters, and reconcile yourselves with your brothers and with Our Lord quickly, before you attend the sacrifice of the Mass – and if a priest is available even whilst at Mass !! – so that you may not invite a greater sin by receiving communion unworthily.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria, Old Goa on 15 February 2026.)

(Image reference: The Last Judgment detail, Viktor Vasnetsov, 1904, Vladimir-Suzdal Museum-Reserve.)

Light in the Darkness: Homily for the Fifth Sunday in Ordinary Time

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.)

Oh Fall on Your Knees! Homily for the Feast of St. Thomas the Apostle

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ Jesus. We are gathered here today to pay homage to your patron St. Thomas the Apostle and I would like to use this opportunity to reflect on what San Tomé, in his famous interaction with the Risen Lord, can teach us about worship and the liturgy.

As many of you would know, in the Gospel according to St. John we are told that Our Lord, after He was resurrected, appeared to the disciples, but Tomé was not among them. When this glorious encounter was recounted to him by the disciples, Thomas famously declared:

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands, and put my finger in the mark of the nails and my hand in his side, I will not believe. (Jn 20: 25)

A week later, Our Lord appeared to the disciples one more time, this time with St. Thomas present, and Our Lord said to him:

Put your finger here and see my hands. Reach out your hand and put it in my side. Do not doubt but believe. (Jn 20: 27)

St. Thomas is recorded as having responded:

My Lord and my God! (Jn 20: 28)

In other words, he fell silent! And I have no doubt that St Thomas would have knelt when silencing himself with these words of worship, because kneeling is the most perfect way of demonstrating that one is in the presence of the sacred.

My dear brothers and sisters, this episode has so much to teach us about the act of worship and the liturgy. To begin with, we must remember that Our Lord does not immediately chastise Thomas for his refusal to believe in the resurrection. This is because Our Lord appreciates that the minds we so pride ourselves on, are in fact feeble, and require physical aids to help our belief.

It is for this, among others, reason, that Our Lord instituted the sacraments, and above all the Eucharist. So that we might have physical aids to help aid our faith, and to direct our worship.

And yet, for some years now, our worship – the liturgy – has become more about the cognitive, about words. We have accretions to the liturgy that distract, rather than aid the process of worship. We have introductions to the Mass, introductions to the readings, directions on when to stand, what to think, there is talk, talk, talk! That there is excessive talk at Mass is bad enough, but there is this babbling even at the adoration of the Blessed Sacrament, when in fact we should be silent, and kneeling in adoration, before His presence.

For generations the Church has recognized this truth, that it is not only the head that has to be engaged in worship, but the entire body; which is why we stand, we genuflect, we kneel. We clasp our hands before us, we cross ourselves. And yet, more recently, amidst all the chatter that we have introduced, the body has stopped being fully exercised in the act of worship. And because we only exercise our minds and not our bodies, we fail to internalize the great truths of our faith, that Jesus, Our Lord, is truly present in the Eucharist.

It was after St. Thomas acknowledged his belief that Our Lord, in his gentle manner, chided the apostle:

Have you believed because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have come to believe. (Jn 20:29)

When he says these words, dear brothers and sisters, Our Lord is referring to all of us – who have not seen Him in the flesh but 'only' veiled under the signs of bread and wine; and experience his salvific touch 'only' through the sacraments. As I have already indicated, this belief is best demonstrated, and reiterated, not through some mental consent, but through an embodied response, we fall down on our knees, we genuflect.

Reflecting on this episode in the life of the Lord, and that of His church, I was reminded of the episode (John 9) where Our Lord heals the man who was born blind. After healing him, Our Lord returned and asked him if he believed in the Son of Man. The formerly blind man responded that he wished to see him so that he could believe in Him. Our Lord responds:

“You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.” (Jn 9: 37)

The blind man, the Gospel reports:

... said, “Lord, I believe.” And he worshiped him. (Jn 9: 38)

Many translations of this verse indicate that this assertion of belief, the act of worship, involved kneeling and prostration. He believed, and knelt down before the Lord.

My dear brothers and sisters, on this day when we celebrate the memory of St. Thomas the Apostle, let us imitate his practice, esteem the physical presence of Our Lord among us and esteem the act of kneeling. Let us genuflect whenever we pass before the Blessed Sacrament. Let us kneel when we await the reception of Our Lord in communion; and kneel in silence after we have received Him. Let us return to privilege the silences of the Mass and remember that it is often in these silences that Our Lord speaks to us.

May Our Lord bless you all, and may your patron St. Thomas intercede for you all. San Tomé, rogai por nós.

In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the chapel of San Tomé, Pangim on 1 Feb 2026. For the Sunday homily faithful to the lectionary, click here.)

(Image reference: St Thomas doubts Christ, Joseph E. Nuttgens, 1944, St Teresa’s church, Beaconsfield, UK.)