The Doors of Holiness: Homily for the Fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Open to me the gates of righteousness,
    that I may enter through them
    and give thanks to the Lord.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, these lyrics from Psalm 118: 19 are not prescribed for today, and yet, these were the words that suggested themselves as I contemplated the lectionary for this fourth Sunday in Ordinary time.  The formulation that suggested itself to me, however, was somewhat different:

              Open to me the gates of holiness, that I might enter and give thanks.

As you will have noticed, the shift is from righteousness to holiness. My head, or perhaps the Spirit, was suggesting to me that what the scripture intends to communicate is that righteousness is the basis of holiness.

This is not a bad way to approach holiness, since it steers us away from the pietism that has come to dominate so much of contemporary Christian – not just Catholic – life. Whether we are piously veiling, receiving communion on our knees, or are regular praise and worship concertgoers coming away with a religious high, there is a dangerous tendency to consider piety and devotion sufficient to keep us on the path of holiness. And while piety is important – I especially believe that Eucharistic piety is very important to growing in holiness; and that the proper reception of communion is fundamental – it is not sufficient. A growth in righteousness is fundamental to the growth in holiness.

And what is righteousness? Guided by this Sunday’s lectionary, I would like to define it as being just, justice being understood as giving to others what is their due (ius). These others include not just those around us, but also God. To be just, then is to give what is due, both to those among us, and also, firstly to God – which is praise, thanksgiving and proper worship.

Let us turn now to the words of the first reading:

Seek the LORD, all you humble of the earth,
who have observed his law;
seek justice, seek humility;
perhaps you may be sheltered
on the day of the LORD's anger.

Who are these, “humble of the earth” that the prophet Zephaniah refers to? They are those who, baptized in Christ, become a part of the Church, His mystical body. If one goes through the list of the beatitudes, that is our Gospel reading for today, we realise that the beatitudes are in fact descriptors of Christ, his saints, and the marks of the true Christian, i.e. those “who observe his law”.

seek justice, seek humility

My dear brothers and sisters, these are the two virtues we need to assiduously seek in our times, whether we live in Goa, or outside. This search is critical because all around us the structures that were built through Christian ethics are now collapsing, and causing much sorrow and loss, and not just to Christians. As the Urdu poet Rahat Indori has so succinctly observed:

Lagegi aag to aayenge ghar kai zad me. Yahan pe sirf humara makan thodi hai.

Many houses will be engulfed in an inferno. It is not as if mine is the only house here.

The pursuit of justice and humility must begin in our daily lives, and in simple ways. Look at the ways in which we drive! I speak for myself, and the terror I experience, when on the highway, vehicles driving at twice the 80 kmph speed limit surge from behind me, and then overtaking from the left, transgress into the bike lane, zip past me and cross over into the lane to my right. I grit my teeth as traffic jams are compounded by those who zip past existing files of cars, creating third and fourth lines. I remind myself in both cases that this happens because the state that ought to enforce discipline, and justice, has abandoned its role. It does not even know what justice is. And yet, I cannot be the enforcer of justice in this mess – I need to have the humility to recognize this. All I can do, for now, is to make sure that I do not join these unjust. For these men are most certainly unjust, given they create potential death traps, and deprive rule-abiding people of their due even when not killing them.

And why is it that we seek humility and justice? The last line from Zephaniah is very clear. So that:

you may be sheltered
on the day of the LORD's anger.

It will be on the dread day of judgement that the meek and humble will inherit the kingdom of heaven, those who mourn will find comfort, that those who hunger and thirst for righteousness will be satisfied when they see the smug violators of every rule come to divine justice, burning eternally in the fires of hell. On this blessed day of judgement, those who have shown mercy through their attempts at justice, and humility, will be shown mercy. Those who regularly clean their hearts through the sacrament of confession will be admitted into His presence and see the face of God. Those who have struggled to make peace will be acknowledged by the Son and welcomed by the Father into the Kingdom of heaven where they will live eternally in contemplation and adoration of the divine face.

Rejoice and be glad,
for [on that day] your reward will be great in heaven.

It is for this day of judgement that we Christians walk the path of holiness. For we know that life extends beyond this material world, and the impious perpetrators of injustice in this world will repent at leisure.

May Our Lord give us the grace to grow in holiness, for as psalm 118: 20 teaches us:

This is the gate of the Lord;
    the righteous shall enter through it.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria on 31 Jan 2026.)

(Image reference: Bishop Mark Eckman at the doors of St. Paul Cathedral Pittsburgh, Louis B. Ruediger, 2025, via TribLive.)

Lux in Tenebris: Homily for the Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

He withdrew to Galilee.

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ,

Last week I suggested to you that holiness is about finding in our hearts the capacity to delight in fulfilling the law of Our Lord and His Church. In other words, holiness is about delight!

As I preached about delight and holiness, I could not, like many of you surely, but help think of Stª Teresa da Avila, the sixteenth century Spanish mystic who has left us great resources with which to understand the progress of the spiritual life.

Delights, form part of the vocabulary of Stª Teresa’s description of the spiritual life. According to Stª Teresa, spiritual delights are movements of God’s grace. These delights come to those who seek Him in His time and His plan. Spiritual delights bring a peace and stillness to the soul that fulfills and expands our hearts.  They can even come in the busiest and noisiest of circumstances.  For a moment, even as we might be busy about other things and thoughts, we are brought to a different level of awareness. And these spiritual delights are not felt purely at the level of the spirit, but in fact, are experienced viscerally as well.

But, as satisfying as they may be, Teresa does not recommend that we remain with this experience of delights. She instead asks us to persevere for more. In this path of spiritual progress, we encounter what St. John of the Cross, another Carmelite, and a collaborator of Stª Teresa, has famously presented as being the dark night of the soul. These are the moments when it appears that God has withdrawn from us. He appears to not be present, there is no sign of either consolation, or delights. And yet, Teresa maintains, we must persevere in our love of Him, and our spiritual exercises, go about our ordinary life, avoid offending God, and practice loving others.

When the time is right, we are told, God will reveal how great a light the “dark night” really was – like staring at the sun, so bright, that we can only see darkness. In this context, the words from the first reading today can be read somewhat differently from the usual:

Anguish has taken wing, dispelled is darkness:
for there is no gloom where but now there was distress.
The people who walked in darkness
have seen a great light;
upon those who dwelt in the land of gloom
a light has shone.
You have brought them abundant joy
and great rejoicing,
as they rejoice before you as at the harvest,
as people make merry when dividing spoils.

The anonymous Christian author of the incomplete work on Mathew draws on common sense to point out that the recollection of past troubles not only does not harm us but gives even greater delight. As long as our troubles are present, they seem to be oppressive, but when they are a thing of the past, the memory of them, he says, is a cause for our delight.

We must take these words to heart my dear brothers and sisters for those times when we believe that Our Lord has withdrawn His favour and His face from us. We know (intellectually) that He never in fact does so. In the light of the teaching of Stª Teresa, we know that He is preparing us for greater things, causing our faith to increase, primarily because at this point we progress on faith alone since our regular prayers seem to be of no use. When the trial is over, however, we will see how this experience opened our hearts to a greater, and different, experience of prayer.

As the first reading today teaches us:

First the Lord degraded …
but in the end he has glorified

All of these, we must bear in mind, is because like He called the first disciples, He has called us. He has called us by name, and He has taken us in His hand. He will not abandon us, but rather, is on the journey with us, so that He may cure us and take us to live with Him for all eternity. As the acclamation of the Gospel teaches us today:

Jesus proclaimed the Gospel of the kingdom
and cured every disease among the people.

The path of the Christian is necessarily littered with trial and tribulation, because this is the way of the Cross. It is the only way to participate in the salvific action of Christ. When we suffer, we suffer with Christ, so that we may share in His glory, and, as St. Paul tells us today;

so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its meaning.

Our Lord suffered the experience of abandonment on the Cross, but trusted in His father and through this trust entered into the glory of the resurrection. Similarly, it is when it appears that Our Lord withdraws from us that we are being taught the meaning of the Cross. Let us pray, therefore, for the grace to persevere when we believe that He has withdrawn His grace from us and know that we walk not in darkness, but in light.

(A version of this homily was first preached to the faithful at the Cathedral parish of St. Catherine of Alexandria on 24 Jan 2026.)

(Image reference: Christ walking on the waters, Virgilio Mattoni, late 19^th cent., Private Collection.)

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.)