I know who you are—the Holy One of God! (Luke 4:34c)
The "spirit" world was (is?) very real to the people of the Middle East. The people of Jesus' time believed that the world was inhabited by five different levels of beings. At the head of the order was God who was surrounded by the "sons of God," the beings we call angels. Directly below them on the ladder were the good and evil...
On this Labor Day, September 2, we begin our continuous reading of the Gospel of St. Luke. For me it is always a signal that we have entered the last few months of the liturgical year.
St. Luke's Gospel could be called the Gospel of the Outsiders as he himself was an outsider. A Gentile by birth, St. Luke was the only one of the four evangelists who did not experience Jesus...
This is the will of God, your holiness (1 Thessalonians 4:3a).
The Hebrew Scripture or Old Testament is the first instance wherein we are introduced to the concept of holiness. Since, as St. Paul asserts in our first reading for today's liturgy, holiness is God's will for us, it would be a good idea if we really understood to what God is calling us. I fear that many of us have a...
If you know what a chiasm is, you must have a poetic or rhetorical soul. A chiasm is a figure of speech that leads the reader to the middle of a poem or of an essay or, in this case, the Gospel to highlight what the author thinks is really important. St. Matthew's Gospel bears some striking examples of chiastic structure. For instance, in the very first chapter of the Gospel, St. Matthew...