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Sunday Bible Reflections
This Sunday
Heads Up: Scott Hahn Reflects on the First Sunday of Advent
Every Advent, the Liturgy of the Word gives our sense of time a reorientation. There’s a deliberate tension in the next four
weeks’ readings—between promise and fulfillment, expectation and deliverance, between looking forward and looking back.
In today’s First Reading, the prophet Jeremiah focuses our gaze on the promise God made to David, some 1,000 years before
Christ. God says through the prophet that He will fulfill this promise by raising up a “just shoot,” a righteous offspring of David, who will rule Israel in justice (see 2 Samuel 7:16; Jeremiah 33:17; Psalm 89:4–5; 27–38).
Pure Religion: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Twenty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time
Today’s Gospel casts Jesus in a prophetic light as one having authority to interpret God’s law.
Jesus’ quotation from Isaiah today is ironic (see Isaiah 29:13). In observing the law, the Pharisees honor God by ensuring that nothing unclean passes their lips. In this, however, they’ve turned the law inside out, making it a matter of simply performing certain external actions.
A Choice to Make: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Twenty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time
This Sunday’s Mass readings conclude a four-week meditation on the Eucharist.
The Twelve Apostles in today’s Gospel are asked to make a choice—either to believe and accept the New Covenant He offers in His Body and Blood or return to their former ways of life.
Wisdom’s Feast: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Twentieth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The Wisdom of God has prepared a feast, we hear in today’s First Reading.
We must become like children (see Matthew 18:3–4) to hear and accept this invitation. For in every Eucharist, it is the folly of the Cross that is represented and renewed.
To the world, it is foolishness to believe that the crucified Jesus rose from the dead. And for many, as for the crowds in today’s Gospel, it is foolishness—maybe even madness—to believe that Jesus can give us His Flesh to eat.
Scott Hahn Reflects on the Solemnity of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin Mary
On this feast, we praise God who has taken the sinless Virgin Mary, body and soul, into His glory.
In our first reading, from Revelation, we find God’s temple in heaven opened and the Ark of the Covenant revealed. The most sacred item in Israel’s history, the Ark had been missing since the Temple’s destruction in 586 B.C. Thus, John reports some startling news. Even more startling is his revelation that the sacred vessel is now a woman, who is mother of the royal Son of David, the Messiah.
Take and Eat: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Nineteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
Sometimes we feel like Elijah in today’s First Reading. We want to lie down and die, keenly aware of our failures—that we seem to be getting no better at doing what God wants of us.
We can be tempted to despair, as the prophet was on his forty-day journey in the desert. We can be tempted to “murmur” against God, as the Israelites did during their forty years in the desert (see Exodus 16:2, 7, 8; 1 Corinthians 10:10).
Endurance Test: Scott Hahn Reflects on the Eighteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time
The journey of discipleship is a lifelong exodus from the slavery of sin and death to the holiness of truth on Mount Zion, the promised land of eternal life.
The road can get rough. And when it does, we can be tempted to complain like the Israelites in this week’s First Reading.
We have to see these times of hardship as a test of what is in our hearts, a call to trust God more and to purify the motives for our faith (Deuteronomy 8:2–3).
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