Jesus Sees Something in You - Bishop Barron's Sunday Sermon

0:00 Peace be with you. Friends, we come now to the 11th Sunday in Ordinary Time, and I always find with a certain sigh of relief. I love all the high holy days in Lent and Easter and Pentecost and Holy Trinity and Corpus Christi. We have this whole series of great feasts, and then we turn back to ordinary time. And I always do so with a certain sense of, all right, good, we're back to basics again, back to ordinary things. I think it's appropriate the gospel for this return to ordinary time is about Jesus sending the 12 on a mission. You know, whenever you hear Jesus and the 12, Jesus and the apostles, it's the church. Now, not the church in the sense of the Vatican and dioceses and all that. Those are later developments. But we can see the church in seminal form in these scenes. I think what we're meant to do is reflect upon this.

0:58 The nature of the church in its different dimensions is on display in these stories. So it says Jesus summoned the 12 disciples, of course, the 12 tribes of Israel, and he gave them authority. Well, there's the basic structure, right? That Jesus, the Son of God, gathers around himself these 12. He sends them. Apostele means to send. So the apostles are sent, and they're equipped with his authority to continue his work. Well, you know, I'm a bishop. We say in the church, the bishops are successors of the apostles. Priests are ordained by bishops to share in the work of a bishop. So in a way, this is the whole authority structure of the church is on display right here. Jesus empowering his apostles, who then in turn will empower people to help them, who will then do the work of the Lord in the world. So, it's the church in seminal form.

1:55 Now, whom does he call? That's what I want to focus on a bit here. Well, he calls this interesting group of people. You know, Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew, James and his brother John, Philip Bartholomew, Thomas Matthew the tax collector, Simon the zealot, Judas Iscariot, and so on. Now, I know this part of my sermon you've probably heard a thousand times, but I'll do it one more time because it's important to understand the church. Was Jesus choosing clearly the best and brightest people in the society of his time? No. He wasn't going to the best educated, the most politically influential, the most culturally astute. No, they're mostly fairly ordinary people. Moreover, these are all compromised characters, and it's a beautiful feature of the New Testament, and it doesn't cover that up in any way. We are perfectly aware of the limitations. I'll just give you some examples. Simon called Peter, who at the moment of truth, three times again and again, denies that he even knows Jesus. Terrible, terrible, lapse, terrible betrayal of the Lord, right?

3:11 So deeply flawed character. James and John, what do we hear about them at one point where their mother comes to Jesus saying, hey, put these two sons of mine at your right and left when you come into your glory? Ambition? Does ambition beset leaders of the church? Yeah, up and down the ages. Just, you know, sometimes church leaders like Peter, can lose their connection to Jesus completely. Other times, they're compromised by their ambition for high office and position.

3:47 What else do we hear? Matthew, the tax collector. Well, Matthew, tax collector. Hated. Collaborated with the Romans. Someone who's abusing his own people. I mean, deeply flawed character. Thomas. Hey, we've seen the risen Lord. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I'll believe it when I can put my finger in his, the wounds in my hand in his side. I doubt all that. Is church leadership at times beset, you know, by, let's say, a preoccupation with money? That might be Matthew's problem. Sometimes beset by a skeptical doubting of the faith. Yeah, yeah. You know, Simon from Cana, he's called here, but he's also called Simon the Zealot in other of the gospel. The zealots, of course, were a violent group trying to overthrow the Romans through violent revolution.

4:45 Religious extremism, sometimes leading to violence. Have we seen that in the church and its leadership over the centuries? Uh-huh. Uh-huh. You don't have to look too hard to find that. So these are the people Jesus chooses. I think it's very important, everybody, that we follow the gospel here in not blinding ourselves to this. From the beginning, the Lord is aware of the limitations of the people he's choosing to lead the church. And so it's gone up and down the ages. Now, we've got to remember, as Paul said, we hold the treasure in earthen vessels. The treasure is Christ and his authority. The vessels are people just like them. and their successors up and down the ages. You say, okay, okay, I've heard that sermon, and I know the flawed character of the leadership, but is there another side to it?

5:42 And the answer is certainly yes. You know, I tell the guys that I ordain, Christ chose you to be a priest. And if you put the stress on Christ choosing, that's very important. That's the grace side of it. You know, it's not you chose me, I chose you. The grace comes first. Christ does the choosing. But then I say to them, but he chose you.

6:07 Yeah, he did the choosing, right, but he chose you. In other words, there's something in you that he noticed, that he loved, that he reverenced, that he wanted to use for his purposes. Is the same thing true here? Yes. Go back to Peter. He denied the Lord three times. Uh-huh, yeah. But did Jesus see something in Peter that was indispensable? I don't know if you—I'm dating myself here, but in Zeffirelli's Jesus of Nazareth, which I always loved, James Farentino was the actor that played Peter. And people my age and older remember him. He was in TV and movies in the 70s and 80s. Anyway, I always loved the way he played Peter. And when Jesus first meets him, he's on his boat, and he's yelling at his brother and his fellow fishermen, and he's barking orders, and he's losing his temper. And then they show the Lord, and he's smiling, certainly seeing the flaws in Peter.

7:07 But at the same time, it's very clear, admiring something in him. What did he see in Peter? Obviously, gifts of leadership. Obviously, a passion to get things done. Peter stands for office in the church, practical leadership, the capacity to get things done. You know, for much of my priesthood, I was not involved in administration. I was a professor most of my priesthood. So, books and teaching and ideas and talks and all that. That was my life, right? And then I was made rector of the seminary. Then I was made auxiliary bishop of the largest diocese in the country. Now I'm bishop of my own diocese. So I've been brought into the world of practical administration. And so I have this renewed appreciation for people that know how to get things done. You say, oh, no, the church isn't about that. Church is about prayer and mysticism and theology. Well, yeah, but I mean, someone's got to build the monasteries and someone's got to build the churches and someone's got to arrange for the organization.

8:15 Did Jesus see in Peter these gifts of leadership that would have to be present in his church? I think the answer is obviously yes. How about in John? Yeah, an ambitious young man, certainly. That's the flaw of John. But John's also the one that rested his head in the breast of the Lord at the Last Supper. John is the mystic, the one whom Jesus especially loved. John stands for prayer, contemplation, mysticism, liturgy That beautiful side of the church Did Jesus see that in this young man? Did he see this capacity for spiritual engagement? And did he see that quality of John being passed down through the ages? As I say, whenever you enter into the liturgy or the contemplative and prayerful life of the church It's the influence of John, right?

9:14 And did he see that in him? I think clearly, yes. You know, Matthew and Thomas, Matthew, who becomes an evangelist, if he was a text collector, he was a probably well-organized person. He was probably educated, so had the capacity to read and write, which is very rare in the ancient world. Did Jesus see that in him? He saw the flaws, of course. But did he see in Matthew this capacity for intellectual work and communication? I think so. How much of the life of the church up and down the ages is all about communication, is all about the propagating of the faith? Look, what I'm doing right now with lights and cameras on me, and this sermon is going to go out to how many hundreds of thousands.

10:10 I'm a descendant here of Matthew. Matthew, the evangelist, well, that's what I'm trying to do. Using the methods available to me now, I'm trying to evangelize. Did Jesus see in Matthew that dimension of the church echoing from the evangelists themselves up through Fulton Sheen? Yeah, I think so. How about Thomas, who's mentioned? Thomas the doubter, yep. Thomas who wouldn't accept it, Thomas of stubborn skepticism. Jesus saw that flaw in him for sure. And has that flaw bedeviled the church? Yeah, it has. Oh, but at the same time, what did he see in Thomas?

10:55 The intellectual life of the church spurred on everybody by a restless curiosity. You know, maybe Peter wasn't interested in those sort of high academic questions. Probably not. He was a man of office and activity, and let's get things done. Maybe John, you know, John the mystic and John the person of prayer and contemplation. But has the church needed, up and down the ages, people like Thomas the Apostle, to ask the skeptical questions, to be bothered enough to find a good answer. And I can't help but think here, everybody, that my spiritual hero, Thomas Aquinas, is in many ways the spiritual son of Thomas the Apostle. I know the image is a bit hackneyed here, but it's one that's always helped me, is the oyster finds inside this irritant, like a piece of sand or a little grit or something, and therefore creates around it this protective shell.

12:02 And we call that a pearl, and we find it magnificent and beautiful. What produces the great pearls of the Catholic intellectual tradition but these irritants inside the minds and souls of people like Thomas the Apostle and Thomas Aquinas and all the great intellectuals up and down the ages? Did Jesus see in Thomas that whole tradition? I think yes. I'll do one more. And that's Simon from Canaan, he's called here. But as I mentioned, Simon the zealot. Negative side, yep. The church bedeviled by it, yep. By violence and extremism, mm-hmm. But did Jesus also see in Simon the zealot something of the energy and the pension and the power the church needs? in a way did he see the zealousness of Simon informing all of the life of the church that in our practical leadership, in our contemplation, in our evangelization, in our intellectual work, in all the dimensions of the church ought there to be something of the zealous spirit, the energy that carries us forward.

13:16 I mean, without Simon the Zealot, can you imagine Francis Xavier? Without Simon the Zealot, can you imagine Francis of Assisi? Without Simon the Zealot, can you imagine John Paul II? Whenever you see this energy and verve and zeal, in a way, that's the positive thing that Jesus saw in this man. So everybody, spend a little time with these apostles whom Jesus gathered and then sent. Because really all of us baptized into Christ are successors of these figures. Find yourself in one of these people, maybe in both the flaws and the virtues, but realize as he chose them,