4th Sunday of Lent A 15 March 2026 Sermon

4^th Sunday of Lent  A  15 March 2026 Live in the light

If we had to form a visual concept of heaven, I don’t think many people would  think of heaven as ever being in the dark. No dark, not even shadow.

By the time we get to Heaven we will have finished with darkness. You were darkness once, but now you are light in the Lord… have nothing to do with the futile works of darkness. (Ep 5 ,8-14  second reading)

Our Lord gives the man sight, for the first time. It was an exercise of that same power by which He created all things.

He was showing how powerfully and how rightly God can intervene.

And the man would have received perfect vision too. God does all things well!

What does this miracle mean for us?

Jesus is restoring our spiritual sight, so that we can tell night from day when it comes to right living, making right decisions.

We see with the eyes of faith, and things previously strange suddenly seem to make more sense (like the need for the sacrifices we make, for instance.)

If we had perfect spiritual sight we would never sin; our judgment would be accurate at all times and in all matters.

This is how it would have been for Our Lady, the perfect eyes of faith leading to the best possible way of living this life.

Our adherence to moral truth would work the same as with physical sight we keep to a well-defined path and do not go toppling off to the side

Somehow it is different when we get to moral sight; we wander off the path quite freely and do not seem to consider that a bad thing.

Due to there being so much sin in the world there is much distortion when it comes to perceiving reality. Wrong judgments are made, and many wrong turnings, leading to much disorder.

Jesus shows us the difference between good and evil, leading us to choose the good which eventually becomes obvious.

In Lent especially we are looking for the light which is eternal and infinite, to be ‘children of light, so that our deeds are good’ (Ep 5,8)

How can we acquire so much clarity?  Different elements come together - . prayer, good works, sacraments, study, discipline etc.

All these things will restore our sight, and make it easier for us to take the obvious right course.

We break free from all distortions and come to see our need for grace and mercy from God.

Whatever truth we grasp we can build upon and habitually make better choices.

We will have eyes to see the glory of God, as much as our nature can absorb.

It is the light that God Himself emanates. It will have a beauty beyond anything we can see or imagine here.

The city lights will lose their appeal -  the passing and often false lights of our world. We will seek instead the purer light of Heaven.

Heavenly light inspires us with its beauty, greater than any earthly light.

Lord, that I may see (Mk 10,51)- the blind man by the side of the road.

3rd Sunday of Lent 8 March 2026 Sermon

3rd Sunday of Lent  8 March 2026 The right God

We worship in spirit and in truth, Our Lord says to the woman at the well (Jn 4,23-24).

The Samaritans had a hazy idea of God, other nations even hazier still; but the Jews had the real God and the right God.

Their response to God was not brilliant but it does help, if we are having a conversation, to know whom we are addressing.

People have formed all sorts of notions about God – that there is more than one god, that gods are not much different from humans when it comes to faults and passions; they plot murder and revenge etc They were likely to get angry and demand obedience from the people.

In the absence of revelation from the real God mankind would struggle, though some of it was their own fault for not obeying. St Paul has put it that all people should be able to work out at least basic truths about God, from the signs around them. (Romans 1,19-20)

Coming to our own time, by now we know a lot about God because He has come down from Heaven to tell us!

We know this many things about God: because He has told us, shown us, or taught us through the Church, the wisdom and example of many saints.

1) God created us to share in His life. He is not cruel as past ages often thought. He wants us to be happy, always happy, and intervenes to help us towards Heaven, with as much Heaven as can be had in the present world.

When we say, God loves us, that is what it translates to – He seeks to maximise our happiness, take away all sorrow.

2) God has revealed Himself carefully as humans have only limited capacity, can only take in so much at a time. So Our Lord clarified much of the Old Testament teaching, not to abolish it, but to fulfil it (Mt 5,17).

3) There is only one God, who is eternal, all-powerful, all-knowing; has no beginning or ending. There cannot be any other god, because the one we worship is infinite. We cannot have half of infinity; it has to be all.

There is no part of time or place outside of the reach of God's knowledge and power.

4) God was not just for the Jews; the kingdom of God was not a political kingdom. It was spiritual and meant for all people, of whatever tribe or race.

The battle for clarity, for truth in worship has been going on ever since.

There is only one real God, and here He is, in this church, with us who profess union with Him. We become one with Him in filial obedience, trust and love.

And then the matter of loving others, what God does so much better than we do, but we learn as we go. We hate no one, reject no one, while we do insist on truth in worship and all dealings with God.  If we seek Him in humility of heart, we will get to know God better and eventually claim Him in Heaven.

Meanwhile, the woman went and fetched her neighbours to see this remarkable man (Jn 4,28-30). We must do the same insofar as we want everyone to know what we have experienced.

Plus we need those neighbours to take their place here with us, and supplement the Church’s presence and activity in such urgent times.

2nd Sunday of Lent 1 March 2026 Sermon

2nd Sunday of Lent 1 March 2026 Consolations 

God expects us to believe and trust Him even when there is not a lot of direct evidence of His closeness.

He expects us to believe and trust Him when the chips are down, when adversity seems to be winning over prosperity.

He wants us to get beyond a faith which rises with good fortune and sinks with ill fortune.

We are tempted to declare there is no God, especially when a number of things go wrong about the same time.

What should we do under adversity? Not condemn God, but rather seek His will, both as understanding it and living it.

We are never tempted beyond our strength, we are told (1 Co 10,13).

It might seem like we are so tempted, but God is ever true to His word, and His arm is not shortened’ (Is 59,1)

Today’s Gospel speaks of the Transfiguration. This event is understood as strengthening the faith of the apostles, so that they would be able to cope with future adversity, especially Good Friday.

Jesus had told them He would rise again, and they should have believed Him by now, but not quite.

The crucifixion looked like a defeat, but it was a victory over sin and death.

We spend too much time doubting when we could be believing. We need lots more faith spread through the Body of Christ. We can encourage each other, and that is one reason why we come here to Mass.

We don’t look for special consolations but we are glad to take them when they come. The Transfiguration is one of those, for the whole Church.

Much of the gospels convey the sense of the tables being turned: those who weep now shall laugh, the last shall be first, the humble shall be exalted, he who loses his life will save it  etc.

We can be happy in this life, by living in this deeper level of trust. We will be able to negotiate any difficulty if we focus on the sameness of God, rather than the changeable tides of present circumstance.

We do  not make light of genuine sufferings but call down the power and goodness of God to make what is wrong right and what is right better still!

Lack of faith leads people to want ‘results’ all the time. If they see no result they will stop praying, and that makes for a weaker aggregate faith throughout the whole Church.

We repeat Easter in particular  to focus on the most important build-up of faith, that of life over death. We drive the point home a little more each time.  Those realities are fixed but our response needs bolstering.

God stays His hand. He could bring events to a head very easily, but He is working to His own time scale. We are glad just to be part of the process.

One of these days it will be Easter every day, in the full glory of being one with God.

Lack of understanding does not mean it is not real. People will say that there cannot be a God given the suffering in the world. We don’t have to understand God's exact purposes  to know He is there.

But if everyone turned to that one God there would be no wars, or similar troubles, because many would come to belief, and there would be no wars started.

God wants us to know him better, such that we are familiar with His ways; and if we do not know everything we know enough as to the course of events.

Such faith as we have, put it in storage, and do not lose it. It will be there when we need it. We reaffirm our stock of faith  every day and build on it.

1st Sunday of Lent A 22nd February 2026 Sermon

 1^st Sunday of Lent  22 February 2026 Temptations

When Jesus began His public ministry the devil was aware of Him but did not know that Jesus was God.

Accordingly the devil launched an attack on Jesus, presuming that he would overcome any merely human opposition, as he usually did.

He put three temptations before Jesus, temptations which contain all the essential points of the conflict between good and evil.

He tempts Jesus to seeking pleasure above all other considerations. Turn these stones into bread.

He tempts Him to put all His trust in Himself, and not God. Be resourceful, use whatever is available to get what you want.

He tempts Jesus to accept Satan’s patronage; it would be rewarding, again appealing to the short-term, immediate fulfilment.

There is no need for God in such a world. If I can do it myself why bother with God?

To all of which Jesus replies simply with a direct rejection, and then pointing to what we should be doing instead: live on the word of God, bow down before Him alone; do not try to tell Him what to do (put Him to the test)

The battle between good and evil comes down to a matter of assertion. Do we regard ourselves to be gods, or are we happy to deflect all the glory to the real God?

Humility will enable the right response. If we are humble we can see ourselves in the right perspective.

This is what Lucifer and the fallen angels were unable to do. They saw their own beauty and concluded that such beauty was enough for them. They could not give praise to any other – such as God, nor to humans as it turned out.

The angels, like the humans, were created to give praise to God. To share His life and the beauty of creation, but most of all to praise God.

They were so distorted in their self-love that they could not defer to God. As they breached their own nature in rejecting the true God they were cast out of Heaven and condemned to an eternity of rejection, of God and from God. Ugly deformity.

In a spirit of revenge they have come back to attack the human race in every way possible, and we certainly feel the effects of that.

However, if we are led by Jesus and His example we will resist the devil’s cunning and take refuge in humble compliance with the will of God.

Jesus as Man gave us the path to follow. Listen to God's word, take instruction from Him.

Repent of our sin, always a major theme of Lent.

Obey at all times and without dispute.

Worship the Lord (which means stating God's worth, which is infinite.)

Doing these things and doing them over and over will keep us spiritually sane.

When the creatures obey the  Creator then we have success and nothing to detract from it.

The devil can tempt but he has been deprived of most of his influence, with the coming of Christ.

Doing penance is one more part of our response. We voluntarily and freely offer to God something of what He has given us, such as food, pleasure, games etc

We thereby show that we value Him more than what we have given up.

We outgrow those first desires, distorted by sin. We embrace instead the balanced, reasoned, controlled  divine alternatives.

It is as simple as this statement: You shall worship the one God and Him alone.

 

 

6th Sunday A 15 February 2026 Sermon

6^th Sunday A  15 February 2026 Choices

From Sirach - you have a choice fire or water. One will burn, one will refresh. Which will you take?  (Sirach 15,16) One will do  you good; one will do you harm, which shall it be?

Adam and Eve had a similar choice. They could eat from any tree in the garden, except that one. That should have been easy to decide, but we know we do not always want the most appropriate thing. So it has ever been since with the human family. How to make the right decision?

It is all part of the ongoing battle between good and evil. Good is the right way of looking at a question; evil the wrong.

Many would say that it is impossible to choose the good every time. It can be hard certainly, but never impossible with God's grace assisting.

We choose water over fire, right over wrong. If we do this in small everyday things it will strengthen us for big decisions when they come.

We become more accurate in our decisions, complying more often with what God Himself would decide.

Some things are easy to decide. The evil in these cases does not appeal to us. For example we are not going to burn down the town  hall, or steal the crown jewels.

We will always choose rightly in such cases.

But when it comes to something I want to do, like talk unkindly of my neighbour, or tell lies to gain some kind of advantage, or perform an action I would rather avoid - then I have to work on my response.

As with any difficult thing we face, we can get better with practice. So we ‘practise’ our faith in doing or refraining from whatever is required.

As we do this the probability of getting it right will increase.

We eventually reach the point where we prefer the right action to the wrong one., so it is no big deal.

As this right-choosing increases we come more and more into the light of Christ.

We are coming to see things the way God sees them.

When He says , Come follow Me it means follow Him in the way that He thinks, He desires, He decides.

The Church proclaims this to the world. We point out the right choice. Fire or water, happiness or misery.

We are not just trying to stop everyone have a good time. We are offering the word of life.

Some human desires can be very entrenched, turning into addictions, compulsions, bad habits. They might need more work. With the Lenten season approaching we resolve to work on these deeper faults. We will come to prefer the good.

We call on Our Lady, who never committed a single sin, because she always saw the will of God as preferable to anything else.

We seek from God all the wisdom  that He can grant to us.

This will give us a foretaste of Heaven. The reason Adam and Eve chose the forbidden fruit is that it was  that it looked good to eat. Heaven will contain a lot more than one tree, and more beautiful than anything we have seen so far.

In the second reading we heard that the Holy Spirit reveals the depths of everything, even the depths of God (1 Co 2,10).

These are deep waters, and we need help to get all this right, and that help is available.

5th Sunday A 8 February 2026 Sermon

5th Sunday A   8 February 2026 Good Works                                                                                                                                                                                                                              There is a practical side of the faith, as expressed in the first reading, Share your bread with the hungry…(Is 58, 7-10 Treat well those under your power, and you will see good things happening.

Your prayers are more likely to be heard and generally everything will run better, because we are grounded firmly in the love of God, and He will make His presence felt.

Think of the world as like a finely tuned machine which might or might not run well.

Sin brings discord and the machine does not run well, and we have seen a great deal of that in human history.

Then, on the bright side, consider the saving presence of Jesus Christ and that presence is in Him and permeates among us, as we place all our actions under His patronage.

His presence is healing itself  and cannot but do good when properly invoked.

It is no great mystery. It comes to saying, Do the right thing and other right things will follow.

Do not hide your light under a bushel (today’s Gospel, Mt 5,15)  We show  by our example the power of Christ to do good in every kind of way.

This is a medicine for every  illness, a light for every path, food for the journey - whatever is not going well can be lifted to higher things.

We might think we would not be much good at giving Christian example to people around us, but such example can take many forms.

The key is how much we love God, how close we are to Him.  We offer all our actions to God's glory, and let Him do what He will with our offerings.

We want to behave as well as possible, for our own sake (it feels good to be good); and for others wherever they may be in the faith world.

A  chance word or action from us may set off other things, and then other things again.

It is all co-ordinated by the Holy Spirit who can use anything good for a good purpose.

Some will do good deeds but ignore God, thinking that they can work out for themselves what needs to be done.

‘Religion’ to them is just an impediment.

But it gets back to the question of union with God. If we are close to God things will  happen for the better. If away from God we are a resounding gong or a clanging cymbal  (1 Co 13,1-3)

Many would be impatient with prayer, thinking that this time could be spent elsewhere.

But we need time to immerse ourselves in God's view of the world.

God wants us to identify with His Body, the Church. He wants us to look after each other. He could do it Himself - feed the hungry, rescue the lost etc, but He wants us to activate His power, to benefit ourselves as we help others benefit.

We need to be both Mary  and Martha (Lk 10,38-42).

Good deeds do not displace prayer but blend in with them, and everything gets better..

We seek to please God for his own sake. Good works - as good as they are - are not the best thing. The best thing is to please God.

The Church attracted early converts of that time (Ac 5,12-14).

And  the Church has seen various renewals, eg monastic life, religious orders, scholarship of popes,  teachers,  saints in great number.

At any point we can pick up the pieces, and resume the great quest for finding Heaven. We help each other by word and example, prayer and practice.

4th Sunday Ordinary Time A 1 February 2026 Sermon

4^th Sunday A  1 February 2026 Humility

A privilege of being human as distinct from say, being an animal, is that we have the power to reflect on abstract matters, such as the meaning of life.

A dog cannot do that. He cannot say, Why did God make me a dog? I would rather be something else!

For all that, sometimes we might wish God had not given us so much capacity to think, in our wishing for a simple life, without too many pressures.

It is doubtful, however, that many people would trade their human identity for an animal’s life.

It is not only about complaining. Humans can glorify God, and that is a great thing. We can praise God for works of nature, such as a sunset, a mountain range, a raging sea. We can praise God also for spiritual works such as listed in the Beatitudes (today’s Gospel) – humility, gentleness, being peacemakers…(Mt 5,3-12)

It is a great privilege to have this ability to admire the works of God, to have an increasingly clear grasp of who God is, and what He is wanting from us.

It is easy to take wrong turnings here, as we see from our own lives and the general history of humanity.

Any way in which a person defies God in rejecting His laws, or refusing to bow down before Him, or even to deny His existence. These are an abuse of the privilege that He has entrusted to us – to know, love and serve Him.

Some will dare to criticise God, to put His judgments to scrutiny  and say, Lord why is it so? To which we can reply, Does the pot say to the potter why have you made me thus. (Rom 9,20-21)

We can question God's ways as long as we do it respectfully and always ready to see that Hs is going to be right.

Accepting God's will does not mean that we have to be pleased about everything that happens. It means that we put our trust in God to make whatever is wrong come right. And we can hasten that process of coming right if we are humble, Especially, humble because that means we will not oppose God's will making everything a lot harder.

We humans can get it right or wrong, and that is our privilege and burden.

Our prayer, sacraments and good works will help us be grateful for the privilege, and not to succumb under the burden.

It is a good thing to be alive. I did not ask to be born, but I am glad I was.

We should all be able to say that.

The humans have not used their privilege of understanding as faithfully as they should have.

The loss of so much potential goodness can be recovered if we repent and start again.

We are already basically happy but would  like to be a lot more happy, in our own lives and in the world in general.

The privilege of being human enables us to become more aware of the closeness of God, and His good intentions towards us.

We seek God. Other creatures cannot do that.

God did not make a mistake when He made me, or us.

Do I seek to be more than I am now, or less? On getting to Heaven we will have an expanding awareness of these things.

Then we shall know as we already are known. (1 Cor 13,12)