In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus lays out many of his basic life teachings. Several of them are extraordinarily difficult for us to understand, much less put into practice. Two of these are the famous "turn the other cheek" and "love your enemy" admonitions. To understand what Jesus is saying and what it means to us today, we first need to understand the context in which Jesus is speaking.
Up Next in Year A
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8th Sunday in Ordinary Time—February ...
It's fitting that this Gospel begins with the admonition reminding us that we cannot serve two masters (God and money) and then delves into Jesus's teaching on worry, because money is often at the top of our worry list. We worry about how to get money if we don't have enough, and we worry about h...
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1st Sunday of Lent—March 10, 2019
We begin our Lenten readings in a most appropriate place: the desert. In the desert, life is stripped to basics and everything, including our weakness, is exposed. We are forced to stand alone and vulnerable before God. Our faith is put to the test. Little wonder, then, that Jesus went to the des...
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2nd Sunday of Lent—March 17, 2019
We tend to believe good times will last forever. While it's nice to be optimistic in that respect, we tend to worry that the bad times will last forever as well. The truth is that life is a series of contrasts—mountaintop experiences followed by deep valleys.
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