Hannah’s voice comes to us in the first reading and the responsorial psalm, while Mary’s voice saturates the Gospel.
This Christmas Octave is considered one extended Christmas Day. It serves to prepare us for the Christian life and readies us for the upset, clash, and clang ignited by the Lord God, who through the cooperation of a young woman, deigned to take on human flesh.
The servant of God in the Bible comes to know that life calls for surrender; therein lies the path to glory.
Begging from a friend even at the most inopportune moment and under the most trying of circumstances is exactly when God’s mercy suddenly appears.
Our faith stands on the conviction that the cross and resurrection of Jesus has struck the definitive blow against Satan and has inaugurated the ultimate defeat of evil. But that defeat is not yet complete
Saul made mistakes and had to deal with their consequences for himself and his family.
Leonard Cohen’s “Hallelujah” imagines a baffled King David composing the psalms: “Probe me, God, know my heart”
Boaz is more than a stock character, and more than a benevolent relative. He is clearly presented in the story as one like God, filled with compassion for the poor.
The book of Genesis essentially recounts tales of the earliest human families as migrants, strangers, and refugees, moving about the earth seeking a land to settle and a home in which to dwell.
It is likely that the passion narrative was the very first part of the early church’s remembrance of Jesus to be put into literary form.
