Friends, Lent is a marvelous opportunity to deepen our lives of prayer, to temper our desires for food and drink, and to engage in a graced time of alms giving. Let’s use this season to get our bodies and our behavior patterns in order, to show our love and service in very concrete ways.

Friends, today’s Gospel centers around Jesus’ healing of a leper. Although there aren’t many lepers around today, there are plenty of people that we treat as outsiders or pariahs. We should welcome them as Jesus does.

Friends, in this Sunday's readings, St. Paul highlights the significance of evangelization. The Church, by its very nature, evangelizes, going out to the ends of the world with its good news. And woe to us if we fail to do this! Paul urges us to organize our lives around mission, and to even move out of our comfort zones to do so.

Moses is, without a doubt, the greatest figure in the Old Testament. He heard the voice of God from the burning bush; he was given the Ten Commandments; he was permitted to talk to God as to a friend.

But Moses speaks of a prophet who is to come, who is “like himself” and who should be listened to. Jesus is this prophet who has the legitimate personal authority to speak the divine word and bring healing to creation.

In today’s first reading, we find the story of Jonah, a narrative about the acceptance (or rejection) of God’s mission. We are all called to difficult things, and so most of us sinners, most of the time, do everything we can to avoid our mission. In Jonah’s case, it was physical flight, but for many of us it’s choosing to ignore what God has said, a giving in to every other voice, taking the path of least resistance, making excuses, pleading our own sinfulness, settling for spiritual mediocrity. What would happen if every single person in our society commenced to embrace his or her mission from God? One man converted the entire city, from the King to the very animals. Nothing is impossible for God and for those whom God has empowered.

With the whole Church around the world, we return to Ordinary Time. This week, we have a wonderful Old Testament reading from the first book of Samuel having to do with the call of the prophet Samuel, and Eli his mentor helping him discern the voice of God. We know that story as a charming, even sentimental story—and it is that—but it's much more than that. And to see it, we have to get a wider perspective.

The Gospel writers compel us, as it were, to pass through John the Baptist to get to Jesus; all four Gospels give us a version of Jesus’ baptism by John. But this baptism was embarrassing to the early Church, because it was interested in presenting Jesus as the Son of God, and yet people were coming to John as sinners for a baptism of repentance. Why would the incarnate Son of God seek out such a baptism? It is the very embarrassment of the baptism that, in many ways, is the point.

For Epiphany Sunday, we hear the marvelous story from the Gospel of Matthew in which the Magi journey to see the Christ child. This scene has beguiled artists, poets, and preachers for centuries. But we can distill five profound spiritual lessons—about being attentive, taking action, facing opposition, giving Christ what is best in us, and being transformed into new creations—from this perhaps overly familiar story.

The Bible is not particularly sentimental about families. What makes a family holy, as far as the biblical writers are concerned, is its willingness to surrender to the purpose of God. We see this in a number of key figures, including Joseph, Anna, and Simeon.