Friends, welcome to Word on Fire Catholic Ministries.

Word on Fire is an apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization,

using media both old and new to share the faith on every continent

and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and His Church.

The efforts of Word on Fire engage the culture and bring the

transformative power of God's Word where it is most needed. Today, we invite you to join Bishop

Robert Barron as he preaches the gospel and shares the warmth and light of Christ with each one of us.

Peace be with you. Friends, our gospel for today is from the sermon on the plane. That's Luke's

version of Matthew's sermon on the Mount. So we're getting the essential teaching of Jesus,

which means our ears have to perk up. It means we have got to really listen

attentively. And this section we have in the reading today is extraordinary. It's saying

something not only about our moral lives, it's saying something very, very profound about God.

And so let's attend to this. But I want to get at it from a different angle,

or a somewhat interesting angle, I hope. In the 20th century, there were a number of philosophers

who reflected on what they call the aporea of the gift. Aporea is a fancy Greek way of saying,

the kind of difficulty or even impossibility of the gift,

that it's really, strictly speaking, impossible to give a true gift.

Now, you say, what are they talking about?

Well, let me give you a famous example, drawn, in fact, from sociological studies of primal peoples.

There's an instance of a tribal chieftain who gives a banquet to his kind of rival tribal chieftain.

And the banquet is extraordinary. He goes all out, spends a fortune of money on the food and entertainment and everything else.

Well, the rival

...