This is Father Robert Barron. Friends, I invite you to reflect with me on the word of God, which is the word on fire.

Word on fire Catholic Ministries is a non-for-profit apostolate dedicated to the mission of evangelization.

We utilize media both old and new to share the faith on every continent and to facilitate an encounter with Christ and His Church.

Through our efforts, we hope to take the gospel out into the peripheries of the culture, where the transformative power of God's Word is most needed.

Let us open our hearts to the word on fire, which is God's Word of Love for each one of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us, so that we might share the warmth and light of Jesus Christ, who is the Word on fire.

The global benefactors of Word on fire, with the support of the arts diocese of Chicago, now present Word on fire.

Peace be with you. Friends, we might puzzle a bit over our first reading for today, which is taken from the book of Deuteronomy.

We might wonder why would a speech that Moses made to people thousands of years ago concern us?

Well, the reason the church puts this reading in here today is that Moses is speaking indirectly of Jesus and of Jesus' distinctiveness.

On the verge of taking leave of the people he had light out of slavery, Moses looks as it were into the future.

And he spies now, it's a famous phrase in the Old Testament tradition. He spies a prophet like me, whom God will raise up.

Well, here's the thing, Moses was in many ways the greatest of the Old Testament figure, someone who communed with God, a friend to friend.

Moses received the law, led the people out of slavery. He was God's intimate.

So when Moses speaks of a prophet like me, and it came to mean as the Old Testament tradition unfolded, a prophet greater than I.

God was someone even greater than I. Well, who would that be?

Think of the whole of Jewish life in many ways was traced back to Moses.

So if a rabbi is teaching, he'd say, well, I learned this from rabbi so and so, who is my teacher, who learned it from rabbi so and so, his teacher.

Tracing it all the way back, finally to Moses, who learned it from God. That's the way a Jewish teacher would think.

So who's the prophet greater than Moses? Well, it would be a very distinctive and extraordinary character.

That's the interlogic of Moses statement as it's being drawn out.

Now in light of that, you see how really weird and interesting the gospel is.

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