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, I love this gospel for this weekend. The story of

Jesus healing the man with the speech impediment we can't hear. It operates

at so many different levels and they're all beautiful. Here's the first thing to

notice about it is Jesus does something which is relatively rare in the

gospels. That is, he wanders outside of the territory of Israel. So mind you, he

said, I've come for the law sheep of the House of Israel. So that's his first

obligation. But we know that after the resurrection, especially Paul, here comes

to mind, the church goes outward from Israel to the ends of the world. So

occasionally in the gospels, we get a kind of foretaste to kind of hint of this

move. Well, especially in this story because Jesus wanders out of Israel into

what's called in Greek the decapolis. It just means the area of the ten cities.

This was a territory to the east of the river Jordan. So in present day

Jordan. At the time, it was very much under the influence of the Greco-Roman

culture because the Romans wanted the signal, you know, our culture's gone to

the ends of the world. So it was kind of the eastern extreme of the Roman Empire.

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