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 first reading for this weekend is taken from the

marvelous book of Syrac. Maybe some older Catholics would remember it as the

book of Ecclesiasticus. It was so listed in some earlier translations of the Bible.

It was written the scholars speculate around the year 175 BC not too long before,

you know, the time of Jesus, and likely written in Alexandria where there was a

very large and important Jewish community. It's not a narrative, the book of Syrac.

You don't so much sit down and read it from cover to cover like a story. It's a

collection of aphorisms, kind of brief statements, usually of a moral nature.

So it's a really good book to prove. You could kind of just dip into the book of Syrac and draw

little tidbits of wisdom throughout it. Well, the passage for today is from the 28th chapter

of Syrac. By the way, it's kind of a long book, Syrac. So you can spend, you know, a good amount

of time with it. But we're looking now at chapter 28. It has to do with anger, vengeance, and

forgiveness. Interesting to me how central those themes were to the preaching of Jesus. Go through

the teaching of the Lord, especially in the sermon on the Mount. Notice how often he refers

to these issues of anger, forgiveness. Well, we see this now in Syrac. Here's the one liner from

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