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, all

three readings for this weekend, center around a theme that was very familiar to

the ancient audiences who first took them in, but that is rather alien to us. I'm

talking about the theme of substitutionary sacrifice.

Substitutionary sacrifice. A very basic problem we have when we seek to

understand this idea is that we're marked through and through by a very strong

individualism. And this is the fruit of modernity. And we're in many ways, we

Americans are kind of a peridigmatically modern people. What I mean here is

that we take for granted that everyone acts and speaks for himself takes

responsibility for his own actions. But see ancient people, and this is not just

in the Bible, but ancient people in general, lived within a far more collective

or corporate consciousness. They understood the individual, don't get me wrong,

they understood that each person is his own person, but they tended to

emphasize the group or the body or the collective more than the individual.

And see, on this reading of things, one person could indeed perform an act on

behalf of another or for the benefit of another. Now, the idea even extended to

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