Word on Fire is brought to you by Catholic Cemetery's, serving the Chicago area since 1837, and FSP dedicated to food service excellence.

This is Cardinal Francis George, and I invite you to join me for the next few minutes to reflect with Father Robert Barron on the Word of God, which is the Word on Fire.

Father Barron will challenge us to open our hearts to the Word on Fire, which is God's Word of Love for each of us.

If our hearts are open, the Lord can change and transform us, who we might speak with love about the One who is love.

The Archdiocese of Chicago through the generosity of Sacred Heart Parishing Winnicka now presents the Word on Fire.

Peace be with you.

Friends, we've come to the end of our Lenten journey.

With the church we celebrate today, Palm Sunday, Passion Sunday, the beginning of this terrible and wonderful week when the salvation of the world was affected.

Every year on Palm Sunday, we read one of the great Passion Narratives from the Gospels, this year we read from St. Mark's.

St. Mark's, you know, is the first Gospel written, therefore this account of Jesus' Passion and Death is the first one and therefore of enormous influence and power, shaping not only the other Gospels, but shaping through them the whole of Western culture.

In fact, is there a story better known to us than this one? The story of the rest, the trial, the persecution, the passion, the death of Jesus?

You know, I suggest to that in some ways the very familiarity of this story is a problem.

We begin to listen to it when we say, oh sure, that's the story of Jesus' Passion and Death. I know that one by heart.

And so it runs through our minds and we don't attend to it.

Hemingway has a little story he tells about being on a ship in the Caribbean and he saw a young man, one of the sailors, and he was reading a book with wrapped attention.

Hemingway said, what are you reading? He said, it's the Gospel of Matthew. Hemingway said, well, why are you reading it so carefully? And the kids said, I want to know how it ends.

The reason that story is strange is that it's so anomalous. Doesn't everyone know how this story unfolds and how it ends?

What I want to do therefore is focus on four elements in the story that are quirky, odd, strange, surprising, ones that we probably don't attend to, because each one, I think, says something of great importance about the Passion of Jesus.

Here's the first one. It's how Mark's account opens. When Jesus was in Bethany reclining a table in the house of Simon the leper, a woman entered carrying an alabaster jar of perfume made from expensive aromatic gnar.

Breaking the jar, she began to pour the perfume on his head. It's the vignette with which this terrible and wonderful story opens. A woman comes to Jesus with this extremely expensive and extremely precious substance, this perfume.

She doesn't give him a little, doesn't pour a little bit on him, doesn't dab it on him, but she breaks open this jar and she pours the whole thing on the Lord so that the aroma of it must fill the space.

Well, as we know, those around her sniffed at this. Well, what a waste. How extravagant, how over the top, couldn't this perfume have been sold and the money given to the poor? How inappropriate.

...