 It's so good to be here, a real blessing. I was a regular here at this conference when I was a seminarian. We used to come almost every year. And then once I got ordained a priest, it got a little bit more difficult. It was a little more sporadic. And it's the first time I've been here as a bishop. So it's great to have come full circle. It's especially good to be here with you, brother priests, brother deacons. I was a seminarian once too, a very long time ago. It brings to mind a joke that I thought I would start with. Please forgive me if you've heard it. But a parish priest and his bishop died on the same day. In fact, in the very same hour. And they appeared at the gates at the same moment. And there St. Peter was. He flipped open the book of life, tracked down the names. Yes, Father Satsanchach. Come on in, welcome. Bishop, let's find your name here. Oh, look, there it is. A courageous and faithful bishop. Come on in, come on in. And so he said, well, now I'm gonna show you your eternal dwelling places. So they're walking along the streets of gold and they come to this absolute mansion. Diamonds in gold and beautiful, just majestic. And the St. Peter turns to the bishop and says, Bishop, welcome to your home, your eternal dwelling place. And the bishop is so grateful and he's so happy and he goes in. So now this priest, this simple, humble, parish priest is getting pretty excited because that place looked awesome. So they walk down the street of gold a little further and they come to another place, which is actually kind of humble. It's so beautiful, but it's much smaller and it's sort of in a group of another bunch of... And this priest turns to St. Peter and says, now wait a minute here. We're in heaven now. There's not supposed to be any favoritism. What's this? St. Peter turns to him and says, yeah, I know, you're right. But you see, we get hundreds, even thousands of you simple parish priests every week, but that's the third bishop we've seen at five centuries. With that little bit of humility, I'll move on. The title that I was given for this opening address as we heard is The Good News, Hope of the World. And I think, brothers, you would agree that the theme is well-chosen. Not only because it's the gospel, which is always appropriate, but also because of our context. There's a lot of disturbing things going on around us, isn't there? Things that could leave us very discouraged. I've spoken with a lot of priests and deacons who feel a sense of helplessness and hopeless in the midst of all that's going on. There's a war going on in Europe, something we never thought we would see again. And it could easily ignite more and deeper devastation in the world. There's saber-rattling going on in Southeast Asia. And it's dangerous. We live in a world of deep and political and social divisions that are tearing apart the unity of our modern democracies even. Things that seem so stable, suddenly in jeopardy. In the wake of the collapse of Christendom, we've seen the advance of aggressive secular agendas. A dictatorship of relativism dig deep. We've seen the ascendancy of new ideologies which are actually rooted in very ancient heresies and that are completely inimical to what God has revealed. To what God has revealed about the dignity of human beings, of justice and what is social justice, of the family, as the foundation of society. We're living in an era when the persecution of Christians in so many parts of the world is savage. And largely ignored. And even sadly, within Mother Church, the bride of Christ, so much confusion and division, so many people distracted and divided battling over issues. Issues that have their place, granted. Some of greater, some are of lesser importance but all of them far less important and far less critical than the commission that Jesus himself gave to us. Go into the world and make disciples, baptize them in the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit and teach them everything that I commanded of you in the midst of all these disturbing realities and among all these things that can be so discouraging, so overwhelming and at times seemingly hopeless, where is our hope? What's supposed to be the rock? The immovable foundation, the source of our hope, we hear Jesus said, I have said these things to you that in me, you may have peace. In this world, you are going to have trouble, but do not fear. I have overcome the world. When you look at a text like this, I love to go to the amplified version and look at a few different translations because very often it's hard to capture in just a few words everything that the Greek words mean and what they entail. So here's a bit of an amplified version from a few different translations. I have told you these things so that in me you may have perfect peace. In the world, you will have tribulation, distress, suffering, but be courageous, be confident, be undaunted, be filled with joy, be filled with hope. I have overcome the world. My conquest is accomplished. My victory is abiding. He alone, Jesus and his work, what he accomplished and his message, that's our rock. That's our immovable foundations. Kingdoms rise and kingdoms fall. Kings rise and kings die. Ideologies come and ideologies go, but he's the rock that doesn't move. As St. Peter confirms, we are born anew to a living hope, born anew to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead. There are a multitude of proposed solutions to the situation of the world, social, political, psychological, martial, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. And they have varying degrees of legitimacy and we can have varying degrees of natural optimism or pessimism about them, but our hope, which is much more than natural optimism because it unites us to God is a theological virtue infused into us by the Holy Spirit. Our hope is in Jesus and what he has done and is doing and is bringing to fulfillment. We and the whole world are under his providential gaze. He knows what he's doing. He alone is the faithful witness, the first born from the dead, the ruler of the kings of the earth, the judge of the living and the dead who has the final word on everything. His gospel is what we need. It's what we need to live to embrace. It's what we need to witness with our lives and to proclaim with our voices and to minister to the people that God has entrusted to us, that through his life, death and resurrection, he has annihilated and destroyed our sins and their power. He has destroyed in his own flesh, in his own soul, the alienation between us and God, the Father. He has opened the path again. He has made it possible to be reconciled that through baptism and faith, we are united to him. We become his body, his mystical body on the earth. We are filled with his divine life. We become partakers of the divine nature sharing the indestructible life of God so that the second death will have no power over us. And he invites us to make a decision. He invites us to accept him through the mediation of Mother Church, of course, but to accept him as Savior, as Lord, knowing that our lives were lost. We deserved hell. And so everything after he saves me is his. How could it be otherwise? He's at the right hand of the Father receiving the Holy Spirit from the Father. We are told pouring him out like a waterfall on us to sanctify, to strengthen, to empower, to continue his mission. This is the karygma, the basic good news. Oh, in the Catholic Church, we have a terrible tendency of trying to build houses from the third floor down. We begin with all our sophisticated theology, which is great, but unless we've laid the foundation, it's gonna crash down. And this is the foundation, the person, the work of Jesus himself. We have a terrible tendency in the church to try to cataclyse and sacramentalize the unevangelized. We don't need more good ideas. We need good news. We need Jesus. To him alone every knee will bend and every tongue confess. Under the dominion of either his power in inescapable judgment, or the dominion of his merciful saving love, every knee will bend. Every tongue will confess. We, brothers, have been invited as friends to be with him. That's the first movement in the call, to be with him and then to be sent out in a privileged place in his saving mission. My own spiritual father in Christ, Father Bob Bedard, some of the old-timers here will remember him. He's a great man, a founder of the companions of the cross, my own spiritual family in the church, a pioneer of the new evangelization, new Pentecost, Marian movement. He expressed, in my opinion, what we so desperately need as ministers in our day and in our time. These are the words he spoke. We have been tantalized by Jesus. We have been fascinated by him, dazzled. We've been trapped and captured. We are prisoners of the Lord, but we are delighted to be in his custody. We would not want it any other way. We are able to say with St. Paul that we have repraised all else as rubbish. The Greek word there is skrubalon. It means human excrement. We have appraised all else as rubbish in the light of knowing Christ Jesus, that we are now racing to capture the prize for which he has captured us. We, especially us as ministers of the gospel, we need, as St. John Paul II, so many times called us to do, to start afresh from Christ. To shake off the slumber of routine, the taking it for granted that is such a danger to us who are professionally religious. We handle the gospel so often that we forget. It's dynamite. It is the power to save souls. It is the power to change the course of history. It's so easy to do, to get into the routine. We need to rediscover and re-encounter Jesus as living and risen Lord who is alive and on the move. As Father Bob said so powerfully, to be tantalized, to be fascinated by him again, dazzled by him, captured by him all over again. And this is the work of the Holy Spirit. Read the Catechism carefully. The first work of the Holy Spirit is to reveal Jesus, the reality of Jesus. That we would not just see a human face, but we would see the glory of God shining on the face of Christ. That we would not know him as merely some historical figure, great guru, prophet, whatever, from 20 centuries ago, but the risen Lord in our midst, acting, speaking, saving, reconciling, forgiving, consecrating, brothers, we need to scrape off the barnacles of going through the motions. We need to scrape off the barnacles of all our preconceived notions and our false shrunken ideas of what Jesus is capable of doing in our lives and in our parishes. We need to read the gospel in the Holy Spirit. How many times has the last three popes told us, please, dulexio divina with the scriptures. Study them historically, critically fine. Study them as biblical scholars fine, but we need to encounter Jesus in the scriptures and that requires the Holy Spirit. We need to begin by praying to the Holy Spirit and praying with the word of God, allowing it to penetrate us, allowing the Lord to speak into our lives and into our situations. We need to listen to the word anew. And if we do that, there is no doubt that we're gonna be amazed by Jesus. As more than a few scholars have pointed out, Jesus is hardly the domesticated, de-clawed, safe house cat that modern tastes have reduced him to. Let's face it, too many people think of Jesus as a fat house cat. He purrs on command when we need to feel better, but when he's kinda in the way, we toss him outside. Jesus is a lion. He is a rampant lion of the tribe of Judah. As St. Paul reminds us, this is an awesome thing to fall into the hands of the living God. He is untamed goodness, so pure and wild, so dangerous that to risk a real encounter with him is to be changed. There's a little tradition in my community, the companions of the cross, our founder used to tell us as seminarians, go out, sweat together, get to know each other, become brothers, do more than share a house, share a life. And so we would do these little adventures in the summers and our breaks, and one of them was going whitewater canoeing up in the Canadian North. And we'd spent two weeks in the bush and we'd have a ball, it'd be great. We would stink and unshaven, and nobody would wanna come within 50 feet of us when we got home, but it was a lot of fun. But you get used to the routines. Everybody does the same thing pretty much every morning. One guy'd go down and try and get fish, one guy starts making coffee, somebody's starting to fire. You get into routines. Well, on one of those particular trips that we were on, one of these priests, and he doesn't mind me stealing his story, I tell it all the time. He goes down as he always goes down. First thing, with the fishing pole to the river, and he's gonna catch us breakfast. And sure enough, he was down there one morning and he caught a couple of fish and dropped them at the side and he's fishing. And like every other morning, he hears another one of the brothers, Charles was his name, his father Charles, coming down the path behind him with the coffee mug to get some coffee boiling, get some water boiling for the coffee. And so he did as he did. Every morning, he greets him over his shoulder as he's casting. Morning Chuck, how you doing brother? No response. So thought, well, he didn't hear me. Little louder. Hey, Chuck, how you doing brother? Get a good sleep? No response. So finally, he thinks this is a little odd, so he turns around to discover that it was not Charles coming down the path. It was something that eats things like him. It was a big bear coming down to check out the fish, I would guess. Now, he says, usually at this point when he was telling the story, people would always say the same thing. What did you do? And his response is classic. He says, when you're staring into the face of a 400 pound animal that eats things like you, it's not what I decide to do that matters. It's what the bear decides to do that matters. It sets the agenda. It has the power. See the analogy? If we've gotten into the place in our ministry that we think that we're managing Jesus, whoa. The lion might have a thing or two to say. I was told that it was Saint Augustine who said, you don't have to apologize for Jesus. He's a lion, just open the cage and let him out. Let him do his thing. The most common reaction to Jesus in the gospels is a little surprising. I work with university students who are used to quite a bit and I would ask him that question and inevitably they would say, oh, well, love. They would feel love from Jesus. I'm gonna say, well, that's probably true once they got to know him. But you know what the scriptures actually say? That the most common reaction to Jesus when people first encounter him is fear and awe. As Bishop Barron says, they come away amazed and afraid. C.S. Lewis was even stronger. He said, read the gospels. Nobody ever had a mild approval or mild disapproval of Jesus. It was either hatred or terror or adoration. These are the reactions and it's not hard to see why. He spoke with an authority and a command that people had never heard before. Mark tells us that he kept large crowds in the synagogues spellbound by his teaching. They hung on his words. People by the thousands would walk out into the desert and stay there for three days without food. Just to hear him speak. When the temple guards are sent out by the Sanhedrin to arrest him, they come back empty handed. And when they're upgraded by the Sanhedrin, what's their response? No man has ever spoken like this. He commands storms, drives out demonic forces with a word, heals blindness and leprosy. Can you imagine? He raises the dead. Tell me that fear and awe would not fire through a crowd like lightning. If you saw him say, get up and a corpse rises. We are told that power goes out from him. The word in Greek is dunamis, the root of dynamite. Goes out from him, heals people in droves. People left astonished. The apostles themselves sitting in the middle of the lake looking at each other going, what kind of man is this? And despite all the modern nonsense to the contrary, he knows exactly who he is and what he is about. Just read all the fantastic biblical scholars that the Lord is raising up in the church today, one of whom is here with us. Brent Petrie and Scott Hahn and then the list goes on and on and on. Read the writings. Anyone who is reading the gospels honestly cannot mistake the determined and clear mission that Jesus is on. From his baptism in the Jordan to his ascension, he is about the work of the Messiah. God's rescue operation in this fallen world and he does everything the Messiah was supposed to do. Only he does it in a way that is so far beyond their expectations that they can easily miss it. The Messiah is supposed to reconstitute and renew Israel. Well, they're thinking about that little patch of land along the sea, the Mediterranean Sea, 12 patriarchs in the holy land, but Jesus wants the world. So he's got 12 apostles who are sent out to capture the whole world and make it holy. He does reconstitute Israel. He chooses his chief steward, his prime minister, Peter, and gives him the keys, read Isaiah 22, 21. This is what the king did to the steward. He makes it clear that Mary is the queen mother of the kingdom of God, whose job is to intercede. Woman, what is this to you and to me? My hour has not yet come. What hour? The hour he takes up his kingship on the cross and then it will be the job of the queen mother to bring the needs of people to him. The Messiah was supposed to restore the temple of God, which was so important because it's where God met humanity. Oh, but they're thinking bricks and mortar. They couldn't see that he is the new temple. And when you put him down in three days, he will raise it up again. Ezekiel saw the vision of the new temple of God in the messianic era and out of the eastern gate flowed the river, which got deeper and wider as it went down into the Arabide to the place of desert and death and desolation and lifeless, bringing life everywhere it went. And there at the end of his earthly life, we see Jesus hanging on the cross and the eastern side of the temple is pierced and out comes the blood and water which renews the whole world. They're thinking too small. The Messiah was supposed to be a warrior king who liberated God's people from the oppressors. But they're thinking Romans and Philistines and Babylonians and Assyrians. But he liberated us from Satan and death. He inaugurates the new exodus, beginning with his baptism in the Jordan. Why in the Jordan? Because this is where the exodus enters into the promise and he is bringing the promise to fulfillment. The new covenant he establishes promised by Jeremiah Ezekiel and others, he's the lamb of sacrifice, fulfilling the Old Testament sacrificial system in his own person. He's the great high priest standing now before the father, the slain lamb who has risen interceding on our behalf in the divine liturgy of heaven that we enter at every mass. Just thinking too small. This is Jesus and he is awesome. Even more astonishingly is his clear identity. He knows exactly who he is. Read the scriptures with a Jewish eye. This is what this modern generation of biblical scholars in the Catholic Church is bringing to us, helping us to unpack the scriptures in light of the Old Testament. And when you do that, it pops, it comes alive. He acted with an authority that only God can wield and speaks in the very person of God. He forgives sins. Only God forgives sins. He claims lordship over the Sabbath. Anybody here read the Old Testament? There's only one Lord of the Sabbath. There's example after example after example that can be used. But the one that strikes me most deeply is he takes the Torah, the very word of God, the last word on every issue and says you have heard it said but I say to you, fulfilling, perfecting the very word of God. He knows who he is and he knows what he's about. I myself will shepherd them. God spoke through Ezekiel, Jesus. I am the word, the name of God to Moses on Sinai. I am the good shepherd and on and on we could go. We know this, brothers. Everything about Jesus is beautiful and amazing. Not just the sensational things, but everything. Jesus, the king of majesty emptied himself to the condition of a slave and washed the stinking feet of the apostles. Probably part of the ordination ritual as it was part of the ordination ritual in the Old Testament but also the job of the lowest household slave. Think about that. He was often cold and hungry, lonely and tired and he was never even thinking about himself. He was just love poured out and there's a tenderness in Jesus. Read the scriptures with new eyes, brother. He raises the little girl from the dead and what does he say to her, talitha kum? That's a term of endearment. What he's saying is, sweetheart, and then his first words, get her something to eat. He was so focused on her needs. When he heals the blind man, outside, he takes him outside the village because he knows it's gonna be overwhelming for him. So as he begins to see things, he's not overwhelmed. Such a tenderness, such a care. The rich young man, he looked at him and loved him. When he raised the boy at, was it name? Very interesting. It says that the boy was the only begotten of that woman. The only other time that phrase is used in the scriptures. And Jesus has moved deeply because why? Because he knows another woman who is about to lose the only begotten, the heart of Jesus. He even got frustrated, angry. We hear his seething indictments of the Pharisees and the scribes, but it's not hatred. It's medicinal. He loves them strong enough to confront them, to shock them into reality and repentance. We are told in the Acts of the Apostles that many priests and Pharisees followed him. How many did he save with those words of truth? And this courageous, fierce anger, this fierce love is all over the gospels. When John tells us in chapter 11 that Jesus was deeply moved at the death of Lazarus. I don't know about you, but I had in my mind that he was kind of half fainting, overcome with emotion. Well, I learned in Greek what it actually says is he was snorting in spirit to turn, to turn from that language. It's what a war horse does before it's about to charge, pawing the ground and snorting. As a smell of battle hits it. He's snorting in spirit at the death of his friend because death took his friend and now he's gonna take death down. Death, I will be your death. This is Jesus. Maybe one last thing as I'm running out of time. Usually they don't pull you off early when you wear a pointed hat, but here at Steubenville, they're used to bishops. We're like stray cats, so I could get in trouble. The generosity of Jesus. He scatters the seed everywhere. What a symbol of who he is. Any farmer listening to that parable is gonna go, you threw seed on the road? You threw seed in the rocks? In the weeds? What are you thinking? Oh, but it's a symbol of Jesus and his infinite generosity because there's nobody he's not going after. He's putting on the guitar, but I still have 12 minutes and 33 seconds left here. When I get preaching, the brothers in my community know this, when I get preaching, when Bishop Scott gets going, they say, don't look at your watch, look at your calendar, but I promise I'm wrapping up. He scatters the seed everywhere because he loves everyone and he wants everyone. There's so many more examples here. 12 baskets full of leftovers when he feeds the 5,000. 153 big fish for his three friends on the beach. 120 to 150 gallons of the best wine for the wedding feast after they're already inebriated. That's 780 to 900 bottles. I love Jesus. And brothers, all of that, you know, is just a symbol of his real generosity, bone weary, trying to escape the crowds, not even able to eat after pouring himself out for weeks in ministry and his humanity utterly exhausted, trying to get away from the crowds and be alone with his disciples and the crowds find him. And what happens inside of him? His heart is moved with compassion because they were like sheep without a shepherd and he gives more of himself when he probably felt that in his humanity there was no more to give. And even that's just a foreshadowing of 2,000 years of pouring out his body, blood, soul and divinity in the Eucharist through our voices and our hands, loving, healing, shepherding through the sacraments. And this is just a few examples. If we think that he has given us all that he is willing to give, we don't know him. If he thinks he's taken us as far as he wants to take us in our personal lives, in our ministry, in our parishes, in our assignments, we don't have a clue who he is. He told Faustina, St. Faustina, that the mercy in the heart, in his heart was so full that it wounds him, it burns him and he yearns to pour it out but so few are willing to accept it. He told St. Angel of Filinho, make yourself a capacity and I will make myself a torrent. He wants to give us more than we could ever ask or imagine and all of this we know. It's just his earthly ministry, a foreshadowing of his full glory now, his full majesty in heaven. It's breathtaking. Just a suggestion, take Revelation chapter one verse two through to verse two for your personal prayer for your Lectio Divina tomorrow morning. There is Jesus amongst the seven labstands, amongst his body, his bride. Curious, Lord, the hair white as snow, the ancient of days, his face shining like the sun at full strength, his eyes blazing like fire, the sharp two-edged sword protruding from his mouth, in the high priest's vestment and the kingly sash and the feet that are immovable. That's who Jesus is, all powerful. The ancient of days, all authority in his hands, all seeing, all knowing, the great high priest, the eternal king immovable, wielding the sword of truth, the sword of the spirit, the word of God, the power of the Holy Spirit that he pours out upon us. That's who Jesus is. Brothers, we need to start afresh from Jesus. We need to rediscover him and re-encounter him in the power of the Holy Spirit. We need to get rooted in the Word again and allow the Lord to speak into our lives, to speak into our ministry. He sits at the sidelines of our lives and he doesn't like it. He wants to be in the middle of the action, calling the shots, leading the way. He wants our permission to do what he wants to do. And not only does he want our heartfelt permission and it will get messy if we do this, you set the Holy Spirit free, it gets messy because stuff comes up, but he wants us to give him that permission to do what he wants to do in our lives, in our ministries. And he wants us to tell our people to give him permission too. If he gets enough permissions, he's gonna move. If he gets hearts that are open, he's gonna move. It says in 2 Chronicles, the eyes of the Lord scan the earth, looking for those whose hearts are open to him that he might raise them up. Let's be those men. Let's be those priests and deacons. It's only saints who reform the church. Why not you? Why not me? Let's be dazzled by Jesus again. Let's be captured by Jesus again. Let's be fascinated by Jesus again. Let's fall in love with him all over again, like we did at first. Shake off the slumber, shake off the routine, come afresh to Jesus, and let him speak into our lives. Amen. Brothers, I invite you to stand. I just wanna lead you in a short prayer of response to this word that I believe the Lord asked me to speak. We're gonna have a little bit of worship so that we can receive it fully. Lord Jesus, we come to you. We are weak and broken. We are sinful. We are quite literally cracked pots. And the grace that you pour in us too often falls to the ground unfootful. We're not much, Lord, but we're yours. We're all yours. Jesus, our confidence is not in our worthiness but in your goodness. Our hope is not in what we can or can't do, how we sinned, how we pray, how we measure up. That's not our hope. You're our hope. You're our hope. You speak the word of life. Oh, Lord, send upon us anew. You're all holy, good, and life-giving spirit. Pour him out upon us like a waterfall because we want to be renewed. We want to be the men that you call us to be. We want to have stirred in us the love that pulsed in our hearts at first. We want that mad eros agape that burns in your heart that burn in our hearts. Holy spirit in the name of Jesus, reveal him to us anew. Each day as we come before him in his word, in the gospels, anoint our minds, anoint our hearts. Let us encounter the real Jesus. Let us see things that we never saw before. Let us see the real Jesus who is amazing, who is fascinating, who is dazzling, who strikes those who see him with fear and awe because of his majesty and his power and his beauty and his untamed goodness. Holy spirit, lead us into a deeper encounter with the risen and living Lord that we can come alive to him, especially in any areas, Lord, where we've taken it all for granted. We've handled your dynamite carelessly. Come Holy Spirit, come and fill us now. Fill us in the name of Jesus. Fill us with the good news, the good news, that renews, that revitalizes, that changes, that transfigures, that deifies. Come Holy Spirit, come Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus. I invite you brothers to call upon the Holy Spirit in the name of Jesus, that he might come to us anew, come Holy Spirit.