Gospel Acclamation: First Sunday in Advent

Show us Lord, Your love; and grant us Your salvation.

As we begin the season of Advent, a season of waiting, reflection, and repentance, today's Gospel acclamation offers us a prayer that we can use throughout our Advent meditations.

As we ask our Lord to show us His love and grant us His salvation, we should open our hearts to receive both that love and that salvation. We should also remember that God wants to shower us in His love. In fact, He does so at every moment just by keeping us in existence. He does that because He loves us.

What's more, in 1 Timothy 2:4, we read that God “desires everyone to be saved and to come to the knowledge of the truth.” We can be certain, then, that God will give us every bit of grace we need to be saved. He wants us home in Heaven with Him for all eternity.

Let us pray, then, throughout this Advent, that we can open our eyes to see God's love, our minds to know it, and our hearts to experience it. And let us pray that we will embrace the salvation that our Lord so lovingly holds out to us and prepare our souls for a full immersion in His love in Heaven.

Gospel Acclamation: The Solemnity of Our Lord Jesus Christ, King of the Universe

Blessed is He who comes in the name of the Lord!
Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!

Jesus is the ultimate Davidic king, the fulfillment of the covenant oath God swore to David that a king would arise from his line, a king who would reign forever. The Davidic kingdom would return in more glory than David himself could ever imagine, for it would be the Kingdom of God.

This is what we proclaim in today's Gospel acclamation on Christ the King Sunday. Jesus comes in the name of the Lord, for He is the Second Person of the Blessed Trinity, the Son of God, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit. He comes to unite us to the Trinity through grace and through the indwelling presence of God in our souls.

So we proclaim Him blessed as He blesses us, and we proclaim the kingdom of God that has come, is coming, and will come definitively at the end of time.

Gospel Acclamation: Thirty-Third Sunday in Ordinary Time

Stand erect and raise your heads because your redemption is at hand.

As we approach the end of the liturgical year, the Church invites us to reflect on the last things. We are encouraged to think about our own death and judgment, which are inevitable and may come unexpectedly. We are asked to meditate on the end of the world, which is also inevitable, and no one knows when it will arrive.

Therefore, we must be prepared. We must live in such as way as to be ready to go at a moment's notice whenever our Lord comes for us, whether that be our own death or the end times. This means constant prayer, reception of the sacraments, especially confession and the Eucharist, and a longing for God's will, no matter what it may be.

This acclamation also invites us to face the future with confidence. We are to stand up and raise our heads. We are to look forward with eagerness to the coming of our Lord, for He brings our redemption with Him. This is a very good thing, and we should be longing for our Lord to come, watching and waiting with attention and joy and love.

Gospel Acclamation: Thirty-Second Sunday in Ordinary Time

Jesus Christ is the firstborn of the dead; to Him be glory and power, forever and ever.

Today's Gospel Acclamation is prime example of praise. Jesus is the firstborn of the dead. He is risen from the dead. He lives and will always live. And He will bring us to eternal life and resurrection with Him.

What does it mean to give Jesus glory and power? He has those already. We cannot add anything to them. Yet we can and must recognize and admit Jesus' glory and power. We must acknowledge His divinity and open ourselves to His work in our minds, hearts, and lives. We must embrace Him in His glory and power. We must tell others of that glory and power in our words and in our lives.

How often do our prayers turn to praise? Are we too busy asking God for what we want? As important as petitions are, we should always strive to begin and end our prayers with praise and expressions of love for God, Who has surrounded us with His love. Today's acclamation can provide an example and a starting point for our own praise as we turn our minds to how wonderful our God really is.

Gospel Acclamation: Thirty-First Sunday in Ordinary Time

God so loved the world that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him might have eternal life.

Now here is love. God the Father loves us so much that He sent His Son Jesus to suffer and die on the cross for us. The Father and the Son did not have to do this. God would only have had to will the world's redemption. He is God, after all. But the way He chose is so much more fitting, and it expresses His overwhelming love so much better.

In fact, we can look at what Jesus has done for us, knowing that He would have done the same thing if we were the only ones in need of salvation, and we can recognize the depths of His love and of the Father's love.

Our response to this love must, of course, be faith that works in love and is expressed in love. We can also look forward to the next great gift that God wants to give us: eternal life. We can start living this life already by God's grace, and we will experience it fully in Heaven when we will see Him face to face.

Gospel Acclamation: Thirtieth Sunday in Ordinary Time

God was reconciling the world to Himself in Christ, and entrusting to us the message of salvation.

We live in a fallen world. With the sin of our first parents, our human nature fell, and all creation went with it. God could have left it at that. He didn't have to do anything about it. Adam and Eve had already shown that they would not obey Him but rather wanted to be “gods” in their own right, choosing for themselves what is “good” and what is “evil.”

But God loves us. He loved (and still loves) Adam and Eve, and He loves all of their sinful, broken, fallen descendants. So He refuses to leave us in our sinfulness and brokenness and fallenness. Instead, He sent His only Son to save us, to reconcile the world to Himself through Jesus' life and death, His passion and resurrection.

God didn't have to do it. He wanted to do it. He doesn't have to save us or forgive us. He wants to save us and forgive us.

But God won't do that without us. We have free will, and God wants us to cooperate with Him, to choose His mercy and love. And He wants us to spread the message of that mercy and love to others. He entrusts to us the message of salvation.

This is a major responsibility. We are all called to proclaim the Gospel in our words and our lives. We are called to cooperate in reconciling the world to God, uniting ourselves to Jesus Christ so that fallen humans and the fallen world can be raised up again.

Gospel Acclamation: Twenty-Ninth Sunday in Ordinary Time

The word of God is living and effective, discerning reflections and thoughts of the heart.

The “word of God” has multiple meanings within Christianity, so this Gospel acclamation can also take on more than one sense. Ultimately, of course, the Word of God is Jesus Christ Himself, the one Word spoken by the Father from all eternity. He always was; He is now; and He will always be living. He is, as He says, “the life.” And He is fully effective in atoning for our sins and drawing us back to the Father. He discerns the reflections and thoughts of our hearts better than we do, and He will tell us all about them if only we open our hearts and minds to Him in prayer.

Yet the “word of God” also refers to the Sacred Scriptures. These, too, are living, for the Holy Spirit continues to work through the words that He has inspired. When we read the Bible with faith, seeking understanding with an open mind and heart, the Holy Spirit will guide us into truth. In the Scriptures, Dei Verbum tells us, “the Father who is in heaven meets His children with great love and speaks with them” (#21). God's message in the Bible teaches us about ourselves. It opens up the secrets of our hearts. It helps us discern where we are in our journey to God. It nudges us toward repentance and toward a deeper love of God.

Indeed, the word of God, both the Word Himself and the words He has spoken, is living and effective, discerning reflections and thoughts of the heart.