6th Sunday of Ordinary Time (Year A) - 15 February 2026
15th February 2026
“Remember that nothing is small in the eyes of God. Do all that you do with love.” - St Thérèse of Lisieux
A reflection on today's Gospel theme by the Venerable Archbishop Fulton J Sheen:
In the Christian way we are not governed by law at all, we should be beyond it. We seek not merely the keeping of the Commandments, but we seek to be related to our blessed Lord. Is it hard? Is it possible?
Remember, one day a young man came to our blessed Lord and asked what he must do to be saved, and our blessed Lord said he must keep the Commandments. Our Lord mentioned about five or six of the Commandments, such as not stealing, not committing adultery and the like. The young man said, “I have kept all these from my youth.” Our blessed Lord then added, “If you would be perfect, go sell all you have. Give it to the poor then come follow Me.” The young man left feeling sad, because he had great possessions. This troubled the Apostles. Must everybody sell everything to follow our Lord? They said, “Who then, can be saved?” Our Lord answered that it is not possible with men alone, by our own human power, but it is possible with God. All things are possible with God; we have His grace.
Christianity is hard from a worldly point of view, but it gives inner peace and joy to those who obey the law of love of our blessed Lord. When we understand the full import of the law we hear our Lord say, “Give Me all, all of you. Give Me your whole self.” Is that a loss? No, because He said, “I will give you a new self. I will give you Myself, My own will shall become yours.”
We are trying to remain what we are and at the same time to keep a reasonable amount of peace. We want to be “good.” We want our heart and our mind to go one way; maybe it’s after money, pleasure, or social prestige, and at the same time, we do want to behave honestly, chastely, and to keep the Commandments.
Our blessed Lord said, “A thistle cannot produce a fig, and a field that contains nothing but grass seed cannot produce wheat.” If I want to produce wheat, the change has to go deep down below the surface. I have to be plowed up and to be resown. Our Lord said, “If you would be perfect, come follow Me”, and again, “Be ye perfect as your heavenly Father is perfect”. He meant we have to go in for the full treatment. It is hard but hankering after it is a bit harder. When you get down to rock bottom, what are we afraid of? We are afraid to give our finger to God because we fear He may take our hand. We have little secret gardens back in our heart that we tend. The fruit is not His; it is ours. We wall it off from Him, sometimes a petty sin, a vice or selfishness, whatever it happens to be. We do not get the full joy of being a Christian. It’s very hard for an egg to turn into a bird, but it would be much harder for it to learn to fly while remaining an egg. We are just like eggs now, and we cannot go on being just good eggs. A good egg is an egg that hatches.
Our blessed Lord insists upon a kind of a death; we have to renew in our lives exactly what happened in His. He is the pattern. He repeatedly said to Nicodemus and to us that if we are to live again, we have to perish in our old existence. Is there anybody who hopes the real danger spots are rendered harmless because He is a kind Saviour who takes hardened sinners back without questions? That person must read the text where he said He would not subtract one jot from the severity of God’s law. He had not come to abolish the law, but to perfect it. Grace is not cheap. It cost our Lord His life. Can you think of anything more costly than what a man must pay on a cross? If we want peace, we have to pay the price. Without that death to the lower life, there’s no peace; there’s only fear and we live a kind of half existence.
Our blessed Lord said, “He who wills to do the will of the Father in heaven will know whether the teaching is from God.” He means one of the reasons there are agnostics and skeptics is because they are not keeping the law of God. If we know His will, we will understand His doctrine. We may have entirely too much insistence upon a knowledge of Christian doctrine and not enough insistence on the doing. Our blessed Lord said, “If you do My will, you will know My doctrine.” Only he who does the will earnestly and stakes his life on it will come to understand Christ and all that His redemption means. Our Lord is known only to those who venture, not to the cowards.
At first our blessed Lord is a disturber. He seems to irritate you and lead you into a kind of a crucifixion. You are an easy going worldling and have settled down comfortably into your world view, but if you are in earnest with Christ, you will have to give up that comfort because it is a false peace. The first advent of Christ into our lives is of one who upsets us, but once we give ourselves to Him, He becomes our defender. Before we have Christ, our heart accuses us, we are unhappy with half measures. After we give ourselves to Him and His law of love, then our heart is at peace. His attitude completely changes once we have changed ours.
(Your Life is Worth Living)
Prayer of St Thérèse of Lisieux
O my God! I offer all my actions this day for the Sacred Heart of Jesus. I desire to sanctify every beat of my heart, my every thought, my simplest works, by uniting them to His perfection; and I wish to repair for my sins by casting them into the furnace of His merciful love. O my God! I ask of You for myself and for those whom I hold dear, the grace to fulfill perfectly Your holy will and to accept for love of You the joys and sorrows of this passing life, so that we may one day be united in Heaven for all eternity. Amen.
Image: Private Leslie "Bull" Allen, 2/5th Australian Infantry Battalion, carrying the first of 12 wounded American soldiers to safety during the Wau-Salamaua campaign of World War II. He faced sniper, machine gun and mortar fire.
Location: Mount Tambu, New Guinea, 30 July 1943.
Photo Credit: Original Photographer - Gordon Herbert Short. AWM 015515.