Mother Claire's Sermons

One of my favorite things about knowing both of a child’s parents is seeing both of them in their child. It’s like a multicolored dress, where if you wear it with the red sweater all of the red pops, but if you wear it with the blue sweater, you see all of the blue in the pattern and not so much of the red - it’s is still there, you just can’t see it as clearly. That’s the way it is with my 4-year-old. If you see her next to her dad, she looks so much like him. If you see her next to me, she is very clearly my child. We see the same kind of thing with the dual natures of Jesus: that he is at the same time fully human and fully divine. We see both of these natures throughout Matthew chapter 14. It begins with an account of the beheading of John the Baptist and of John’s disciples telling Jesus the news. After hearing the news, Jesus wants to do the very human act of mourning his friend out of the public eye. But the crowds followed him. He cured their sick, and then tried to send the