(LifeSiteNews) — On this week’s two-part episode of The Bishop Strickland Show, Bishop Joseph Strickland discusses pausing to listen to the Sacred Heart, courageously being salt and light to evangelize and convert those around us, and how Christ is the fulfillment of the law and the prophets.

The bishop begins the episode with a commentary on part of the Sermon on the Mount, in which Christ calls the disciples the salt of the earth. Strickland, looking at the passage in light of the feast of St. Barnabas, notes that the saint was not one of the original apostles, but joined their number as one of their successors.

As the word “apostle” means witness, Strickland says that it is a reminder to us that the word is not just applied to the twelve apostles, but that “the basic qualification for apostle is witness.” Bishops, as successors to the apostles are called to witness to the truth that is Christ.

“I think [the passage] is very important because we desperately need all of us as baptized Christians, and especially those baptized and knowing the fullness of the sacraments in our Catholic faith, the world needs us, salt and light, like never before,” he says, adding that it is a “very striking image” for Christ to ask what good salt would be if it lost its savor but to be trampled underfoot.

The salt, Strickland continues, has “tremendous opportunity” to season the earth and spread the Gospel. This is a reminder that if we live as salt for the earth, then we live according to a glorious calling. But if we do not, rejecting the call of our baptism to holiness, hiding our light under a bushel and “not … [daring] to salt things up because I don’t want to get in trouble, I don’t want to lose my position,” we are fit for trampling.

Strickland maintains that if we would reject that calling, we would be worse off than those without baptism who never had the chance to be salt and light.

“In a world that is wandering in darkness and losing its savor of the Gospel, losing the Light of Christ, we desperately need the Body of Christ, the Mystical Body of Christ that we are, the Church, to stand up and be joyful and strong like the saints of old,” the bishop asserts. He looks to St. Boniface, who cut down a tree dedicated to the worship of Thor and built a church with the wood, as an example for what Catholics ought to be.

Later in the first part, Strickland reads his recent letter on listening to the beating of the Sacred Heart of Jesus, in which he invites people to pause and listen to said beating amidst the gathering “storm” that threatens the Church.

READ: Bishop Strickland: Pause and listen for the beating of Our Lord’s Sacred Heart

Strickland says there were multiple reasons for writing the letter, looking to things he already addressed in the Church and in society, the upcoming presidential election, and that he felt “compelled” to tell people that when we pause we hopefully begin to “wake up” and hear more clearly, in the context of the month of the Sacred Hearts of Jesus and Mary.

“A little silence goes a long way to help us cut through the noise of life, and all of our lives are noisy, and we can easily be so distracted by the noise that we’re really not hearing anything,” he says. “All of that combined really compelled me to share this message and to urge people to be consecrated to the Sacred Heart of Christ through the Immaculate Heart of the Blessed Virgin Mary.”

Strickland begins the second part with commentary on another part of the Sermon on the Mount, this time when Christ says that he came not to destroy the law but fulfill it. He draws attention to Christ’s remark that whosoever breaks one of the smallest commandments and teaches others to do so will be called least in the kingdom of heaven, noting that elsewhere Christ said that if someone should scandalize a little one it would be better for a millstone to be tied around that person’s neck.

The passage Strickland comments on, he says, should be “well known across the world, in every corner of the Church,” since it is presently being “violated.” He says it is as though we have elected to ignore the passage in question, yet we ignore it “at our peril.” Noting that he knows Christ but must know Him better, and that his own love of Christ is imperfect, Strickland adds that we are “challenged” to purify our love by being more open to His grace.

Turning his attention to the concept of fulfilling the law and prophets, Strickland considers how important Christ’s words were for the Israelites. While the Israelites knew God, they did not know Him as Trinity, as Christ revealed. Christ, he adds, is the Law Incarnate, and that if anyone would have come to abolish the law, it would have been Christ. As such, the passage reminds us of the fact, the bishop opines, that revelation begins with the Old Testament and is fulfilled in Christ, the Word Incarnate.

As Christ was present at the creation of the world, He remains present today, and thus we must “embrace that and understand that all of us have to lovingly but clearly reject the so-called new prophets of today that are telling us exactly to do what Jesus tells us we can’t: to dismantle the law and the prophets and say, ‘Oh we’ve come to a new understanding.’”

“That’s not what Christ says!” Strickland states. “If anyone had license to change the law and the prophets, the Son of God who is the Law Incarnate, but beautifully, He shows us that revelation is a cumulative revealing, until it reaches the point where Jesus Christ is standing in the world, talking to the scribes and pharisees, talking to Pontius Pilate, and He is Truth Incarnate, showing them the Truth.”

Later in the second part, Strickland discusses a statement by Cardinal Robert Sarah he retweeted in which Sarah warns that the African “academy” should take care not to be “contaminated” by the diseases the West’s spirit would “impose” on it, a spirit the cardinal said is “afraid of the search for truth.”

Something Strickland appreciated in Sarah’s remarks is that the cardinal referenced the “reality that we face.” “Too many are rejecting truth, because they’re compromised, and their corruption would be exposed if the truth really came out,” he says, believing that it is a “key part of what we’re dealing with.”

The reason why people are saying that the commandments and the law must change, Strickland maintains, is because they themselves are not living according to them. What they do is seek to change Christ and “the message.” As such, much of the rejection of the truth deals with an unwillingness to amend one’s life. Hence an unwillingness to hear or proclaim the truth. The truth, however, must be proclaimed and heard, as the truth sets us free.

Towards the end of the second part, Strickland remarks on the use of the world’s largest monstrance being used in Corpus Christi processions in reparation for atrocities committed during the Spanish Civil War.

Strickland says that something like that monstrance is needed in the United States, as all are required to make reparation for their sins, as well as for the sins of others and the sin that has a “stranglehold” on the Church. What people need now, the bishop believes, is a “Lenten feel for everything.”

“You can say now every day should have a penitential tone to it, because there is much to make reparation for,” he says.

To watch all previous episodes of The Bishop Strickland Show, click here to visit LifeSite’s Rumble page dedicated to The Bishop Strickland Show.