SLU Liturgy Resources

For many years, the Sunday Website at Saint Louis University has provided reflections on the Sunday readings for mass, as well as examples of music, prayer, and art, that have been a blessing to so many people around the world. This website has been the creative brainchild of Fr. John Foley, S.J., who has been the website's director. Together with Eleonore Stump, the coordinator for the website and a regular contributor to its reflections, Fr. Foley's leadership and his own weekly reflections on the readings have made the website theologically educational, spiritually fruitful, and powerfully moving.

But Fr. Foley's health has made it necessary for him to bring closure to the website as it has been under his leadership, and so the website as you have known it for so long will cease its publication in its usual mode with Easter 2026. 

Certainly it is always sad when something we have loved and used and benefited from comes to an end. But we are fortunate to have had Fr. Foley's version of the liturgy website as our companion for so many years. Now we can look forward to the new version of the website, and I am sure that it will be a blessing to us too.

The readings for the Cycle A Easter season, have selections from the Acts of the Apostles, the First Letter of Peter, and selections from the Gospel of John except for the Third Sunday and Ascension Sunday.

The selection from the Acts of the Apostles offers an image of the Christian life that results from the resurrection of Christ.  The new life was not simply a personal experience but had a social and communal impact. Verse 42 describes the foundation of the Christian community.  Attention was given to the Apostles' instruction. They had been the eyewitnesses to Jesus' life and teaching. It is through them that the authentic message continues.   

Secondly, there is a shared life.  Christ has shared life with us and so we are called to share life with one another.  While it did not become law in the Church, it has become a principle of solidarity in which we each have a concern for all other members of the Body of Christ.  This is expressed in prayer for one another, volunteering our time and energy to help others, and contributing donations to causes.  

Thirdly, the breaking of bread became a ritual expression of the Christian identity.  It is uncertain whether the reference has a singular focus on the Eucharist (the term is found in Luke 24 which we will read next week) or a broader reference to the life and vitality that was experienced in common meals in the early community while being persecuted from the outside.  Either way, they came to experience nurturing, vitality, and joy in gathering.

Fourthly, prayer was a central focus of the early Christians.  To be a part of the community, one knew the source of life as God and that this life was strengthened and renewed by connecting with God.  In Judaism, the great focus was on obedience to the law that God had given.  In the new life of the Risen Christ, the focus was on relating with God in Christ, who was accessible to each person and who invited us into an ever-deeper relationship.  This is one of the unique qualities of Christianity that distinguishes it from other religious traditions.

Jesus is still present in the community through those who are being added to the community each day, through those who are living a new way of life, and through the breaking of the bread.

The second reading from St. Peter is considered by scholars to be a baptismal homily that was given to help the newly baptized understand their new identity as Christians.  While the author has "seen" the risen Lord, the newly baptized have not "seen" Christ but come to know Christ through the testimony and life witness of others.  This same theme is picked up in the Gospel today.  The community also shares in the suffering of Christ.  Their newness of life should reassure them that they have, like Christ, something even greater awaiting them.  

The Gospel recounts Jesus' appearance to the disciples on Easter night, declaring peace to them, conveying the Holy Spirit to them, and authorizing them to forgive sins.  (This Sunday is also referred to as Divine Mercy Sunday because of this commission.)  The Gospel also presents Jesus appearing a second time to the apostles a week later, and this time Thomas is present.  (This Sunday also has been called Doubting Thomas Sunday.)  John’s original audience was struggling with where Jesus was.  Jesus is present to them through the Spirit and the continuation of his ministry.

The forgiveness of sins is also another unique aspect of Christianity.  Other traditions have prescribed activities or rituals that will earn a person forgiveness.  Christianity sees forgiveness as a gift.  It is God's gift to us that cannot be earned. It is a gift, and all we need to do is accept it.  Through Christ's words to the apostles, the Church is empowered to offer this gift to everyone who desires it.  God's great mercy is unlimited.

Thomas’ desire to see Christ and place his fingers in the nail marks, raises the issue that people have asked in every age.  Unless I can see, I will not believe it.  But even seeing does not always produce faith.  The Jewish leaders who rejected the miracle of the man born blind saw someone who was blind and could now see, but that did not bring them to faith.  Thomas comes to faith when Jesus addresses him.  The Word of God came into his mind and heart, and he believed.

Themes

• Resurrection
• Christian Community
• Jesus’ Presence today
• Forgiveness

Reflection Questions:

• What are the central aspects of Christianity that strike you in your experience of the Church today?  Are any of the items in the Acts of the Apostles part of your list?
• How has your experience of God changed in prayer?  Have you experienced a connection with God in prayer?
• When do you experience life and vitality in your life?  Do you recognize God present in these moments?  (St Ignatius of Loyola recommends looking for God in your experiences of life that lead to wholeness, and connectedness with others.)
• The risen Lord became real to Mary Magdalene and Thomas when He spoke to them. How have you heard the Lord in your life?  In which scriptures, did the voice of Christ speak to you or touch your spirit?

© Joseph Milner, 2026

So what was the trouble with Thomas?

His doubts have echoed through history. We often assume that he was just a tough guy who had trouble trusting. But it would help you and me in our own doubts if we could understand more about this man who wouldn’t believe the resurrection.

Doubting Thomas.

First, who was he? The Aramaic name Te'oma (Thomas) meant twin, and he was also called Didymus, which meant the same thing in Greek, twin. So he probably was an actual twin.

What else?

Well, he might have been a bit glum. For instance, he gave a practical but gloomy response when Jesus’ wanted to go back to Judea after Lazarus died. None of the disciples wanted to return because they knew the Jewish leaders had tried to stone Jesus there (John 10:24-30). Jesus gave them some high-minded talk about what the disciples might learn by going, but Thomas ignored these reasons and said to the others, “Alright, let us also go die with him.” A dour and cynical statement (John 11:16).*

Here Thomas reminds me a bit of Joe Btfsplk, the famous Al Capp cartoon character who walked around with a perpetually dark rain cloud over his head!

Just before the passion Jesus had said, “Where I am going you know the way.” This was a spiritual statement about going to the Father, but Thomas took it literally. “Master, we do not [even] know where you are going; how can we know the way?” (John 14:3-6). Again, a very matter-of-fact question, but with an emotional backdrop. “You haven’t even told us anything! Are you going to leave us like this?”

Thomas loved Jesus doggedly but moped about the dangerous situations Jesus was always walking right into. Thomas' practical nature looked frankly at these and drew out the pessimistic conclusion. He had twin emotions, as his name implies. Love and loss.

Is it any wonder, then, that in this Sunday’s Gospel Thomas laid down his requirements for believing in the resurrection? His worst misgivings had come true on the cross: Jesus actually was killed. To deal with his sorrow Thomas resolved to accept the death stolidly, no matter what it felt like. He would never slip and talk about his departed friend in the present tense, as people sometimes do when a beloved friend has died. Thomas the pragmatic knew that beloved Jesus was dead and gone.

Suddenly the apostles reversed the field.

“Didymus, Jesus is alive! When the doors were locked, suddenly he stood there among us!

He talked to us!"

No. No. Thomas’ heart could not accept it. Too much was at stake.

Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands
and put my finger into the nail marks
and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.
This is exactly in character for Thomas/Didymus. The tough words are really a protection for a heart that would break in half if given still another false hope. “The only way I would believe such nonsense is if you give me very practical proof.”

Jesus gave it. Fingers in nail marks. Hand into side.

In spite of his cynicism, Thomas had always belonged to Jesus. When he got the practical proof he needed, he sank to the ground.

“My Lord and my God.”

What a great story for Eastertide.

Why does God stay hidden? Why doesn’t God reveal himself so concretely and physically that no one could doubt his existence?

I like Karl Rahner’s perspective on this. God isn’t hidden, he says, we just don’t have the eyes to see God because our eyes aren’t attuned to that kind of reality: “We are just discovering today that one cannot picture God to oneself in an image that has been carved out of the wood of the world. This experience is not the genesis of atheism, but the discovery that the world is not God.”

We struggle with doubt because we can’t picture God’s existence, imagine God’s reality, or feel God’s presence in our normal ways. At a certain point, our minds, imaginations, and hearts simply run out of gas, out of room, out of feeling, and leave us dry, unable to nail down the reality of God the way we’re used to nailing down most everything else. The reality of God is elusive to our conscious minds and hearts because we can’t picture, imagine, or feel God in the usual way we do these things.

Why is that? Rahner’s insight provides a clue: we struggle with faith because the world is not God and we can’t walk around the landscape of spirit in the same way as we stroll around in this world. Why not? Precisely because God and the other world are spirit and we are being invited into a reality whose hugeness is beyond conception, whose silence is beyond language, and whose reality is beyond the physical and all that we can see, touch, taste, smell, and feel in the normal way. God is life, light, love, energy, vastness, and simplicity beyond our categories. God has a different metaphysics.

Thus, it’s easy to have doubts about God’s existence, and not just if we are young and still over-enthralled by the reality of this world, its stunning beauty, the promises it dangles before us, and its overpowering physical character. In a world where the physical defines everything, it can be difficult to believe in anything else.

But that struggle, ironically, also afflicts those who are mature in faith, in a more painful way, in fact. It was Jesus, after all, not some wayward youth who cried out: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me!” and who cautioned us to pray daily so as “not to be put to the test.” It was this test exactly that Jesus had in mind. What is “the test”?

The classical mystics speak of two “dark nights of the soul,” two painful, purifying periods of life we must all undergo. The first of these it calls “the night of the senses.” This darkness, they tell us, refers to a period of painful trial which helps purify our motivation so as to make us less selfish. But these same mystics assure us that, during this first dark night, we are given consolation in our faith. God feels near. The feeling is like that of taking a bitter-tasting medicine that we know will make us better.

The second night, “the night of the spirit,” is much more “the test” to which the Lord’s Prayer refers. What happens here is that God seemingly disappears. All our old securities in faith dissolve and all efforts to reground ourselves through former faith-practices come up dry. God seems unreal to our heads and hearts, even as, in the depth of our being, something else is happening which belies what’s happening on the surface, namely, even as our thoughts and feelings about God seem empty, we are, in our more important decisions and values, riveting ourselves ever more firmly to God and the other world. Such are the dynamics of faith. Sometimes what feels like doubt and atheism is the beginning of real belief.

Nicholas Lash, professor of divinity at Cambridge, once made this comment about our struggle:

… We need do no more than notice that most of our contemporaries still find it “obvious” that atheism is not only possible, but widespread and that, both intellectually and ethically, it has much to commend it. This view might be plausible if being an atheist were a matter of not believing that there exists “a person without a body” who is “eternal, free, able to do anything, knows everything” and is “the proper object of human worship and obedience, the creator and sustainer of the universe.” If, however, by “God” we mean the mystery, announced in Christ, breathing all things out of nothing into peace, then all things have to do with God in every move and fragment of their being, whether they notice this and suppose it to be so or not. Atheism, if it means deciding not to have anything to do with God, is thus self-contradictory and, if successful, self-destructive.

Lash isn’t saying that a personal God doesn’t exist, but that God’s person and being are of a different order, beyond the wood of this world, and that over-powering light can feel like darkness.

Jesus had been abandoned by his disciples at the time of his death. One of them had turned him over to the authorities. Another had denied he even knew Jesus. The others ran away, apparently in fear and horror.

That same fear still gripped the disciples as they stayed behind locked doors. The risen Jesus suddenly appears among them, and there is not a word about their betrayal, denial and abandonment.

“Peace be with you,” he says, as though nothing had ever happened. They look at his wounds, and he repeats his remarkable greeting: “Peace be with you.”

If only we could follow in the footsteps of Christ and wish peace to everyone! If only we could forgive as he forgave! Where would be the wars? the discrimination? the hatred? the death penalty? They would go the way of death itself, conquered by the resurrection.

Jesus assures us that we have received the Holy Spirit. We have the power to release others of their wrongs against us, just as we have the power to keep them and ourselves bound. Our Easter faith that we have “become a new creation” should strengthen our resolve to forgive as Christ forgave.

We urge our brothers and sisters in Christ to remember the teaching of Jesus, who called us to be reconciled with those who have injured us and to pray for forgiveness for our sins “as we forgive those who have sinned against us.”

We call on you to contemplate the crucified Christ, who set us the supreme example of forgiveness and of the triumph of compassionate love.

U.S. Bishops, Statement on Capital Punishment, 1980:23.

As you know, just about everything these days comes with a disclaimer of some sort. So you click on something on the web, and you're told that this website uses cookies, or you see an ad for some medication, and you're told all of the horrible things that can happen if you take it. So, the reason I'm saying this is this homily comes with a warning. To explain the warning, I have to tell you a secret, so please, can I count on you not to tell anybody about this? This is very confidential. It's a very embarrassing part of my life. So… The first time I preached on a second Sunday after Easter and this Gospel was in 1979. And I had been ordained in 1978, so this was my first Easter and the first time I had preached on it. And the setting was, I was still studying theology at our theology school in Berkeley, Jesuit School of Theology in Berkeley. And back then, they had a big Sunday Mass. And so, almost all of the students the faculty came, and this was Berkeley, so just about anybody that wandered by came in, too. Now… So, I preached on this gospel. So, a few days later, I learned… I had gotten into trouble. And the trouble was that The professor who taught John, who's taught the Gospel of John and the readings of John, used my homily as an example books in class of how not to preach on the gospel of John. So, you're probably sitting there thinking, so we're going to get this awful homily from 1979, it's going to be very stale, and is it going to be all about Jimmy Carter and inflation? No. To be honest, I don't really remember what I said back then, but it must have been pretty bad. I hope I've improved in the 44 years since. But today's gospel has many things going, and there's no way that I can cover all of them and get us out sometime before tomorrow. So, I'm just going to narrow the focus, if you don't mind.

So … you know, Jesus comes in, and for the first time, and gives the Holy Spirit to all of the disciples but Thomas, and then Thomas comes in. If you remember a few chapters earlier in John, when Jesus says to the disciples on the … on learning of the death of Lazarus, let us go up to Jerusalem, Thomas' remark is, yes, let us go and die with them. So … People interpret this differently, perhaps, but to me, it sounds like he may not be terribly optimistic just by temperament. And, so here he is now, and he's not going to be easily convinced.

I think there are two problems, and this is not just me, these are commentators on the gospel, with Thomas' attitudes. The first is by insisting that he actually put his hands in the wounds, he's focusing on the physical resurrection of Jesus. And the whole point by Jesus giving the Spirit is, “That's not the point. I'm not gonna be here physically. I'm going to be here through the Spirit.” It's going to be a different kind of presence. More about that in a minute.

But the other problem is, he doesn't believe his brother disciples, apostles. He doesn't take their word. Now, all of us come to faith because of other people, don't we? Whether it's our parents who had us baptized, or some example. But we stay in the faith because of what we see. It's not just the spoken word, it's the living word that draws us on. And by living word, I mean the way we see people act. And I think the church very brilliantly gives us a clue on what this means in that first reading, where we see the idealized community of disciples, of Christians, in Acts. Now, we know that's an ideal picture, and we know from the rest of Acts, there were a lot of problems in the community, but the bottom line is, it was the way they dealt with each other and with everyone else that drew people to them.

And I think this is very important to us, because I think the really important line in this Gospel is one that comes to us directly. Now, we've all seen movies or plays where one of the characters will speak directly to the audience, or read a book where the author says, and now, dear reader, and makes a point.

And we see that in today's Gospel, but we are spoken to not by an author, but by Jesus himself. When he says, Blessed are those who have not seen, and have believed. That's us. That's you. That's me. And … What are the implications of this? Well, just as he set forth the disciples. We too, we have that same spirit. We are sent forth. We today are the presence of Jesus. Whether we like it or not. Whether we feel we're up to it or not, it's real.

I think the way that we act is something very simple, and something we can control. You know, people will say, well, you tell me that, but I have all of these bad thoughts, I get angry and upset. Well, remember. It's the decisions you make and the actions you do that you are accountable for. So you can have all kinds of bad thoughts, but what do you decide to do? How do you decide to treat people? How do you decide to treat yourself?

For many years, I worked in the formation of Jesuits, and I'm still called upon every now and then to give a little bit of advice, and I pass on the advice I got when I first started teaching. A wise person said to me, you know. These students will remember very little of what you tell them and teach them. They will never forget how you treat them. And I think that is sort of at the crux of how we show Jesus to the world.

Today is a Sunday that also celebrates the mercy of God through Jesus. And so, I think it's important that in treating others, we not forget to be merciful to ourselves as well. That we need not get discouraged. It's important not to get discouraged. We feel like we try and try again, but we can't get discouraged because God never gets discouraged in forgiving us. That mercy is always there, waiting for us, begging for us. The hard thing for us to believe is God really wants to be with us. It's not something we have to make happen. We don't go up to God. God has come down to us and is with us.

So, as we go forth today, Let us remember that true Jesus does not have hands and feet in the world today.

But we do.

And that's our goal.

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases:

• Jesus came
• Receive the Holy Spirit
• Unless I see ... I will not believe
• Jesus came
• have not seen and have believed

To the point: The basic issue in this gospel story is coming to believe that Jesus is risen and alive. What is made clear is that believing is not dependent on physical contact with Jesus (Thomas makes his profession of faith without touching Jesus), but coming to believe does depend on personal encounter. Authentic encounter between persons only happens through mutual self-giving: Jesus’ self-giving is shown through his gift of the Holy Spirit to us; our self-giving is shown when we open ourselves to receive that Spirit. Coming to believe more deeply that Jesus is risen and alive is the work of the Spirit within and among us. What a Gift!

Connecting the Gospel …

…to First Reading: In the Gospel Jesus extols those who come to believe that he has risen even though they have not seen him. In the first reading Peter also extols those who have not seen, yet still love and believe in Jesus. Belief in Jesus’ risen Life elicits “indescribable and glorious joy.” So who would not want to believe?

… to experience: We don’t come to belief through proofs; we come to belief through the attestation of others whom we trust. The same is true of our belief in the risen Jesus. We have not seen him, but we do encounter him and come to believe in him through the words and actions of others.

Copyright 2014 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota.
All rights reserved.
Used by permission from Liturgical Press, St. Johns Abbey, P.O. Box 7500 Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500

The Trying of Faith

“More precious than passing splendor.” (Pt 1:7)

The early Easter church of faith worked wonders. These believers performed signs, prayed, shared everything, heaped generosity, worked hard every day, praised God, and won new recruits. They even got along with each other, judging from the accounts of the early parts of Acts. Later chapters, however, prove that the long labor of faith was only beginning. It was not all sweetness and light.

No doubt it is those rosy pictures of the first Christians that dominate our minds when we think that, if we were really a people of faith, everything would be hunky-dory. We “People of God” would behave and perform far better than we seem to be doing. We would also be more impressive, “winning the approval of all” as the early church did. Well, we are not getting much approval—neither from the world around us nor from each other.

The same gap between expectation and performance appears in our individual personal lives. One would think that we’d be doing marvels if we really had faith. There would not be so much confusion in our lives. We would not be contentious. We would pray more and hurt less. We would not be so haunted by doubts. We would be happy. We’d be nicer. Life would not be so daunting.

We presume that faith, like love, should make things easy, even effortless. We imagine that if we really believed in and loved God, we would, in the words of the First Letter of Peter, “rejoice with inexpressible joy” (1 Pt 1:8). Love is supposed to feel good, at least so say the songs. And you’d think that faith would make things a little less arduous and more fulfilling.

I have now begun to think otherwise. The philosopher Immanuel Kant helped change my mind. His view of life is not very fashionable today, but that may be because we are in such a mess. We think something is drastically wrong if we feel unhappy or unfulfilled. Kant, on the other hand, thought that feeling good or being fulfilled had little or nothing to do with ethics and moral goodness.

What counted for Kant was whether we were doing what we knew was right. Ease and inclination had nothing to do with it. After all, what really tests and shows the moral character of a person? Telling the truth when it is fulfilling and easy, or when it is difficult and daring? Where is the greater moral worth to be found? In a faithful spouse who enjoys being faithful, or in a faithful spouse who finds it difficult?

I don’t mean to imply, even if Kant may have, that a thing is good only if it is painful. But there is a wisdom in seeing that there is more to goodness, love, and faith than the feeling of success or fulfillment that may accompany them.

Perhaps a parent’s greatest love for a child appears more in the hard times than the happy times. Perhaps a friend’s trust in me is more deeply felt when inclination is otherwise than when it seems effortless.

What I am getting at is this: admittedly, the delight, the “inexpressible joy,” is part of Easter faith. But our faith in the risen Lord is revealed in sad and troubling moments as well.

The Twelve, remember, were locked in. They were in fear; there was a lack of peace; perhaps there was confusion, pain, and division. It is into that unsettled disquiet that Jesus came. Even then the Apostles were not able to experience fully the joy of his presence without entering the mystery of his wounds. Once they saw his hands and side, the remnants of pain and sorrow, they could rejoice.

The experience of faith is not the absence of pain or sorrow or loss. It is, rather, the bearing of pain or sorrow in faith. Faith does not take away the wounds; it transforms them. In faith, flaws are not obliterated; they are refined and purified.

Thomas, still hanging around a community of faith, discovers Christ in his unbelief. Although they kept telling Thomas— it went on for a week — that Jesus had risen, he refused to believe. “I’ll not believe” without entering the wounds. How right he was. Faith must be found as much in the wounds of life as in the glories. And from the wounds a faith might most amazingly emerge. “My Lord and my God,” that skeptic is reported to have said.

There is a subtext to Jesus’ comment that while Thomas became a believer in the seeing, those who do not have the joy of seeing offer something far more splendid in their act of sightless faith. We are told that Jesus did other signs. The ones scripture records are meant to help us believe that Jesus is the Messiah. That belief, that faith, is finally felt and expressed not in sheer joy alone, but in arduous trial, in the plague of worry or doubt, in the grip of fear. These lacks, these wounds, these trials make faith shine all the more and the hearts that hold such faith more precious than gold.

  “Through your faith, God’s power will guard you. ... This is a cause for great joy, even though you may for a short time have to bear being plagued by all sorts of trials; so that, when Jesus is revealed, your faith will have been tested and proved like gold—only it is more precious than gold, which is corruptible even though it bears testing by fire.”

 

Copyright © 1997 by John F. Kavanaugh. All rights reserved. Used by permission from Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545-0308

The Word Embodied: Meditations on the Sunday Scriptures
Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York (1998), pp. 48-51.

A common literary form appears throughout the Bible to describe the divine vocation of a great patriarch or prophet who is called to be the leader of God’s people. It can be found in the vocation stories of Moses (Ex 3:4-4:9); Gideon (Jg 6:11-36); Jeremiah (Jer 1:1-10); and Jesus’ disciples (Mt 28:16-20; Lk 24:33-53; Jn 20:19-27; Jn 21:1-19).

The complete form has five elements which can be identified in today’s passage as follows.

Introduction

The setting for Jesus’ appearance to commission the disciples is a house with locked doors in which the Eleven are gathered.

In Jesus’ nosey Mediterranean society, people suspect that those who gather behind locked doors are up to no good. Unlocked doors allow the children, the official “spies” or “snoops” in the village, to wander in and out of homes at will, keeping everyone on the up and up.

For this reason, John notes that the Eleven were hiding nothing but were rather protecting themselves against attacks from Judeans who did not believe in Jesus.

This observation is truer of John’s time (especially after 90 CE) than of Jesus’ time. The locked doors have no relationship to Jesus’ ability to penetrate them without opening them.

Confrontation, Reaction, Reassurance

The sudden appearance of the risen Jesus (confrontation) startles the disciples (reaction), requiring that Jesus set them at ease: “Peace be with you!” (reassurance).

Commission

Three points characterize this commissioning ceremony: (1) the commission is formal (“As the Father has sent me, so I send you” Jn 20:21); (2) they are to preach repentance and forgive sins (Jn 20:22-23); and (3) the commission is confirmed by Jesus’ sending of the Holy Spirit (Jn 20:22).

Objection

It falls to Thomas rather than the newly commissioned apostles to raise an objection. He implies that the apostles may have suffered hallucination, an alternative state of consciousness.

He expresses strong doubt about the reality of the risen Jesus. His demand to stick his fingers into the wounds of Jesus in the story created about him by John is well known.

Reassurance, Sign

Ordinarily, deities would be miffed by such objections, but in the heavenly commissions reported in the Bible the divine response is very different.

In this story, Jesus returns once again to the disciples chiefly to reassure Thomas, and through him all followers who experience difficulty believing without seeing.

The sign is the invitation to Thomas to stick his fingers in the wounds as he wished (Jn 20:27). Jesus’ gesture works; Thomas is convinced.

Modern Western believers have become rather familiar with “literary forms” in the Bible over the past twenty-five years. Parable stories, healing stories, the letters of Paul—all these and more are reported in the Bible in stock, stereotypical (i.e., unchanging) forms.

After learning about these many forms and their structure, believers (and often even preachers) say: “So what? What does this mean in the real world?”

Today’s Gospel describes how Jesus commissioned his followers to bring new members into God’s covenant community. He had done this earlier in the farewell discourse (Jn 13:20; Jn 17:18).

Careful study of the literary form and its structure convinces scholars that the commission is addressed to all disciples and is not limited just to the Eleven. All believers are commissioned to bring new members into the community.

How does each one of us respond to this commission?

 

John J. Pilch was a biblical scholar and facilitator of parish renewals.
Liturgical Press has published 14 books by Pilch exploring the cultural world of the Bible.
Go to Liturgical Press to find out more.

Copyright © 1995 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, MN. All rights reserved. Used by permission from The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321

The complete text of the above article can be found in:
The Cultural World of Jesus, Sunday by Sunday, Cycle A

John J. Pilch. The Liturgical Press. 1995. pp. 70-74.

After eight days Jesus came in and stood among them.

By his miraculous entry through closed doors Christ proved to his disciples that by nature he was God and also that he was none other than their former companion.

By showing them his side and the marks of the nails, he convinced them beyond a doubt that he had raised the temple of his body, the very body that had hung upon the cross.

He had destroyed death’s power over the flesh, for as God, he was life itself.

Because of the importance he attached to making his disciples believe in the resurrection of the body, and in order to prevent them from thinking that the body he now possessed was different from that in which he had suffered death upon the cross, he willed to appear to them as he had been before, even though the time had now come for his body to be clothed in a supernatural glory such as no words could possibly describe.

The peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds. We have only to recall Christ’s transfiguration on the mountain in the presence of his holy disciples, to realize that mortal eyes could not have endured the glory of his sacred body had he chosen to reveal it before ascending to the Father.

Saint Matthew describes how Jesus went up the mountain with Peter, James, and John, and how he was transfigured before them. His face shone like lightning and his clothes became white as snow. But they were unable to endure the sight and fell prostrate on the ground.

And so, before allowing the glory that belonged to it by every right to transfigure the temple of his body, our Lord Jesus Christ in his wisdom appeared to his disciples in the form that they had known. He wished them to believe that he had risen from the dead in the very body that he had received from the blessed Virgin, and in which he had suffered crucifixion and death, as the Scriptures had foretold. Death’s power was over the body alone, and it was from the body that it was banished.

If it was not Christ’s dead body that rose again, how was death conquered, how was the power of corruption destroyed?

It could not have been destroyed by the death of a created spirit, of a soul, of an angel, or even of the Word of God himself. Since death held sway only over what was corruptible by nature, it was in this corruptible nature that the power of the resurrection had to show itself in order to end death’s tyranny.

When Christ greeted his holy disciples with the words: peace be with you, by peace he meant himself, for Christ’s presence always brings tranquility of soul.

This is the grace Saint Paul desired for believers when he wrote: the peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, will guard your hearts and minds.

The peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, is in fact the Spirit of Christ, who fills those who share in him with every blessing. 
 

Commentary on Saint John’s Gospel 12: p. 74, 704-705

 

Cyril of Alexandria (d.444) succeeded his uncle Theophilus as patriarch in 412. Until 428 the pen of this brilliant theologian was employed in exegesis and polemics against the Arians; after that date it was devoted almost entirely to refuting the Nestorian heresy.

The teaching of Nestorius was condemned in 431 by the Council of Ephesus at which Cyril presided, and Mary’s title, Mother of God, was solemnly recognized.

The incarnation is central to Cyril’s theology. Only if Christ is consubstantial with the Father and with us can he save us, for the meeting ground between God and ourselves is the flesh of Christ. Through our kinship with Christ, the Word made flesh, we become children of God, and share in the filial relation of the Son with the Father.

 

Edith Barnecut, OSB, a consultant for the International Committee for English in the Liturgy, was responsible for the final version of many of the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours.

Copyright © 1992, New City Press.
All Rights Reserved.

Journey with the Fathers
Commentaries on the Sunday Gospels - Year A, pp. 44-45.
To purchase or learn more about
this published work and its companion volumes,
go to New City Press

Being Saved

Faith in the resurrection of Jesus Christ is much more than simply believing in an amazing fact. Each of this Sunday's readings reminds us that belief in Jesus' resurrection is to accept and participate in a relationship that can enliven every part of our lives—now and forever.

John's Gospel may speak of Jesus appearing simply to “the disciples,” unnumbered and unnamed, to help us later readers include ourselves in the picture. To enable those disciples to be sent as Jesus was sent, Jesus breathed on them and said, “Receive the holy Spirit.” When we recall that this remarkable action is occurring near the end of a book that began with the words, “In the beginning,” it is not hard to see in this breathing an allusion to the creation of Adam.

Easter enables a new creation. A frightened people are empowered to live out Jesus' mission of sharing the life of God with others through their own self-giving, in imitation of Jesus. If the beatitude, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed,” is not clear enough for us, the author's own statement of purpose is crystal clear: “These [signs] are written that you may [come to] believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name” (Gospel).

If we want a concrete illustration of what “life in his name” entails, we need look no further than the cameo picture that Luke provides in today's first reading from Acts. Although vowed religious communities have, through the centuries, taken this summary as a model for their community life, the context of this passage in Acts suggests that Luke intends this to be a portrait of Christian community generally.

The details are worth pondering.

They devoted themselves to the teaching [didache] of the apostles, to the communal life [koinonia], to the breaking of the bread and to the prayers. We recognize here the perennial ingredients of Church life. The apostolic “teaching” would, no doubt, include the sayings of Jesus and the interpretations of his life by way of texts from the Hebrew Scriptures. The “communal life” includes the generous sharing of possessions mentioned later in this description. The “breaking of the bread” seems to be, as in the Emmaus account in Luke’s Gospel (Luke 24), the celebration of the Lord's Supper. And “the prayers” likely include continued engagement in the Temple liturgy.

Awe [phobos] came upon everyone. Some translations interpret this as a description of outsiders’ response to the apostolic “wonders and signs,” but the statement can just as easily be taken as a description of the community itself. If so, it likely refers to that fear of God which the Hebrew Scriptures name as the beginning of wisdom. Belief in the resurrection of Jesus, repentance, baptism, and the gift of the Holy Spirit (First Reading) have revived in these pious Jews an awe for the presence and power of the Creator.

And many wonders and signs were done through the apostles. “Wonders and signs” (with its peculiar reversal of the usual order “signs and wonders”) echoes the wonders and signs mentioned in the quotation from Joel, applied to Jesus' healing actions in Peter's Pentecost speech (1Pet 2:19, 22). By using the same phrase here, Luke underscores the fact that the apostles continue the divinely empowered ministry of Jesus (soon to be illustrated by the healing of the lame man through Peter and John [Acts 3:1]).

All were together who believed and had all things in common; they would sell their property and possessions and divide them among all according to each one's need. This spells out part of what is meant by the earlier mention of communal life. The very phrasing suggests that such sharing of goods is a spontaneous expression of the Easter faith. When one takes the Creator personally, one uses creatures differently and more generously.

Every day they devoted themselves to meeting together in the temple area and to breaking bread in their homes. This puts us in touch with the realities that the Jerusalem Christian community still saw themselves as Jews very much in contact with their Israelite tradition and community, and that their own homes served as the place for the Christian breaking of the bread. Strikingly, Luke can use the descriptive word sozomenoi—“those who were being saved”—to describe new Christians.

Fr. Hamm was professor of the New Testament at Creighton University in Omaha. He published articles in The Catholic Biblical Quarterly, The Journal Of Biblical Literature, Biblica, The Journal for the Study of the New Testament, America, Church; and a number of encyclopedia entries, as well as the book, The Beatitudes in Context (Glazier, 1989), and three other books.

Copyright © 2001, Dennis Hamm, S.J. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.

Reading I: Acts 2:42-47

Readings from the Acts of the Apostles take the place of readings from the Old Testament during the Easter season in series A, B, and C. Such readings are appropriate because they show the continuing work of the risen Christ in his Church.

Luke, by defining his first volume as a record of all that Jesus began to do and to teach (Acts 1:1), implies that his second volume covers what Jesus continued to do and teach.

Verse 42 is a succinct characterization of the life of the apostolic church. Here we see the necessary signs of the presence of the church. Where these signs are, there the church is.

(1) The Apostles’ Teaching. The sharp distinction between didache (teaching) and kerygma (preaching) was probably overdrawn.

Certainly the gospel has to be proclaimed in a different way to outsiders (see the kerygmatic speeches of Acts) from the way it is proclaimed in the ongoing life of the church. But the teaching here must include the continued preaching of the Gospel to the already existing church, a function that is necessary to keep the church in being as a church.

In the interest of such teaching, the sayings of Jesus and incidents from his life would have to be remembered and be given shape, and so the gospel tradition would gradually have evolved.

(2) Fellowship. The Greek word used in verse 42 is koinonia, which means common life, a shared life.

In the Christian community this is based on the sharing of the risen Christ’s life with his people—what Paul in 2 Cor 13:14 calls the koinonia of the Spirit, and what the Johannine writer means when he speaks of his readers as having fellowship “with us,” that is, with those who have seen the risen Christ.

But this vertical dimension of koinonia produces a horizontal dimension. The early Christians, we are told, “had all things in common,” the so-called early Christian communism described in the ensuing verses.

Of course, such communism was not based on any economic doctrine but was a spontaneous expression of Christian agape, necessitated in any case by the removal of the Galilean fisherfolk to the capital.

Nor can it have been so general as Luke suggests in his idealized picture (“all who believed”), for when he speaks of Barnabas in Acts 4:36-37, he seems to imply that there was something exceptional in what he did. 

This shows that the so-called communism was not meant as law for the church for all time.

In Paul’s churches it took the form of the collection for the Jerusalem church. Nonetheless, there must be some concrete expression of the horizontal dimension of koinonia as an essential mark of the church.

(3) The Breaking of the Bread. Scholars have debated whether this is a reference to the Eucharist or not.

If we mean the Eucharist as it later developed (by the time of Paul, for example, when the backward- and forward-looking elements combined), it would be an anachronism to call it such.

But Acts 2:46 expands on the brief summary of Acts 2:42 to show that this daily meal had a distinctly sacral character. There we read that they took their food “with glad and generous hearts.”

The Greek word (agalliasis) represented by the English adjective “glad” is a noun meaning exuberant joy at the coming of the Messiah (so Bultmann).

This shows that the daily meal was an anticipation of the messianic banquet, a partial fulfillment of the Lord’s promise at the Last Supper that he would eat and drink with his disciples in the consummated kingdom of God.

(4) The Prayers. This rather unspecific term probably refers to participation in the hours of prayer of Jewish devotion. It is curious to find the earliest Christians participating in the prayers of the Jewish Temple.

Stephen would later have something to say about that, and then the breach between Christianity and Judaism would be widened.

The observance of daily hours of prayer, originally a devout practice of individuals, was eventually developed into the monastic office. A private prayer life is clearly one of the marks of the Christian community.
One more comment. This summary does not mention baptism as one of the signs of the church’s presence. There is an oblique reference to it in the final sentence of our reading: “And the Lord added to their number day by day those who were being saved.”

Baptism was the means by which this “addition” was effected. The phraseology tells us much about early christian thinking on baptism.

Baptism is an act through which God works (note the “divine” passive), bringing the convert into an already existing community of those who are on the way to final salvation. One does not become a member of the church as a result of individual decisions to get together after an individual experience of salvation.

 
Responsorial Psalm: 118:2-4, 13-15, 22-24

(This is a slightly different selection of verses from the same psalm that was used on Easter Sunday.)

Psalm 118, with its reference to the stone rejected and made the headstone of the comer, was perhaps the earliest psalm that the primitive community applied to the death and resurrection of Christ. It was the basic Old Testament text for the “no-yes” interpretation of the earliest kerygma.

 
Reading II: 1 Peter 1:3-9

It is widely believed among contemporary New Testament scholars that 1 Peter is based on an Easter baptismal homily. Some even think that it is a baptismal liturgy, but that is probably going a little too far.

Through their baptismal identification with Christ’s death and resurrection, Christians have experienced a new birth. But the author warns his readers that this new life is not yet completely realized.

They are being guarded for a salvation to be revealed in the last time, and meanwhile they may have to face various trials and have their faith tested in the fire of persecution.

Speaking with apostolic authority, that is, as one whose faith is grounded on his having “seen” the risen Lord, the author distinguishes himself from his hearers, who depend for their faith on the eyewitness of others because they have “not seen.” This adumbrates a theme that is to be developed in the story of Thomas in the gospel that follows.

 
Gospel: John 20:19-31

This is the traditional Gospel of “Low” Sunday. The author is here wrestling with what became a real problem in the post-apostolic church: How could one believe in the risen Lord without the benefit of a resurrection appearance? The answer is that even seeing, as in the case of Thomas, is no guarantee of faith. 

For Thomas, faith came by hearing the word of the risen one addressing him personally. For those who come after, faith comes through hearing the Word of God, through hearing the risen one speak through his apostolic messengers.

 

Copyright © 1984 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission from The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321

• For the Church: that we may offer faithful witness to Christ by being united in mind and spirit as we worship, form a community, and serve the needs of others
• For a spirit of reverence: that as we break the bread and share the cup, we may recognize more fully the Risen Lord in our midst
• For all Christians: that we who have received the Spirit, may generously participate in the mission which Christ entrusted to the Church
• For Christian unity: that by devoting ourselves to listening to the Scriptures and prayer, we may promote greater unity and cooperation within the Body of Christ
• For all who struggle with faith: that the Word of God may liberate their hearts and open them to a relationship with God
• For the grace to forgive: that flowing from God’s forgiveness of us, we may forgive those who have harmed or wronged us
• For all confessors: that God will give them wisdom to encourage penitents and help them to be signs of God’s love and mercy
• For all who are bound by sinfulness: that God may break their bonds and open a new path of life that reveals love, kindness, and mercy to them
• For all who are frightened: that Christ will give them peace, bring light into their darkness, and hope for tomorrow
• For all who are ill: that Christ’s new life may bring strength and healing to all who are ill, recovering from surgery, advancing in age
• For greater appreciation of creation: that we may experience God’s gift of new life in the flowering of creation and the renewal of life around us
• For peace: that Christ’s gift of peace may settle in the hearts of all the human family and turn us away from war, violence, and revenge

© Joseph Milner, 2026

Sinners yet Loved

Suppose you and I are walking along in the countryside, and a stranger starts to stroll along with us.

  “What are you discussing as you walk along?” he asks? We stop, dejected.

One of us, maybe you, says to him in reply, “are you the only person in the world who does not know of the things that have taken place during these years and these centuries?”

He replies, “What sort of things?”

You say, “we had promised to continue Christ’s works, to revere his presence, to preserve his love and to let it overflow through us to everyone.” You stare at the ground. “But now the Church is falling apart. So much is happening, including betrayal of the Church's mission.”

  “Betrayal?” the stranger says.

  “Yes. We found out that some of our own priests and even some Bishops have gone against the very mission they were sent to preach. And churches are closing in all the cities, and dioceses are going bankrupt! And hardly anyone is entering the priesthood now, so how are we going to have the sacraments?”

I gesture to you with a “calm down” motion, but you go right on talking.

  “We have crucified Christ all over again! Oh, we were hoping that he would make the whole world come right!”

  “How slow of heart you are to believe all that the prophets spoke,” he says quietly. “Is it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things even today and so enter into his glory?”

  “What do you mean?” you stutter. “Why should he suffer? And worse, why would he let all these horrors happen, in Ukraine and the South and, and, and, and ... ”

He raises his hand. He begins to tell us everything that refers to himself in the scriptures, beginning with Moses and all the prophets. His voice is very kind. He shows how God had endlessly sought a loving relationship with his people, and how these would agree for a while but then turn their backs and run away. Battles and wars, belief and unbelief, rich versus poor and sick, the very ones who are aching for love.

He tells us that there is only one way the human heart could say Yes to God and mean it.

One human being had to do it on behalf of us all, one who was human to the core and who could not refuse to remember God's love, even in the midst of mindless suffering and death. This one would be with the troubled people of the world, be with them in every pain and also every joy of their lives. God's love, he said, is stronger than death.

The stranger goes on with us and stays with us. He walks with human beings now, with a love so deep that we can always count on it, even if we are sinners. It is a love which strengthens us and sends us out. It is God's love.

You are calm now as we walk, and I am too. Maybe the resurrection did happen, you whisper to me so that the stranger cannot hear it. We both nod. We have recognized him. We see him in the breaking of the bread, but also and astoundingly in the breaking bones of the world.

 

Copyright © 2023, John B. Foley, S.J. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.

Every dream eventually gets crucified.

How? By time, circumstance, jealousy, and that curious, perverse dictate, somehow innate within the order of things, that insures that there is always someone or something that cannot leave well enough alone, but, for reasons of its own, must hunt down and strike what is good. The good will always be envied, hated, pursued, smudged, killed. That's true even of dreams. Something there is that needs a crucifixion. Every body of Christ inevitably suffers the same fate as Jesus. There's no smooth ride for what's whole, good, true, or beautiful.

But that's only half the equation, the bad half. What's also true, what the resurrection teaches, is that, while nothing that is of God can avoid crucifixion, no body of Christ never stays in the tomb for long either. God always rolls back the stone and, soon enough, new life bursts forth and we see why that original life had to be crucified. (“Wasn't it necessary that the Christ should so have to suffer and die?”) Resurrection follows crucifixion. Every crucified body will rise again.

But where do we meet the resurrection? Where does the resurrected Christ meet us?

Scripture is subtle, but clear. Where can we expect to meet the resurrected Christ after a crucifixion? The gospel tells us that, on the morning of the resurrection, the women-followers of Jesus, the midwives of hope, set out for the tomb of Jesus, carrying spices, intending to anoint and embalm the dead body. Well-intentioned, but misguided, what they find is not a dead body, but by an empty tomb and an angel challenging them with these words: “Why are you looking for the living among the dead? Go instead into Galilee and you will find him there!”

Go instead into Galilee. What a curious expression! What is Galilee? Why go back? In the post-resurrection accounts in the gospels, Galilee is not simply a physical geography. It is, first of all, a place in the heart. Galilee is the dream, the road of discipleship that they had once walked with Jesus, and that place and time when their hearts had most burned with hope and enthusiasm. And now, just when they feel that this all is dead, that their faith is only fantasy, they are told to go back to the place where it all began: “Go back to Galilee. He will meet you there!”

And they do go back, to Galilee, to that special place in their hearts, to the dream, to their discipleship. Sure enough, Jesus appears to them there. He doesn't appear exactly as they remember him, nor as often as they would like him to, but he does appear as more than a ghost or a mere idea. The Christ that appears to them after the resurrection no longer fits their original expectation, but he is physical enough to eat fish in the presence, real enough to be touched as a human being, and powerful enough to change their lives forever.

Ultimately that is what the resurrection challenges us to do, to go back to Galilee, to return to the dream, hope, and discipleship that had once inflamed us but that now is crucified.

This too is what it means to “be on the road to Emmaus.” In Luke’s gospel, we are told that on the day of the resurrection two disciples were walking away from Jerusalem towards Emmaus, their faces downcast. That single line contains an entire spirituality: For Luke, Jerusalem, like Galilee for the other gospel writers, means the dream, the hope, the kingdom, the centre from which all is to begin and where ultimately all is to culminate.

And the disciples are “walking away” from this, away from the dream, towards Emmaus. Emmaus was a Roman Spa—a Las Vegas and Monte Carlo of human consolation. Their dream has been crucified and the disciples, discouraged and hope-emptied, are walking away from it, towards human consolation, muttering: “But we had hoped!” They never get to Emmaus. Jesus appears to them on the road, reshapes their hope in the light of the crucifixion, and turns them back towards Jerusalem.

One of the essential messages of Easter is this: whenever we are discouraged in our faith, whenever our hopes seem to be crucified, we need to go back to Galilee and Jerusalem, that is, to the dream, to the road of discipleship that we had embarked upon before everything went wrong. The temptation of course, whenever we feel this way, whenever the kingdom doesn't seen to work, is to abandon discipleship for human consolation, to set out instead for Emmaus, for the consolation of Las Vegas and Monte Carlo.

But, as we already know, we never quite get to Emmaus. In one guise or another, Christ always meets us on the road, burns holes in our hearts, explains the latest crucifixion to us, and sends us back—to Galilee and to our abandoned discipleship.

Once there, it all makes sense again.

 

Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. He can be contacted through his web site, www.ronrolheiser.com.

The two disciples are leaving Jerusalem. They had been caught up in the experience of following Jesus, and they were devastated by his crucifixion.

Moreover, they were undoubtedly frightened by the prospect of what might happen to them as followers of the executed master.

On their way from Jerusalem to Emmaus, they have an unusual encounter.

The man they find themselves walking with seems to understand much about the scriptures, but they aren’t able to make the connection between what he says and who he is.

It is only in welcoming him into their house and sharing a meal with him that they realize who it is they are facing: it is Jesus, the risen Lord. So moved are they by the encounter that they turn around and head back to Jerusalem, to join up with the other disciples but also to face risk and uncertainty.

They may very well have headed straight into martyrdom.

The Easter event can also turn around our lives. It can cause us to “rise and come forth into the light of day,” but we must be prepared for the risk and uncertainty such a conversion would entail.

For the Church, evangelizing means bringing the good news into all the strata of humanity, and through its influence transforming humanity from within and making it new.The purpose of evangelization is (an) interior change, and if it has to be expressed in one sentence the best way to stating it would be to say that the Church evangelizes when she seeks to convert, solely through the divine power of the message she proclaims, both the personal and collective consciences of people, the activities in which they engage, and the lives and concrete milieux which are theirs.

Pope Paul VI, Evangelii Nuntiandi, 1975: 18.

 

From To Love and Serve: Lectionary Based Meditations, by Gerald Darring.

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases: conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near, Stay with us, their eyes were opened, hearts burning, opened the Scriptures, made known to them in the breaking of bread

To the point: On our own we cannot grasp the mystery of the resurrection. The two disciples on the road to Emmaus were “conversing and debating”; they could recount the facts but could not believe the mystery. Yet they greatly desired to move from disappointment and unbelief to hearts burning with life and belief—they invited Jesus to stay the night with them. Our own participation in Word and sacrament must give rise to the same desire in us: to seek Life by journeying deeper into the mystery.

Connecting the Gospel …

… to the Second Reading: Word and “breaking of bread” brought the disciples on the road to Emmaus to belief that Jesus had risen. The revelation of Jesus’ resurrection through Word and sacrament challenges us to address our “futile conduct” and do the good “works” that give witness to our coming to belief, faith, and trust in God’s power to save.

… to experience: An encounter with any kind of mystery always leaves us “conversing and debating.” The nature of mystery is that it cannot be known through facts alone, but in “the beyond” that tantalizes us, draws us, and intrigues us. How much more so with the mystery of risen Life!

Copyright 2014 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota.
All rights reserved.
Used by permission from Liturgical Press, St. Johns Abbey, P.O. Box 7500 Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500

This story, unique to Luke, tells of Jesus’ appearance to two disciples who had given up their faith and departed from the group of Jesus’ disciples.

They were traveling from Jerusalem to Emmaus when the risen Jesus joined them, seemingly out of nowhere, opened their eyes to the Scriptures, and then revealed himself to them in the breaking of the bread.

Where exactly is Emmaus? This question helps move our reflection still further as we explore the “correct” understanding of Scripture.

Pilgrims to modern-day Israel are shocked to learn that as many as six sites are identified as “Emmaus.” Here are the four more popular ones.

(1) Latrun. The tradition of identifying this place as Luke’s Emmaus reaches back to the historian Eusebius (330).

Christians may have lived here since early times, but the first known Christian is Julius Africanus who in 221 obtained for this village from Rome the rights of a Roman city and a new name, Nicopolis.

The Byzantine tradition never doubted this identification, but it seems to have been forgotten when a plague wiped the village out in 639.

Modern archaeologists doubt that this is the place mentioned in Luke. It certainly is 160 stadia (31 km) from Jerusalem (see Lk 24:13), but other ancient manuscripts of Luke read 60 stadia, suggesting Abu Ghosh or Qubeiba as the more likely spot.

(2) Abu Ghosh. This is the village on the Jaffa road where the ark of the covenant rested for twenty years (1 Sam 6:21-7:2), but in Old Testament times it was located atop the hill, not in the valley.

The crusaders, our embarrassingly ignorant Christian warrior-ancestors in the faith, did not know about Latrun. So in typical crusader style, they measured 60 stadia from Jerusalem and identified the nearest village as Emmaus.

When the crusaders were beaten in 1187 at the Battle of the Horns of Hattin, this place lost its importance mainly because travelers to Jerusalem used a different route. The identity of Emmaus was eventually transferred to Qubeiba.

(3) Qubeiba. Between 1114 and 1164, the Canons of the Holy Sepulchre founded a village here to intensify the agriculture of the region from which they drew sustenance. They named it Parva Mahomeria, perhaps because of a Muslim shrine already here (el-Qubeiba = “a little cupola”).

As frequently happens in the Holy Land, later pilgrims assumed this place was related to the life of Christ, and since it was sixty stadia from Jerusalem, they identified it as Emmaus.

(4) “Most probable” Emmaus. After the Jewish War against Rome in 66-70 C.E., Vespasian assigned eight hundred discharged veterans to live in a place called “Emmaus,” located about thirty stadia, or four miles, from Jerusalem.

Their encampment completely overshadowed the little town, and the site was given the name (until recently) Qoloniya. Abandoned in 1948, it was located near contemporary Motza.

The round trip between Jerusalem and this place is sixty stadia, or about seven miles, half of this being a very plausible distance allowing the disciples to get up from table right after supping with Jesus and to return immediately to Jerusalem (Lk 24:33).

This brief archaeology and geography lesson suggests that those who read the Bible or understand their beliefs too literally will surely encounter serious problems.

Jesus was able to “correct” the misunderstanding of his followers only because they were already familiar with the Scripture about him. Modern scholarship offers similar assistance to interested contemporary believers.

“Blind” faith, after all, is a curious gift to return to the creator of human intelligence.

 

John J. Pilch was a biblical scholar and facilitator of parish renewals.
Liturgical Press has published fourteen books by Pilch exploring the cultural world of the Bible.

Copyright © 1995 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, MN. All rights reserved. Used by permission from The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321

One of my favorite pictures—I have a copy of it pasted into my book for the Liturgy of the Hours—shows a scene of three robed figures walking along a dirt road, shafts of sun breaking through trees and clouds.

The man in the middle, hand upraised as he talks, seems to fascinate the others. Ahead in the hazy distance is a town, perhaps Emmaus.

Although there are many other artistic renditions of the scene, this one appeals to me the most. The perspective allows the viewer to observe the travelers from behind.

They are walking away from Jerusalem; and since they have yet to “recognize” him in the breaking of bread, they do not realize the Lord is with them.

It’s a lovely Easter story that the Gospel of Luke gives us. Here we have two people who seem to think everything is over. They have just experienced a great loss.

“We had hoped,” they say, “he was the one to set Israel free.”

Not only have they left the community, they don’t place much credence in the testimony of the women who heard angels declaring Jesus alive. Other witnesses saw the empty tomb, but they did not see Jesus. Perhaps that is why they are walking away.

Observe what is going on here. We have two people who seem to be in a situation of unbelief, hitting the road, leaving their community, deep in confusion.

Two things happen. One, they are joined by Jesus on the road. He actually walks with them within their loss of hope and within their bewilderment. Two, he asks them to tell their story, and he stays to have dinner with them.

Even when he chides them for their weak faith and goes through the scriptural promises of the messiah, they are not in a state of full belief. They have yet to recognize him. Only with the breaking of the bread are their eyes opened; and at that moment of recognition, he vanishes from sight.

Imagine this incident as a metaphor of how God deals with someone who has gone away or lost the way, an image of how we could deal with each other in our unbelief.

With the breaking of the bread, the two wayfarers are brought into communion, even though they have not fully acknowledged the mystery that beckons them.

The story of the disciples on the road to Emmaus presents a strange state of affairs indeed.

Jesus was more with them on their journey, even in their doubt and unbelief, than when they actually saw and recognized him and finally believed.

And it was only in retrospect that they could see that their hearts were enkindled as they were walking and talking on the road—even though they did not know that it was he who was explaining the scriptures to them.

I find this paradox of faith, of distance and closeness, of belief and unbelief, repeated over and over again in people’s lives. Although I cannot see when or if it happens to me, it is startlingly clear when I witness it in others.

A man tells me he feels distant from God. He is unhappy about the sense of separation.

He regrets his carelessness with the gifts that have been given him, the loves entrusted to him. He wishes he were more attentive, more “close” to God, more appreciative and prayerful.

Finally, and strangely, there are times when he wonders whether he trusts in God at all. In those times he feels at sea, at a loss.

A young, vibrant woman wonders if she has lost her faith. She doesn’t feel its magic anymore. She only wishes she could have back those moments when it all felt so wonderful. Now it just seems empty without God.

I ask her: “Well, do you believe in God the creator and father of Jesus Christ your savior?” “Oh yes.” “Do you believe that Jesus died for you and is risen with a promise for you of eternal life?” “Of course; but I don’t feel it. I miss having a relationship with God.”

Now look at these people and imagine you are God. One is sad only because he misses you, because he takes you for granted; and his worst times are when he thinks you might not exist. He finds the thought of your nonexistence almost unbearable.

The young woman says that life feels empty without you. She only wishes she could feel your presence more, that she could see and talk with you again. Her greatest worry is that she might have lost her faith in you.

Now, do you, God, think you have a relationship with them? Do you think they have a relationship with you? Do you think they love you? Do you think they hope and trust in you? Is not their whole life, their whole being, a prayer?

“We had hoped,” they said on the road to Emmaus. But even their sense of loss, their longing to hope, was hope. Even their desire to believe was believing. Even their longing to love was love.

And so, present with him at the table, they finally recognized the gift of the mutual presence that was there all along, walking, talking, wondering why, telling their woe, hearing his story once again.

Finally recognizing him, they set their faces toward Jerusalem to tell the others how their hearts were set on fire, not only in the breaking of the bread, but in the revelation to them of their past and future glory.

 

Copyright © 1997 by John F. Kavanaugh. All rights reserved. Used by permission from Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545-0308

Commentary by a Twelfth Century Author
They recognized Jesus at the breaking of the bread.

When bread is broken, it is in a way diminished, or “emptied.”

By breaking understand the virtue of humility, by which Christ—even he who is the bread of life— broke, diminished, and emptied himself. And by emptying himself he gave us knowledge of himself.

The hidden Wisdom of the Father, and a treasure whole and concealed—what use are they?

Break your bread for the hungry, Lord, the bread that is yourself, so that human eyes may be opened, and it may not be regarded as a sin for us to long to be like you, knowing good and evil.

Let him know you through the breaking of bread, who from the beginning wished to strive after or grope for you in your undiminished state.

Break yourself that we may learn to break our own selves. Balaam heard the words of God and saw visions of the Almighty, but he fell with open eyes because he did not know the Lord through the breaking of bread

It is the same today: you see many people studying the Scriptures, teaching in cathedrals, preaching in churches, but their works do not agree with their words. With words they claim to have a knowledge of God, but with their deeds they deny it, because God cannot be known except through the breaking of bread.

Break yourself, then, by the labor of obedience, by the humiliation of repentance. Bear in your body the marks of Jesus Christ by accepting the condition of a servant, not of a superior. And when you have emptied yourself, you will know the Lord through the breaking of bread.

True humility opens our eyes. It “breaks” and diminishes other habits which might blind us with a spirit of pride, and teach us that of ourselves we are nothing. When we humble ourselves, so much the more do we grow in the knowledge of God.

Sermon for Easter Monday: PL 184, 978-97

 

Edith Barnecut, OSB, a consultant for the International Committee for English in the Liturgy, was responsible for the final version of many of the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours.

Copyright © 1992, New City Press. All Rights Reserved.

Easter's Freedom

Redemption is one of those biblical words with a powerful, but largely forgotten image at its root. It comes from a Latin word meaning literally “buying back”—as in the liberation of a slave by ransom. So to be redeemed means to be freed from slavery.

Unfortunately, some theologians, over the centuries, got distracted by the literal image of buying back and asked, in the case of Christian redemption, to whom the payment was made. This led to theories about Satan somehow getting paid off. The point of the word redemption, of course, is the essential metaphor of release from bondage, not the commercial transaction by which such release sometimes occurs in society.

On this Third Sunday of Easter, it is worth noting that each of the three readings speaks of the resurrection of Jesus and its consequences in terms of release from bondage.

First, we hear a section of Peter's speech at Pentecost (the first sentence, followed by the middle third of the speech). We hear Peter (or Luke the speech writer working with second-generation hindsight) applying Hebrew Scripture to the experience of the resurrection. Earlier the speech interpreted the prophetic utterances of the Spirit-filled community as realizations of Joel's prophecy about end-time “wonders and signs” and the pouring out of God's spirit upon all flesh. Now, in this part, the speaker announces that the mighty works Jesus did were already end-time wonders and signs worked by God.

Then Peter proceeds to show how Scripture also helps us understand Jesus’ resurrection. He observes that Psalm 16 (attributed to David, as all of the psalms were in those days) uses words that really make no sense as applied only to David. David says in the psalm, “nor will you suffer your faithful one to undergo corruption.” Well, says Peter, we have to acknowledge that David's body did indeed suffer corruption; it had been moldering in its Jerusalem grave for a good thousand years.

But the words of the psalm find their fitting application in Jesus. As the remainder of the speech spells out, “Since [David] was a prophet and knew that God had sworn an oath to him that he would set one of his descendants upon his throne, he foresaw and spoke of the resurrection of the Messiah, that neither was he abandoned to the netherworld nor did his flesh see corruption” (First Reading [Acts 2:30-31]).

We are so accustomed to thinking of Jesus rising from death on his own power that we forget something: the usual New Testament language about the resurrection is that God raised Jesus from the dead. In other words, the resurrection is not simply an act of the Son; it is a Trinitarian affair, with the Father raising the Son in the power of the Spirit.

This way of speaking of the resurrection (and our participation in it) as a liberating act of the Trinity is also reflected in the Second Reading (1 Pet 1:17-21). The author reminds recently converted Gentiles, scattered among the Roman provinces of Asia Minor, that they have been delivered from the futile way of their ancestors, by the Blood of the Lamb. Here the liberation image is linked to its roots in the redemption from slavery in Exodus. Christians are involved in a new Exodus.

Finally, freedom talk surfaces in an ironic way in today’s Gospel. The forlorn disciples say to the risen but still unrecognized Jesus: “we were hoping that he was the one who would set Israel free.” They thought that the recent death by crucifixion of their master had signaled the end of that hope. They were not impressed by the news of the empty tomb and the women's talk about a vision of angels declaring Jesus alive.

Were these disciples wrong to hope for a political liberation of Israel? Not really. For Israel’s hopes for “The Age to Come” entailed the restoration of the twelve tribes of Israel and the freedom from foreign empires that they had enjoyed under David.

It will take a lot of post-Easter reflection, and the grace of Pentecost, for them to recognize that these hopes for restoration and freedom are fulfilled in the kingdom of God, now guided by the spirit of the risen Lord, although he reigns in a very different way than they had expected.

Copyright © 2001, Dennis Hamm, S.J. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.

Reading I: Acts 2:14, 22-33

This passage is part of the first kerygmatic speech in Acts, put into the mouth of Peter on the day of Pentecost. It prefaces the central events of the death and resurrection of Jesus with a brief summary of his earthly ministry and concludes with a proof text for the resurrection.

As the caption to the reading suggests, it is on this proof text that the emphasis should lie. It was not possible for Christ to be held by the powers of death.

Why not? Did his divinity give him an unfair advantage over us?

That is to ask the question the wrong way around. The divinity of Christ is rather a confession of faith that we make after being confronted with the story of his fate.

Christ could not be held by the power of death because in his cross he had overcome it.

Death, understood at the theological rather than the biological level, means a person’s ultimate separation from God as the result of rebellion and consequent alienation.

Jesus had faced final separation from God in full obedience to his will right up to the end, and thereby he overcame separation from God. He could not be held by the pangs of death because he was what he was—but what he was did not involve some abstract quality of divinity that gave him unfair advantages over us, but his complete obedience to the will of God, which none of us has ever achieved.

The Resurrection did not snatch victory from the jaws of defeat or reverse the tragedy of the Cross like a deus ex machina. The Resurrection made manifest what was true of the Cross itself—that it was in fact the victory over human alienation and separation from God, over all that the New Testament means when it speaks of sin, the wrath of God, and death.

Responsorial Psalm: 16:1-2, 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11

Quite fittingly, the responsorial psalm is the psalm from which the proof text in Peter’s sermon in the first reading was taken.

Originally this psalm probably contained no hope of life after death, but was a thanksgiving for delivery from a plight near death. But as it passed into Christian usage, it acquired a much deeper meaning in the light of Christ’s death and resurrection.

It is not really a proof text, for it does not prove the resurrection of Christ, but it does show that the God of the Old Testament is the same God who is finally revealed in the resurrection of Jesus Christ, a God who rescues people from the power of death and opens up the path of life.

Reading II: 1 Peter 1:17-21

In this passage the paschal-baptismal associations of 1Peter again come out clearly. In the Christ-event we were “ransomed … with the blood of the Lamb.” This primitive Christian language interprets the death of Christ in terms of the Passover.

The Passover lamb was not originally interpreted as a ransom for sin or a means of expiation, but it did acquire that meaning in later Judaism. It was this later interpretation of the Passover that gave the early Christians some of the language with which to speak of the significance of the death of Christ.

The language may be crude and cultic, but “ransom” does speak of the liberation that Christian experience has always known to be the consequence of Christ’s death (though we must not press it and ask to whom the ransom was paid; it must be left at the level of poetry and liturgy).

Again, “blood” speaks of the event of the cross, of Jesus’ total surrender of his will and life to the Father that was the means of that liberation.

Two consequences of this faith are spelled out for present behavior. At the beginning of the passage, the readers are told, “ ... live in reverent fear during the time of your exile.”

By shifting the metaphor from redemption from Egyptian bondage to a present existence in Babylonian exile, the writer damps down overenthusiastic claims about the consequences of our participation in Christ’s resurrection and insists on the “not yet” aspect of it.

We do belong to heaven, but we still have to live on earth meanwhile. Therefore “fear”—circumspection—must characterize the Christian life.

But there is a positive side of this “not-yet-ness,” too, which is picked up in the final verse of our reading: it is an existence characterized by confidence and hope—not hope that everything will turn out all right (the readers were due for the fiery trial of persecution anyhow), but the hope of final participation in the glory of Christ.

Gospel: Luke 24:13-35

This is the most beautiful of all the appearance stories, and it seems almost blasphemy for the critical scholar to lay hands upon it. Nevertheless, modern New Testament study shows that this story grew up through the years from an original nucleus and became the repository for theological ideas at various stages of development. Finally, Luke, with consummate literary skill, made it into a vivid narrative.

In its present form, the story reflects the pattern of early Christian worship. The self-manifestation of the risen One takes place through the two events of the exposition of the Scriptures and the breaking of the bread. These two events take place in every liturgy; word and sacrament are integral parts of a single coming of Christ to his own.

Karl Barth wrote in his Gifford Lectures the following words:

What we know today as the church service in Roman Catholicism and in Protestantism is a torso. The Roman Catholic Church has a sacramental service without preaching. But I wish to speak at the moment not for or against her, but about our own Protestant Church. We have a service with a sermon but without sacraments. Both types of service are impossible.

Barth would have to revise his words about Roman Catholicism today, but I wonder parenthetically whether many Protestants have paid sufficient heed to his words! 

A shepherd once told me that sheep are completely helpless if they are unsheared, especially if they get turned on their back. Maybe you and I remember our childhood when we turned various insects on their back to watch them struggle and never achieve their proper legside down position—without help.

Another thing about sheep is their loyalty. It does shade into stupidity, the way they follow the shepherd without question. But there is something deeply symbolic of love if the shepherd is kind and careful with them.

History tells us that all the sheep were kept together in a big sheepfold where the various shepherds had brought their small herds down to Jerusalem. Without brands, without markings of any kind, how, you might ask, does each shepherd get back the sheep that belong to him or to his boss?

Well, first, the shepherd calls each of his flock by name. He has been with them on the hillsides so that he knows just who each sheep is. The one with the nick in its ear, the one with the pretty face, the one that limps. There is a name for each one because they are not just a herd; each has a personality that is special, just like human beings.

And second, the sheep each recognize not only the name he calls them by, but the actual voice of the shepherd. It is a much loved sound to them. The one who flipped them back on their feet when he found them upside down. The one who protected them from wolves. The one who took them to fresh pastures when they had eaten the fields down to nubs. A stranger’s voice could not have the gentle resonance of their own master and friend.

Alright, so why does Jesus use sheep imagery on the upcoming fourth Sunday of Easter? I suppose it is obvious but, if you will pardon the comparison, you and I are a lot like sheep. The shepherd calls us each by name—the utter God of the universe does this (of the galaxy, infinity, etc.). God is great enough that in Jesus he knows each and every one of us better than we know ourselves. The name he uses for each of us reaches way down into the full potential of our souls, calling us to be most truly who we are in ourself and in the Lord. An intimate recognition within each of us responds.

And, like the sheep, each of us knows by heart the sound of God’s voice. Alright, we may misunderstand it, ignore it, resist it, slam all our gateways shut to it, but in our moments of sane and solitary wholeness our spirits know the sound of that voice. It resonates within us.

Whichever ones of us are free hearken and follow. The call is safe, in spite of wolves and wildness all around. The call lets our fear drop away, turns us right side up so that we can go follow our master and friend over rocks and even through dark valleys.

Often people insult the human race by calling it a bunch of sheep. But this Sunday it is the greatest compliment we could get.

 

Copyright © 2023, John B. Foley, S.J. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.

Inside each of us there is a deep, congenital restlessness. We are not restful beings who sometimes get restless, but restless beings who occasionally experience rest.

Karl Rahner, I believe, had it right when he said that we do not have souls that get restless, but that our souls themselves are lonely caverns thirsting for the infinite, deep wells of restlessness that make us ache to sleep with the whole world and all that is beyond.

Because of this we can find it difficult to concentrate during the day and to sleep at night. We go through life feeling like we are missing out on something, that life is more exciting and fulfilling for others than it is for us. Our achievements rarely satisfy us because we are always aware of what we haven’t achieved, of missed chances and failed possibilities. Always too, it seems, that we are inadequate to the task, that we must not disappoint those we love, but we do.

We are always a bit dissatisfied. As Henri Nouwen puts it, in this life it seems that there is no such a thing as a clear-cut, pure joy, but that even our happiest moments come with a shadow, a fear, a jealousy, a restlessness. Inside us, no matter what our age, we are always somewhat lost and full of a sadness, one that we don’t quite know what to do with. Thoreau was right, we do live lives of quiet desperation. What should we do with that?

An analogy might help us here: 

We can learn something valuable, I believe, by comparing these feelings to what a baby feels at a certain moment in the presence of a baby-sitter but in the absence of its mother. As many a frustrated baby-sitter has learned, there can come a moment, usually later in the evening, when the baby grows tired of being titillated by flashy toys, extra sweets, and the continued cooing of the baby-sitter. The baby becomes irritated, cranky, weepy, and finally disconsolate. At point nothing will soothe its aches, except the voice and the touch of the mother herself. The baby needs to hear the mother’s voice and only the mother’s voice. No attempt by the baby-sitter to replace the mother or even to imitate the mother are of much avail. The baby will not be fooled. There comes a moment when only the mother can soothe and comfort. The baby’s disquiet will disappear only when she hears again the mother lovingly call her name.

It’s no different for us really, as adults, in trying to come to grips with our congenital restlessness.

We can distract ourselves for a while, be titillated by flashy toys, be soothed and lulled by sympathetic voices, and momentarily be content even in the absence of our real mother. But there will come a time, usually a little later on in the proceedings, when we are a bit more tired and cranky, when these things will soothe no more. We will begin to miss, in the very depths of our souls, the one voice and one presence that can ultimately bring us rest.

Of course that one voice that can soothe, that one voice that we search for among all the others, is the voice of God, who is the primordial Mother. Ultimately we reach a point in life when there is an ache and a sadness inside us that no one can still and comfort other than the one who ultimately brought us to birth. Like the baby frustrated with its baby-sitter, we too need to hear our mother lovingly pronounce our names.

The Gospel of John opens very differently than the other Gospels. There are no infancy narratives. Right at the beginning we already meet the adult Christ and the first words he speaks are a question: “What are you searching for?” John’s whole Gospel tries to answer that, but the full answer is given only at the very end, by Jesus himself.

What are we ultimately searching for? On the morning of the resurrection, Mary Magdalene meets the newly-risen Jesus but she doesn’t recognize him. He approaches her and asks (in words that repeat his question at the opening of the Gospel): “what are you searching for?” She explains that she is searching for the body, the dead body, of Jesus.

He says just one word to her in response: “Mary.”

He calls her by name and in that she not only recognizes him, but she hears precisely what a disconsolate baby cannot hear in the voice of her babysitter: the voice of the mother, lovingly pronouncing her name.

In Jesus’ response to Mary Magdalene, we learn the answer to life’s most fundamental question: what do we ache for?

Ultimately all our aching is for one thing, to hear God, lovingly and individually, call us by name. There comes a moment in the night for each of us when nothing will console us other than this, hearing our names pronounced by the mouth of God.

Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. He can be contacted through his web site, www.ronrolheiser.com.

The risen Jesus is the true shepherd, “the one who enters through the gate, who walks in front of them, and the sheep follow him because they recognize his voice.”

True Christians follow the true shepherd: they recognize his voice and they obey his commands. They hear his message about loving enemies, about seeking first the kingdom of God, about forgiving seventy times a day.

They hear him talk of concern for the poor, of selling all that one has, of being perfect as their heavenly Father is perfect. They listen to him say that they should not worry about tomorrow, that they should turn the other cheek, that they should lose their lives.

They hear and obey, following their shepherd through the gate.

There are false shepherds who speak other words, who talk of defending one’s rights, of accumulating wealth, of achieving social prominence. Some Christians listen to them rather than to the true shepherd.

Both the true and the false shepherds lead one to death. The difference is that the true shepherd leads beyond death to resurrection.

In Christ and through Christ God has revealed himself fully to mankind and has definitively drawn close to it; at the same time, in Christ and through Christ man has acquired full awareness of his dignity, of the heights to which he is raised, of the surpassing worth of his own humanity, and of the meaning of his existence.

Pope John Paul II, Redemptor Hominis, 1979:11

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases: hear his voice, calls … by name, follow him, recognize his voice, I am the gate, have life … abundantly

To the point: Jesus states clearly that he came so that his followers might have abundant Life. Jesus uses the metaphor of a caring shepherd and sheep to indicate how his followers might receive that Life: by hearing his voice and their name, by following the Good Shepherd, by recognizing whose voice calls them. Hearing, following, recognizing: we are to open our ears in faith, open our hearts in trust, open our minds in love. This is the way to abundant Life. The Gate is wide open. Will we enter?

Connecting the Gospel …

…  to the Second Reading: The shepherd “walks ahead” (Gospel) of the sheep who are to “follow in his footsteps” (Second Reading). Following Jesus leads to insult, suffering, judgment, and the cross. But it also leads us even further—to abundant Life.
…  to experience: We encounter gates in many areas of our lives. There are gated communities, entry gates for theater and sporting events, toll gates. These gates separate, close, keep out. Jesus is the Gate who excludes no one, calls each by name, offers abundant Life.

Copyright 2014 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota.
All rights reserved.
Used by permission from Liturgical Press, St. Johns Abbey, P.O. Box 7500 Collegeville, Minnesota 56321-7500

The Sheepgate

“I lay down my life.” (John 10:10)

“Over my dead body!” Have you ever heard that challenge? It seems to bang around in my brain as something I’ve surely heard a few times and maybe even said. These words push their way back into my consciousness when I see this Sunday’s readings.
It is not so much the content of Peter’s ringing sermon in the Acts of the Apostles that triggers the words. It is rather the First Letter of Peter, with its daunting description of Christ and the manner of his suffering that bring “over my dead body” to mind.

We are told that Christ’s suffering is a path for us to follow. And yet it remains, for the most part, truly a “road not taken” by people and institutions that bear the name of Christ.

“He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth. When he was insulted he returned no insult. When he was insulted, he returned no insult; when he suffered, he did not threaten; instead, he handed himself over to the one who judges justly.

He himself bore our sins in his body upon the cross, so that, free from sin, we might live for righteousness. By his wounds you have been healed” (Second Reading, emphasis mine)
This is a hard road to follow. We think that if we do no wrong and tell no lies, we have some justice due us. We might have the gumption to take insults without retaliation, but to undergo pain and suffering and offer no resistance—that is too much to expect.

Jesus, for his part, does not rely on his innocence or righteousness or the truth of his ideas. His sole security is the one who sent him.

More troubling still, Jesus takes our sin into his own body on the cross. Only by his wounds and death are we healed and given life. It is over his dead body that we are saved.

That is what this letter seems to be saying. How proper, then, that the next few words allude to the fact that we were like straying sheep who are now returned to our shepherd, the guardian of our souls.

The Good Shepherd, as we all know, is one of the abiding pictures of Christ in Christian imagination. Words like “pastor” and “pastoral care” draw their meaning and power from the image of Jesus as the kind and caring guide of the flock.

The sheep approach the protection of the sheepfold through the gate. Those who climb in by other ways—over the rocks and brambles—are either robbers or predators. The true shepherd enters and leaves first, calling their names; at the sound of his voice they follow.

This passage is called a “figure” by the writer of the Fourth Gospel. And when the hearers seem not to grasp the figure fully, Jesus goes further, offering them what many have thought a somewhat disconnected second metaphor. All of a sudden, he is no longer the shepherd. He is the gate itself.

But this shift is not a mixing of metaphors. Like many devoted shepherds, Jesus is both the shepherd and the gate.

I once heard a description of Middle Eastern shepherding practices that ties these two images together. The sheepfold, especially one unattached to a larger settlement or dwelling, is a circular wall of stones, topped by barriers of briar. There is a small opening for the sheep to pass through.

Once they are all in, instead of closing a hinged gate, the shepherd simply lies across the opening, so that nothing or no one can get through without going over his body first, without confronting or even killing him.

This particular kind of shepherd literally makes himself into a barrier gate, a role that requires not only care but courage. If any marauders or predators are to get to the sheep, they will only do so over the dead body of the shepherd.

When Jesus reveals that he is the gate of the sheepfold, he is not just suggesting that he is the unique way into safety or the only way out to pasture. He is saying that he will prevent our destruction by laying down his life. He has come to us that we may have life and have it abundantly.

The continuation of the passage is important. “I am the good shepherd, the one that lays down his life for the sheep.” It is for this reason, we are assured, that God’s love is so totally poured out into Christ—and so empowering that his life, even though laid down, is given back again.

The Passover, with its commemoration of Christ’s “dead body” and Resurrection, is the full realization of the twenty-third Psalm’s promise. With this shepherd, we shall never want. We will have repose. We will be led and refreshed and guided along right paths.

“Even in the dark valley I will fear no evil. You are at my side. You give me courage. You are my food and drink. You anoint me. There is nothing I shall want. Goodness and kindness will follow me all my days. I will dwell in your fold forever.”
Can we be lost or destroyed? Only over the Lord’s dead body. But he is risen now, to die no more. Through the laying down of his life on the cross and his rising before us, we are led into the sheepfold of eternal life.

Copyright © 1997 by John F. Kavanaugh. All rights reserved. Used by permission from Orbis Books, Maryknoll, New York 10545-0308 

An Honorable Shepherd

In today’s Gospel, Jesus begins by describing a scenario concerning raising sheep in first-century Palestine. Then he applies the scenario to himself and his ministry.

The Scenario

Jesus ... carefully spells out the characteristics of an honorable shepherd.

1.  He enters by the door instead of sneaking in some other way.
2. The gatekeeper recognizes him as the genuine shepherd of this flock and permits him to enter. Others would be barred.
   
   Recalling the large, extended nature of the Middle Eastern family, even the gatekeeper role makes sense. Each family had its own flock, but pasturing their flocks together required a common pen where they might be kept. One kinsperson who knew all the shepherds was designated gatekeeper.
3. He leads the sheep in and out.

This characteristic is more difficult to appreciate. People who raise sheep insist that shepherds do not lead sheep. They rather walk behind and urge them forward thus being able to keep an eye out for wayward stragglers.

However, in the Middle East, some shepherds walk before the sheep and call them with a peculiar cry. It is this cry rather than simply voice recognition that guides the sheep.

Sheep in general are not very powerful, hence unable to defend themselves effectively. Moreover, they are not very good at recognizing localities, which explains why they can so easily go astray. When lost, the sheep panics. It falls to the ground and bleats loudly in hopes that it will attract the shepherd.

All this information and imagery is familiar and clear to the disciples, but they fail to grasp the point Jesus wants to make. Who is the honorable person and who is the thief, bandit, and stranger? He must explain it to them.

The Application

At the implicit level, Jesus seems to be attacking the Jerusalem priests and the Pharisees. Leading sheep in and out echoes the symbolic description of Joshua in Num 27:16-17.

Moses is urged to “appoint someone over the congregation who shall go out before them and come in before them, who shall lead them out and bring them in, so that the congregation of the Lord may not be like sheep without a shepherd.”

The leaders of Jesus’ time are not doing this (see Mk 6:34).

At the explicit level, Jesus identifies himself as the gate. This image, however, is interpreted in two senses. In verse 8, Jesus notes that any shepherd who approaches the sheep other than through him (the gate) is a thief and bandit.

In verses 9-10, Jesus is the gate through which the sheep must pass to gain life, salvation. This interpretation fits the parable in verses l-3a rather clumsily; it must have been torn from a different setting (Ps 118:20; see Jn 14:6).

To find pasture is to find life. Those who seek pasture through Jesus find life, life in abundance (Jn 14:10). The thief can offer only theft, destruction, and death. Such a shepherd contrasts starkly with Jesus the gate and the noble shepherd, the figure to which Jesus turns attention in the subsequent section.

If contemporary American believers can see beyond the sheep imagery to the question of leadership in the Christian community, today’s few verses should stimulate healthy reflection.

Are contemporary leaders noble guides or more like thieves, bandits, and strangers?

 

In our sickness we need a savior, in our wanderings a guide, in our blindness someone to show us the light, in our thirst the fountain of living water which quenches for ever the thirst of those who drink from it. We dead people need life, we sheep need a shepherd, we children need a teacher, the whole world needs Jesus!

If we would understand the profound wisdom of the most holy shepherd and teacher, the ruler of the universe and the Word of the Father, when using an allegory he calls himself the shepherd of the sheep, we can do so for he is also the teacher of little ones.

Speaking at some length through Ezekiel to the Jewish elders, he gives them a salutary example of true solicitude. I will bind up the injured, he says; I will heal the sick; I will bring back the strays and pasture them on my holy mountain. These are the promises of the Good Shepherd.

Pasture us children like sheep, Lord. Fill us with your own food, the food of righteousness. As our guide we pray you to lead us to your holy mountain, the Church on high, touching the heavens.

I will be their shepherd, he says, “and I will be close to them,” like their own clothing. He desires to save my flesh by clothing it in the robe of immortality and he has anointed my body. “They shall call on me,” he says, “and I will answer, ‘Here I am.’” Lord, you have heard me more quickly than I ever hoped!

“And if they pass over they shall not fall says the Lord,” meaning that we who are passing over into immortality shall not fall into corruption, for he will preserve us. He has said he would and to do so is his own wish. Such is our Teacher, both good and just.
He said he had not come to be served but to serve; and so the Gospel shows him tired out, he who labored for our sake and promised “to give his life as ransom for many,” a thing which, as he said, only the Good Shepherd will do.

How bountiful the giver who for our sake gives his most precious possession, his own life! He is a real benefactor and friend, who desired to be our brother when he might have been our Lord, and who in his goodness even went so far as to die for us!
(The Teacher 9, 83, 3-85, a: SC 70, 258-261)

 

Edith Barnecut, OSB, a consultant for the International Committee for English in the Liturgy, was responsible for the final version of many of the readings in the Liturgy of the Hours.

Copyright © 1992, New City Press. All Rights Reserved.

Clement of Alexandria (c. 150-215) was born at Athens of pagan parents. Nothing is known of his early life nor of the reasons for his conversion.

He was the pupil and the assistant of Pantaenus, the director of the catechetical school of Alexandria, whom he succeeded about the year 200. In 202 Clement left Alexandria because of the persecution of Septimus Severus, and resided in Cappadocia with his pupil, Alexander, later bishop of Jerusalem.

Clement may be considered the founder of speculative theology. He strove to protect and deepen faith by the use of Greek philosophy. Central in his teaching is his doctrine of the Logos, who as divine reason is the teacher of the world and its lawgiver.

Clement’s chief work is the trilogy, “Exhortation to the Greeks,” “The Teacher,” and “Miscellanies.”

The House of Israel and Those Far Off
As the Church began to flourish and spread after that first Easter, the main tool it had to proclaim its Good News to the rest of the world was the language of the Hebrew Scriptures. More often than not, the version they used was the Greek one. That detail may sound like something that ought to be reserved to the footnotes of scholarly tomes. In fact, it sometimes makes a considerable difference in our understanding of the New Testament. The little speeches that make up about a third of the Acts of the Apostles provide abundant examples of Christian use of the Hebrew Scriptures in Greek.

This Sunday’s First Reading gives us the end of Peter’s Pentecost speech, along with its immediate aftermath. When Peter refers to his audience (Jews gathered in from a worldwide Diaspora) as “the whole house of Israel,” he is using a term that implies that his listeners constitute potentially the “restored Israel” of “the age to come.” For, earlier in the same speech, Peter had cited Joel 3, understanding that passage as relating to “the last days,” and interpreting those last days as what was beginning to happen then and there on that particular Pentecost.

That same passage from Joel also said,

And it shall be that everyone shall be saved
who calls on the name of the Lord. (Acts 2:21)

In Joel’s context, that statement referred to those who cast themselves on the mercy of Yahweh. In the language of Acts, “the Lord” is understood as a title for Jesus, and so “those who call upon the name of the Lord” becomes virtually a name for all Christians. (see Acts 9:14, 21; 22:16) It is with that meaning that Peter invites his audience to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. In so doing, they too will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit prophesied in that same Joel passage.

Just after that last line quoted from Joel, there is a further statement, which in its Greek version says, “In Mount Zion and in Jerusalem there will be a remnant, just as the Lord said, and they will be preached the good news, those whom the Lord summons.” When we read this, the aptness of the Joel passage becomes even more obvious, for it speaks not only of the outpouring of the Spirit of God but also of the preaching of Good News to a remnant of Israel in Jerusalem.

Then Peter's speech reaches out to the rest of the human family: “For the promise is made to you and to your children and to all those far off, whomever the Lord our God will call.” The promise” is the one made to Abraham: “In your descendants all the nations of the earth shall find blessing.” (Gen 22:18)

Like Paul in Galatians 3:6-9, Luke understands that this promise was fulfilled especially in the gift of the Holy Spirit to Gentiles as well as Jews. And the inclusion of Gentiles comes through as well in the phrase “those far off,” which in the Greek version of Isaiah 57:19 appears to refer to the Gentiles. Thus a single stunning passage in the Hebrew Scriptures (even more strongly in the Greek version) supplies an explanation of both their own revitalized life and the Church's mandate for mission.

Our second reading, from 1 Peter, interprets the fourth Servant Song of Isaiah. (Is 52:13-53:12) Here, the author takes a passage that Jews understood (and still understand) as portraying Israel as a witness to the nations, and he applies it to Jesus (fulfilling Israel's role).

The Gospel passage has for its background a number of Old Testament passages about God and God’s Anointed One imaged as shepherds, especially Ezekiel 34. In this vision, the prophet excoriates the “shepherds” of Israel who “pastured themselves” and failed to heal the sick or seek the lost. (Ezek 34:4) He quotes God saying, “I myself will pasture my sheep.” Further, God will do this through an agent: “I will appoint one shepherd over them to pasture them, my servant David.” (Ezek 34:23)

The previous chapter of John had shown Jesus doing the work of the Good Shepherd, healing the man born lame and then “seeking him out” later—all this despite the abuse of those “bad shepherds,” the religious officials, who are portrayed as blind in their arrogance. In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus describes himself as the Good Shepherd who leads his sheep to fullness of life.

The more seriously we take the Jewish sources of our Christian language, the better we understand that language and the more we recognize that we are the “far off” ones who have been extended the hospitality of the house of Israel by its shepherd.

 

Copyright © 2001, Dennis Hamm, S.J. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.

Reading I: Acts 2:14a, 36-41

The first lection here gives the tail end of Peter’s kerygmatic sermon at Pentecost (a substantial part of which was read last Sunday) and goes on to indicate the response of his hearers.

The conclusion of the sermon sums up the whole kerygma in a single christological formula: “God has made him both Lord and Messiah, this Jesus whom you crucified.”

Such a statement puzzles those who approach the New Testament with the presuppositions of later dogmatics. 

It looks like “adoptionism”—the view that Jesus was a man who was made divine at his resurrection, the later heresy that a colleague of mine once wittily defined as the theory that Jesus was a man but graduated in divinity with honors.

This, however, is to read back the later ontological Christology of the patristic church into the Hebraic parts of the New Testament. Hebrew thought viewed matters in functional rather than ontological categories (see Gregory Dix’s book Jew and Greek).

  “Lord” and “Messiah” are functional terms, meaning that from the Resurrection onward, the risen and exalted One exercised the functions of Messiah and Kyrios.

Henceforth he rules over his people, forgives them, nourishes them with his word and sacraments, and commands their obedience.

All that God does toward his people is done through Christ. All God’s acts bring along with them, as it were, the salvation that Jesus wrought in his earthly history. It is as important to say that Jesus is Lord and Messiah as it is to say that Jesus is Lord and Messiah.

The response that preaching evokes is, “What should we do?” The answer is, “Repent and be baptized.” Repentance in this context does not merely mean sorrow for past individual sins but a radical reassessment of Jesus and his significance. 

By crucifying him, Jesus’ contemporaries rejected him. For them, he was not the emissary of God, the bringer of salvation, but either an impostor or a deluded fanatic. Now they must reassess him: he is the emissary of God and the bringer of salvation. Baptism is the event in and through which converts are brought into the sphere of his salvation. 

They receive forgiveness of sins, which again has a far richer meaning than the remission of individual peccadilloes—it means God’s eschatological salvation in its wholeness. And they receive the gift of the Holy Spirit, for baptism “adds” them to the Spirit-bearing community.

 
Responsorial Psalm: 23:1-3a, 3b-4, 5, 6

The theme of Christ as Good Shepherd, which used to belong to the second Sunday after Easter, has been transferred to this Sunday. This, the most familiar of psalms, introduces the shepherd passages in the second reading and the gospel.

In the original psalm, it was Yhwh who was the Shepherd. When the Greek-speaking Christians adopted the title Kyrios for the exalted Christ, as a translation of the Aramaic mari (cf. Marana tha), the consequence was that many of the passages in the Greek New Testament that spoke about YHWH-Kyrios were transferred to Christ-Kyrios.

This did not involve any compromise of Old Testament Jewish monotheism. It meant that henceforth the exalted Christ is that aspect of the being of God that is turned toward us in saving action. 

Ultimately, of course, this would lead to the formation of the doctrine of the Trinity. Meanwhile, even the earliest Church believed that God acts in us through the exalted Christ. Through him God exercises his Lordship, which includes his work as Shepherd, the one who nourishes and defends his people.

 
Reading II: 1 Peter 2:20b-45

This is the traditional epistle for Good Shepherd Sunday. We recall that the materials used in this letter were taken from a baptismal homily. The author is exhorting his readers to be patient. He holds up Christ in his passion as an example, quoting an early hymn that draws upon the Suffering Servant Song in Isaiah 53.

But, as so often happened when things were quoted, the author continues to quote when he gets beyond the point he wishes to make, and speaks of Christ’s passion not merely as an example of patience but as redemptive: “He himself bore our sins in his body on the cross.”

Note that  the Revised Standard Version has “tree,” an early Christian designation for the cross, recalling with defiant apologetic the Deuteronomic curse on all who hanged upon a tree.

Christ’s wounds bring healing, and by his redemptive death we are enabled to die to sin and live to righteousness.

At this point the writer turns from the hymn to his readers. He recalls their conversion and tells them that, having strayed, they have now returned to the Shepherd and Guardian (the Greek word is episkopos, “bishop”) of their souls.

This last phrase throws an interesting sidelight on the development of the church’s ministry by the time 1 Peter was written. While formally it was the ministerial designations (shepherd-pastor and bishop) that provided christological titles, it was really the other way around.

The church’s ministers are bishops and shepherds because it is through them that the risen Christ exercises his shepherding and overseeing.

 
Gospel: John 10:1-10

There is a long and complicated history behind the discourse of the Good Shepherd. It begins with a fusion of two parables (vv. l-3a and 3b-5).

In the first parable the picture is of a sheepfold into which two parties seek to enter—a prowler and the shepherd himself. The second parable concerns the relationship between the sheep and the shepherd on the one hand, and the stranger on the other.

The combined parables are followed by an allegorical interpretation in which the Johannine Christ successively identifies himself with the gate and the shepherd.

Today New Testament scholars would regard the two parables as originally separate and possibly authentic parables of Jesus. The fusion must have happened in oral transmission, while the allegorical interpretation would be the work of the evangelist himself.

The first parable is a challenge to Israel’s religious authorities. Will they accept Jesus’ message? This challenge must belong to the final part of Jesus’ ministry in Jerusalem.

In the second parable, the situation is earlier in Jesus’ ministry. He can offer no external credentials for his authority, but there are those who respond in faith to his message because they hear in it the authentic voice of God.

In the last analysis, both identifications of Jesus—gate and shepherd—make the same point. The risen Christ is the One who nourishes his people in his word and sacraments, giving them life and enabling them to have it abundantly.

 

Copyright © 1984 by The Order of St. Benedict, Inc., Collegeville, Minnesota. All rights reserved. Used by permission from The Liturgical Press, Collegeville, Minnesota 56321

When preparing music for your assembly do you consider:

• the time of day
• the make up and size of the assembly at this particular Mass
• any recent happenings in the parish, community, city, state or nation which might be reflected in the prayer of the assembly (a parishioner dying of cancer, a flood, civil war, elections, etc.)
• the unique resonance of your worship space
• your music ministers and their
  • unique abilities
  • instrumentation (one instrument, two or more)
  • vocalists (cantor, small group and/or choir)
  • presentation (cantor with organ is different from cantor with piano which is different from cantor with keyboard which is different from cantor with guitar, etc.)
  • where they are located in your worship space
• the readings (including Responsorial Psalm)
• the planned homily, presider input
• Liturgy Committee recommendations
• reflections by other ministers (Eucharistic ministers, readers, greeters, ushers, dancers, servers, any other minister involved with this liiturgy)

Beginning Prayer

Lord, I am humbly in your presence. Open my heart and my mind. Let me dwell in your Spirit in the midst of your assembly.

First Reflection

I think of the place where I will worship on Sunday. I recall its many aromas…
I feel myself within it …

I listen …
I look …

If I am a singer,
I see the breath support and resonance of my body
my voice projecting from a place deep inside me

If I play an instrument,
I imagine how it feels in my hands
the manuals, pedals and drawknobs of the organ
the strings and frets of the guitar
the keys of the piano
drum, flute, trumpet, violin

my voice or my instrument resonates, first on its own, then blending with all the others

As I join the song, I feel the Holy Spirit deep within me voicing my deepest longing and desire

Second Reflection

I see the assembly
looking into their faces,
I see Christ

every person raising her voice in song,
singing his praise to God

All of us together, before our God

Third Reflection

I bring to mind a song we will sing
perhaps we pray to God
or encourage one another

singing the words of the psalmist,
the prophets,
or God’s disciples, ancient or new

stirring feelings deep within

Final Prayer

Loving God,
I come before you to offer my gift of music.
Help me play and sing our prayer.
Help me lead your assembly in prayer;
for the song is not mine, but ours.
Let us all resound with your praise. Through us, create the world anew in your image.
Fill us with your Holy Spirit once again,
Rouse your power within us.
Amen