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

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.  Today, the Third Sunday, the Gospel passage is from Luke.  All three readings this Sunday present the resurrection from a unique dimension.

 

The selection from the Acts of the Apostles offers the first part of the speech by Peter on Pentecost.  It is a proclamation of the foundation for Christian Faith.  Christ is the one who was sent by God and God revealed this through the teachings and miracles of Jesus.  Jesus showed his faithfulness by trusting God even into death.  God then responded by raising Jesus from the dead.

 

There are two ways to view death.  Biologically, death is the end of life as we know it.  Theological death is separation from God.  Jesus was faithful to God even through the cross.  Physical death did not separate him from God but rather destroyed the power of physical death, as seen in the resurrection.  Jesus' death on the cross was the victory over alienation and separation from God.  For Christians, physical death is joining Jesus in fullness of life.

 

Highlighting Psalm 16, Peter states that God’s faithful one will not be abandoned to death and undergo the decay of the body. Those words were not fulfilled for David (who was assumed to be the author of the psalm) whose tomb was near where Peter was speaking and is still present in Jerusalem today.  David died and his body decayed.  The words of the psalm find their meaning in Jesus, who, when he died, could not be held by death but was raised from the grave by the Father’s faithfulness.

 

Psalm 16 is also used as the responsorial psalm, "You show us the path of life."  It is often hard to choose when we have options because we do not know what the consequences of our choice will be.  Sometimes one is paralyzed and cannot make a choice.  At other times, one makes a choice and then continually wonders what would have come for making a different choice.  Our faith (trusting reliance) upon God leads us to confidence that God is with us and will guide us.  We ask God to show us the path that will lead to the fullness of life and live in confidence that God will guide us along our journey.

 

The First Letter of Peter invites us who call God Father to rely upon God’s care for us as parents care for their children.  In this time of war and unrest

, our journey is difficult, but we cannot forget that God is with us.  The passage also continues the exploration of baptism and its significance for believers.  Christians have been delivered from a futile way of life through the death and resurrection of Jesus.  The reflection ponders baptism through the lens of Passover and the Babylonian exile.  Ransom and Liberation highlight the Passover experience, and the not yet reflects the exile experience.  The author is drawing our attention to the fact that although we do belong to God’s heavenly reign, we are still living on earth in anticipation of God’s final revelation.

 

The Gospel recounts one of the most beautiful stories in the Gospels.  It draws our attention to how we encounter Christ.  Two phrases highlight the change that takes place, Eyes were prevented from recognizing him/Eyes were opened and Conversing while downcast/Hearts were burning.  Two people who think everything is over because Jesus has died and their hopes for the end of Roman rule and the restoration of the kingdom of Israel are unfulfilled. Their understanding of Jesus and his ministry was very limited, and they did not recognize the bigger plan that God had.  In their grief, they leave the community and head off on their own.  Jesus accompanies them as they travel along even though they did not recognize him or what his ministry entails.

Jesus converses with them and offers them insights into the scriptures.  Still, they do not recognize him.  Often, we get so focused on our agenda or goal, and we do not recognize anything else.  It is when Jesus acts, he breaks the bread, that they recognize him.  In the ritual action that connects to events in Jesus' life, the disciples come to a new understanding of Jesus and themselves. So, for us, only when something happens, do we look back and recognize the presence of God in our life. In breaking and sharing bread, one is sharing life with the others.  Jesus shared life with humanity in giving his life for others.  They rise and return to the community in Jerusalem even though they had walked all day downhill.

Where are you downcast or weary?  What has prevented you from recognizing Christ in your life?

Who has accompanied you on your life journey?  Who has helped you see the path of life?  Give thanks for them.

What are some signs in your life that Christ is risen?

Have you ever experienced a scripture passage burning in your heart (bring you a sense of life and vitality) or an “Aha” moment in which things became clear to you?

How might you grow in your awareness of the scriptures?

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! 

• For the church: that as we break the bread and share the cup, Christ may reveal himself more and more to us and strengthen us to be faithful disciples
• For all Christians: that the freedom brought by the resurrection may enable us to live with purpose and help others to forsake the fruitless pursuits of power, fame, and wealth
• For wisdom: that as we bring our lives, experiences, and relationships to the Eucharist each week, the Scriptures may help us recognize that Christ is with us in every aspect of life
• For a deepening of our love and hunger for the Word of God: that through reading and praying the scriptures, our hearts may be set on fire, and our commitment to God grow
• For all in our community: that the Spirit will guide our daily journeys and enable us to ease fear, bring hope, and offer encouragement to those who touch our lives
• For all who are on significant journeys, for missionaries, pilgrims, aid workers, and those discerning their life vocation: that God will protect them from harm, lead them safely to their destination, and help them be aware of God’s presence with them
• For a deeper appreciation of the gift of the Eucharist: that we may be strengthened each week as we celebrate God's love in the liturgy and come to recognize Jesus more readily in our lives
• For all who are awaiting the sacraments of initiation: that God will sustain them, help them to deepen their commitment, and grow in their desire to serve God each day
• For all who are recovering from storms: that God will give them strength and courage to rebuild their lives, guide them to the resources that they need, and help all to help one another
• For all who study, teach, or participate in scripture discussion or prayer groups: that the Spirit will guide their pursuit of God’s Word and help them to witness to God’s message in their lives
• For all who are ill: that God’s healing love will relieve their pain, strengthen their minds and bodies, and make fruitful their treatments and therapies
• For all seeking employment: that God will guide them to good opportunities where their gifts can grow and develop, and where they will contribute to the good of society
• For all who are in isolation: that they may find companionship with God through the scriptures, recall with gratitude all who are significant in their life, and encourage others who are alone
• For peace: that God will inspire leaders with courage and new ideas to end warfare in Iran,  Lebanon, and Ukraine, open new avenues for negotiations, and bring forth structures that promote safety and justice for all

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

The selection from the Acts of the Apostles presents the final part of the speech by Peter on Pentecost and the response of the people.  Peter declares that the resurrection is a clear sign of who Jesus is.  Lord (Adonai) is the word that is substituted for God’s name in traditional Hebrew practice.  The sacred four letters that God revealed to Moses was never spoken in common dialect.  Instead, Adonai (Lord) was used.  Christ is the English equivalent of messiah which means anointed one.  Peter proclaims that the anointed one sent by God was God.

In response to the question from the crowd, Peter tells them to repent and be baptized.

This repentance is not just changing a few ideas or some behavior.  It is to turn one’s life around, to turn one’s thinking inside out, and to begin to live in a whole new way.  Submitting to baptism was a declaration that one could not do it on one’s own effort.  It was placing yourself in God’s hands to begin living anew.

Baptism was a common religious practice.  There was baptism into Moses of which Paul speaks.  John the Baptist celebrated a baptism of preparation for the coming of the Messiah.  The Jewish Essene community practiced a daily baptism in case the Messiah might come tomorrow.  It marked a decision to leave the old and live in a new way.

For those who have been baptized and for those preparing for baptism, each of us is challenged not to just be satisfied with the usual life of our society but to ever seek God’s vision for what life can be like.

The First Letter of Peter continues the reflection on what baptism means.  Drawing on the fourth Suffering Servant Song (Is 52:13-53:12), Peter invites us to follow more closely the life of Christ, even to sharing hardship and suffering.  

He committed no sin, and no deceit was found in his mouth.
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.

In suffering, we are challenged to look to Christ and open ourselves to letting God right the wrongs that are experienced.  Christ gave us an example of how to face suffering.  A Christian is one who entrusts herself or himself to God knowing that God will bring forth justice.  Christ has suffered and was raised up.  God will bring us to wholeness and freedom from all the wrongs that have been done to us.

The background for the Gospel images comes from Ezekiel 34.  The prophet explores the actions of the bad shepherds and how God shepherds.  In the Gospel, this passage follows the story of the man born blind.  His parents were fearful of the Jewish leaders.  The man himself was thrown out because he declared that Jesus is from God.  At the end of the first century when this Gospel was being written, Christians were being expelled from the synagogues.  This placed them in danger of the Romans who required Emperor worship as a sign of loyalty to the state.  The words of Jesus are directed to those who follow him and against any structure or person which pretends to have ultimate authority.

The Gospel presents two parables that probably come of the ministry of Jesus.  The first uses the sheepfold (pen).  Sheep were kept in an enclosed area to protect them from wolves. Several Shepherd’s flocks may have been in the same enclosure.  The gate keeper will let the shepherd who has sheep enclosed enter the pen.  If someone enters another way, they are to be viewed with suspicion.  Later in the chapter, Jesus identifies himself as the gate.  That the way to life is through him.

The second parable examines the relationship between the sheep and shepherd.  The sheep hear and recognize his voice.  This does not happen automatically.  It is over time that sheep come to recognize the voice that cares for them.  With Jesus as shepherd, we must listen to his voice and over time recognize it in prayer, in other people, in the scriptures, and in events in our lives.

Themes

Repentance and Conversion                                 Jesus as the Good Sheperd

Leadership in the Church community                   The Church as God’s flock

Reflection Questions:

• What does repentance mean for you?
• How has your life shown signs for change and new thinking as you enter more deeply into the Christian way of life?
• When have you have suffered unjustly?  How have you responded?
• What does the statement in the First Letter of Peter invite you to do?

If you are patient when you suffer for doing what is good, this is a grace before God. For to this you have been called, because Christ also suffered for you, leaving you an example that you should follow in his footsteps.

• What are some ways that you have recognized the voice of Christ in your life?

Prayer Suggestions:

For the Church: that we may hear the voice of the Lord and follow the Good Shepherd to fuller life 

For a listening heart: that we, who have been called by name, may hear the voice of the Good Shepherd, and respond confidently to God’s invitations

For all who minister in the church: that they will faithfully help others find Christ by the witness of their lives, the truth of their words, and the integrity of their actions

For all Christians: that we who have been called to follow Christ may lift to God those who cause us to suffer and refrain from threatening, insulting, and judging them

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

First Reading
Acts 2:14a, 36-41

1. Those listening to Peter’s sermon were “cut to the heart.” Does anything affect you this way? (School shootings? Ukraine war?) They asked, “brothers, what should we do?” How do you think you would have responded to Peter’s sermon?
2. Do you know what the word conversion means? Is it a once-in-a-lifetime experience or is it on-going? Explain. Who needs conversion? Name the things that conversion involves besides a change of behavior.

Second Reading
1 Peter 2:20b-45

1. Christ’s innocence and lack of vengeance show us what God’s love is like. Where do you find strength to endure your own suffering? How can suffering be an occasion of grace? Was the pandemic an occasion of some graces for you?
2. In this reading Peter says the following about Jesus: “When he was insulted, he returned no insult.” Is he referring to the suffering inflicted on a person who does good? Can you give other examples in which this has been the case. Have you had this experience? Where do you think Mohandas Gandhi and Martin Luther King got their ideas of nonviolence?

Gospel
John 10:1-10

1. When flocks were mingled together, each flock would recognize the sound of their own shepherd’s voice and come to him, ignoring other shepherds’ voices. Can you tell which “voice” in your life belongs to the Good Shepherd? Which of the following is your favorite comparison of Christ to the Good Shepherd. Then explain.
   • calling by name
   • recognition of voice
   • following Christ
   • not following strangers
   • shepherd as gate
2. The Good Shepherd “calls his own sheep by name, … he walks ahead of them, and the sheep follow him.” According to Pope Francis what is it about the relationship between shepherd and sheep that makes them follow? And where does Christ, the Shepherd, lead his followers?

He knows his sheep. But this does not only mean that he knows many things about us. To know in the biblical sense also means to love. It means that the Lord, “while he reads our inner beings,” loves us. … Jesus seeks a warm friendship, trust, intimacy. He wants to give us a new and marvelous awareness—that of knowing we are always loved by him and, therefore, that we are never left alone by ourselves.

[He knows his sheep.] … They listen, they feel they are known to the Lord and they follow the Lord who is their shepherd. … They go where he goes, along the same path, in the same direction. They go to seek those who are lost (cf. Lk 15:4), they take an interest in those who are far away, take to heart the situation of those who suffer, know how to weep with those who weep, they reach out their hands to their neighbors, carrying them on their shoulders.

Pope Francis, Fourth Sunday of Easter
Angelus May 8, 2022

 

Copyright © 2023, Anne M. Osdieck. All rights reserved. Permission is hereby granted to reproduce for personal or parish use.

For the Church: that we may hear the voice of the Lord and follow the Good Shepherd to fuller life …

For Pope Leo, all Bishops, and all Pastors: that God will strengthen them, help them to faithfully proclaim the true, and guide them in accompanying us into a deeper relationship with God …

For all who are discerning a call to ministry in the church: that they may listen deep within for the voice of Christ, be open to surprises, and trust that God will never forsake them …

For all who do not know God: that the Holy Spirit will instill a hunger and thirst for something more in their lives and guide them to a Christian Community who will share the Gospel message with them …

For the grace of true repentance: that God will lead us to a deeper reliance upon God’s loving kindness and trust in God’s care for us

For the gift of courage: that God will help us face the sufferings that we encounter and bear these patiently following the example of Jesus

For all celebrating First Communion this Spring: that they may enter into a deeper relationship with Jesus and come to know Jesus as their helper and strength …

For government leaders: that they may seek the greater good for all whom they serve and work toward the common good for the benefit of all whom they serve …

For healing in mind, body, and spirit: that the wounds of Christ will restore to wholeness all who are suffering, awaiting surgery, or undergoing therapy …

For all who are homebound: that God will comfort and sustain them and help us to offer encouragement and friendship to them …

For all who are experiencing drought: that God will send gentle rains to them so that plants may grow and everyone have the food that they need …

For all medical researchers: that the Holy Spirit will guide them in finding new and morally acceptable treats for the major diseases facing the human family …

For all who are suffering from violence and war; for the people of Ukraine, Sudan, Iran, and Lebanon: that God will be a shepherd to them, guide the peace negotiations, and lead the innocent to places of safety and peace …

Years ago on television, at the end of the George Burns and Gracie Allen show, Gracie would talk on and on and finally George would stop her dryly with the words, “Say good night, Gracie.” She would reply, “Good night Gracie.” Laughter.*

George was her “straight man.”

In Sunday’s Gospel, Philip and Thomas (of doubting fame) serve as straight men—not for a comedian but for Christ, who is explaining the very deepest meaning of Christianity.

  “There are many rooms in my Father’s house,” Jesus says. “I will come back and take you there. You know the way to where I am going.”

Thomas asks rather naturally, “Master, we do not know where you are going; how can we know the way?” He might as well have said, “Do your magic.”

So Jesus makes a play on “the way.” Thomas thinks these words mean a roadway or a pathway. But Jesus means something else. He says, Thomas, you already know The Way quite well. It is me. I am the Way and the Truth and the Light. I am the Pathway to the Father. If you know me then you know the Father.

The early followers of Jesus actually called their Jesus movement, “the Way,” instead of “Christianity.” All puns aside, what does “the Way” mean?

It is the way to real life. Jesus is saying that the Father has been shown forth completely, in himself, the Christ. Jesus called him “abba,” but he is the God all ages have sought for, the One who is all good and all loving and all powerful. God. Do you want to know God? Look at Jesus. Follow his way.

Philip does want to know “the Father,” but he completely misses Jesus’ play on the words, “the Way.” He replies, “Master, just show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” We can’t understand your explanations, just give us the goods.

People throughout the ages had said the same thing. We want to know the gods. We want the favor of those exalted ones who have no suffering, no crop failures, no droughts, starvation, no aids, no genocide, no Covid. no death. We want what they have, a luxury, power, honor, and glory. Show us that Father, Philip says.

Maybe you and I say exactly the same thing! We are so attracted to the itches of our heart: to have exactly what we want, to avoid troubles, to live “the good life.” As television says, “it doesn't get any better than this.” Oh doesn't it?

Jesus' response: “show you the Father? What Are You Saying, Philip? I AM showing you the Father. God is so present in my life (and death and resurrection) that to know me is to know the Father.”

Let the meaning in. Jesus seems to say that God is totally within him. They are one. You can see infinite love revealed!

Can you or I look at the Cross and the Resurrection and see God’s infinite love embedded there? Can we see a love that is stronger than death, stronger than honor, power, riches, stronger than a “trouble-free life”?

It is The Way to freedom.

 

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

A friend of mine likes to explain his religious background this way: “I have powerful conservative roots. I was raised in a very strong conservative, Roman Catholic, immigrant, German farming family, with all the inhibitions, protectiveness, exclusivity, and reticence that this entailed. It would be hard to find a more strongly conservative religious background than mine. And I'm grateful for that. It's one of the greatest gift you can be given. Now I'm free for the rest of my life!”

There is something both healthily conservative and healthily liberal in that assessment. The instinct within the liberal wants to push edges, to widen the circle, to move away from narrowness, to be more inclusive, to not always see the other as threat, and to protect the ineffability of God and God's universal salvific will. Whereas the conservative intuits the necessity of being rooted in truth, in grounding yourself in the essentials, in having proper boundaries, and in not being naive to the fact that everything that's precious and true will invariably be under attack.

Both protect the soul. The soul, as we know, has two functions which are often in tension with each other. On the one hand, the soul is the source of all energy inside of us, the fire that fuels everything we do. We know the precise moment when the soul leaves a body. All energy ceases. On the other hand, the soul is also the source of unity and integration. It glues one together. Decomposition begins the very second the soul leaves the body. Without the soul, every element goes its own way.

The liberal instinct is mostly about the fire, the conservative instinct is mostly about the glue. The story of the man who was raised in such a strong conservative background and who now feels rooted enough to be more liberal illustrates that both are necessary. There is a time to be liberal and there is a time to be conservative and it is important that we know which time is right both as regards to our own growth and as regards to the growth of others.

Malcolm X once said something to this effect: I have a strong allegiance to both Christ and Muhammad because we need them both. Right now, so many of the men to whom I am trying to minister need the discipline of Allah. Their lives are in such disrepair that they need clear, hard rules of discipline that are spelled out for them without ambiguity. Later on, once they have their lives more in order, they can turn more to the liberal love of Jesus. First we need the discipline of Allah, later the freedom of Jesus.

He understood that there are stages to the spiritual life and that what is needed in one stage will sometimes be very different than what is needed in another. What are the basic stages of the spiritual life?

The gospels, the mystics and the great spiritual writers, with some variation in how they express this, concur that there are three clear stages to the spiritual journey or, in another way of putting it, three levels of discipleship:

The first level, which might aptly be termed, Essential Discipleship, is the struggle to get our lives together, to achieve basic human maturity (which itself might be defined as the capacity for essential unselfishness, the capacity to put others before ourselves). The second level can be called Generative Discipleship and is the struggle to give our lives away in love, service, and prayer. The third level can be called Radical Discipleship and consists in the struggle to give our deaths away, that is, to leave this earth in such a way that our deaths themselves become our final gift and blessing to our families, churches, and society.

1. The first stage, Essential Discipleship, is, yes, about essentials, about getting our lives together by properly channeling our energies through discipline (the origin of the word, discipleship). By definition, that task is mainly conservative: learning proper teaching so as to have a healthy vision, submitting to rules of behavior that ground us and move us beyond our instinctual selfishness, and being a learner within family and church community. Metaphorically speaking, at this stage we are learning the “discipline of Allah.”
2. But, once this stage is achieved with a certain proficiency, the challenge becomes different. Now the task is to give our lives away—and to give them away ever more deeply and to an ever-widening circle. That's a more liberal task and it becomes even-more liberal as we move towards that truly great unknown, death, where all that we have grounded ourselves in must be left behind as we are opened to the widest circle of all, cosmic embrace, infinity, and the ineffable mystery of God.

In our discipleship, our spiritual journey, there is an important time to be conservative, just as there is an important time to be liberal. We are not meant to pick one of these over the other.

Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his web site, www.ronrolheiser.com.

 

The risen Jesus is “the way, and the truth, and the life.”

Jesus is the way, the path to eternal life with the Father: “no one comes to the Father but through me.” To try another way is to ensure failure.

Jesus is the truth, the word of God. To seek the truth elsewhere is to “stumble and fall,” to deal in falsehood and lie.

Jesus is the life, the God who has “filled all ages with the words of a new song.”To live outside of Christ is to die.

Those who follow Jesus faithfully are a chosen race, “a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation.” They are chosen to “proclaim the glorious works” of God. They are priestly mediators “offering spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God.”

They are consecrated to “the One who called you from darkness.” Built on the cornerstone of Jesus Christ, they are a powerful community, descending from that early church where “the word of God continued to spread and the number of disciples ... enormously increased.”

When Jesus, who had suffered the death of the cross for mankind, had risen, He appeared as the one constituted as Lord, Christ and eternal Priest, and He poured out on His disciples the Spirit promised by the Father. From this source the Church, equipped with the gifts of its Founder and faithfully guarding His precepts of charity, humility and self-sacrifice, receives the mission to proclaim and to spread among all peoples the Kingdom of Christ and of God.

Vatican II, Dogmatic Constitution on the Church, 1965:5.

 

 

First Reading
Acts 6:1-7

1.  As the early church grew, problems arose and were addressed. For instance, the Hellenists neglected widows. Do you see areas of negligence today for which the Church might help to find solutions? School shootings and gun violence? Ecojustice? Homelessness? Immigration? Racial inequality?
2. “The Hellenists complained. … So the Twelve called together the community of disciples. … ” What is a “Synod”? Will Synodality involve the “community” in making needed changes?

Second Reading
1 Peter 2:4-9

1. St Peter says that we are “a chosen race a royal priesthood and holy nation, a people of his own.” Do you “announce the praises of him who called you out of darkness into his wonderful light”? Regularly? Sometimes? With words? With works?
2. How do you “announce the praises of him who called you out of darkness” to the hungry on your streets? When there is eco-injustice in parts of your city? When there is racism in your office?

Gospel
John 14:1-12 

1. The disciples didn’t know where Jesus was going and certainly did not want him to leave. Can you relate to this desire to be with the people you love? How is human love either a reflection of divine love or else actually a participation in it?
2. “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” What did Jesus tell his disciples (and us) in this reading to ensure that our hearts are not troubled, according to Pope Francis?

Jesus is risen and lives precisely to be always by our side. We can thus say to him, “Jesus, I believe that you rose again and are beside me. I believe that you listen to me. I bring to you what upsets me, my troubles. …

… “My Father’s house has many rooms … I am going there to prepare a place for you.” … he reserved a place in Heaven for us. He took our humanity upon himself to carry it beyond death, to a new place, to Heaven, so that we might also be where he is.

… God is in love with us; we are his children. … We are in transit here. We are made for Heaven, for eternal life, to live forever. …

But how can we reach heaven? … He says to us today: “I am the Way” … to have a living relationship with him, to imitate him in love, to follow in his footsteps … of service to others.

Pope Francis
Angelus, 5th Sunday of Easter
May 10, 2020

The selection from the Acts of the Apostles points out that divisions, biases, and conflict are part of human nature and have existed in the church from the earliest days.  The conflicts between Aramaic-speaking and Greek-speaking Jews existed for many years before the church.  The Hellenists were Greek-speaking members of the community.  Widows and orphans were the poorest in society.  Women and children depended upon husbands and fathers; if they died, they had no source of livelihood or place to stay.  The Hellenists made it known that they thought the widows of the Hebrew-speaking part of the church were getting more support, and the Greek-speaking widows were being neglected.  Caring for the poor and those in need has been part of the church's life from the beginning.  

In response to the conflict in the community and to improve the assistance, the Apostles decided to appoint some Hellenists to oversee this assistance.  They broadened the ministry of the church to meet the needs that existed.  These seven men came to ministry out of everyday life.  Diakonia is a Greek word that means service.  It can be used as a general term for service as a waiter serves at the table, or it can be used for those who dedicate themselves to a life of service.  The church continues this ministry with both transitional and permanent deacons.  Transitional deacons spend a time as a deacon on their way to ordination as priests.  Permanent deacons are ordained later in life, often married, and committed to serving the needs of the church in a parish or other ministry.    

The passage from the First Letter of Peter continues unfolding the meaning and significance of Baptism.  Although the leadership of the Jewish community rejected Jesus, he was affirmed by God, who raised Him up.  Jesus, living as a human and offering a challenging message, is a stumbling stone.  The way to God is through Jesus, and those who reject him follow a path that diverges from God.

The last two lines of the reading present a beautiful image of who we are called to be.

Chosen Race /a people of his own: The chosen aspect reflects God’s choice to be in relationship with you and to include you in a special people, the people of God.  In times past, this has been misused to promote prejudice and racial superiority.  The chosen race is not from our perspective but God's, and all who respond and come to know God are part of God’s chosen people.

Royal Priesthood:  Royal has to do with the king, who was the anointed of God.  God set them apart for a special task of focusing the people on the task that they were to do.

Priests were the ones who brought the people’s prayers and offerings before God.

The title, royal priesthood, is given to the baptized who have been anointed and chosen by God to bring the prayers and needs of all the human family to God in prayer.  We are called to be intercessors.  

Holy nation: To be holy is to be set aside from the ordinary, to be other.  To be God’s people is live differently than the rest of society.  The way of Jesus and his message is different from the way of society in both his day and our day.  The beatitudes catch this difference: To be dependent upon God, desiring justice, to be merciful, to be single-hearted, to be peacemakers, to endure suffering for doing right, and to forgive those who wrong us.  This is a different way to live.

The Gospel brings out the disciples' fear as Jesus approaches death.  The fear also existed in the early church when Jesus did not return in the decades after his resurrection.  What were they going to do?  Jesus assures them that he is the Way, the Truth, and the Life.  They are connected to him and the Father by faith, by the Holy Spirit who dwells within them, and by the works that they do.  Jesus did what the Father asked of him, and they could see it in his life.  Just as they do the work that Jesus did, they will realize they are connected to Jesus and the Father.  He is the Way by how he lived, and we follow that way in the way we live.  Jesus is the Truth not as static answers but in the living, dynamic relationship He has with the Father.  As we share in that relationship, we are in the Truth.  It is not how much one knows but how one lives the truth.  Jesus is the Life.  He is the source of life, the spring of living water that nurtures and renews.  As we follow the way and live the truth, we fully enter life.  Not even death could take life from Jesus, and when we are connected to Him, we will have life to the full.

Key themes:

• Service and the ministry of deacons
• Priesthood of the baptized
• Holiness
• Chosen People
• Unity with Christ and the Father

Reflection questions:

• Who is powerless and needy in our society? 
• Have you seen or participated in any outreach programs for those in need?
• What does it mean for you to live a holy life? 
• How can you intercede (priestly) with those in need?
• How have you experienced God’s presence in the deeds you have done and the actions that you have taken?

Prayer suggestions:

For the church: that we may recognize that we are a chosen and holy people, living stones, whom God is creating into the Body of Christ, to announce the deeds of the Lord, 

For fuller discipleship:  that God will guide us in living sacrificial lives and continuing the ministry of Christ in laying down our lives for our families, our communities, and our society

For all who serve the poor, widows, orphans, and the forgotten of society: that God will renew their hearts and strengthen their spirits as they continue to reach out to those in need

For all burdened by worry and anxiety: that they may find in Christ hope, freedom, and peace

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases: Do not ... be troubled, I am going, I am the way, know my Father, how can we know the way?, do the works

To the point: Jesus’ words in this gospel from the Last Supper discourse are reassuring ones: “Do not let your hearts be troubled.” Yet Thomas and Philip, who hear Jesus also tell them that he is leaving, are not reassured and question him anxiously. The leap from the Jesus at the Last Supper to the Jesus after the resurrection is one giant step, one the disciples have not yet taken. But we have taken this leap. We are an Easter people. We have received the Holy Spirit who empowers us to know Jesus, through him to know the Father, and to do the works of Jesus. Believing this mitigates all troubles, all anxiety.

Connecting the Gospel ……  to the Second Reading: Peter can confidently invite people to “Come to [Christ]” and name them “a people of [Christ’s] own” because he is writing from an Easter faith; he has encountered the risen Lord. He has made the leap that the troubled and anxious disciples in the gospel have not yet made.
…  to experience: Being troubled and anxious is a fact of our stress-filled lives. “Do not be troubled” the surgeon says to someone before major surgery; “Do not be troubled” a parent says to a child wakened by a nightmare; “Do not be troubled” …The only way we can truly not be troubled.

The appointment of deacons, as recounted in the Acts of the Apostles, was a response to the needs of fellow Christians and the desires of the Twelve to be more available for prayer and the proclamation of the word.

While the task at hand concerned material requirements of the community—the fair distribution of food among the widows—what is more interesting about the account is the Apostles’ flexibility in responding to the needs of their time.

As the ages rolled by, the function and meaning of the diaconate took various shapes, sometimes of minor importance, but always linked to service, whether liturgical or communal. In the contemporary Western church, the hallmark of deacons is that they assist, not preside, even though, in response to need, deacons do preside at baptisms, marriages, and burials. Thus, the diaconate gets more closely linked to the priesthood. But I hope not too close.

I have often wondered whether there is a hidden hindrance in the preaching and the hearing of the word in today’s Church. I mean more than the quality and length of sermons. It is inevitable that some of us preachers are just not as good as others—certainly not as good as some preachers who have grown up more in the tradition of the word than of sacrament.

There is a deeper issue here that involves our lives and labors. As an old African-American woman told a group of us one day, “I’d rather hear one sermon lived than ten preached.”

If there are problems with our preaching, it is not only that we are too busy doing other things—although administrative duties can consume a pastor in any parish. A far bigger problem is this: even the best of homilies can be sloughed off because it is tied to the very nature of the presiding office, the task, the business of priestcraft.

A significant charism of deacons in the contemporary church is related to the fact that most of them are married, have other places of work, have had an active career, and have no reason to give service to the church other than their faith. The work of priests, even their preaching, can be subconsciously passed off as “what they have to do.” But when a deacon visits the sick, when a mail carrier or a business person gets into the pulpit, something else is going on. And people know this. It is not just “their job.”

There is something particularly moving and engaging about an ordinary person who wants to read and preach the word of God—and it’s not “business as usual.” It can’t be sloughed off as something that is “expected” to be done.

The witness of married folk, living “ordinary” lives, is most powerful precisely because they do not need to do it, nor are they expected to do so. One of the charisms of the Promise-Keepers and Opus Dei is the fact that people, who seem ordinary, desire to do uncommon things for God and community. Similarly, the primary source of vocations to the priesthood or conversions to the Catholic faith is the example of family members, friends, and co-workers. It is a matter of persons, not institutional strategy.

Two of my closest friends, till the day they died, had prayed for the ordination of women in the Catholic church. Though they are gone, I still hold their hope that if it is the will of God and the work of the Spirit, the church will have the humility to change.

Yet both of these women eventually confided to me that they experienced in their labors (one as a nun-physician, the other as a wife and professional photographer) strange powers of communicating faith that no priest or preacher seemed to have. Since they didn’t have to preach and pray, people could not ignore them the way they could ignore an official minister. Since they were not expected to be servants of the poor, advocates for justice, or ministers of the word, they could not easily be explained away.

This is the very thing I experienced in those moments when married women scouted the far reaches of mystical prayer or a father of a large family revealed, before me and other men, how his life would have no final meaning or joy without Christ. We have all known deacons who, because of their kind service, led others to say, “See how those Catholics love one another—and others as well.” It was precisely because they were not priests that they were so effective.

We are a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a consecrated nation. The ritual prayer that commissions deacons should be for us all, “Receive the Gospel of Christ whose herald you are; believe what you read, preach what you believe, put into practice what you preach.”

Whatever our office in the church, we are all called to be deacons, just as we are called to the priesthood of faithful believers. The diversity of roles is life-giving. A mother lives what I could never preach. A celibate reveals a color in the spectrum of faith that spouses cannot. A single lay person consoles in ways that other Christians never could.

Isn't it appropriate, then, that Jesus is reported to have said, “In my father’s house there are many mansions”?

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

Farewell Addresses

Scholars identify chapters 14-17 of John’s Gospel as the evangelist’s creative presentation of teachings of Jesus in the form of a “farewell address.”

In general, these passages begin with an indication that the speaker is about to die or depart. Then follows an exhortation to his successors. The elements in this part of the address vary: there are prophecies, words of caution about the future, God’s intentions for the future.

Successors are also exhorted to pass these words on to others. Sometimes there is also notice of the speaker’s death and burial.

When John 14 concludes with “Get up, let us go,” we are surprised to see that John 15 continues the farewell address. Clearly the evangelist has strung together otherwise separate traditions.

Jesus The Way

Jesus’ words and deeds in this Gospel speak love at every turn. He demonstrates absolute, total, and universal love in his varied responses to those who approach him.

Jesus’ life, teaching, and behavior do indeed present people with “an authentic vision of human existence,” that is, a model of the way human life ought to be lived.

If one lives like this, one will definitely encounter God, who is Love.

These are heartening words not only to Jesus’ disciples but especially to believers within John’s community who are beginning to suffer for believing in Jesus. “The Judeans had already agreed that anyone who confessed Jesus to be the Messiah would be put out of the synagogue” (Jn 9:22; see also Jn 12:42; Jn 16:2).

Such excommunication deprived these people of a community and a place that were dear to them. Moreover it raised doubts about whether they really could meet God anywhere else.

The synagogue, after all, represented God’s chosen community. Jesus assures his disciples and through them all subsequent generations of believers: “If you know me, you will know my Father also.” If one has met Jesus, one has met the Father.

Philip still doesn’t get it. He asks Jesus to “show us the Father” (Jn 14:8). This must have been particularly disappointing to the historical, earthly Jesus.

Jesus himself called Philip to be a follower, and he in turn brought Nathanael to Jesus (Jn 1:43-48). When faced with a hungry multitude, Jesus turned to Philip and asked him how they could be fed (Jn 6:5-9). When curious Greeks wanted to meet and talk with Jesus, they approached Philip to intercede on their behalf (Jn 12:20-22).

Only against this background can one appreciate Jesus’ disappointment: “You still do not know me!?”

Philip’s failure provides Jesus with the opportunity to point to the future successes of his followers: “The one who believes in me will also do the works that I do and, in fact, will do greater works than these. ... ” (Jn 14:12).

The works of Jesus are the works of God: to give life, and to restore meaning to life or enrich life’s meaning. Already at creation God called us to take dominion over evolution (“to till the garden and keep it,” Gen 1:26-28).

This is our challenge to engage in life-giving activities rather than death-dealing ones. This is also our challenge to put meaning into life rather than suck it out. This is what Jesus in his “last will and testament” urges his followers to do out of love for others.

Jesus has presented himself as the authentic vision of existence. Believers can only echo Peter: “Lord, to whom can we go? You have the words of eternal life” (Jn 6:68).

 

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

Commentary by Ambrose
I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life.

Let us march forward intrepidly to meet our Redeemer, Jesus, pursuing our onward course without swerving until we come to the assembly of the saints and are welcomed by the company of the just.

It is to join our Christian forebears that we are journeying, to those who taught us our faith—that faith which comes to our aid and safeguards our heritage for us even when we have no good works to show.

In the place we are making, the Lord will be everyone’s light; the true light which enlightens every human person will shine upon all.

In the house where we are going the Lord Jesus has prepared many dwelling-places for his servants, so that where he is we also may be, for this was his desire.

Hear his own words about them: “In my Father’s house are many dwelling-places,” and about his desire: “I will come again, he says, and take you to myself, so that where I am you also may be.”

  “But he was speaking only to his disciples” you say, “and so it was to them alone that the many dwelling-places were promised.” Do you really suppose it was only for the eleven disciples they were prepared?
And what of the saying about people coming from all the corners of the earth to sit at table in the kingdom of heaven? Do we doubt that the divine will will be accomplished?

But for Christ, to will is to do! Accordingly he has shown us both the way and the place: “You know where I am going,” he said, “and you know the way.”

The place is where the Father is; the way is Christ, according to his own declaration: “I am the way, and the truth and the life; no one comes to the Father except through me.”

Let us set out on this way, let us hold fast to truth, let us follow life. It is the way that leads us, the truth that strengthens us, the life that is restored to us through him.

To make sure that we really understand his will, Christ prays later on: “Father, it is my desire that those whom you have given me may be with me where I am, so that they may see my glory.”

How graciously he asks for what he had already promised! The promise came first and then the request, not the other way around.

Conscious of his authority and knowing the gift was at his own disposal, he made the promise; then, as if to show his filial submission, he asked his Father to grant it. He promised first to make us aware of his power; he asked afterwards to show us his loving deference to his Father.

Yes, Lord Jesus, we do follow you, but we can only come at your bidding. No one can make the ascent without you, for you are our way, our truth, our life, our strength, our confidence, our reward. Be the way that receives us, the truth that strengthens us, the life that invigorates us.

Death as a Blessing 12, 52-55: CSEL 32, 747-750

Ambrose (339-397) was born in Trier, the son of a praetorian prefect of Gaul. On the death of Auxentius, the Arian bishop of Milan, Ambrose, while still a catechumen, was elected to the see by acclamation. We know from Saint Augustine that as bishop he was accessible to everyone. Although Ambrose was influenced by the Greek Fathers, especially Origen, his preaching had the practical bent characteristic of Western theological writers.

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

In Acts, when Luke sketches scenes from the story of the early days of the Church in Jerusalem, he is not simply recording events. He is providing paradigms that portray something about the Church's nature.

And the scenario we meet today in the First Reading is not entirely a pretty picture.

   “At that time, as the number of disciples continued to grow, the Hellenists complained against the Hebrews because their widows were being neglected in the daily distribution [diakonia]” (Acts 6:1). The “Hellenists” are best understood as Greek-speaking Jews (probably people who grew up in the Diaspora and later emigrated to Judea). “Hebrews,” then, would be Aramaic-speaking Jews. We have evidence, even as far back as the Maccabees, that there had long been tension between the Jews who had taken on the language and even some of the ways of the Hellenistic world, on the one hand, and the more traditional Jews who preferred to speak Aramaic, on the other.

The passage from Acts 6 (First Reading) lets us know that the infant Christian community of Jerusalem included Jews from both subgroups, and that becoming Christian did not automatically erase the “liberal/conservative” baggage that they brought with them. Luke informs us that the community had set up a daily distribution (of food?) to take care of the needy among them, especially widows. But the Greek-speaking widows were somehow being neglected.

Where did that neglect come from? A combination of scarcity and prejudice? Were the (“Hebrew”) Twelve favoring their own kind? Were they too busy to oversee the distribution properly? Whatever the cause of the neglect, the Twelve chose to apply a familiar practical solution: they increased the staff. Too busy with the diakonia of the word to tie up their time with serving at table (or, in another valid translation, “keeping accounts”), they call the entire community together and mandate it to select seven good men to carry out this other diakonia. That the seven chosen all have Greek names suggests a kind of affirmative action on the part of the community: they chose Greek-speaking members, thereby assuring that the neglect of Hellenist widows would be remedied. This freeing up of the apostles led to continuing rapid growth of the Church, even attracting some of the Temple priests to the fold.

This vignette shows the Spirit-filled community facing a very human set of problems and acting practically and faithfully. The Second Reading, from what appears to be a baptismal homily embedded in 1 Peter, describes the Church in a very different way. This passage is a densely layered poem made of imagery mined from the Law, the Prophets, and the Psalms.

Urging the recently baptized, whom he calls “born again,” the writer/homilist invites them to “come to [the Lord], a living stone, rejected by human beings but chosen and precious in the sight of God.” The author here draws upon an application to Jesus of Psalm 118:22 attributed both to Jesus himself (Luke 20:18) and to Peter (Acts 4:11). The original meaning of the psalm was to call Israel a stone rejected by the mighty empires around it but nonetheless destined to become the foundation stone in God's own victorious work.

Such is now true of Jesus: the rejected stone now becomes the foundation stone of the “spiritual house,” the Church. The baptized person is encouraged to participate in the victory of his resurrection. Preparing to describe the community as temple, he calls Jesus a “living” stone to highlight the reality that the Church is no inanimate object but a living unity, in which the new Christian is a living stone.

Shifting the image slightly, but remaining in the Temple ambiance, the author reminds the baptized that they, collectively, are to grow into “a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.” Like Paul in Rm 12:1-2, Peter makes it clear that by “spiritual sacrifices” he means the basic relationships of community life: “since you have purified yourselves by obedience to the truth for sincere mutual love, love one another intensely from a [pure] heart.” (1 Pt 1:22) The author ends the poem by applying to the Church phrases used in Ex 19:5-6 to describe the covenant community of Israel at Sinai: “a royal priesthood, a holy nation, a people of his own.”

Luke the historian describes the Church facing a knotty administrative challenge. Peter describes the same Church in a poem that plays Hebrew refrains in a new key. Both picture the Church, ever human, always guided by a power greater than itself.

 

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

Reading I: Acts 6:1-7

For the New Testament scholar, several problems are raised by this story from Acts 6.

The main one is that although we are told that the Seven were appointed to “serve tables” in order to allow the apostles to give their undivided attention to the ministry of the word, nevertheless the only members of the Seven whom we hear about after their appointment turn out to be themselves notable ministers of the word, namely, Stephen and Philip.

Probably this confusion is due to the author of Luke-Acts, who sees in the appointment of the Seven the institution of a subordinate ministry (deacons?—he uses the verb diakonein, meaning “serve” but does not actually call them deacons).

In actual fact, however, the Seven must have been more than that. They must have been, in a real sense, leaders of the growing Greek-speaking part of the community.

In that case, the real concern of the apostles in recognizing the Seven would have been to prevent a split between the Greek-speaking and the Aramaic-speaking Christians (Hellenists and Hebrews).

Perhaps even the act of ordination—laying on of hands with prayer—reflects the practice at the time Luke wrote rather than that of the earliest church (see also Acts 13:3 and Acts 14:23, which are probably equally anachronistic).

Nevertheless, ordination by the laying on of hands with prayer must have been introduced in a Palestinian-Jewish environment, for it reflects the synagogue practice of ordaining elders—a fact that has even led some modern scholars to suppose that the Seven were appointed presbyters (elders) rather than deacons.

But this is improbable. The truth more likely is that we have here two levels of interpretation:

1. the original historical situation, that is, the tensions mentioned above and the recognition of the leaders of the Greek-speaking group by the Twelve, thus averting a breach between the two parties;
2. the origins of a subordinate ministry. 

Responsorial Psalm: 33:1-2, 4-5, 18-19

As a psalm of thanksgiving for the mighty acts of God in salvation history, this selection is appropriate for the Easter season, particularly since the last stanza refers to deliverance from death.

Originally, of course, this was a reference to deliverance from some natural calamity, probably famine, which is mentioned in the last line.

In the context of this Easter liturgy, this can be given a full Christian sense. In his resurrection Christ has indeed delivered the souls (lives) of his people from death.

 
Reading II: 1 Peter 2:4-9

We recall that 1 Peter is full of baptismal references. Originally, perhaps, this passage was an instruction for baptismal candidates.

It tells them the nature of the community into which they are being admitted. It is a temple (the place of God’s presence) made up of living stones (that is, men and women). It is, like the people of the old covenant (Ex 19:6), a holy or royal priesthood, a distinct race and nation.

Special stress is laid upon the priestly aspect of the community, for only this aspect is spelled out in terms of implied functions.

The community expresses its priestly character by offering up spiritual sacrifices acceptable to God through Jesus Christ and declares the wonderful deeds of him who calls it out of darkness into light.

Between this exposition of the nature of the Church there is inserted a string of Old Testament quotations, connected by the theme of the stone (Is 28:16; Ps 118:22; Is 8:14-15) and applied to the person and work of Christ. These quotations were evidently suggested by the reference to the composition of the church out of living stones.

This reminds the author that Christians, as living stones, are joined together by Christ, who is the cornerstone. Remove the prosaic quotations and we have what may have been an early (baptismal?) hymn about the church.

This is the locus classicus in the New Testament on the theme of the church’s priesthood. It was, of course, the passage that inspired the Reformers to reassert the doctrine of the priesthood of all believers. Though it was understandable, it was a pity that they had to assert it polemically against the late medieval doctrines of ministerial priesthood, obscuring thereby the priestly understanding of the ministry.

A book by an American Lutheran scholar, John H. Elliott, has sought to cut the ground from under this polemic by insisting that (1) there is a basic difference between the priesthood of the church as predicated in Ex 19:6 and the cultic priesthood of Leviticus, and (2) the sacrifice offered by the Christian community, which is not cultic but ethical—the living of a Christian life in the world.

It is a helpful insight that the priesthood of the church is based on Exodus rather than Leviticus. This protects the teaching of the letter to the Hebrews that Christ has once for all replaced the sacrifices of the Levitical priesthood by his redemptive act, and that any priesthood we predicate of the church or its ministry can never abrogate the “once-for-all-ness” of his sacrifice and the uniqueness of his priesthood.

Nor can it be denied that the author of 1 Peter sees the Exodus-type sacrifice of the church as being actualized and made visible to the world in the quality of its ethical life.

Nevertheless, I wonder whether we can exclude cultic ideas altogether from this passage. The “spiritual sacrifices” offered by the church do not exclude the “declaring” (or recital) of the wonderful deeds of God in salvation history.

Here is the primary focus of the church’s priesthood, and this is what the church does in the liturgy. Of course, this issues or should issue in a lifestyle in the world. But its cultic basis must be preserved or the whole conception of sacrifice will evaporate.

The great Eucharistic Prayer (traditionally called the “canon” in the West and the “anaphora” in the East) is the occasion par excellence when we “show forth,” “declare” or recite before God in thanksgiving God’s mighty acts of salvation.

This is the primary work of the church. For this we are baptized, and for this we renew our baptismal vows at Easter.

 
Gospel: John 14:1-12

What CH Dodd wrote some years ago about the First Epistle of John is equally applicable to the discourses in the Fourth Gospel:

The argument is not closely articulated. There is little direct progression. The writer ‘thinks around’ a succession of related topics. The movement of thought has not inaptly been described as ‘spiral,’ for the development of a theme often brings us back almost to the starting point—almost, but not quite, for there is a slight shift which provides the transition to a fresh theme.”
This special pattern makes an analysis of a passage like today’s Gospel very difficult. A number of themes arise in succession:

1. Jesus’ impending departure, that is, his death and exaltation.
2. (Linked by the key word “way”:) Jesus as the revelation and the way to the Father.
3. Following this, a dialogue with Philip unfolding this christological affirmation: Jesus as the revelation of the Father, a reference to the words and works of Jesus as the words and works of the Father, words and works that make him the revelation of the Father.
4. A challenge to believe Jesus, preferably because of encounter with his whole person or, if not that, at least because of his works.
5. The promise that believers will do even greater works because of Jesus’ departure — which brings us back almost to where we started.

Obviously there is much in this passage that could be developed for a homily. The liturgical season, with Ascension Day approaching, suggests that we read it because of what it says about Jesus’ departure to the Father.

No doubt when the farewell discourse was first chosen in the traditional Lectionary for the lessons of the old “great forty days,” our ancestors equated this departure with the ascension as a separate event and thought of the discourses almost as though they were delivered by the risen Christ during the great forty days.

Our understanding of the Easter event today, as well as of the farewell discourses, is more sophisticated. For us, the “going” of Jesus to the Father is the whole complex event, celebrated throughout the great fifty days — his resurrection, exaltation, appearances, and the gift of the Spirit.

And the farewell discourses themselves, while doubtless enshrining the traditional sayings of Jesus, are meditations of the Johannine community upon the meaning of this total complex of events.

For us, the important message of today’s pericope is that the risen, exalted Christ continues his words and works in his church.

Are these “greater works” — the word and the sacraments — greater because they will actually mediate the divine salvation, whereas the words and works of the earthly Jesus only pointed forward to, and prepared for, the central saving acts?

His departure from earth was preparatory for his continual coming to his church.

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 live as God’s chosen people and follow Christ who is our Way, our Truth, and our Life
• For fuller discipleship:  that God will guide us in living sacrificial lives and continuing the ministry of Christ in our families, our communities, and our society
• For the healing of divisions within the Christian Community and between Christian Communities: that the Spirit will help us hear each other’s pain and open a pathway for reconciliation and cooperation
• For those struggling to come to know Christ: that the Spirit will lead them to recognize the works of God in their lives and the world around them as signs of God's love and presence
• For all who serve the poor, widows, orphans and the forgotten of society: that God will renew their hearts and strengthen their spirits to continue to reach out to those in need
• For all Deacons: that they may faithfully follow Christ as they unselfishly serve those who are in need in body, mind, or spirit
• For all who are being ordained this spring: that God will fill them with the Spirit and help them to bring Christ’s presence to all whose lives they touch
• For students who are taking final examinations:  that they may recall all that they have learned this semester and that God will help them clearly express their learning and make beneficial use of it in their lives
• For an end to gun violence: that God will break the cycle of gun usage to resolve disputes and disappointments, and open a greater respect for human life
• For all burdened by worry and anxiety: that they may find hope, freedom, and peace in Christ
• For all who are struggling with addictions: that Christ may be their way to freedom and wholeness
• For all who work the earth: that they may use their skills wisely to feed the human family and that God will give them favorable weather and an abundant harvest
• For all who are unemployed:  that God will give them courage, help them to persevere as they wait, and help them find support from others
• For all who are ill: that God will give them strength, restore them to health, and sustain them through therapy
• For Peace: that God touch the hearts of all leaders engaged in warfare and give them a new conviction of the value and peace and the shortcomings of violence

We live in an age when nostalgia sells. We have radio stations devoted to “oldies,” that is, the music of some former era. Television has endless recall of shows from Jack Benny to Leave it to Beaver to I Love Lucy to ... you name it.

Such a human thing it is to remember the spirit of the past and to understand better what we have done and have been. Can all of it media hype, designed to “sell product”? We are tempted to say, yes, hype, hype and nothing but hype. Yet much of what our nostalgia dredges up was actually good in its day, and remains so.

Throughout Easter the Church is recalling the adventures of the Church in the weeks after Jesus died and then rose again. We sit around the campfire of our memories, telling stories about how it was then. Philip. Remember Philip who told Jesus, “just show us the Father and that will be enough for us.” Of course he was seeing Jesus and therefore was looking at the Father, but he did not know it.

And do you remember what Jesus said just before his passion and death? That he would send the Spirit of Truth into our hearts. And that we would not be left orphans. It was hard to understand then and it is still pretty difficult.

Let us go over it one more time. Jesus seemed to say, first, that God the Abba was so much within Jesus that every time you see him it is the same thing as seeing God. Second, Jesus said, I am going to be so much within you — yes, you normal people — that whenever people see you it will be the same thing as seeing me! And of course, the Father is in me, so they see the Father too!

   “I almost have it,” Philip gulped.

So Jesus said it again. You will not see me anymore. But that doesn’t make me absent from you. I and Abba will be within you so that your very spirit will hold the Spirit of me and of the Father. All you need to do is to say “yes.”

Then Philip saw it. In the upper room he touched the truth. Very soon he was running from place to place doing miracles and preaching about the Messiah!

With one accord, the crowds paid attention to what was said by Philip when they heard it and saw the signs he was doing. For unclean spirits, crying out in a loud voice, came out of many possessed people, and many paralyzed or crippled people were cured. There was great joy in that city (First Reading)

We ourselves touch the truth and receive it also. Maybe it is not so dramatic as Philip's experience, but we have it every Sunday and any other day we choose to participate in Mass. We touch and receive Jesus on the tongue.

Simple? No.

Well, maybe it is simple. This Sunday let us remember again not hype but these deepest, dearest mysteries of our lives.

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

At the heart of our faith lies the deep truth that we are unconditionally loved by God. We believe that God looks down on our lives and says: You are my beloved child, in you I take delight! We do not doubt that truth of that, we just find it impossible to believe.

Some years ago, at a workshop, a woman came up to me during the break and articulated it in these words: “God loves me unconditionally. I know that’s true, but I how can I make myself believe it? I simply can’t!” She could have been speaking for half of the human race. We know we are loved by God, we can say the words, but how do we make ourselves believe that?

Why? Why is that so difficult to believe?

For many reasons, though mostly because (unless we are extraordinarily blessed) we rarely, if ever, experience unconditional love. Mostly we experience love with conditions, even from those closest to us: Our parents love us better when we do not mess up. Our teachers love us better when we behave and perform well. Our churches love us better when we do not sin. Friends love us better when are successful and not needy. The world loves us better when we are attractive. Our spouses love us better when we do not disappoint them. Mostly, in this world, we have to measure up in some way to be loved.

Moreover many of us too have been wounded by supposed expressions of love that were not love at all but were instead expressions of self-serving manipulation, exploitation, or even positive abuse. Beyond even this, all of us have been cursed and shamed in our enthusiasm by the countless times someone, either through words or through a hateful or judgmental glace, in effect said to us: Who do you think you are? We wither under that and become the walking wounded, unable to believe that we are loved and loveable. So, even when we know that God loves us, how can we make ourselves believe it?

At one level, we do believe it. Deep down, below our wounded parts, the child of God that still inhabits the recesses of our soul knows that it is made in God’s image and likeness and is special, beautiful, and loveable. That is why we so easily become angry and enraged whenever someone violates our dignity or puts us down.

But how do we make ourselves believe that we are unconditionally loved in a way that would make us less insecure in our attitude and our actions? How do we live in a surer confidence that we are unconditionally loved so as to let that radiate in the way we treat others and ourselves?

There are no easy answers. For a wounded soul, like for a wounded body, there are no magic wands for quick easy healings. Biblically, however, there is an image that, while confusing on the surface, addresses this: When God gives Joshua instructions on how to move into the Promised Land he tells him that, once there, he must “kill” everything there, all the men, women, children, and even the animals.

Taken literally, this text is horrible and speaks about everything that God is not. Yet this is not a literal text but an archetypal one. It is an image, a metaphor. I suspect that someone in an Alcoholics Anonymous program will more easily get its message: Killing all the inhabitants of Canaan means precisely giving away all the bottles in your liquor cabinet—the scotch, the bourbon, the wine, the cognac, the gin, the beer, the vodka, and everything else that’s there. You can’t take the Promised Land and still keep a few “Canaanites” on the side or you will soon lose the Promised Land.

That image also tells us what we must do to enter our true self-image, the deep truth that we are unconditionally loved by God. In great mythical literature we see that, usually, before the great wedding where the young prince and the young princess are to be married so as to live happily ever after, there first has to be an execution: the wicked older brothers and the wicked step-sisters have to be killed off. Why? Because they would eventually come and spoil the wedding.

Who are those wicked older brothers and wicked step-sisters? They are not different people from the young prince or princess getting married. They are their older incarnations. They are also inside of us. They are the inner voices from our past that can, at any given moment, ruin our wedding or our self-image by dragging in our past humiliations and saying: “Who do you think you are? Do you really think that you can marry a prince or princess? Do you really think that you’re loveable? We know you, we know your past, so don’t delude yourself!”

To actually believe that we are unconditionally loved, we first have to kill a few “Canaanites.”

 
Used with permission of the author, Oblate Father Ron Rolheiser. Currently, Father Rolheiser is serving as President of the Oblate School of Theology in San Antonio Texas. He can be contacted through his web site, www.ronrolheiser.com.

 

In today’s Gospel Jesus promises us that “I will not leave you orphaned; I will come back to you and you will have life.” Our faith, nurtured in this great paschal season, tells us that God-made-flesh is God-with-us, never abandoning us and always filling us with life.

It should be a great comfort to all of us, who share in the pain and suffering of ordinary life, to know that the Spirit of Jesus is with us always. It should be especially comforting to know that Jesus will not leave orphaned all those whom the world casts aside: the poor and homeless, the racial and ethnic minorities, the sick and dying, the prisoner and the refugee.

   “Christ died for sins once for all, a just man for the sake of the unjust.” He rescued us from our attachment to injustice, and then he sent his Spirit to remain with us and within us. Our prayer is one of gratitude for such a gift and hope that “we feel its saving power in our daily life.”

Jesus loves us so much that, even after his death, resurrection, and ascension, he remains with us. He is, after all, Emanuel, ‘God with us,’ but now through his living, sanctifying Spirit.

We now encounter him in new ways: in other human beings; in any place where people gather in his name; in the inspired words of Holy Scripture; in his Church, particularly her liturgical celebrations; in the person of his minister; and especially in the sacraments.

U.S. Bishops, The Eucharist and the Hungers
of the Human Family, 1975.

First Reading
Acts 8:5-8, 14-17

1. Why did the crowds “pay attention” to what Philip was saying? What gets your attention in spiritual matters?
2. The Samaritans saw many signs and were filled with “great joy.” What are the signs of the presence of God in your life? Do such signs fill you with joy? Can you think of these signs as “everyday miracles”? Is it a “miraculous” sign when you see people on the news taking truckloads of food to the starving children of South Sudan?

Second Reading
1 Peter 3:15-18

1. Does your life indicate that the Spirit inspires you? How do you “sanctify Christ as Lord” in all of life’s arena: home, government, church, world, and all creation?
2. St. Peter was the writer of this Second Reading. How does he recommend answering someone who asks about your hopefulness? In the gospels, do we find Peter always true to his advice? Did he do a lot better after he received the Spirit? Will the same Spirit help you?

Gospel
John 14:15 to 21

1. “Whoever loves me will be loved by my Father, and I will love him and reveal myself to him.” If studying or reading or discussion are your only approaches to God, what else is needed, according to this reading? How does love impact knowledge and understanding in any friendship?
2. “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Advocate to be with you always, the Spirit of truth. … ” According to Pope Francis—quoting St. John Paul II— is the Holy Spirit able to untie the most “knotted” human affairs? Is there some small way you can allow the Holy Spirit to use your creativity to help untie the knots of hunger, gun violence and climate change?

To believe that the Holy Spirit is at work in everyone means realizing that he seeks to penetrate every human situation and all social bonds: ‘The Holy Spirit can be said to possess an infinite creativity, proper to the divine mind, which knows how to loosen the knots of human affairs, even the most complex and inscrutable.’ (from St. John Paul II)

Evangelium Gaudium, 178

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases: keep my commandments, Spirit of truth, world … neither sees nor knows, you will see me, you will live, one who loves me, loved by my Father
To the point: In John’s gospel, “world” refers to everything opposed to God and being obedient to Jesus’ commandments. The world sees neither Jesus nor the “Spirit of truth”; faithful disciples do. The world does not love; faithful dis- ciples do. The world does not have life; faithful disciples do. Faithful disciples see, love, and live because of the Father’s gift of the Spirit dwelling within them. This divine indwelling is God’s very love. We are to be God’s love made visible, that the world may see Jesus, come to the truth, and choose to live in faithful love.
Connecting the Gospel ……  to the Second Reading: Peter is writing to a community who has welcomed “Christ as Lord in [their] hearts” and has remained faithful by their “good conduct in Christ.” These disciples have heeded what Jesus asks in the Gospel: to keep his commandments. Through their faithfulness, the world that conducts itself with evil is “put to shame.”
…  to experience: The world and its trappings are attractive. The “Spirit of truth” poured into our hearts by the Father leads us to discern where true satisfaction lies: in Jesus himself and being faithful to love as he has loved us.

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 

Baptism in the Spirit

“There was great joy in that city.” (Acts 8:8)
Some Catholic parents experience the sadness of seeing their children, once they reach or pass adolescence, leave the church of their childhood. I have never found parents indifferent to this. Rather, their feelings and faith span a range from anger, through guilt and worry, to an abiding trust in God and their children as well.

Although watching one’s children drift into a churchless way of life can be a jolt, it seems to be even more unsettling to some mothers and fathers to see their child leave Catholicism for something “better.” A son or daughter undergoes a conversion experience, is “baptized in the Spirit,” or finds deep Christian fellowship somewhere else.

I have yet to discover a satisfying account of how this happens. One thing is sure: there are no guaranteed causes of faith or its loss. Some children with casually Catholic upbringings become devoted churchgoers as adults. Others with a strict and extensive exposure to the traditions and practices of the church reject it all.

Our example, the environment of the home, the culture at large, the range of education, the quality of friendships—all influence the formation of a committed Catholic adult, but all of them together cannot ensure it.

What if a teenager discovers a new life of faith, prayer, and commitment in a Christian community other than ours? A number of times I have been approached by young adults who have had such an experience. To each person I put the following questions: Does it lead you into deeper union with Christ? Does it foster a life of greater virtue and service? Does it increase your faith, hope, and charity?

If the answers are yes, I then talk about the unique grace and goodness, as well as the deficiencies, of Catholicism; and if our young ones are tempted to reject this faith of ours, given through our church and sacraments, I bless their journey and entrust it to God.

Is that heresy? Should a strong and stern warning be given? If this were done, would it have any effect? Would a life of tepid or cafeteria-style Catholicism be better? To be sure, lukewarmness is not a universal trait of Catholics; but we do have to admit that there are lacks in our church.

Maybe we neglect some of the emotive power, the courage, the unique feeling of faith that is appropriate for a people truly saved by Christ and baptized in his Spirit. Our faith, one would think, is meant to be engaging and transforming.

Certainly, to judge by the accounts in the Acts of the Apostles, Philip’s proclamation of the Messiah manifested such power that the whole town of Samaria felt joy that they described as being at a “fever pitch.”

After accepting the Word of God, Peter and John met with them to pray that they might receive the Holy Spirit. Do we pray with and for our own young in such a manner?

Beyond baptism in the name of the Lord Jesus, the Apostles also imposed hands on the new believers so that they might receive the Holy Spirit.

In our own preparation for the sacrament of confirmation, many parishes seem to be increasingly aware of the opportunity to invite our young into a mature commitment and courageous conviction.

Apparently it was such conviction that led to the heroic examples of suffering for the name of Christ to which the First Letter of Peter alludes.

In any event, in the Fourth Gospel Jesus does promise a Paraclete, a Spirit of truth that the world does not see or accept. Are we ourselves so comfortable with our world and its language that our children judge our faith to be neither profound nor special?

The Spirit that Christ promised would be revealed by a life of love. Is that the Spirit our young hunger for?

For our part, we might learn more deeply that our faith engages feeling as well as reason and practicality, that it involves not only practices and creed, but a personal relationship to Christ.

We might ask if we really care enough about our faith that we desire to bestow it as our dearest gift to our young. Perhaps it is then that we will have experienced greater fellowship and solidarity as well as a sense of Catholic uniqueness.

The Spirit of Christ is the bearer of a mighty truth that challenges the world and transforms our hearts. We are called to lives of holy resistance and revolution. We really do offer something different and most strategic to the world.

If we believe that, how could we not want to talk of faith and proclaim Jesus as our Messiah?

As for those young people who might leave us, the last chapter is not yet written for their lives. Just as our church itself has a long and winding history, so do the great majority of its communicants.

Through it all, what is most important is that the believer, as well as the believing community, pass on to its young the great truth that Jesus Christ has saved us. Such is the ground of our faith and hope as well as of all the Spirit’s gifts.

That is why it is only into God’s hands that we entrust our lives — and the lives of those we love. 

Speaking Truth
Repetition and Style

Today’s Gospel concludes Jesus’ response to Philip’s request: “Show us the Father” (Jn 14:8). The beginning and end of this passage repeat the same idea but in reverse: “if you love me, you will keep my commandments” (Jn 14:15) and “those who have my commandments and keep them are those who love me” (Jn 14:21).

Such a literary construction is called an “inclusion” characterized by “reverse parallelism” The text “included” within these verses is intended to be viewed as a unit.

The unit (Jn 14:16 to 20) contains three basic ideas, also repeated in parallelism.

(1) The Spirit is coming to the community as advocate, helper, counselor (Jn 14:16); Jesus is returning (Jn 14:18). This pattern repeats itself throughout the farewell address.

Jesus alternates the expressions “I go to send the Spirit” with “I myself shall return.”

One and the same basic fact, that God does not abandon the community but remains ever with it, is captured in each statement.

(2) The forces of evil neither see nor know the Spirit (Jn 14:17a); the disciples see the risen Jesus, source of their life (Jn 14:19a).

Seeing and failing to see are major themes in John’s Gospel. Here the forces of evil (the world) stand in contrast to the force of Risen Life (the disciples).

(3) The disciples know the Spirit because he abides with and in them (Jn 14:17b); the forces of evil do not see the risen Jesus, but the disciples recognize his abiding presence in the mutual love that they express freely and openly (Jn 14:19b).
A number of insights from Mediterranean culture help modern believers to gain a better understanding of John’s repetitive style.

Repetition And Meaning

First, secrecy, lying, and deception are key strategies in this culture for protecting one’s honor It is always difficult to know the truth; the suspicion is always that others are lying.

Though this makes life very difficult, the culture offers strategies for affirming that truth is being told. One is to call God to witness to what one says. The prohibition against using God’s name in vain is a prohibition against calling God to witness a lie.

The fact that such a commandment exists suggests that it was a common practice to name God as witness to a lie.

Modern Western culture’s access to polygraph tests, sodium pentathol, and similar means makes it difficult to appreciate the frustration the ancients felt in trying to discover the truth. Jesus’ guarantee of the Spirit of truth as Paraclete was good news indeed.

Second, modern believers may feel uncomfortable about the contrasts John regularly draws between “us” (believers) and “them” (the world, the forces of evil). If John and his community sound slightly paranoid, that judgment may be more than partly correct.

Middle Eastern culture is agonistic, that is, it is conflict-prone. Its basic social institution is the large and very extended family. Everyone outside the family is suspected of being an enemy, plotting evil against the family, seeking to damage it. Truth was owed only to family and kin extending no further than the village. No one outside the village had a right to know anything.

This cultural orientation is challenged by Jesus’ teaching to love one another and imitate the love that exists between Jesus and the Father Jesus’ love-command extends beyond the family and the village.

John’s reference to “the world” or the forces of evil no doubt stems from this basic cultural hostility toward non-kin, but it also is based on the realization that some people refused to believe in Jesus and his message and sometimes did take hostile action (e.g., ejecting folks from the synagogue).

Since they live in a different culture, what role do Americans expect the Paraclete to play in their lives?

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

Commentary by John Chrysostom
I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor. (John 14:16)

   “If you love me,” said Christ, “keep my commandments.” I have commanded you to love one another and to treat one another as I have treated you. To love me is to obey these commands, to submit to me your beloved.

   “And I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor.” This promise shows once again Christ’s consideration. Because his disciples did not yet know who he was, it was likely that they would greatly miss his companionship, his teaching, his actual physical presence, and be completely disconsolate when he had gone.

Therefore he said: “I will ask the Father, and he will give you another Counselor,” meaning another like himself.

They received the Spirit after Christ had purified them by his sacrifice. The Spirit did not come down on them while Christ was still with them, because this sacrifice had not yet been offered.

But when sin had been blotted out and the disciples, sent out to face danger, were preparing themselves for the battle, they needed the Holy Spirit’s coming to encourage them.

If you ask why the Spirit did not come immediately after the resurrection, this was in order to increase their gratitude for receiving him by increasing their desire.

They were troubled by nothing as long as Christ was with them, but when his departure had left them desolate and very much afraid, they would be most eager to receive the Spirit.

“He will remain with you.” Christ said, meaning his presence with you will not be ended by death.

But since there was a danger that hearing of a Counselor might lead them to expect another incarnation and to think they would be able to see the Holy Spirit, he corrected this idea by saying: “The world cannot receive him because it does not see him.”

For he will not be with you in the same way as I am, but will dwell in your very souls, “He will be in you.”

Christ called him the Spirit of truth because the Spirit would help them to understand the types of the old law. By “He will be with you” he meant, “He will be with you as I am with you,” but he also hinted at the difference between them, namely, that the spirit would not suffer as he had done, nor would he ever depart.

“The world cannot receive him because it does not see him.” Does this imply that the Spirit is visible? By no means; Christ is speaking here of knowledge, for he adds: “or know him.”
Sight being the sense by which we perceive things most distinctly, he habitually used this sense to signify knowledge. By “the world” he means here the wicked, thus giving his disciples the consolation of receiving a special gift.

He said that the Spirit was another like himself, that he would not leave them, that he would come to them just as he himself had come, and that he would remain in them.

Yet even this did not drive away their sadness, for they still wanted Christ himself and his companionship. So to satisfy them he said:

“I will not leave you orphans; I will come back to you.” Do not be afraid, for when I promised to send you another counselor I did not mean that I was going to abandon you for ever, nor by saying that he would remain with you did I mean that I would not see you again. Of course I also will come to you; I will not leave you orphans.

John Chrysostom (c.347-407) was born at Antioch and studied under Diodore of Tarsus, the leader of the Antiochene school of theology. After a period of great austerity as a hermit, he returned to Antioch where he was ordained deacon in 381 and priest in 386. From 386 to 397 it was his duty to preach in the principal church of the city, and his best homilies, which earned him the title “Chrysostomos” or “the golden-mouthed,” were preached at this time. In 397 Chrysostom became patriarch of Constantinople, where his efforts to reform the court, clergy, and people led to his exile in 404 and finally to his death from the hardships imposed on him. Chrysostom stressed the divinity of Christ against the Arians and his full humanity against the Apollinarians, but he had no speculative bent. He was above all a pastor of souls, and was one of the most attractive personalities of the early Church.

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

Baptism in the Spirit
“Have you been baptized in the Spirit?” Beginning some thirty years ago, exponents of the prayer movement known first as the Pentecostal movement (later, as the charismatic renewal) posed this question to their uninitiated friends. Most of us probably answered with something like, “I thought I received the Holy Spirit when I was baptized.” “No,” the questioner continued. “I'm talking about receiving a further in-filling of the Spirit that comes when you let a group pray with you for that gift. It can change your life.”

What often followed was testimony about the adult conversion experience that such group prayer often occasioned for people who participated in the charismatic prayer groups that began to spread among the mainline Christian churches in the late 60s and early 70s. Members of such groups began to speak of their friends and their priests as either “Spirit-filled” or not, and a new insider/outsider language began to be heard among the churches.

The source of the confusion came from the vocabulary of the Assemblies of God, where the contemporary charismatic movement took its origin. They distinguish between water baptism and spirit baptism. And they use this Sunday's first reading to substantiate this distinction. On the face of it, the passage does seem to support their claim. For the text says plainly that the Samaritans “had only been baptized in the name of the Lord Jesus” and that it took the special and later prayer of Peter and John for them to receive the Holy Spirit

But in another passage, Luke tells of these events happening in the opposite order. When Peter preaches to the household of Cornelius (Acts 10), Luke says that “the holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word.” The Jewish Christians who accompanied Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit should have been poured out on the Gentiles also. Peter observes, “Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have.”

Does Luke intend in these narratives to teach a distinction between spirit baptism and water baptism? Luke seems to provide the norm for understanding the link between baptism and the gift of the Spirit in Peter's speech on Pentecost. On that occasion Peter says, “Repent and be baptized, every one of you, in the name of Jesus Christ for the forgiveness of your sins, and you will receive the gift of the Holy Spirit.” (Acts 2:38)

The Gospel language about “baptizing in the Spirit” derives from the preaching of John the Baptist. Clearly, the Baptist makes a distinction between his prophetic (and pre-Christian) water baptism and the baptism in the Spirit that will come with Jesus (see Luke 3:16). And the rest of Luke-Acts makes it clear that the language normally refers to the Christian conversion-initiation experience of people receiving the Holy Spirit on the occasion of their baptism. The apparent exceptions can be accounted for by Luke's purposes. In the case of Peter and John laying hands on the Samaritans, the point is that the Samaritan mission (the first mission beyond Judaism) receives apostolic approval. And in the case of Peter with the Cornelius household, the point is that the movement of the Christian mission to the Gentiles has been divinely initiated.

In the biblical sense of getting baptized in the Spirit, then, every baptized Christian is baptized in the Spirit. What the charismatic renewal has highlighted is the genuine truth that sometimes adults do need to pray in community to let that gift of the Holy Spirit become more manifest in their lives. Understood within that framework, the readings for the Sixth Sunday of Easter (and for Ascension as well) give us rich texts to illustrate what life in the Spirit means. It means being ready to re­spond to those who ask the reason “for your hope.” (1 Pet 3:15) It means discovering that our obedience to Jesus' teaching enables us to know the Holy Spirit as our Advocate. (John 14:15-21) It means letting ourselves be called from apocalyptic sky-gazing and allowing the power of the Spirit to spur us on to mission in the world around us.

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

Reading I: Acts 8:5-8, 14-17

The Acts of the Apostles is planned to trace the expansion of the Church’s mission from Jerusalem, Judea, and Samaria to the ends of the earth (Acts 1:8). The campaign undertaken by Philip, one of the seven, after the martyrdom of Stephen marks, for Luke, a decisive stage in the execution of this plan (Samaria).

Equally important for Luke is the concern that each successive stage should receive the imprimatur of the original Jerusalem community and its apostles. Hence the curious anomaly that in this story baptism does not convey the gift of the Spirit, as is normally the case in Acts, but has to await the arrival of Peter and John to lay hands on the Samaritan converts.

In later times, especially in Anglican thought during the past century and in revisions of the Book of Common Prayer produced in the 1920’s, this passage was taken as the Magna Carta for the episcopal confirmation of children baptized in infancy.

This exegesis has thus passed into the theology of the average Anglican parish priest without question. Let it be said with all emphasis that such an interpretation has no foundation in this passage, in the rest of the New Testament, or in the early Fathers.

The author of Luke-Acts knows nothing of  “confirmation” as a separate rite, distinct from baptism, performed by the apostles or their successors (however justifiable such a development may have been in later times, granted the practice of infant baptism).

Rather, he is concerned with one of his major theological themes—the maintenance of the ties between the expanding mission of the Church and the Mother Church at Jerusalem as the center of salvation history.

 
Responsorial Psalm: 66:1-3, 4-5, 6-7, 16, 20

Precisely the same selection of verses from Psalm 66 is used on the fourteenth Sunday of the year in series C. The only variation here is the optional substitution of the Easter Alleluia for the refrain.

However, this is an excellent example of the way in which the liturgical use of Scripture is itself an exegetical act.

The psalm originally celebrated some historical deliverance of the nation. It picks up the traditional language of the Exodus: “He turned the sea into dry land; men passed through the river on foot” (stanza 6).

Now, in this season, the mighty acts thus described as an exodus become the resurrection of Christ and our participation in it through baptism.

 
Reading II: 1 Peter 3:15-18

The baptismal material in the first part of 1 Peter, which runs through 1 Peter 4:12, includes warnings of possible persecution (after 1 Peter 4:12 the tone changes and the persecution becomes actual). The references to persecution in the present passage are contingent in character: “Always be prepared ... when you are abused ... if that should be God’s will.” 

The newly baptized, thrilled at their admission to all the privileges of the people of God as detailed in last Sunday’s Second Reading, are here reminded that it will not be smooth sailing all the time. They must know what they are in for.

Indeed, how could it be otherwise, since the Christian life is a following in the footsteps of Christ? That is why the passage ends with a quotation from an early Christian hymn about the death and resurrection of Christ (the hymn continues beyond the present reading through 1 Peter 3:15 to 22).

The words “the righteous for the unrighteous” are thought to have been added to the hymn so as to adapt it to its present position (see 1 Peter 3:14, ibid.16), in which the passion of Christ is treated as an example for the persecuted Christians to imitate.

In this way we see how a hymn receives new applications by being taken up successively into new contexts, namely (1) into a baptism homily; (2) into a letter warning Christians for whom persecution is an impending reality; (3) as used in today’s liturgy, where the whole passage receives yet another interpretation.

 
Gospel: John 14:15-21

We see here the same kind of spiral thought that characterizes the farewell discourse throughout and of which we spoke in our comments on last Sunday’s gospel. The points made are:

1. Love of Christ means obedience to his commandments.
2. The promise of the Paraclete (RSV: “Counselor”) sent by the Father in response to the prayer of the Son.
3. The Spirit, whom the world cannot receive, will dwell in the community.
4. The coming of the Spirit is equivalent to the return of the Son and almost completely fulfills the primitive expectation of the parousia.
5. The world will no longer see the Christ, but the community will (a) see him, (b) live because he lives, (c) know the mutual indwelling of Christ with the Father and of Christ with the community. 
6. This indwelling is a relationship of mutual love that includes obedience to Christ’s commandments.

It will again be noted how point 6 brings us full circle to where we were at point 1. Yet, the spiral leads to an enrichment of understanding.

The Christian life is not an external observance of Christ’s commandments but an intense relationship of the community to the three Persons of the Trinity, each with a specific role to play in this relationship.

The Spirit conveys the presence of the Son, who reveals the Father.

But this intense personal relationship is not dissolved into mere emotion; it is concretely and soberly manifested in a life of obedience to Christ’s commandments.

The departure of Jesus does not mean that he is now absent. It means his ever-renewed presence through the coming of the Spirit to the community. That is the Easter message of this Gospel reading.

Stay a While
At schools such as Saint Louis University the students and their life-networks always fly away at the end of each school year. Or at least drive away. The school always misses them. And now, in this wake of the Pandemic, especially so.

In my own college days, if I stayed on after the last day, there were empty halls and rooms and broad, completely undisturbed yards of grass. Yes, we were all glad to have the year done. But at the same time, why were the buildings deserted, and where is the buzzing life of intermingling students? Is zoom is the wave of the future?

All this must be a pointer to the hollowness that the disciples surely felt after the crucifixion. It was true especially of the women who had loved Jesus so much.

The passion had been the worst part for all of them.

What sort of lives could Jesus’ followers find after the very center of their lives had been taken away?

Well, you say, there was the resurrection. Correct. But we have seen how confusing this was to the disciples. Doubting Thomas said, “I will not believe this unless I put my hands on him. And Jesus’ new presence did not last so very long, did it? Suddenly there was this week’s “Ascension,” and didn’t it empty their lives all over again?

We might say that Jesus had graduated from life into Life. Having tunneled through the tight passageway of death—as you and I certainly will do one day—he had given everything he was and everything he possessed to the Father. Out of sheer love.

Instead of there being nothing left for humankind, there was now humanity transformed: a divine human person who had opened himself all the way and who was now marked with the totality of love. He was on his way back to the dynamic, swirling, Trinitarian circle of love from which his humanity had issued in the first place.

After the Resurrection he had lingered only in order to tell us about it, to comfort us, to ease the loss!

  “Stay in Jerusalem until my Spirit comes to fill your heart,” Jesus said to his followers (Ascension, First Reading). They were going to be filled “with all humility and gentleness, bearing with one another through love, striving to preserve the unity of the Spirit through the bond of peace: one body and one Spirit.” (Second Reading)

Can you or I follow Jesus in his resurrection and ascension, his immense act of humble love poured into us and ever since known to be the Holy Spirit? Jesus would continue to be alive within the world after all, but in a different form: the Holy Spirit’s presence within our own human bodies. Loss and absence have been turned into real presence.

In the Eucharistic Prayer and in Communion we take his body and blood into our own body and blood. His Spirit helps us accept his life, death, and resurrection. These settle into us and into others around us.

This real presence now abides forever in our midst, urging us, gently nudging us to say yes.

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

The Mystery of Presence and Absence in Love
Someone needs to write a book with one of these titles: The Metaphysics of a Goodbye, The Anatomy of a Farewell, The Pain of Moving On, or, better still, A Spirituality of the Ascension. Why such a book?

Because we experience many painful goodbyes in life. There are so many times when someone we love has to go away, or we have to go away. There are many times when, for whatever reason, someone has to move on and irrevocably change a relationship. Almost always this is painful, sometimes so painful that it leaves us feeling restless and empty, as if all the color, energy, and joy have gone out of our lives.

But, as we know, usually this isn't the end of the story. Most of the time, after the restless, dark heartache of a painful goodbye has worn off, we experience the opposite, a deep joy in sensing now our loved one's presence in different way.

Parents, for example, experience this when their children grow up and leave home to start lives of their own. At first, when a child leaves home to go to college, to get married, or to take a job elsewhere, we are often left with a restless heartache that leaves us feeling empty. But, after a while, especially when our child, in the full bloom of adulthood, comes back to visit us our heartache can just as quickly disappear because our loved one, now no longer a child, can offer us a richer love and presence than he or she could when they were little. The pain of losing someone turns into the joy of finding something deeper in the one whom we thought we had lost.

When Jesus was preparing his disciples for his ascension, he told them: "It is better for you that I go away! You won't understand this now. You will grieve and have heavy hearts, but, later, this will turn to joy and you will understand why I have to do this because, unless I go away, I can't send you my spirit."

These are the unspoken words that children say to their parents when they leave home to begin lives on their own; these are the unspoken words we say to our friends when we have to move on from a certain circle of friendship to get married; these are the unspoken words spouses sometimes say to each other when they have to grow in ways that, at the end of the day, will make their marriage stronger, but which, on a given day, leave their partner with a heartache; and these are the unspoken words we say to each other every time we have to say a goodbye, even if it's just to go off to work for the day: “It is better for you that I go away, even if there is sorrow now!”

The paradoxical interplay of presence and absence in love is a great mystery. We need to be present to each other physically, but we also need to be gone from each other at times. We bring a blessing both when we visit someone and when leave after the visit is over. Presence is partly predicated on absence and there is something of our spirit that we can only give by going away. Why is this so?

Because absence is sometimes the only thing that can purify presence. When we are physically present, there are always certain tensions, irritations, disappointments, flaws in our bodies, and faults in our character that partially block full love and blessing. That's why we rarely appreciate our loved ones fully, until they are taken away from us.

Absence can help wash clean. What the pain of absence does is stretch our hearts so that the essence, the beauty, the love, and the gift of the one who is absent can flow to us without being colored by the tensions, disappointments, and the flaws of everyday life. As well, the other's absence can work to stretch our hearts so that we can receive him or her in a way that more fully accepts and respects who he or she really is. That's why our children have to go away (and we have to feel that bitter heartache) before we can accept that they are no longer children, but adults like ourselves, with lives of their own.

The mystery of saying goodbye is really the mystery of the Ascension, the most under-understood mystery both inside and outside of religion. The Ascension is about going away so that our loved ones can fully receive our spirit. It's about the mystery of saying goodbye, when goodbye isn't really goodbye at all, but only love's way of taking on a different modality so that it can be present in a way that's deeper, purer, more permanent, less-clinging, and less-limited by the tensions, disappointments, inadequacies, wounds, and betrayals that, this side of eternity, forever make our intimacy a work in progress.

The Mission in the World
Having ascended into heaven, Jesus can now say that “I am in the world no more, but these are in the world.” He is not physically present in the world the way he was in the first third of the first century. It is now up to us to deal with the world.

During the period dominated by Trent and Vatican I, the Catholic Church was defensive in its approach to the world, which was regarded as an occasion of sin. Vatican II heralded a new approach based on dialogue rather than confrontation.

The world is viewed not as the enemy but rather as the object of service. This positive approach is much closer to our biblical roots: “I believe that I shall see the good things of the Lord in the land of the living.”

“Time is the unfolding of truth that already is.” The world and its history are where we encounter the eternal God, “reaching from end to end of the universe.” We are not called to abandon the world but to remain in it and to take responsibility for its well ordering. The paschal mystery is a challenge to us to lift the world to the heavens.

Holding faithfully to the gospel and exercising her mission in the world, the Church consolidates peace among men, to God’s glory. For it is her task to uncover, cherish, and ennoble all that is true, good, and beautiful in the human community

Vatican II, Constitution on the Church
in the Modern World, 1965: 76.

First Reading
7th Sunday: Acts 1:12-14
Ascension: Acts 1:1-11
1. (Ascension:) Jesus told his apostles that they would receive power when the Holy Spirit came upon them. They would be his witnesses unto the ends of the earth. On whom did the disciples depend for understanding what that meant for them? Did they understand right away or did it take some time? Do we depend on the same source for spiritual understanding?

2. (7th Sunday:) While they waited for the Holy Spirit they prayed together.* Did you receive the Holy Spirit at Confirmation? Once for all time? Or is the Spirit dynamic and new always? Do you pray alone and together with others that the Holy Spirit will illuminate the minds of scientists and people searching for solutions to problems like war, gun violence, hunger, racial justice and climate change?

Second Reading
7th Sunday: 1 Peter 4:13-16
Ascension: Ephesians 1:17-23

1. (Ascension:) If the “eyes of your hearts be enlightened,” what might they see? People suffering? The good that people are doing to relieve suffering? Would some of the goodness we see be related to “the fullness of the one who fills all things in every way”? What might be some “everyday kinds of fullness”? What kind of fullness would you like to have in your life?

2. (7th Sunday:) If you had your choice would you avoid all suffering? The Holy Spirit is sometimes called the Comforter. How does the Spirit comfort you if you suffer? Would you let such comfort come in? Is there some way you can add consolation to someone’s life?

Gospel
7th Sunday: John 17:1-11a
Ascension: Matthew 28:16-20

1. (Ascension:) “I am with you always, to the close of the age” (v. 20). How does Pope Francis say we realize Jesus’ presence today? Are we ever alone?

Through His Spirit, who leads the Church to walk through history as the companion of every person. … With the promise to remain with us until the end of time, … Jesus is present in the world but with … the style of the Risen One, that is a presence that is revealed in the Word, in the Sacraments and in the constant and interior action of the Holy Spirit. The Feast of the Ascension tells us that although Jesus ascended to Heaven, … he is still and always among us: this is the source of our strength, our perseverance, and our joy, from the very presence of Jesus among us with the strength of the Holy Spirit.

Ascension Angelus 2020

2. (7th Sunday:) The Father entrusted the good news of salvation to Jesus and he in turn entrusted it to his disciples. “Go, therefore, make disciples of all nations.” What are the implications for you?

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases: went to Galilee, Jesus had ordered them, Go, all nations, until the end of the age

To the point: On the morning of his resurrection, nearing the end of his earthly life, Jesus orders the disciples back to Galilee where he had inaugurated his saving mission. The disciples are to begin where Jesus did, doing what Jesus did, but without geographical or temporal limits: their mission is to “all nations” and continues “until the end of the age.” In effect, then, Jesus com- missions not only those first disciples but all those through the ages who come to know and believe in him. Jesus chooses to complete his work of salvation through us. We must choose to take up his Great Commission.

Connecting the Gospel …

… to the First Reading: Jesus makes clear in his words to his disciples before the ascension that, far from abandoning them, he will send the Holy Spirit to empower them to be witnesses to his saving work.
…  to experience: We mistakenly think that the ascension pertains only to Jesus. The liturgy communicates the ascension’s significance for us: “he ascended, not to distance himself from our lowly state but that we, his members, might be confident of following where he, our Head and Founder, has gone before” (Preface I of the Ascension of the Lord).

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

Once during Holy Week Jesus made the covers of Time, Newsweek, and U.S. News and World Report—a phenomenon that might lead us to think that he had really changed the world for good, except for the fact that the Unabomber appeared on all three covers the following week.

Anyway, the three magazines vary greatly in their knowledge about Jesus. The real superstars of the articles are speculative theoreticians, whose own imaginings and desires we find in abundance.

Robert Funk, who started the Jesus Seminar and has taught at the academic shrines of Texas, Harvard, and Emory, wants to “set Jesus free,” he says, from scripture and creed.

But what, one might ask, is left of Jesus Christ without scripture, without creed? Well, he’s more like a “Jewish Socrates or Lenny Bruce,” we are told: “Jesus was perhaps the first stand-up comic”—not political, not programmatic, offering no program for the world. It turns out that the most reliable description of Jesus is that he is “an ironic secular sage.”

Some theoreticians say that Jesus is a projection of Christian need and faith. Isn’t it strange, then, how like a professor their Jesus is, this “ironic secular sage”? ’Tis a pity he himself was not tenured, that he was not interviewed by one of the more reputable reporters of his time, that he had not published in a peer-reviewed journal.

I do not mean to belittle or caricature the contemporary academic readings of Jesus Christ. Surely there is a rich diversity of opinion and quality in the theologians quoted by our newsweeklies. There is also devoted and painstaking research going on in our universities.

But the media coverage merits a clear and critical look. The cover stories of our magazines represent a religious crisis of our times: not just the refusal to face up to the crucifixion and Resurrection of Jesus Christ, but a deep resistance to the transcendent God whom Jesus reveals.

How close is the so-called contemporary account of Jesus to a rejection of any faith in a God beyond? What criteria are used? All miracles must be deemed impossible; any mention of transcendence is suspect; all messianic claims, all reference to an afterlife are unacceptable; any thought that we need salvation by his death on a cross must be repressed.

The contemporary “secular sage” insists that it is all so ordinary, this faith, this story, this gospel, this Jesus. Yet it is precisely the extraordinary, the supernatural, that makes him what he is—not only his moral teachings (which some great sage might dream up), but also his resurrected body (which no other religion has come up with), and the seeming disgrace of his cross.

No human inventiveness would dare to concoct what was an embarrassment to the Roman Empire, a stumbling block to the Greek world, and a repudiation of Gnosticism. As the luminous Kierkegaard suggested, if faith is an offense to rationality, how might reason deal with faith other than by rejecting it?

It is not new, this struggle of faith in Jesus Christ. Since the beginning it was known that if we banish Christ’s divinity, he and all of us are utterly alone. He was just another heap of chemicals who died. It is humanity alone on that cross. And it is a stranded humanity that is left with post-Resurrection delusions.

But if we believe that Jesus is indeed the eternal Word of God made flesh, then our very God was crucified as well; and the destiny of our dying bodies is somehow found in the presence of the almighty God. 

If we do not believe that the cross bore the sorrows of God as much as it does our own, we ought not to have approached that wood to kneel. If we do not believe that by his Resurrection we are destined to be free, we ought not to have sung our alleluias on his day of victory. If it was not a heavenly, unearthly Jerusalem to which Jesus ascended, we ought not gather to look and pray to a God beyond who beckons us.

For it is sheer folly, the things we have done this Paschal season, if Christ does not reveal our sublime fortune. It was all a charade if our saving God was not on that cross, if it was not miraculously one of us who ascended on high. But if we worshiped in faith this season, we have again professed that, rather than being dupes of folly, we are the agents of the only true revolution that has graced human history.

In the death, resurrection, and ascension of Jesus, neither Christ nor we are “confined” to dogma or scripture. Rather, our God is revealed and we are therein liberated.

It is God-with-us, Emmanuel, who died our death. It is the God who called history forth and loved it enough to marry it, to preserve and save it, to redeem its terrible, fragile beauty. Thus it was with full heart that we could pray: “We adore thee, O Christ, and we bless thee, because by thy holy cross thou hast redeemed the world.” And it is with faith in the miraculous, the transcendent, that we, like Jesus in the Fourth Gospel, look to heaven for the giver of eternal life, the glory of the earth and the love and truth from which we all came.

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

The Meaning and Types of Prayer

Jesus ends his farewell address with two prayers (Jn 17:1-19, 20-26). The first is concerned with Jesus’ immediate disciples after his death; the second looks to believers yet to come.

From a purely cultural perspective, prayer is a socially meaningful act of communication directed to persons perceived to be in control of the life situation of the one praying and performed for the purpose of getting results.

The message of the prayer reveals how the persons praying perceive themselves and God. This is captured in a traditional saying: lex orandi, lex credendi, that is, how and what we pray reveal what we believe about the one to whom we pray.

Prayer can address seven practical purposes. It can be: (1) instrumental (“I/we want”); (2) regulatory (“do as I/we tell you”); (3) interactional (“me/we and you”); (4) self-focused (“here I am/we are”); (5) heuristic (“tell me/us why”); (6) imaginative (“let’s pretend”); and (7) informative (“I have something to tell you”).

John 17:1-5. The first five verses of Jesus’ prayer focus on the core Mediterranean cultural value, honor. The key word is “glory” or “glorify.” Recalling that honor is a claim to worth and a public acknowledgement of that claim, we note that Jesus is praying in the presence of the disciples (and not in secret, as he once instructed them; see Mt 6:5-6).

This portion of Jesus’ prayer is instrumental, that is, it is a prayer to obtain a good (honor) and a service (public proclamation) from God to satisfy Jesus’ and his disciples’ social need: to be recognized as honorable people.

John 17:6-8. This portion of Jesus’ prayer is self-focused, that is, he identifies himself and his disciples to God, with special emphasis on the disciples.

John 17:9-11. Jesus now switches the focus of his prayer back to the instrumental mode. He asks the Father “to protect them in your name that you have given me, so that they may be one, as we are one” (Jn 17:11). This is a petition for unity in community. The reason for petitioning this protection for his disciples is that Jesus is taking leave of them.

What he expresses here in prayer, Jesus later accomplishes in deed when, dying on the cross, he entrusts his mother to the care and protection of a good friend.

Modern Western believers may consider this approach to Jesus’ prayer as esoteric. But careful reflection on Western styles of public prayer reveals that very often these are composed with greater concern to impress or edify the human listeners than to stir God to action. The reason for this is that Westerners are convinced that they are masters of their own destiny and are expected to look out for themselves. No one else will.

Our Middle Eastern ancestors in the faith believed that they had no control over their lives. Only God did, and public prayer stirred God to act because it put God’s honor on the line. That was Jesus’ intent in this prayer. How do American believers pray?

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 Gospel describes the Lord’s life upon earth and his return to heaven. But the sublime prophet David, as though unencumbered by the weight of his body, rose above himself to mingle with the heavenly powers and record for us their words as they accompanied the Master when he came down from heaven. Ordering the angels on earth entrusted with the care of human life to raise the gates, they cried: “Lift up your gates, you princes; be lifted up you everlasting doors. Let the King of glory enter.”

But because wherever he is he who contains all things in himself makes himself like those who receive him, not only becoming a man among human beings, but also when among angels conforming his nature to theirs, the gatekeepers asked: “Who is this King of glory?”

He is the strong one, they were told, mighty in battle, the one who is to grapple with and overthrow the captor of the human race who has the power of death. When this last enemy has been destroyed, he will restore us to freedom and peace.

Now the mystery of Christ’s death is fulfilled, victory is won, and the cross, the sign of triumph, is raised on high. He who gives us the noble gifts of life and a kingdom has ascended into heaven, “leading captivity captive.” Therefore the same command is repeated.

Once more the gates of heaven must open for him. Our guardian angels, who have now become his escorts, order them to be flung wide so that he may enter and regain his former glory.

But he is not recognized in the soiled garments of our life, in clothes reddened by the winepress of human sin.

Again the escorting angels are asked: “Who is this King of glory?”

The answer is no longer “The strong one, mighty in battle” but, “The lord of hosts,” he who has gained power over the whole universe, who has recapitulated all things in himself, who is above all things, who has restored all creation to its former state: “He is the King of glory.”

You see how much David has added to our joy in this feast and contributed to the gladness of the Church. Therefore as far as we can let us imitate the prophet by our love for God, by gentleness and by patience with those who hate us.

Let the prophet’s teaching help us to live in a way pleasing to God in Christ Jesus our Lord, to whom be glory for ever and ever. Amen.

Sermon on the Ascension: Jaeger 9, 1, 323-327

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

Between Ascension and Pentecost

This Sunday rounds out the seven Sundays of Easter, the season of the Church's explicit celebration of the resurrection and its meaning for Christian life. At the same time, this seventh Sunday, coming between Ascension Thursday and Pentecost Sunday, focuses exquisitely on the transition between the departure of Jesus' physical presence to his followers and the birth of the Church with the end-time outpouring of the Holy Spirit.

Granted that we later generations of Christians live in an era long after Pentecost, there is something about this transitional moment, which Luke symbolizes as a ten-day segue, that can help us understand our own moment in salvation history.

Today’s First Reading gives us Luke's snapshot of the apostles and other disciples gathered in prayer in that interval of time. While they were still gaping at the sky after the ascension, angels sent them back into the rest of history with a jibe: “Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky?”

Instinctively, they gather with the rest of the little band of disciples in the upper room, where some of them had shared the Last Supper with their master. Luke will note that they number about 120. This numeric note is more than mere census; the multiple of twelve underscores Luke's conviction that this Jerusalem community of “Jews for Jesus” begins to fulfill the ancient expectation that “the Age to Come” would entail the restoration of Israel.

The list of eleven disciples is conspicuous for the absence of Judas. The first agenda item for this post-ascension community will be the restoration of the core group to the number twelve, showing the apostolic concern for restoring the number to the very meaning of Jesus’ original choice of a symbolic Twelve. The mention of “Mary the mother of Jesus” recalls the only other times Luke refers to Jesus' mother by name, the accounts of the conception (Lk 1:27) and the birth (Lk 2:5) of Jesus. The mention of her by name here in Acts underscores the fact that a new birth in the power of the Spirit is about to occur, the birth of the Church on Pentecost. Like Jesus praying after the baptism at the Jordan River, just before a fresh manifestation of the Holy Spirit in his life, the 120 in the upper room “devoted themselves with one accord to prayer.” (Lk 1:14)

Though we live long after Pentecost, Luke's scenario reminds us of some perennial realities about being Church. Though life in the community of faith requires plenty of nitty-gritty administrative tasks (like electing a replacement for Judas), at the end of the day, the Church takes its life from an act of God. Like the birth of Jesus itself, the Church is conceived and brought to birth by the Holy Spirit. As in its inception, the continued life of the Church demands ongoing communal prayer and openness to the Spirit, never forgetting that we always pray with Mary.

In this Sunday’s Gospel, John addresses many of these same post- Easter realities couched in much different language in the prayer of Jesus concluding his Last Supper farewell discourses. As in Acts 1, the focus of John 17 is on the transition between the earthly ministry of Jesus and the life of the post-Easter Church.

To modern ears not attuned to the biblical roots of the New Testament writing, talk of “glory” can carry vague and sentimental associations. But for people of John's and Jesus’ time and place, glory meant the visible manifestation of God's presence and power. We first meet this meaning of “glory” in John's prologue:

And the Word became flesh
and made his dwelling among us,
and we saw his glory,
the glory as of the Father's only Son,
full of grace and truth. (Jn 1:14)

The incarnation of the eternal and creative Word in Jesus is the manifestation of the presence of God in the humanity of Jesus. Here in the prayer of John 17, Jesus refers to his public life as an expression of the glory of the Son's own pre-creation presence to the Father. Toward the end of the part quoted as today's Gospel, he says that he has been glorified in his disciples. 

This way of thinking led to our insight that the purpose of the Church is to be the primary sacrament of the incarnation. This sense of “glory” helps us understand Jesus' prayer at the end of John 17, where he says, “I have given them the glory you gave me, so that they may be one, as we are one, I in them and you in me, that they may be brought to perfection as one, that the world may know that you sent me, and that you loved them even as you loved me.” (Jn 17:22-23)

 

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

First, let us remind ourselves that Ascension Day should not be thought of as a historical commemoration. The New Testament treats the ascension as an integral part of the Easter event.

In fact, the earlier Easter narratives depict the appearances as manifestations of the already risen and ascended One. Hence Paul could include his Damascus experience among the appearances in 1 Cor 15.

The later appearance narratives (Luke and John) show a tendency to separate the Resurrection and the Ascension, but still they are not regarded as two successive events. They are separated in order to contemplate the meaning of two aspects of a single, indivisible event.

When this separation occurs, the Ascension seems to be variously located: in Lk 24, on Easter Sunday evening or, at the latest, the next day; in Jn 20, sometime between the appearance to Mary Magdalene (who is told not to touch the risen One because he has not yet ascended) and the appearance to Thomas (who is invited to touch him); in Acts 1, after the forty days (which, however, are symbolic of the time of revelation; there may be no intention to suggest that the Ascension actually “occurred” on the fortieth day).

For several centuries the church did not, either in its writings or in its liturgy, treat the Ascension as though it actually “occurred” on the fortieth day.

With the revised church calendar, we still keep it on the fortieth day as a matter of convenience (and that this is not an absolute rule is indicated by the rubrical permission [in the Roman Liturgy] to transfer the observance to the following Sunday). This allows us to isolate for contemplation one particular aspect of the total Easter event.

 
Reading I: Acts 1:1-11

It is curious that in his two-volume work Luke tells the story of the Ascension twice (Lk 24; Acts 1). Each narration brings out a different aspect of the truth. The version in Acts looks forward to the future, to the inauguration of the church’s mission and the final return of the ascending One.

Luke’s perspective on salvation history represents an adjustment. Salvation history, already in the Old Testament, is constantly readjusted in the light of earlier events. 

The earliest Church looked for only a brief interval between the Ascension and the parousia, an interval that would be marked by the apostles’ mission to Israel and by persecution and martyrdom.

Now salvation history is greatly extended. Paul already had modified it to include the mission to the Gentiles.

Now, for Luke, the church is here to stay, with a mission to the whole civilized world. But the hope of the parousia is still maintained, and the church’s mission is viewed as a preparation for the end.

 
Responsorial Psalm: 47:2-3, 6-7, 8-9

This is one of the enthronement psalms, which, according to some scholars, were sung at a (hypothetical) annual feast at which the king was enthroned to symbolize Yhwh’s kingship over his people.

As the king took his seat upon his earthly throne, the whole people would have chanted this psalm in celebration of the kingship of Yhwh.

The Church in its liturgy has associated this psalm with, and transferred it to, the ascension of Christ. Ascension Day is the feast of Christ’s enthronement.

Henceforth God exercises his sovereignty over the universe through his exalted Son.

 
Reading II: Ephesians 1:17-23

Ephesians, whether written by Paul himself or, as now seems more likely, by a close disciple steeped in the thought of his master, begins, like most of Paul’s letters, with an opening thanksgiving and prayer. This prayer reproduces the pattern and phraseology of a liturgical hymn.

The first part of our passage prays for the church’s growth in wisdom and knowledge, and looks to the risen and ascended Christ for the power to foster this growth. The hymn then goes on to elaborate on the exaltation and kingship of Christ.

The New Testament views Christ’s kingship as exercised in two concentric circles. The inner circle embraces the church, where his kingship is known and acknowledged; the outer circle embraces the world, where he is de facto king but his kingship is as yet unrecognized.

The church’s function is to extend that inner circle to cover more and more of the outer one.

 
Gospel: Matthew 28:16-20

As we noted in our introduction to this feast, the earlier Easter narratives saw the appearances as manifestations from heaven of the already risen and ascended Christ. This is still the situation in Matthew’s story of the final appearance in today’s Gospel.

It is the ascended One who says, “All authority in heaven and on earth has been given to me.” It is the ascended One who commissions his apostles and sends them out into the world in the great missionary charge (see Eph 4:8-13, where the apostolate appears as the gift of the ascended Christ).

The final appearance takes place on a mountain. This, for Matthew, has theological significance.

The great sermon had been preached on a mountain. The Transfiguration took place on a mountain, as in the other Synoptists. And now the great appearance also takes place on a mountain.

This is, in fact, the only appearance that Matthew records, apart from the personal and private one to the women (Mt 28:9-10). All the meaning of the Resurrection appearances is, for Matthew, compressed into this single story.

Such a device was probably suggested to him by the angel’s charge to the women in Mk 16:7 to tell the disciples to go to Galilee, where they would see the risen Lord.

The primary significance of the appearances is that they are revelations of the risen One. Because they are revelations, they can be doubted as well as believed. But those who do believe respond in adoration (Mt 28:17).

In his opening words about his authority, the risen One echoes the language about the Son of Man in Dan 7:14 in the wording of the Greek Old Testament, a fact that suggests that this story must have crystallized in the Greek-speaking church.

The declaration of authority is followed by a missionary charge in three parts:

1. The disciples are commanded to “make disciples” of all nations. This is typically Matthean phraseology (cf. Mt 13:52; Mt 27:57). The longer ending in Mark, which has “proclaim the good news” (Mt 16:15), probably represents the earlier tradition, which Matthew has reworded to suit his own interests.

The association of the appearances with the command to mission goes back to the earliest tradition, as the word “apostle” itself shows, as do the terms in which Paul speaks of his own call on the road to Damascus (Gal 1:16).

2. As in Mk 16:16, the call to mission includes the charge to baptize. All our evidence agrees that baptism was practiced by the church right from the outset, and this despite the fact that baptism had not been a feature of the Lord’s public ministry.

This remains true even if there was an earlier period when Jesus worked side by side with John the Baptist and during which he too baptized (Jn 3:22).

There can be no doubt that it was the impact of the post-resurrection appearances that led to the revival of baptism by the earliest Christians. Baptism became the way in which those who had not had a firsthand encounter with the Christ event were brought into its sphere.

The command to baptize given by the risen One in Mark and Matthew (see also the allusions to the forgiveness of sin in the appearance stories of Luke and John) is a verbalization of this experience.

In the earliest community and for some time, baptism was administered in the name of Jesus. It is only in this passage of Matthew and in the Didache, a Christian writing probably dating back to the end of the first century, that we hear of the threefold formula.

One may say, however, that the use of Jesus’ name alone as a baptismal formula implies the threefold name, for baptism in the name of Jesus implies the confession of him as the Messiah (“Jesus is Lord” was probably the earliest baptismal confession), and in Jewish context Messiah means the agent of God’s final salvation, while the bestowal of the Spirit is a consequence of messianic salvation.

Hence, we may say that from the earliest date the Jewish Christians would have understood baptism in an implicitly trinitarian sense. The development of the threefold formula would have become necessary in Gentile communities, where the implications of the primitive confession of Jesus as Lord were no longer understood and had to be spelled out.

This does not mean that we should now go back to the single formula of earliest times. That would have quite a different meaning now—the repudiation of what was implicit in the earliest use of the single formula.

3. The command to baptize is followed by a charge to teach. It is not clear whether this teaching means post-baptismal instruction. “Baptizing” is a present participle in the Greek, as in the English translation, and this could suggest teaching accompanying baptism, that is, catechetical instruction.

After the charge to teach comes a final promise of the permanent presence of the ascended Christ from now until the parousia.

This is a far cry from the perspective of the earliest community, which thought of the interval between the Ascension and the Second Coming as a period of Christ’s temporary absence (Acts 3:21).

The wording of this promise thus verbalizes the experience of Christ’s presence, an experience made possible for the church through the gift of the Spirit and in the cultus during the intervening period.

 

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

The Great Sharing
Pentecost is a feast equal to Christmas and Easter in importance. It is the official sending of the Holy Spirit into men and women.

We have been hearing Jesus talk about this moment in the Gospels for weeks now. We have been hearing that he will not leave us alone, but will send the Spirit, the Paraclete, to us.

Now it has happened.

• The Father is so much within Jesus that if you know Jesus you know the Father.

• Just as the Father is within Jesus, Jesus will be within us.

• This will happen through the sending of the Holy Spirit, who is the “insides” of Jesus and of the Father. The Spirit is the love they have for each other, the closeness, the great sharing.
The first sign is that the apostles begin speaking in tongues. People from all different lands and languages gather and each understands the disciples’ words without any translation (First Reading). No small thing.

The reading then tells who the people in the crowd were:

• Parthians, Medes and Elamites,
• inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, of Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia
• Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene;
• travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism;
• Cretans and Arabs.

Language students of today wish they could talk in so many languages, don’t they? But the real point is deeper than that. God’s Holy Spirit means to bring us together, to allay differences, to let us hear other persons in the way they express themselves, not just to think about our own self. Each one has a “language” that expresses who they are (not a literal language, but an idiomatic way of speaking and acting that comes from the inside of who that person is). If you are able to hear, you can “listen through” characteristics and receive loving knowledge of that person, even if they have no intention of letting us in.

But that is so difficult, you say. Some people you run into are just plain annoying. “So-and-so just talks on and on and I think I will go crazy if there is a minute more.” How in the world can we “hear” another human being?

With the aid of the Holy Spirit.

It is not magic. The work of the Spirit is to listen for the “insides” of the other person, as we saw above. If you take Jesus seriously in the Gospel, you will hear with the aid of the Spirit, the Paraclete, which is Love given to the deepest part of you. Not Love instead of your own freedom, but Love as a help, a push (not a shove) toward caring for everything in God, of course, and what is best in other people, even troublesome ones.

It takes time to learn all this, of course, to clear the various blockages inside us that keep the Spirit at bay. Remember, we are being invited into the greatest closeness possible, the great sharing that is God himself. Yes it does take time. And we make a lot of mistakes. But God is willing to make us “temples of the Holy Spirit,” and to stay with us, strengthening us, guiding us, helping us to make Love a root in us.

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

Deeper Language

A year ago, outside of Guatemala City, Lorenzo Rosebaugh, a Missionary Oblate of Mary Immaculate, was shot to death as he was driving with a number of his fellow missionaries to a community meeting. The real motive behind his killing may never be known. On the surface, it appeared to be nothing more than a violent robbery, but given the circumstances of Lorenzo's life and his life-long fight for justice for the poor, everyone—myself no exception—wants to believe that his shooting was more than a question of being at the wrong place at the wrong time. Too much suggests that this was more than an accident. If nothing else, his death by gunshot is somehow symbolic: Lorenzo wasn't meant to die of old age in a comfortable bed.

I first met Lorenzo at our mother-house at Aix-en-Provence in France ten years ago. He had just returned from a long missionary stint in Latin America where, among other things, he had lived on the streets of Recife with its poor, without roof or fixed address, for several years. A serious illness drove him back to the USA and his Oblate community sent him on a sabbatical to France. He arrived there unable to speak any French whatsoever. Yet, when I met him there, less than a month after his arrival, he was sitting on the steps of the church which is attached to our community residence with a dozen street-people gathered round him. They were sharing food and cigarettes and some kind of conversation. It looked like a picnic in the park.

There is nothing exceptional about this except that Lorenzo couldn't speak a word of French and the people gathered round him couldn't speak English, Portuguese, or Spanish (his languages). Yet they clearly seemed to be communicating with each other, and deeply, in a way that would trigger envy to an outsider, and Lorenzo was their focal point.

How? How can we speak to each other beyond communicating in the ordinary languages that we know?

When the Evangelist, Luke, describes the first Pentecost, he tells us that, after receiving the Holy Spirit, the first followers of Jesus came out into public and began speaking and, everyone, absolutely everyone, no matter their ethnicity or language, heard the disciples’ words as if they were in their own language. The old barriers of native language no longer blocked hearing or understanding. The language given by the spirit transcended ethnicity and native tongue.

It is too easy for us to simply write this off as a miracle, an exceptional foundational intervention by God which helped found the church. That may also be true, but there is another point to this: Language functions at different levels.

At its most obvious level, language depends upon the spoken word and that word is always in a particular language, e.g., French, English, Spanish, Chinese. At this level words have a relative power, but they can also deceive and lie. Words don't always accurately mirror the heart. Moreover, they invariably fail us just when we most need them, especially in depth situations where tragedy, death, and betrayal render us mute.

Alright, but we have other languages: beyond the spoken word there is body language. Our bodies speak louder and more honestly than do our words. Through our body, through its gestures and the nuances of its countenance, we speak more deeply and more truly than we do with our words.

And we have still yet a deeper language: More deeply than through the body, we speak through the spirit, through the language of the Holy Spirit, a language that transcends the spoken word and the language of our bodies. What is the language of the spirit?

The Holy Spirit is not just a person inside the Trinity, hopelessly abstract and beyond our conception. Scripture tells us that the Holy Spirit is also very concrete, conceivable, and tangible inside of charity, joy, peace, patience, goodness, longsuffering, fidelity, gentleness, and chastity. These speak through us more loudly and clearly, either in their presence or their absence, than do all our words and gestures.

In the end we are not fooled by each other. We hear beyond spoken words, bodily gestures, and beyond what we explicitly intend to say to each other. The heart reads the heart and the spirit recognizes itself wherever it sees itself as manifest. Thus many of us talk passionately about our love for the poor, but the poor do not hear us, understand us, or gather round us, even when our diction is perfect in their native tongue.

While working in Latin America, Lorenzo Rosebaugh spoke only broken Spanish and broken Portuguese. Yet the poor there heard him and perfectly understood what he was saying. He spoke no French at all and still he was able to sit on the steps of a church in France and gather round him the street-people there who spoke only French—and they understood him clearly, as in their mother-tongue.

Such is the language of Pentecost.

Dreams and Visions
In today’s Gospel Jesus promises us that “I will not leave you orphaned; I will come back to you and you will have life.” Our faith, nurtured in this great paschal season, tells us that God-made-flesh is God-with-us, never abandoning us and always filling us with life.

It should be a great comfort to all of us, who share in the pain and suffering of ordinary life, to know that the Spirit of Jesus is with us always. It should be especially comforting to know that Jesus will not leave orphaned all those whom the world casts aside: the poor and homeless, the racial and ethnic minorities, the sick and dying, the prisoner and the refugee.

  “Thus says the Lord: I will pour out my spirit upon all mankind. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your old men shall see visions.”
The coming of the Spirit should fill us with dreams and visions of a better world. Let us dream, in the Spirit, of a classless society in which all people are regarded and treated as equals.

Let us dream, in the Spirit, of a nonviolent world in which there is no war, no terrorist attacks on innocent people, no murder, and no death penalty.

Let us dream, in the Spirit, of a world of economic justice in which all people have their basic needs met, and no one lives in poverty, hunger, or homelessness. Let us dream, in the Spirit, of a world of love, forgiveness, and service.

"Lord, send out your Spirit, and renew the face of the earth.” May the Spirit of God guide us to end the suffering we have brought on ourselves and “unite the faces and nations on earth to proclaim your glory.”

The People of God believe that they are led by the Spirit of the Lord, who fills the earth.

Motivated by this faith, it labors to decipher authentic signs of God’s presence and purpose in the happenings, needs, and desires in which this People has a part along with other men of our age.

For faith throws a new light on everything, manifests God’s design for man’s total vocation, and thus directs the mind to solutions which are fully human.

Vatican II, Constitution on the Church in the Modern World, 1965:11

 

First Reading
Acts 2:1-11 (Day)
1. Every nation was confused and amazed because everyone understood in his or her language what the apostles were saying. If you were completely open to the Holy Spirit, would you have a deeper understanding of all that you hear? Was the miracle in the speaking or the hearing? How does the Holy Spirit use the miracle of hearing with you?

2. “When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled they were all in one place together. ... ” Was fear present? What took the place of “fear” after the Holy Spirit rested on each one of them? According to Pope Francis, what are the implications of this for the Church today?

When they were locked in there, in the Upper Room, they were not strategizing, no, they were not drafting any pastoral plan. …

The Spirit himself opens doors and pushes us to press beyond what has already been said and done, beyond the precincts of a timid and wary faith. In the world, unless there is tight organization and a clear strategy, things fall apart. In the Church, however, the Spirit guarantees unity to those who proclaim the message. The Apostles set off: unprepared, yet putting their lives on the line. One thing kept them going: the desire to give what they received. The opening part of the First Letter of Saint John is beautiful: “that which we have seen and heard we proclaim also to you” (cf Jn 1:3).

Pope Francis Pentecost Homily
May 31, 2020
Second Reading
1 Corinthians 12:3b-7, 12-13
or Romans 8:8-17

1. “To each individual the manifestation of the Spirit is given for some benefit. ... ” Were Vivaldi and Michelangelo, for instance, given gifts solely for their own pleasure? For whose benefit were they given? What are your gifts and for what benefit were they given to you and those around you? What gifts are you given to help with racism, gun violence, ending war or climate crisis? Are you a finder of solutions? A peace maker? A giver of food or money? One who prays?

2. Could the gifts of the Spirit help eradicate many of our problems: gifts of knowledge, wisdom, understanding, reverence, courage, right judgment and awe and wonder in the presence of God?

Gospel
John 20:19-23
   or John 14:15-16, 23b-26

1. Jesus “breathed” on them. How does this relate to Genesis 2:7, “God formed man of dust from the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life”? What is the significance for you? How important is the Holy Spirit to you?

2. “ … When the doors were locked where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews … ” How were the disciples different after the Spirit’s arrival? In your own life do you tend to see the Holy Spirit as dynamic and constant or as only occasional? Rate your belief in the Holy Spirit being your constant companion on a scale of 1 to 10, with 10 being the highest. Are you different when you are confident that the Spirit is with you? Explain.

Focusing the Gospel

Key words and phrases: locked, fear, Peace, Peace, I send you, Receive the Holy Spirit, forgive

To the point: One of the fruits of the Holy Spirit is peace. This peace is not a passive state of tranquility, but an empowering force that allays our fears, urges us forth to take up Jesus’ mission, and instills in us forgiving hearts. This peace transforms how we see ourselves, how we pursue discipleship, and how we relate to the world and one another. Certainly, this peace is life encompassing and enduring. How much more so is Jesus’ gift of the Holy Spirit!

Connecting the Gospel …

…  to the Second Reading: The Second Reading alludes to the same empowering force as does the gospel: the Spirit bestows “spiritual gifts,” calls us to “different forms of service,” and manifests “different workings” such as forgiveness. All this for the benefit of the Body of Christ.

…  to experience: We often think Jesus’ mission is given only to professional parish staff and other church ministers. All of us are called, however, to take up the mission of Jesus because of the Holy Spirit given to us at our baptism.
 

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 Church of Many Voices

“What the Spirit brings is very different.”(1 Corinthians 12:4)
There are many gifts in the church, many ministries, many works, many members. That’s a problem. Who’s best? Who’s important? Who has the right way? Who corners the truth?

Some of us would love to have the special charism of solitary prayer. But not having it, we might think ourselves inferior. More distressing, we might envy contemplatives or even resort to the tactic of thinking that prayer isn’t so special after all. (Those people who run from the world, hide in their rooms, frequent chapels: wouldn’t it be better if they were like us, finding God in the rough and tumble, helping the poor, being busy?)

Then again, others of us wish we had the charism of community: family, relationships, friends, parties, gatherings. Social stars shine. They seem to engage others effortlessly. How do those people manage to be so outgoing and open? The same hints of our inferiority, however, set us on the way to envy and then resentment. (They’re nothing but enthusiasts, extroverts with slick surface and little depth. They usually are the ones who don’t care about peace and justice, as long as they are having a good time.)

Many of us, in our better moments, admire Christian social activists—people who hunger, thirst, and labor for justice. In our worse moments, however, we wish they wouldn’t bother us or remind us that the gospels challenge our way of life. (These people ought to get their own act together instead of trying to change the world. After all, we can’t hope for heaven on earth. All they do is send us on guilt trips.)

Surely those who have devoted their lives to the corporal works of mercy win the respect of us all. Has there ever been a time when we did not secretly desire to be like them? But this desire, too, sometimes sours; and the example of “do-gooders” feels more like a rebuke than an inspiration. (Bleeding hearts. Why do they care only about the poor—and not the rest of us? At least they could take better care of their own kin. Even that Mother Teresa, she only did band-aid work, anyway. Why didn’t she challenge the unjust political and economic structures?)

These examples, of course, are just caricatures; but they do suggest attitudes that stir hostility and division in the church. One might wonder, for example, whether some of the sharp quarrels between liberal and conservative, right and left, traditionalist and reformist are more a function of particularism and resentment than they are expressions of profound faith.

Are there not gifts of conservatives that liberals miss? Isn’t there a ministry the liberal gives us that the conservative does not? Do not traditionalists as well as innovators have a charism? Don’t contemplatives, social activists, Catholic Workers, and urban families all embody our faith in ways both necessary and complementary?

St. Paul, I propose, would say yes. The variety of talents and works, whether of Jew or Greek, slave or free, serves the common good. The diversity of the members makes them a body. But to be one body, they must have one Spirit and speak with one voice. “Jesus is Lord,” is their fundamental message, announced by those who drink of the same Spirit.

This is the Spirit that on Pentecost filled the disciples. It was so strong a confirmation of faith in Jesus that believers could speak in a way that was not only united but was universally understood. This is the Spirit that Jesus, in John’s Gospel, breathes in a moment of peace, igniting discipleship.

It is the Spirit, as the great hymn “Veni Sancte Spiritus” recalls, which inhabits the heart of the poor as well as the solitary. It quickens joy, eases sorrow. It permeates deep intelligence as well as high feeling. It transforms labor as well as the human heart.

In the Letter to the Galatians (Gal 5:19-23) we read that, as opposed to sexual indulgence, idolatry, wrangling, jealousy, ill-temper, disagreements, factions, envy, and orgy, “what this Spirit brings is different: love, joy, peace, trustfulness, kindness, goodness, gentleness, patience, and self-control.”

What a wonder it would be, what a breeze of life, what a fire of zeal, if differences in the church were marked by these gifts of Pentecost. Rather than all our particular ideologies, our special interests, our private fixations, we would communicate to the world (and to the young) in a language that we all understand. It is the language of the Holy Spirit, the language of love, revealed in patience and kindness, generosity and trust, and a faith both forgiving and enduring.

What a gift to speak the language of such love. What a renewal of the earth as well as our church. Rather than being shamed by the grace of another, we would be graced. Rather than shrink at comparisons, we arise in praise to God.

Is such a gift worth praying for? The alleluia verse of Pentecost leaves no doubt: “Come, Holy Spirit, fill the hearts of your faithful; and kindle in them the fire of your love.”

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

Air in Motion
The change from “Holy Ghost” to “Holy Spirit” in the English translations of sacred texts was literally correct and long overdue. (Other languages always translated the original Hebrew and Greek words with “spirit.”)

Middle Eastern culture sheds significant light on the evolution of the meaning of these Hebrew and Latin words.

Wind And Power

The Hebrew word ruah, the Greek pneuma, and the Latin spiritus all basically mean “air in motion,” “breath ” or “wind.” The root meaning is power.

Apart from human and animal power, wind was the main observable energy source in the ancient world. Sometimes it was experienced as a cool, refreshing breeze (Gn 3:8), other times as a strong wind (Ex 10:13, 19), and sometimes it had hurricane or tornado force (1 Kgs 19:11).

Poetic texts in ancient literature frequently preserve archaic expressions. Thus, Ps 18:15 (also 2 Sam 22:16) describes the wind as God’s breath.

Then the channels of the sea were seen, and the foundations of the world were laid bare at your rebuke, O Lord, at the blast of the breath of your nostrils. (see also Ex 15:8; 2 Sam 22:16; Hos 13:15; Is 30:28; Job 4:9).
Thus, the primitive understanding of wind in the Bible is as the breath of a very powerful being.

Wind As Liquid

Also interesting is the ancient understanding of wind (and water and fire) as possessing what we now consider to be the properties of liquids. This explains why the ancients believed that the wind or spirit could be “poured out”:

And I will never again hide my face from them, when I pour out my spirit upon the house of Israel says the Lord God. (Ez 39:29; see also Is 32:15; Joel 3:1ff.).

Wind, God's Breath

Since human beings tend to perceive and understand God from a human perspective, our ancestors in the faith spoke anthropomorphically of God’s arm (Is 40:15), hand (Dt 2:15), face (Gn 33:10), mouth (Ps 33:6), and breath (Jb 32:9; 33:4), which they understood to be God’s vital power or spirit.

The Old Testament never presents the spirit of God as a person but rather as the power by which God acts in human life. This power is no more distinct or separate from God than a hand or mouth.

Even so, God’s power or breath acts outside of God and can be “sent” (Is 48:16), “placed” (Is 63:11), or “poured.”

The Holy Wind, Breath, Spirit

This background helps a modern believer to appreciate what the apostles and Jesus understood to be taking place in today’s gospel.

Jesus announces that he is sending the apostles just as the Father sent him. Then he “breathes” on the Eleven (Jn 20:22), imitating the moment of creation when God “blew” up the nostrils of Adam and brought him to life (Gn 2:7).

The risen Jesus re-creates these human beings as children of God.

“Receive a holy spirit” continues Jesus as he empowers the apostles to forgive and hold sins. The Greek word for “sin” here (hamartia) portrays it as an “evil power or force.” (Twenty-five of the thirty-one occurrences of this word in John are in the singular!)
Thus Jesus gives the apostles a holy power to fight against an evil power, a mighty force to do combat with an evil force.

John’s viewpoint challenges modern believers to look beyond “lists of sins” and “new sins” and to view sin as an evil force. The good news is that Christ gives the spirit (or force) to all Christians to do battle against this evil force.

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

Commentary by Augustine

As the Father sent me, so I send you: Receive the Holy Spirit. (John 20:21)

The happy day has dawned for us on which Holy Church makes her first radiant appearance to the eyes of faith and sets the hearts of believers on fire. It is the day on which we celebrate the sending of the Holy Spirit by our Lord Jesus Christ, after he had risen from the dead and ascended into glory.

In the Gospel it is written: “If anyone is thirsty, let him come to me and drink. Whoever believes in me, rivers of living water shall flow from his heart.” (Jn 7:37-38)

The Evangelist explains these words by adding: “Jesus said this about the Spirit which those who believed in him were to receive. For the Spirit had not yet been given because Jesus had not yet been glorified.” (Jn 7:39)

Now, the glorification of Jesus took place when he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, but all was not yet accomplished. The Holy Spirit still had to be given; the one who made the promise had to send him.

This is precisely what occurred at Pentecost.

After being in the company of his disciples for the forty days following his resurrection, the Lord ascended into heaven, and on the fiftieth day—the day we are now celebrating—he sent the Holy Spirit. The account is given in Scripture:

Suddenly a sound came from heaven like the rush of a mighty wind, and there appeared to them tongues like fire which separated and came to rest on each one of them.

And they began to speak in other tongues, as the Holy Spirit gave them power of utterance. (Acts 2:2)
That wind cleansed the disciples’ hearts, blowing away fleshly thoughts like so much chaff. The fire burnt up their unregenerate desires as if they were straw.

The tongues in which they spoke as the Holy Spirit filled them were a foreshadowing of the Church’s preaching of the Gospel in the tongues of all nations.

After the flood, in pride and defiance of the Lord, an impious generation erected a high tower and so brought about the division of the human race into many language groups, each with its own peculiar speech which was unintelligible to the rest of the world.

At Pentecost, by contrast, the humble piety of believers brought all these diverse languages into the unity of the Church. What discord had scattered, love was to gather together.

Like the limbs of a single body, the separated members of the human race would be restored to unity by being joined to Christ, their common head, and welded into the oneness of a holy body by the fire of love.

Anyone therefore who rejects the gift of peace and withdraws from the fellowship of this unity cuts himself off from the gift of the Holy Spirit.

So then, my fellow members of Christ’s body, you are the fruits of unity and the children of peace. Keep this day with joy, celebrate it in freedom of spirit, for in you is fulfilled what was foreshadowed in those days when the Holy Spirit came.

At that time whoever received the Holy Spirit spoke in many languages, individual though he was. Now in the same way unity itself speaks through all nations in every tongue.

If you yourselves are established in that unity you have the Holy Spirit among you, and nothing can separate you from the Church of Christ which speaks in the language of every nation of the world.

(Sermon 271:PL 38, 1245-1246)

 

Augustine (354-430) was born at Thagaste in Africa and received a Christian education, although he was not baptized until 387. In 391 he was ordained priest and in 395 he became coadjutor bishop to Valerius of Hippo, whom he succeeded in 396. Augustine’s theology was formulated in the course of his struggle with three heresies: Manichaeism, Donatism, and Pelagianism. His writings are voluminous and his influence on subsequent theology immense. He molded the thought of the Middle Ages down to the thirteenth century. Yet he was above all a pastor and a great spiritual writer.

Runaways Blessed And Missioned

Resurrection, and the outpouring of the Holy Spirit, plus mission: Luke spreads these events across fifty days in Luke-Acts, but the Fourth Gospel concentrates them into the scenario of a single day.

This is one of the places that frustrates the historical literalists who insist on finding answers to the question—exactly what happened, precisely when and where? The texts of Luke-Acts and John do not yield answers to that kind of questioning. What these texts do assert is that soon after the death and resurrection of Jesus, God, beginning in Jerusalem, presented Jesus live to a stunned and frightened group of Jesus’ disciples and proceeded to enable them by the power of the Holy Spirit to continue Jesus’ mission. 

The fact that our New Testament canon includes more than one way of telling about this demonstrates that the Church lives easily with the fact that there is almost always more than one way to speak of the Trinity’s action in Jesus. Our business is to attend carefully to what each diverse account contributes to our understanding of the essential mystery of God's action in the world.

John sets the scene in a startling way:

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’

Clearly, whatever Jesus may have said about his imminent death and resurrection, the disciples were entirely unprepared for the shock of his execution. Their first concern after learning of their Master's death by Roman crucifixion, apparently, was for their own safety. If the Romans considered Jesus dangerous enough to kill, surely they, the followers, might be next. John’s phrase “for fear of the Jews” has, or ought to have, a strange sound for our ears. 

After all, they themselves were Jews, as was Jesus himself. The fact is, the Fourth Gospel frequently calls Jesus’ adversaries (especially the religious officials of his day) “the Jews.” One can only make sense of this nomenclature by postulating that, at the time of the writing of the Fourth Gospel, the Christian community was largely Gentile and “the Jews” was for them a way of naming their own opponents. Then it becomes a way to name Jesus’ opponents during his own earthly ministry.

Were John with us today, and given the sad history of Christian anti-Semitism, one suspects that he would delete the phrase “the Jews” as failing to communicate what he had intended.

Jesus’ first statement to these frightened (and no doubt guilt-ridden) runaways is, “Peace be with you.” Before they have a chance to express regret and ask for forgiveness, Jesus blesses them with shalom.

Then, to confirm his identity, Jesus shows them the wounds of his hands and side. He follows this with another blessing of shalom, this time linked with the mandate to carry on his mission: “as the Father has sent me, so I send you.” This Fourth Gospel has said much about Jesus as “sent” by the Father—to be light for the world, to heal, to be bread from heaven, to be good shepherds, to die in order to gather into one the scattered children of God, to be the New Temple, to be the culmination of divine presence in human history. Thus, to be sent by the Father as Jesus was sent is a thought that requires the use of a phrase from the vocabulary of today's youth: totally awesome.

If that way of describing the disciples' mission is breathtaking, it is also breath-giving. For Jesus implements the commission with a powerful and resonant gesture: he breathes upon them. An action that demands an explanation—breathing upon an entire group is surely an attention-getting gesture—this is another of Jesus’ prophetic symbolic actions, like his washing of feet at the Last Supper. The key to the gesture’s meaning is the only other scene in the Bible that even comes close, the creation of Adam (Gen 2:7), where God is pictured as breathing life into a clay model. Thus the post-Easter gift of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples comes in the form of a new creation entailing a mission that implements the very mission of the original Sent One.

Now it becomes clear why John, in his account of the healing of the man born blind, highlights the name of the pool of healing water (Siloam, meaning “The Sent One.” Cf John 9:1–11). All of us are born blind, until we wash in the waters of the Sent One, baptized into the life of faith. Like the healed blind man, our destiny is simply to witness with our lives how we have been healed of fear and blindness and empowered to continue Jesus' mission.

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

Pentecost originated as a final celebration of the ingathering of the grain harvest, which had begun at Passover. Later Judaism transformed it into a feast of salvation history celebrating the giving of the Law at Sinai and the establishment of Israel as God’s people.

All these associations were carried over into the Christian feast that marked the conclusion of the great fifty days. The grain harvest and the Law are replaced by the gift of the Spirit, and the constitution of the old Israelis replaced by the constitution of the new. The feast of the Law becomes the feast of the Spirit.

Reading I: Acts 2:1-11

There is no unanimity in the New Testament about a single outpouring of the Spirit. The gospel of the day, as we shall see, places the gift of the Spirit on Easter Sunday evening, while Acts 2 puts it on Pentecost.

Originally, perhaps, the gift of the Spirit was associated with each of the resurrection appearances, and perhaps the Pentecost story corresponds to the otherwise unknown appearance to the five hundred (1 Cor 15:6).

Historically, this appearance marks the foundation of the Church as a wider community than the original Twelve and the beginning of the kerygma. Perhaps, as a later part of this story suggests (the crowd’s suspicion that the apostles were full of new wine), the beginning of the kerygma was marked by an outburst of glossolalia such as Paul describes as taking place at Corinth (1 Cor 12-14).

This earlier concept of glossolalia has been overlaid with a new symbolism (whether due to Luke or to his tradition, we cannot say) in which Pentecost reverses the effect of Babel.

 
Responsorial Psalm: 104:1, 24, 29-30, 31, 34

This is a hymn of praise to God for his works in creation. The dominant theology of the Spirit in the wisdom literature (“the Spirit of God fills the world”) stresses the work of the Spirit in the created order.

By contrast, the New Testament concentrates almost exclusively on the eschatological work of the Spirit. The pneumatology of the New Testament is conditioned by its Christology.

When the psalmist speaks of the “renewal” of creation through the Spirit, he is probably thinking of no more than the renewal of nature at springtime.

But in Christian use it can be reinterpreted to mean the eschatological renewal of creation, a renewal of which the Church is the first fruits.

 
Reading II: 1 Corinthians 12:3b-7,12-13

Paul’s Corinthians were very keen on glossolalia, but its effect on the community was questionable. It led to divisiveness—those who spoke in tongues treated those who did not have this particular gift as second-class citizens.

In reply, Paul insists on several things here. First, to have the Spirit means to confess that Jesus is Lord.

Here Paul’s use of the name Jesus is especially nuanced. “Jesus” means the earthly Jesus, Christ crucified.

The Corinthians regarded the death of Christ as a mere episode of the past and put all their money on the purely spiritual, ethereal Christ. Paul recalls them to the centrality of the cross, pricking the bubble of their enthusiasm.

Second, the gifts of the Spirit take different forms, not just the one form of speaking in tongues. Each gift, however unspectacular, has to be used for the common good.

Third, the gift of the Spirit must not lead to individualism but to the building up of the corporate body of the community. The Church is one body through a common baptism and a common “drinking of one Spirit.”

The latter is probably a reference to the baptismal Eucharist rather than to a rite analogous to the later rite of confirmation (see “supernatural drink” in 1 Cor 10:4). Here is a further suggestion that 1 Corinthians was written for the paschal feast.

OR
Reading II: Romans 8:8-17

Chapter 8 forms the climax of the first, doctrinal part of Romans. In chapters 1-4 the Apostle had first prepared the way for, and then enunciated, his message of justification by grace alone through faith. Now, having dealt in chapters 5-7 with certain objections to that message, Paul is ready to move from justification to the new life in the Spirit that justification opens up for the believers.

1 Corithinans 8-11 can be found on the fifth Sunday of Lent in series A.

These verses speak of the Spirit’s indwelling the believers as a result of their baptism, making them participants in advance in the resurrection life and renewing their inner being daily in preparation for that resurrection life.

Romans 8:12-17 insist that baptism is only a beginning. Life in the Spirit is a life of freedom, but it is always a freedom struggling with constant temptation. For life in the Spirit means being under the lordship of Christ.

The baptized are not under obligation to the “flesh” (our old, unredeemed nature, not some higher nature); therefore they must mortify the deeds of the body (remember, this will include pride as well as sensuality). They must be “driven” by the Spirit.

At this point notice how Paul appropriates and sanctions the language of the charismatic enthusiasts, which he had probably picked up at Corinth. But, significantly, he gives it an ethical twist.

Not spiritual excitement and religious emotion but obedient Christian living is the supreme test of the Spirit’s presence and activity.

It is that, rather than overpowering emotion, that will entitle Christians to cry out in worship, “Abba, Father.” And still that acclamation is characterized by a “not yet.” Only at the final consummation will the believers really receive the “adoption” anticipated in baptism.

For, as an Anglican theologian of the last generation, Oliver Chase Quick, used to teach, sacraments are both symbolic and instrumental. Baptism is symbolic of our final salvation, and it is instrumental in inaugurating the life in the Spirit that is to be consummated in that final salvation.

As we noted above, the freedom of the Spirit is a struggling freedom. This means that baptism inaugurates a life characterized by an element of suffering.

Suffering is symbolized in baptism when the converts symbolically die with Christ; it is effectualized internally in mortification, and externally in persecution.

Then, at the final consummation, the suffering will lead to glory, when the believers will inherit the kingdom of God with Christ (Rom 8:17).

 
Gospel: John 20:19-23

We have already seen that John places the giving of the Spirit on Easter day, and we have discussed the historical and theological grounds for this.

Here, as in Acts, the Spirit empowers the Church for its mission (“even so I send you”). The mission is defined here, however, not as kerygma but as the forgiving and retaining of sins.

The traditional Catholic and High Anglican interpretation of this has seen it as a reference to the sacrament of penance, but this is probably an anachronism as far as the evangelist is concerned.

In the New Testament, forgiveness of sins is baptismal language (see Lk 24:47), and what we have here is the Johannine version of the tradition, which includes in the appearance stories the command to baptize.

Our text speaks of the giving or withholding of baptism consequent upon faith or unbelief at hearing the gospel message. Only derivatively and insofar as the sacrament of absolution is a renewal of the baptismal status can this text be stretched to cover the traditional interpretation.

If our new interpretation be sustained, it is significant that both the second reading and the gospel speak of baptism, for in patristic times Pentecost was the day when those who for some reason had missed their baptism at Easter were baptized.

Baptism was not continually administered at any time of the year because its corporate significance was paramount.

OR
Gospel: John 14:15-16, 23b-26

We see here the same kind of spiral thought that characterizes the farewell discourse throughout and of which we spoke in our comments on last Sunday’s gospel. The points made are:

1. Love of Christ means obedience to his commandments.

2. The promise of the Paraclete (RSV: “Counselor”) sent by the Father in response to the prayer of the Son.

3. The Spirit, whom the world cannot receive, will dwell in the community.

4. The coming of the Spirit is equivalent to the return of the Son and almost completely fulfills the primitive expectation of the parousia.

5. The world will no longer see the Christ, but the community will (a) see him, (b) live because he lives, (c) know the mutual indwelling of Christ with the Father and of Christ with the community.

6. This indwelling is a relationship of mutual love that includes obedience to Christ’s commandments.
It will again be noted how point 6 brings us full circle to where we were at point 1. Yet, the spiral leads to an enrichment of understanding.

The Christian life is not an external observance of Christ’s commandments but an intense relationship of the community to the three Persons of the Trinity, each with a specific role to play in this relationship.

The Spirit conveys the presence of the Son, who reveals the Father.

But this intense personal relationship is not dissolved into mere emotion; it is concretely and soberly manifested in a life of obedience to Christ’s commandments.

The departure of Jesus does not mean that he is now absent. It means his ever-renewed presence through the coming of the Spirit to the community. That is the Easter message of this Gospel reading.

Commentary on John 14:23-29

In the Easter season we tend to read the farewell discourses, with their promise of the coming of the Paraclete (RSV: “Counselor”), as discourses given by the risen and not yet ascended Lord during the forty days in preparation for the coming of the Spirit at Pentecost.

For the evangelist, they are discourses of the earthly Jesus, placed in the context of the Last Supper. They look through and beyond the death of Jesus to his glorification, which releases the gift of the Spirit. Thus, in the early Church the whole of the fifty days included the celebration of the gift of the Spirit, not just the day of Pentecost.

We are here listening to a promise fulfilled at Easter. In the Fourth Gospel the risen Christ conveys the gift of the Spirit to his disciples on Easter Sunday evening (see the Gospel of Pentecost Sunday). The Spirit is, as in Paul’s letters, the gift of the risen Christ.

In the gift of the Spirit, the risen Christ and the Father come and make their home with the disciples.

The function of the Spirit is to “teach you all things, and bring to your remembrance all that I have said to you.” It is not the work of the Spirit to convey ever new revelations, but to unfold in ever new understanding, interpretation, and application the once-for-all revelation of Jesus Christ (“all that I have said to you”).

“His work is more than a reminiscence of the ipsissima verba of the Son of God; it is a living representation of all that he had spoken to his disciples, a creative exploitation of the gospel” (EC Hoskyns).

This ongoing work of the Spirit gives the disciples peace and takes away their fear, because the Spirit is always there as their helper who stands by them in persecution and martyrdom.

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