5th Sunday of Easter Year B, 2024

 

(Acts 9:26-31; 1^st. John 3:18-24; John 15:1-8)

Dear People of God, it is important for us to realize that today’s Gospel reading is not recorded by the other three Gospels, only St. John tells us about Jesus’ discourse  to His ‘Last Supper’ disciples in which He said:

 I am the true vine and My Father is the vinedresser … you are the branches;

before going on to say, as you heard:

By this is My Father glorified, that you bear much fruit and so prove to be                     My disciples.

From those words, it would seem that there was something not yet sure – fully secure, that is -- about the ‘discipleship’ of those committed followers of Jesus who had followed Him all the way from Gallilee to Judea and its hostile capital, Jerusalem  

Our second reading from St. John’s first letter, gives us some help, for there we read:

Whoever keep His commandments abides in God, and God in him.  And by this we know that He abides in us, by the Spirit Whom He has given us.

The missing link between His faithful disciples who accompanied Him throughout His Public Ministry, and those same disciples Jesus urged at the Last Supper to ‘prove (yourselves) to be My disciples’ would seem to be the Risen Lord’s Gift of the Holy Spirit.   For they did, indeed,  ‘prove themselves to be authentic ‘disciples’ of Jesus and ‘Apostles’ worthy to be sent in His name to the nations, by obeying the Spirit of power given them after His Resurrection and Ascension, to  form them in the likeness of their Crucified and Risen Lord and enable them to proclaim His Gospel in His Name, and establish  His Church by their inspired teaching and preaching,  and the personal witness of their mighty deeds.

Whittled down in numbers by the snares of the devil and the trials and temptations of the modern ‘anything-goes’ world, It is easy for surviving, enduring , ‘going-to-Mass-on-Sunday-and-Holy-Day-Catholics’  to think of ourselves as ‘disciples’ of Jesus.   But we cannot allow ourselves to forget that Jesus required His apparently true ‘Last Supper’ disciples to prove themselves as fully authentic followers of Himself.  And so, each of us today should ask ourselves the question: ‘Have I proven myself to be -- in some measure -- a true disciple of Jesus, or am I a wind-bag full of nothing more than ‘the right words’, or merely a pretender, unable to decide and unwilling to suffer?

Dear friends in Christ, it is the Spirit Who establishes a personal relationship  between Jesus and His true followers, enabling  those who follow His -- the Spirit’s – lead, to abide in Jesus by obeying His commandments, and, by virtue of that relationship, to come to know that He – Jesus their Lord and Saviour -- abides in them.

And at this important juncture it is most important to realize that the Father commands us, Jesus commands us, but the Holy Spirit persuades, encourages, urges, guides, enlightens, strengthens and comforts us as disciples of Jesus.  He does not , however, command us, because His mission is to form us personally in our-own-truest personal spiritual relationship with Jesus, as an in-Him-child of God, for the Father.

And so, dear People of God, Jesus demands obedience from all His disciples, but above all He desires such commitment to be imbued with the intimate beauty of personal communion, whereby the ‘do-er’ of His will, delights in the awareness of His presence.

St. Luke presents the same teaching essentially in our first reading:

The Church was being built up; and, walking in the fear of the Lord and in the comfort of the Holy Spirit, it multiplied.

There we have the difference between those who love Jesus and think that Christians have all they need for their right understanding and imitation of Jesus in the Bible (perhaps more simply in the New Testament, or even, indeed, in the Gospels alone), and those who – like ourselves who in the God-given Church -- seek not simply to know the words Jesus uttered and imitate the things He did, but aspire above all to be formed by the very Spirit of Jesus in the likeness of Jesus.  We pray for, and invite, the Holy Spirit to guide us -- already members of Christ through faith and obedience -- way beyond, and immeasurably far above, any awareness of our own loving thoughts or strictness of our personal discipline, into a Spiritual, by-the-Holy-Spirit, conformity with Jesus.  For God desires that the full majesty and beauty of the Son-made-flesh be manifested in the most sensitive detail by the full complementary of a whole  family of likenesses formed by the Spirit in each and all the individual members of the Children of God – redeemed by Jesus -- for the glory of the Father of all goodness and truth.   No human being is infinite, and the truest spiritual likeness of Jesus can only be formed by a multiplicity of beautiful aspects, glimpses, likenesses and aspirations, of Him Who was, is, and ever will be, the only sublime human likeness of His heavenly Father.

People of God, God is holy, we, of ourselves, are not; God is good, we are needy; let us not, therefore, try to prescribe ourselves a ‘Jesus’ for our imitation, based on our own thoughts, no matter how studious or learned they may be, nor on our own aspirations or imaginations, no matter how pious they may be.  Rather let us try to just love the Lord proclaimed by Mother Church with all our heart, understand Him in her Scriptures to the utmost of our mind, embrace Him in her Eucharist with heart-felt warmth and sincerity, and then both humbly and prayerfully entrust ourselves to the Holy Spirit, beseeching Him to form us into a likeness of Jesus in Mother Church, as He most wonderfully formed Jesus Himself in the womb of Mary.

For we are all -- throughout our lives -- meant to be formed as other, mutually complementary, Christs in the womb of Mother Church, by the Spirit.  And after such a life-time gestation, our ultimate birth into heavenly life should be characterized first and foremost by a sublimely childlike cry of ‘THANK YOU, my Father, my God, and my All’!  A cry most befitting those worshippers who, as Jesus Himself revealed and John alone (4:23s.) reports, the Father desires above all:

The hour is coming, and is now here, when the true worshippers will worship the Father in spirit and truth; for the Father is seeking such people to worship Him.   God is spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in spirit and truth. 

4th Sunday of Easter Year B, 2024

 

I AM THE GOOD SHEPHERD

On the television all those invited to participate in the various programmes  are presented as doing good: from those giving sex-adapting pills to children, and recommending assisted-dying for the sick or elderly; to those asserting that responsible parents should not be allowed to chastise their children physically at all …  no harassed mother allowed to slap her disobedient children, for that causes endless mental health problems (!) for children later on.   ‘Good’ committee members wanting and empowered to reward the  ‘good behaviour’ of prisoners under strict supervision by a reduction of their prison sentence have, and do still, show their ‘goodness by occasionally allowing even vicious criminals to be let loose on the general public  with the result that hundreds and possibly thousands of people (mainly women?) have already been murdered or seriously harmed when such apparently ‘good behaviour’ gives way to new temptation, desire, or fear.  And, the ‘goodness’ of such generous committees is not to be questioned.

Our modern Western or Western-influenced society has reneged on religion, especially the Christian religion which originally gave a rock-foundation for believing  society.  Official modern society no longer believes in Jesus because it thinks it has no need of Him: it does not want what Jesus seems (to them) to offer – obedience now and heaven much later on --  but it most certainly does want what modern society seems to offer: pleasures-a-plenty here and now, do whatever you want so long as it doesn’t harm other people, lots of technological possibilities for both good and evil, and certainly lots of excitement and sex.  Moreover, addicts of whatever kind tend to be thought of, exclusively,  as ‘sick’ people, thus supporting the demise of human will-power, human ability to avoid, even to reject the solicitations of sin.  And all that is seen as forms of modern ‘goodness’.

Jesus, however, said of Himself, and still says in and through His Church: ‘I am the good shepherd’; while the world nowadays says on the other hand, ‘we are doing good for everybody; a good, everybody appreciates, here and now’.  

Who are you to believe, O serious thinker?   What is your faith – and your experience – O People of God:

JESUS IS THE GOOD SHEPHERD!

It behoves us, however, as Christian believers. to try to understand as clearly as we can something of what Jesus meant by the word, ‘good’.

Jesus was sent by His Father -- and by His own filial desire  -- to become the Saviour of human-kind; that is, the Saviour of humanity bound by chains of sin and death.  That is what Jesus’ words ‘good shepherd’ involve: His freeing humankind from those chains which rob them of God’s original blessing of life and love as the crown of His creation and as His own true, adopted children.  And that Jesus did because He, as perfect God and perfect man, could love His Father – adequately -- as God, thus returning  His Father’s original-and-still-enduring love of men; and, as Man -- by His obedience through suffering-and-death -- make up for humans’ disobedience: disrespect for the majesty of God and disregard for the beauty of their own being -- a divinely endowed creation -- by the destructive-and-disruptive, wilful disobedience of sin, emanating from Satan’s own hatred of both God and man.

Jesus, the good shepherd was also characterised by His compassion, e.g. on the Five Thousand he fed after they had totally forgotten themselves listening to Jesus speaking to them about the Kingdom of God.  That compassion of Jesus also ‘pushed’ Him to revive the widow of Nain’s only son … possibly thinking about His own mother who would lose Him soon.  He also was moved with compassion to heal the man lying for 38 years waiting at the Pool of Siloam for a chance to be the first to enter the ‘moved’ healing waters.

His ’goodness’ also ‘pushed’ Jesus again  to love and admire the widow who, out of her poverty, put all that she had to live on into the Temple treasury  for love of God.   Notice there, dear People of God, that Jesus’ goodness as shepherd of His people was ordained above all to enabling, helping, leading this widow, and  His people, to love His Father, their God … and such heavenly love of God was not to be poisoned by sugar-coated human sympathy unable to appreciate the wondrous beauty of the widow’s gift … not of two small coins, but of total disregard of self before the beauty of God;  a gift given out of total love for God… not ‘excogitated’ by her own mind. but, as it were, wrung out of her whole being, by spontaneous and compelling, divinely-gifted, love.

One of Mother Church’s short prayers, is that we might worship God by imitating His  goodness; but in our modern world, ‘goodness’ is ‘done’ not out of a desire to imitate our heavenly Father, but out of a proud and worldly desire to show our own, human goodness.

Dear People of God, for us Catholics and Christians, ‘goodness’ is an expression of, fruit of, godliness, not of sentimentality.   God’s commands are not impossible for He ‘knows us and knows of what we are made.   But He also knows the beauty of the salvation Jesus has won for us, and the power of the Holy Spirit bestowed on us to lead and guide  us to that ultimate fulfilment.   You who are faithful disciples of Jesus know the goodness of God from your own life’s experience … these my words are nothing more than a reminder or gentle spur for your greater love of Him Who is our All.

3rd Sunday of Easter Year B, 2024

 

(Acts of the Apostles 3:13-15, 17-19; 1 John 2:1-5; Luke 24:35-48)

The two disciples whom Jesus had overtaken walking towards Emmaus, although their hearts had been burning within them as He opened the Scriptures to them, only finally recognized Him at the breaking of bread during a meal which they had invited Him to share with them.  On their receiving the bread He had blessed, He suddenly disappeared, whereupon they set off back to Jerusalem at once to inform the apostles that very hour.

Those same disciples, having reported their experience to the eleven apostles, and now joined by some others, were all gathered together secretly in that upper room for fear of the Jews, when Jesus appeared again and His first words (2 in Greek, 2 in Mother Church’s Latin version, 3 in our English version) were:

            Peace  to  you !

Those few words express the whole purpose of the Son of God becoming man for us!

However,  they still disbelieved for joy and were marvelling,

Jesus therefore set about proving to them the reality of His presence:

See My hands and My feet, that it is I Myself. Touch Me and see. For a spirit does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have."

And then He topped that by asking for a snack!!

"Have you anything here to eat?"  They gave Him a piece of a broiled fish, and He took it and ate before them.

The reality of His presence being thus settled, Jesus then got down to the main purpose of His presence with them.   First of all, He was not with them as He had been previously:

These are my words that I spoke to you while I was still with you.

In other words He was saying, “It is indeed I who am here with you now, but things are not exactly as  they were when I spoke those words to you a few days ago.”  Jesus had then been with them as any man is with his fellows; however, things had now changed – as the disciples well knew -- and Jesus was no longer present to them in that worldly way.

Let us now listen carefully to Him telling them just how different His new presence with them was, and learn just how He would make Himself present to all His future disciples.

First, He took great care to explain His presence in the O.T. Scriptures:

“Everything written about Me in the Law of Moses and the Prophets and the Psalms must be fulfilled."  Then He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures.

That was  the first part of Jesus’ purpose for coming: to open His disciples’ minds to understand the Scriptures!!

That presence of Jesus in the Scriptures might be called His first mode of presence to His Church after His Resurrection, because it begins with the Law of Moses, the Prophets and the Psalms, as Jesus Himself said, ‘Moses wrote about Me’, and that presence will culminate in the soon-to-appear New Testament Scriptures about the historic Life, Death, and Resurrection of Jesus, and the perennial Good News He proclaimed for our salvation.

Nevertheless, the supreme mode of Jesus’ real, Personal, presence for His future Church was made absolutely clear by the report brought by those two disciples who had been talking with the Risen Jesus on their way to Emmaus.  Their hearts and minds had been burning with joy and wonder as He explained the Scriptures, but it was not until the celebration of the Eucharist that they recognized Him:

            They told the Apostles how Jesus was known to them in the breaking of the bread.

That Eucharistic manner of Jesus’ risen-presence -- formally, and most solemnly, instituted by Jesus at the Last Supper with His Apostles -- now confirmed the veracity of the two Emmaus disciples’ report to the fearful Church in Jerusalem.

However, our Gospel reading today confirms the reality of yet another, a third, mode of His presence with-and-for His future Church:  the presence He had foretold with the following words recorded for us by St. Matthew (18:20):

Where two or three are gathered in My name, there am I among them.  

Dear People of God, we can find Jesus, experience His presence, in varying ways: He is always present for us, for our understanding,  in the Old and New Testament Scriptures; He is also spiritually present for those assembled together to hear, learn from, and promote His Gospel; and supremely, He is sacramentally present in His Eucharistic- sacrifice-and-feast for those of faith, and Personally present for those who sacrifice themselves with Him at the Eucharist by their lives of devotion and commitment.

As Peter explained to those who had witnessed his cure of the lame man:

 And His (Jesu’s) Name -- by faith in His name -- has made this man strong, whom you see and know; and the faith that is through Jesus has given this man perfect health, in the presence of  you all.  (Acts 3:16)

Living by ‘faith in His name’ is the supremely authentic way of responding with personal  love to Jesus’ gracious presence in our individual lives, showing itself with a commitment of obedient and public witness to His word, as St. John told us in our second reading:

We know that we have come to know Him, if we keep His commandments.

Dear Friends in Christ, by signalling the various modes of His presence to-and-for His believers Jesus was preparing His Church for her great world-wide mission to proclaim:

            Repentance and forgiveness of sins in His name to all the nations.

The early Christians were still very closely bound up with their Jewish brethren in the synagogue; indeed, many still worshipped with them in the Temple and in the synagogue.

However, in our Gospel reading Jesus is preparing His Church for the future and it is essential that her proclamation be recognized as independent of her Jewish origins: those origins are never to be denied but they are not, henceforth, to be racially restrictive or spiritually definitive (Luke 24:47):

Repentance for the forgiveness of sins should be proclaimed in His name to all  nations, beginning from Jerusalem.  You are witnesses of these things.

2nd Sunday of Easter Year B, 2024

 

(Acts of the Apostles 4:32-35; 1^st. Letter of John 5:1-6; John 20:19-31)

Jesus said to Thomas, "Have you believed because you have seen Me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed."

Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of the disciples which are not written in this book.

What precisely was John’s thinking in that passage from today’s Gospel reading?

Having just reported Jesus as saying: ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed;’ he then himself added: ‘Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this book’.

It would seem that John is saying that he didn’t think it necessary to tell us ‘many other signs’  accomplished by Jesus in the presence His disciples because of Jesus’ words of solemn admonition to Thomas:

            Blessed are those who have not seen and yet have believed,

But, if that is the case, why then, did Jesus perform so many signs?

John appears to be confessing that he, Thomas, and the other original disciples of Jesus, had been too weak in faith during Our Lord’s public ministry, and especially at His apprehension and crucifixion by the religious authorities, because they did not then have that key to a right understanding of the fulness of God’s revelation – Our Blessed Lord’s Resurrection and Ascension -- which is now ours through faith in Mother Church’s proclamation of Jesus.

In his first letter John again emphasizes  the supreme importance of resurrection-faith :

Everyone who has been born of God overcomes the world. And this is the victory that has overcome the world … our faith. (1 John 5:4)

There he re-iterates his Gospel teaching, by saying that whoever is one of those praised by Jesus for believing without ‘seeing’, such a one has overcome the world; and his victory over the world is proved by the fact that he is spiritually alive and strong-in-Jesus without any requirement of worldly evidence.   Indeed, need for worldly corroboration could only signal a weakness in the spiritual life of a true Christian.

Now, why does John so emphatically praise such a faithful response to Jesus’ gospel?  In order to teach all of us just how sublime  is  our Catholic faith!  Because, ultimately, it is God -- the Father Himself -- Who introduces us to such faith, as John alone tells us in his Gospel (6:43-45):

Jesus answered the Jews, "Do not grumble among yourselves.  No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him.  And I will raise him up on the last day.  It is written in the prophets, 'And they will all be taught by God.' Everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.

Worldly evidence cannot establish the spiritual realities of our Christian faith, it can only confirm faith’s basic rationality -- for example, we have greater historical testimony for Jesus than for Julius Caesar -- but the faithful, loving, embrace of Jesus’ Gospel can only come as a response to God’s inspiring grace enlightening our mind, moving our heart, guiding and confirming our will.

John is not against us using our natural intelligence to  grow in understanding of the Gospel of Jesus; on the contrary, he expressly tells us that is why he wrote his Gospel:

These (signs) are written that you may believe (that they may help you believe) that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that believing you may have life in His name.

For St. John, the supreme function of the Gospel message is to provoke, awaken and promote our awareness of, our contact with and our response to, God Himself; and that contact, that response, though based essentially on the Gospel message, is not to be limited to or constrained by the written words of the Gospel.   The truth about Jesus, and indeed about God, is broader, wider, goes deeper and higher, is more intimately personal than the inspired but human words of the Gospels; that is why we Catholics accept the Tradition of the Church and acknowledge development in the doctrine of Faith; all, however, on the basis of, and never in contradiction to, the original, Apostolic Gospel proclamation.  And that is also why the Catholic Church has always recognized, revered and delighted in, her authentic saints as shining beacons and inspiring examples of that possibility, open to all her faithful children, of wondrous personal communion with God,  beginning here on earth and leading to its fulfilment through vision, as children of God in Jesus, in our heavenly home.

And so. dear  People of God, we have come to the essential characteristic of our Christian Faith.  It is not simply a faith to be learned, it is not a faith just to be obeyed; it is a faith to be learned, experienced, loved, and lived: not only in the sense of obeying its commands and fighting for its rights, but, above all, as a communion with the Father, in His Incarnate  Son our Lord and Saviour, by God’s great Gift, His most Holy Spirit.   Mother Church today is still called to prepare herself to be inspired by God, not indeed to write or proclaim a new revelation, but to understand yet more fully and appreciate still more deeply the revelation originally and finally given to her by God.

Mother Church is a mystical Church, where truth, rationally elucidated, and emotional awareness born of God’s beauty-perceived, though most gratefully appreciated are also necessarily subjected to the supreme authority of the Apostolic Proclamation, especially the transcendent words of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

All this is contained in those words of our Creed which say: ‘we believe in one, holy, CATHOLIC AND APOSTOLIC Church’.   Those words do not simply state that we believe the Catholic Church to have been founded by Jesus Christ, established on His Apostles, to be guided and preserved by His Spirit; they also mean that it is only in the Catholic Church -- only in her atmosphere, so to speak -- that we are able to breath fully as Christians, fully endowed and empowered to believe aright the fullness of truth  about God and His will for the salvation of mankind.

Whoever is begotten by God conquers the world.   And the victory that conquers the world is our faith.

            The Spirit is the one that testifies, and the Spirit is truth.

Oh, you believing Catholics, rejoice in, and be grateful for, the treasure you have been given!  John, the Apostle whom Jesus loved particularly, regards us today, as -- in some measure -- better placed in relation to Jesus than he, John, was in the days of the Lord’s public ministry!!   Because your faith has been given to you at the instigation of the heavenly Father Himself Who has P/personally called you and introduced you to Jesus.  And that faith is being continually nourished and purified -- even to this very day, at this very hour – by the Holy Spirit of Truth and Love, in the womb of Mother Church.

Dear friends in Christ, you who are remnants -- faithful remnants -- of what was Western Christianity, you who are possibly being persecuted and killed, mocked and defamed, in the midst of a society become pagan; you who today are hearing strange things even in Mother Church herself, words and teachings that would try to conform her to modern society, you who remember those words of the Lord  (Matthew. 10:28):  

Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul; rather, be afraid of the One who can destroy both soul and body in Gehenna;

To all of you I say, let us all rejoice wholeheartedly in the Lord, for He is risen today, One of us, risen for the glory of the Father and for the salvation of all believers.