4th Sunday of Lent Year B 2015

 4^th. Sunday of Lent (B)

            (2 Chronicles 36:14-16, 19-21; Ephesians 2:4-10; John 3:14-21)

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It must have seemed very mysterious to the People of Israel when, later on, scrutinizing the Scriptures in order to better understand and serve the Lord their God, they were faced with that bizarre incident taken from the history of their forebears journeying across the desert from slavery under the Egyptians to the land the Lord would give them, that there they might serve Him in freedom.  It was, indeed, mysterious for them -- and unavoidably so -- because the whole episode has been found to be rich with meaning and significance not only for subsequent Israelites over more  than 1000 years, but even more particularly for the whole future Christian people.  In the desert, several hundreds, perhaps several thousands, of the children of Israel were saved by looking up at the bronze likeness of a deadly serpent; and that saving incident, interpreted for us by Jesus’ words in the  Gospel, has carried and still bears with it salutary teaching for countless millions of Christian people throughout time.

For God, having sent the punishing serpents to do their work among a sinful and rebellious people, was then, subsequently, able to turn that deadly instrument of His wrath into a saving grace: ‘look faithfully at the bronze serpent in sincere acknowledgment of your sin, and you will be healed of your wounds’.

For us now, Jesus says that God the Father allowed His only begotten Son, His Beloved, to be rejected by the religious authorities of His own people and cruelly tortured, before being lifted up on the Cross by the powers and principalities of imperial Rome and finally left as an exhibit to suffer a slow and agonising death.

Can God turn that most brutal, degrading, and horrendous event to serve any good purpose?  Most assuredly He can, for love, divine love, was involved: for He Who suffered loved to call Himself the ‘Son of Man’, Who, as Son of the Father was consumed with divine love for us, while, as Man -- and indeed as our Head -- He loved His Father with the total fullness of His divinely perfect humanity.   The complete answer to our question was made manifest when Jesus, three days later, rose from the dead; for then His rejection and suffering on the Cross was shown to have been but a prelude to, and preparation for, His sublime exaltation to heavenly glory in our humanity!

Father, the hour has come.  Glorify your Son that your Son may glorify You.  (John 17:1)

Look on the bronze serpent raised up on high that all might be able to see it and find healing!  The bronze serpent showed the cause of Israel’s suffering, for it recalled and represented the original serpent in Eden who injected the poison of sin into human life, for indeed it was Israel’s sin that brought on the punishment of  those later serpents bites in the desert of Sinai.  Jesus crucified on high likewise represented the horror of human suffering from sin (not His own but His people’s); but Jesus’ Pasch did not end with that suffering for it was entered upon and embraced as but the initial stage of His way back to His Father; and so it is Jesus, returned to His Father and finally lifted up in the glory of God by the Spirit of God, Who manifests the healing power now being offered to humanity against the primordial and still enduring ‘bite’ of sin and eternal death.

The LORD said to Moses, "Make a serpent and mount it on a pole, and if anyone who has been bitten looks at it, he will recover."

People of God, it is not enough for us -- the new Chosen People of Spirit and Truth -- to look on Jesus crucified with nothing more than sincere sorrow decrying such barbarity, for many humanists pride themselves on such sentiments.  It is necessary for us and all who aspire to salvation, to look at Jesus on that pole of suffering not only humbly confessing Him to have been raised up there for our sins, but also gratefully acknowledging that same Jesus as now raised up on high in glory, and to commit our sinful selves to Him with faith in the promises of His divine goodness, and with confidence in that dying manifestation of His now eternal human compassion; thus being able to hope most surely in Him for forgiveness and healing.

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in His great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope through the resurrection of Jesus Christ from the dead.  (1 Peter 1:3)

The message of Christianity is perennial, and it has been proclaimed implicitly from the beginning of man’s relations with God, and explicitly in the life and teaching of Christ and His Church: in order to reach the fullness of our human capacity for life, the fullness for which we were originally created by God and subsequently redeemed by Christ, we must leave our sin and sinfulness behind by faith in, obedience to, and companionship with, Jesus our Saviour, present to us and for us in and through His Church.

The alternatives are stark and irreducible: as shown, on the one hand, in the horror of the Son of Man suffering as Jesus of Nazareth on the Cross on Calvary, and on the other hand, in the divine majesty of the same Son of Man raised up to, and sharing in, the eternal glory of His Father by the Spirit of them Both.

Why must there be this utterly un-crossable divide?   Because of the divine beauty and goodness of God’s love for us.  Our scientists search ever more frantically for life-supporting planets such as our Earth.  There are none in our solar system and so they go ever further and deeper into mind-numbingly distant galaxies and stars looking for possible planetary systems to be found there … but nothing can be found like our dear Earth … for we are uniquely loved and created in the image and likeness of God.  Profligacy in creation or indifference in our moral response to it are unthinkable because they are both absolutely alien to the beauty and holiness of Divine Love sourcing, and willing to express Itself in, our earthly being and our eternal calling.

Pope Francis seeks to emphasise God’s mercy which indeed, though beyond our comprehension, sustains all our hope, and should be central in our lives; however, St. Paul in today’s second reading guides us to the ultimate root of our faith:

God, Who is rich in mercy, because of the great love He had for us, even when we were dead in our transgressions, brought us to life with Christ (by grace you have been saved), raised us up with Him, and seated us with Him in the heavens in Christ Jesus.

Dear People of God, the great tragedy and the ultimate wrong afflicting and threatening our world today is ingratitude to, and wilful ignorance and defiance of, God’s love for us and all mankind; above all, however, such ingratitude, ignorance and defiance shown by nominally Catholic Christians!  The very first petition in the only prayer taught us by Jesus goes immediately, as did His whole life, to this most radical evil afflicting our world today:

            OUR FATHER WHO ART IN HEAVEN, HALLOWED BE THY NAME;

May our lives, refreshed and renewed by today’s fellowship in and with Jesus our Lord, help bring to fulfilment His work and our glorious legacy:

For God did not send His Son into the world to condemn the world but that the world might be saved through Him (and His Church).

Third Sunday of Lent Year B 2015

 THIRD SUNDAY OF LENT (B)

(Exodus 20:1-17; 1 Corinthians 1:22-25; John 2:13-25)

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In our gospel reading St. John tells us that Jesus drove the merchants out of the Temple with a whip since they were, He said, dishonouring His ‘Father’s house’.  Saints Matthew and Mark speak of the same event with greater detail, because Matthew (21:13) tells us that Jesus declared:

Is it not written, 'My house shall be called a house of prayer'?  But you have made it a den of thieves; 

while Mark (11:17) agreeing with Matthew, also adds that Jesus saw His Father’s house as a house of prayer for all nations.

Thanks therefore to St. Matthew and St. Mark we can now understand why Jesus so strongly objected to His Father’s house being made, as John said, into ‘a house of merchandise’: it was because His Father’s house was meant to be a ‘house of prayer’ and indeed, ‘for all nations’.

When Solomon consecrated the first Temple to the Lord in Jerusalem we are told (1 Kings 8:29-30) that he prayed:

May your eyes be open toward this temple night and day, toward the place of which You said, 'My name shall be there,' that You may hear the prayer which Your servant makes toward this place.

And so, the Temple was God’s House in so far as His name was there; but God Himself had His proper dwelling in heaven, as we hear in the book of Deuteronomy (26:15) and in the prophet Isaiah(Isa 63:15):

Look down from Your holy habitation, from heaven, and bless Your people Israel and the land which You have given us. 

Look down from heaven, and see from Your habitation, holy and glorious.                  

Therefore, in the Temple of Jerusalem there was both a presence and an absence.  

In Mother Church today, each and every Catholic Church is indeed God’s house, His Name is there for it is consecrated to Him, and it is truly a house of prayer.  However, as in the Old Testament the Chosen People were well aware that while His Name was with the Temple, God dwelt in heaven, so today, there is at times, a feeling of absence for some Christians as they kneel in their church or chapel because they have abandoned a supremely important part of their Christian inheritance.

For Jesus took great care to help His Church, our Catholic Church today, by abiding with us in Mother Church and in each and every parish church thanks to His gift of the Eucharist and His Eucharistic Presence.  That presence is a great comfort to all Catholics.  However, we cannot take the Eucharistic Presence with us, the tabernacle remains in the church; and even though we may have received communion at Mass, nevertheless, that Eucharistic presence of Jesus in us is but fleeting: it is a Presence given to us as the supreme channel for the entry of the Spirit of Jesus into our lives.

If we live faithfully by Jesus’ Gift of the Spirit, given to us in and through Mother Church, He, the Spirit, raises us up to a new life in Jesus; and if we allow the Spirit to form us sufficiently in the likeness of Jesus, Jesus and even the Father Himself will come, with the Spirit, to dwell in us as in His Temple, as St. Paul said speaking to his faithful converts:

Do you not know that you are the temple of God and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?

When that takes place, People of God, the distance of God is totally transformed into a presence that is closer to us than we are to ourselves, as the following words of Jesus I am about to quote will explain.  These are indeed words spoken by Jesus with regard to Himself; but since the faithful disciple is one with Jesus, a living member of His Body, and in Him the faithful disciple is being made, by the Spirit of Jesus, into a child of God in the Son, therefore these words of Jesus about Himself and His Father apply also to each and every faithful disciple of Jesus according to the degree of their faithfulness.

Thus, we can experience God’s presence, the Father’s presence to us, both as a total and comprehensive knowing and being known:

No one knows the Son except the Father; nor does anyone know the Father except the Son (Matthew 11:27);

and as a tenderness and loving intimacy beyond any possibility of adequate human comparison or comprehension:

No one has seen God at any time, (but) the only begotten Son is in the bosom of the Father (John 1:18).

Finally, though having been made fully and at times painfully aware of our own nothingness and unworthiness, we are also given total confidence that this treasure, this most wonderful relationship and presence, this divinely evocative power of knowing and loving, cannot be lost, cannot be taken from us by any power, or under any circumstance save that of our own turning away from God:

I give them eternal life, and they shall never perish; neither shall anyone snatch them out of My hand. My Father, Who has given them to Me, is greater than all; and no one is able to snatch them out of My Father's hand. (John 10:28-30)

The High Priests and the Temple authorities abused God’s presence in the Temple in as much as they turned the necessary requirements of sacrifice into a profitable and indeed prolific source of money largely for their own purposes and to their own advantage.  Hence their hatred for Jesus’ symbolic act which manifested and condemned their excessively financial involvement in the Temple as distinct from their religious and liturgical commitments to it.

There is so much for us learn here, People of God, so much to guide us as individuals in our relationship with and appreciation of Mother Church.

See how much ‘official worship’ meant to Jesus!!  

Jesus regularly worshipped in His local synagogue with St. Joseph.  The whole family, Jesus, Mary and Joseph, went to worship in the Temple every Passover.  Consider how, when twelve years of age He became a ‘bar mitzvah’, son of the Law; that is, of age as a Jew to observe the Law fully; and how, it would appear that that legal ‘coming of age’ led Him to stay behind in the Temple, delighting in His Father, while His parents were returning home with the caravan.  The official Jewish liturgy was -- as He thought in the zeal of His youth -- the key for the determination of His very life-style.

As an adult Jesus still continued His regular attendance in His local synagogue, he read there, He healed there, He taught there.   As for His visits to the Temple in Jerusalem we have today’s Gospel testifying to the dignity He required and indeed demanded for worship in God’s house!!

As a Man, however, Jesus also promoted another mode of worship, ‘in Spirit and in Truth’:

The (Samaritan) woman said to him, "Sir, I can see that you are a prophet. Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain; but you people say that the place to worship is in Jerusalem." Jesus said to her, "Believe Me, woman, the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem. You people worship what you do not understand; we worship what we understand, because salvation is from the Jews. But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth; and indeed the Father seeks such people to worship Him. God is Spirit, and those who worship Him must worship in Spirit and truth." (John 4:19-24)

When you pray, do not be like the hypocrites, who love to stand and pray in the synagogues and on street corners so that others may see them. Amen, I say to you, they have received their reward. But when you pray, go to your inner room, close the door, and pray to your Father in secret. And your Father who sees in secret will repay you. In praying, do not babble like the pagans, who think that they will be heard because of their many words. Do not be like them. Your Father knows what you need before you ask him. This is how you are to pray: Our Father in heaven, hallowed be your name …  (Matthew 6:5-9)

How do we reconcile such apparently different if not opposed attitudes: public, liturgical worship and individual, personal prayer?   In a word, by the eminently Christian relationship of complementarity, springing originally from God’s creation of man and woman.  There is, essentially, complementarity in both our physical and our spiritual lives.

In our liturgical and sacrificial public worship of God we, as His children and brothers and sister in Christ, offer Him acceptable and sincere obedience and familial praise.  In return we receive His blessings: ultimately the supreme blessing His own beloved Son made man for us and glorified by His Spirit.  That gift of His Son in our Eucharist still has a glorious ‘physicality’ for us who are so very much ‘flesh and blood’, physical in our being; and that physicality of Our Lord in the Eucharist, though passing short  in us, is nevertheless a most precious spur to an ever deeper personal relationship with Him.    His complementary Eucharistic Gift of the Holy Spirit is however an enduring presence enabling and empowering us to work at that personal relationship with God established in our oneness with Jesus, a work which is precisely our prayer life.  Thus, we are necessarily nourished by our public worship and we intimately deepen and develop our oneness with God in our private, personal, prayer.

What God, in His great wisdom and goodness has joined together, let not sinful and misguided men try to separate!

There is such a beautiful harmony in God’s prescriptions for the fullness of human life; and because Christianity and Catholicism are being cast-aside in our Western eagerness and lust for present, indeed if possible immediate, pleasure, plenty and power, the very fabric of our society is self-destructing and our vision of future blessings has no power to inspire or unite.   Liberty, fraternity, equality become divisive concepts when understood and coercively applied by ever more laws discovering and determining criminality, independently and at times in denial of the Christian teachings of Faith, Hope and Charity.

The law of the Lord is perfect, refreshing the soul; the precepts of the Lord are right, rejoicing the heart; the fear of the Lord is pure, enduring for ever; these are more precious than gold, than a heap of purest gold.

Second Sunday of Lent Year B 2015

The Second Sunday of Lent, (B)
(Genesis 22:1-2, 9-13, 15-18; St. Paul to the Romans 8:31-34; St. Mark’s Gospel 9:2-10)

In our Gospel passage today we find Our Blessed Lord wanting to prepare His disciples for what He foresaw would soon happen: His Passion that would culminate in His sacrificial Death was looming large on the horizon.   Jesus had recently forewarned His disciples of it, but, as in so many other matters, they were not yet able to truly appreciate and fully understand His words.  When the time would come for Him to be taken away from them, they would find it a traumatic and potentially faith-shattering experience because of the original trust they had placed in Him when leaving so much behind in order to follow Him; and yet more now, because of the admiration and love they had conceived for Him as a result of their short but close association together.   Jesus’ immediate purpose, therefore, was to prepare them so that they might be able to draw serious profit from the suffering that would soon come His and their way: He could not spare them the trial, but He would not have them agonize and lose faith because of it.   How then did Jesus go about preparing His disciples for their forthcoming trial of suffering, questioning, and soul-searching?

Notice, first of all, that Jesus was well aware that His disciples were, as yet, weak in faith and by no means steadfast in their love for Him.  At present they were rejoicing in the presence of the Lord: He was the Bridegroom and they were the Bridegroom’s most privileged friends.  However, such present, earthly, joy, though holy, would not be enough to sustain them through the trials that lay ahead.  And that, People of God, is something we should notice.  Joy in the Lord based largely on emotional experiences would not be enough for Jesus‘ disciples, nor can it suffice for us now; their joy, their love, had to be much more firmly founded on faith: on a faith shot through and through with transcendent hope, and becoming ever more incandescent with a divinely-gifted love for the Person of Jesus.  Therefore:

Jesus took Peter, James, and John, and led them up on a high mountain apart by themselves; and He was transfigured before them.  

Why did Jesus take these three particular disciples with Him on that momentous occasion?

The case for Peter is clear enough since he had just, in the presence and in the name of all the disciples, confessed Jesus as the Christ (Mark 8:29):

            ‘Who do you say that I am?’  ‘You are the Christ’.

Moreover, Jesus recognized that Peter had been personally chosen and blessed by His Father in order to make that confession; therefore, as we learn from St. Matthew (16:17), following His Father’s lead, He named Peter as the rock upon which He would subsequently build His Church.  And so, Peter -- spokesman of the disciples, individually blessed by the Father, and chosen as the rock on which Jesus would build His Church -- was, indeed, pre-eminently suited to accompany Jesus up the mountain.

James the Elder, son of Zebedee, would become leader of the original group of Jewish believers in Jesus making up the original Church in Jerusalem; and being in so prominent a position he would become the first of the Apostles to suffer martyrdom for Jesus’ sake about the year 44 AD.  He had to be well prepared for such a calling and so pressing a destiny and therefore he became Jesus’ second choice to follow Himself along with Simon Peter.

Perhaps the reason for John’s being taken by Jesus up the Mount of Transfiguration is to be sought in the mysterious nature of his authorship of the Gospel now bearing his name.  For strangely enough, all three Synoptic Gospels tell of Jesus’ Transfiguration though none of the named authors was present on the Mount; whereas John, on the other hand, though actually present on that unique and momentous occasion, does not give us any explicit details of it!

He was quite a young man at the time; a very committed and observant, sensitive and impressionable, disciple of the Lord.  He was so deeply affected by what he saw and experienced on the Mount of Transfiguration -- an event second only to the unseen moment of Jesus’ Resurrection as testimony to His divinity -- that whereas Peter, a mature man of the world, would give clear and factual reminiscences of the event (Peter being a source for Mark’s Gospel), John would, just as Jesus envisaged, remain (cf. John 21:22): recalling, considering and reconsidering, lovingly praying and calmly contemplating, what had taken place and what had been said on those heights above, as he unremittingly sought to appreciate and assimilate their purest truth and deepest significance for his understanding of Jesus.  When, ultimately, he felt a compulsion to write down or hand on what by then had been filling his mind, heart, and soul for years, His resultant Gospel would be replete, not with factual details of that wondrous occasion, but rather with the all-enveloping atmosphere of divine truth and ultimate reality engendered by Jesus’ presence to, and communion with, His Self-revealing Father in the unity of the overshadowing Spirit … which, John had come to know full well, was not a passing, occasional occurrence for Jesus, but rather a passing manifestation of what was the enduring character of His whole life on earth: for He always lived before and in the presence of His Father; doing His will, proclaiming His truth, and promoting His glory to the utmost of His being.

Therefore, as I have said, the faith of these three very distinct and -- taken together -- most comprehensively talented individuals, needed to be made unyielding and sure on the basis of the divine authority of the words and teaching of Jesus, shot through and through with eschatological hope in the abiding presence and power of His Spirit, and becoming ever more radiant with incandescent love for the Person of Jesus in His Church.  To that end, these three -- Peter, James, and John -- were afforded an experience that would allow them to glimpse, briefly, something of the teaching authority, the hidden majesty, and indeed the heavenly glory of the Lord. 

First of all:

 Elijah appeared to them along with Moses, and they were conversing with Jesus.

This united witness of the Scriptures – Moses and Elijah, the Law and the Prophets -- solemnly confirmed Jesus as Lord of heaven, the long-proclaimed, lovingly-prepared, and eagerly-awaited, Seed of God’s promise to Abraham, of which we heard in the first reading and as Jesus Himself said (John 5:39, 46):

You search the Scriptures, for in them you think you have eternal life; and these are they which testify of Me.    

If you believed Moses you would believe Me; for he wrote about Me.

Dear People of God, we must most sincerely try to love and appreciate the Scriptures aright if we would know and love Jesus in spirit and in truth, if we would remain firm and, indeed, grow even stronger in our faith through times of trial and temptation.

Then, to the yet greater awe and fear of the disciples:

A cloud came, casting a shadow over them, and from the cloud came a voice:  "This is My beloved Son. Listen to Him!"

The heavenly Father Himself (they had no doubt of that!) was impressing upon them again the authority of Jesus’ words and teaching.  But surely, there is something more, something far more intimate and personal than ‘listening’ being advised, even commanded, here; for why did the Father speak, as it were publically, of what was most intimately Personal between Himself and His Son … that is, His love for His Son: This is My Beloved?  Surely, the Father is there, certainly not commanding, not even so much as advising but, most delicately drawing those who are initially committing themselves to His Son, to learn, from Him, the Father Himself, how rightly and fully to love His beloved One.

            This is My beloved Son!

This approach is far more compelling and inviting than any command could be; it is a divine inspiration and heartfelt Personal invitation and call from the Father; it is the sublime source of those subsequent words of Jesus (John 6:44, 65):

            No one can come to Me unless the Father Who sent Me draw him.

            No one can come to Me unless it is granted him by My  Father.

Now we too, should turn to and prayerfully learn something from the Father drawing us to Jesus, His beloved Son, when, at Holy Mass, we prepare to welcome Him into our midst as the Father’s sacramental pledge of love for mankind; and most especially, as we receive Him into our individual hearts as the Father’s Personal Gift of Love to each one of us.  For we should recall, first of all, that Jesus is being given to us by the Father that we might love Him in the power of His accompanying Spirit, and secondly, that the Beloved Son we are receiving is Himself a living Personal Gift of Love Who wills to love in us, as our love for the Father, seeking to draw us back to the Father with Himself.

Holy Communion is that doubly divine and momentous occasion when we are able and called to learn from the gifting Father how to love, better and ever more personally, His beloved Son; and also how best to allow His Son to lovingly respond to and live for the Father in and through us by the Holy Spirit abiding in and with us as Jesus’ gift.

The disciples descended with Jesus from those heights so close and open to heaven with a faith itself transfigured into an anticipation of Christian faith.  Now, despite Jesus’ recent warning of His approaching suffering, rejection by the religious authorities, and resultant death lurking in their minds, they had received a faith-vision of Jesus’ heavenly glory, hidden as yet from earthly scrutiny, but something, nevertheless, both beautiful and sure that would help them relate to the resurrection Jesus promised would follow His death in three days.  Nevertheless, because they would be most sorely wounded by their Lord’s suffering and death, this ‘dry-dock’ work of preparation and confirmation undertaken on the Mount of Transfiguration would be sedulously pursued by the Lord as, again and yet again, for a second and then a then a third time, He clearly warned and loving prepared them for their time of trial and temptation.

People of God, we Catholics and Christians of today are, like the original fathers of our faith, subject to trial and temptation throughout the world; we must, therefore, learn how to protect our faith, our Christian and Catholic civilisation, and our own selves; we must ‘listen to Him’, Our Blessed Lord and Saviour, if we would be strong in faith and love for eternal life, for our adversaries subject us to great stress and savage attacks all over the world.  Our governments are forgetful of their Christian heritage and solicitous only for their own permanence in power and popularity.  As Catholics and Christians, we are not – like those militant, pseudo-religious groups – allowed and encouraged to hate and lust, be it for pleasure or for power!  How such connivance with native passions and their unrestrained expression stirs up ‘religious zeal’ in all sorts of people but especially in the young, short of understanding and  emotional stability, and most eager to make their mark by doing what comes so easily and naturally if encouraged and praised by evil masters!   Our Christian strength – for we are not allowed to become ‘wimps’ ever shivering between humanism and emotionalism! – our strength has to come, as Jesus taught, from our faith in Himself, and has to express itself through the power of His Spirit: faith must not be explained away by rationalising expediency, nor spiritual power subverted by trite and emotional platitudes meant above all to avoid trouble or emolliate opposition.

Moreover, as Jesus was so solicitous for His disciples and future Church we too must look to our children who need help as they try to understand their humanity and adapt to the society around them.  To those ends they should be taught morals and guided towards love of what is truly beautiful. They are not, of themselves, positively innocent; in infancy their relative helplessness demands that they instinctively wail and grab to satisfy their most basic needs, and they need to be loved and guided lest, as they grow stronger in body, they continue to seek and grab, no longer for what they need, but for what they fancy.  Of course, their greatest need as they are growing up is for faith and spiritual strength to withstand peer-pressure which would force them into compliance with group excitement and amusement without reference to any personal thinking or religious morals.   Of one thing we can be certain, children left to ‘find out for themselves’ will rarely find out what is good and true for themselves; they will be led, drawn along, by the examples and solicitations of others in their group, responding to nothing better than the shared exuberance of youth under the domination of passions and pride… feelings which all share or at least can easily understand.  Because of that sharing in emotional awareness and excitement very few members of a group of friends or ‘mates’ dare to ‘go it alone’ and, following their personal conscience, resist, or seek to control, that of which they cannot actually approve, but dare not openly disapprove.

Good Catholic and Christian parenthood is indeed demanding, but it is a most beautiful art with lifelong and indeed eternal rewards.

People of God, delight in the Lord Jesus, try ever to follow confidently His example; trust humbly in the teaching of His Church and her Scriptures; and never give up hoping that the goodness of God Who gives His own Son for and to us all, will lead you to share in the eternal glory of Jesus before the Father if you persevere faithfully thus walking with Him along life’s way to heaven’s reward.