Easter Sunday 2015

Easter Sunday (2015)

(Acts of the Apostles 10:34, 37-43; Colossians 3:1-4; John 20:1-9)

My dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, on this glorious day let us look at one verse in our Gospel passage which speaks volumes about our Risen Lord.
 

You heard that both John and Peter ran to the tomb; John, being the younger, arrived first and:
 

Stooping down and looking in, saw the linen cloths lying there; yet he did not go in.

Peter, coming next, characteristically went straight into the empty tomb where:
 

He saw the linen cloths lying there, and the handkerchief that had been around (Jesus’) head not lying with the linen cloths but folded together in a place by itself.

Now just recently, St. John told us (11:43-44) about Jesus miraculously bringing Lazarus back from the dead and out of the tomb:
 

Jesus cried with a loud voice, "Lazarus, come forth!"  And he who had died came    out bound hand and foot with grave-clothes, and his face was wrapped with a cloth.    

The fact that he was still bound in his grave clothes signified that he was not   totally free from death; he must needs face death again. For the present time however, Jesus said to those around, Loose him, and let him go.
 

As you can appreciate there was a big difference between Lazarus’ being raised and Jesus’ Resurrection, for when Jesus rose He left the linen cloths behind:
 

Simon Peter saw the linen cloths lying there, and the handkerchief that had been around His head, not lying with the linen cloths, but folded together in a place by itself.
 

Jesus rose totally, divinely, from the bonds of death, and could never again be subject to them, as St. Paul emphatically teaches in his doctrinal letter to the Romans (6:9-11):
 

We know that Christ, being raised from the dead, will never die again; death no longer has dominion over Him. The death He died, He died to sin, once for all; but the life He lives, He lives to God. So you also must consider yourselves dead to sin and alive to God in Christ Jesus.
 

Let us, therefore, consider further those discarded binding cloths left behind in the otherwise empty tomb, and, in order to help us, let us recall how Jesus later appeared to His disciples for the first time (John 20:19):
 

(That) same day at evening, being the first day of the week, when the doors were shut where the disciples were assembled, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in the midst, and said to them, "Peace be with you."
 

The doors were locked, and they remained locked, just as if no one had entered.  Nevertheless, Jesus had been able to enter the room, because closed -- even locked -- doors presented no obstacle to His Risen Body.  In like manner, the linen cloths and the kerchief we are now considering: though Jesus had risen, those grave-clothes remained as they had been on His body, save that the head-cloth -- the kerchief which had been round His head -- was now neatly folded and separate from the body cloths.  If we therefore, following that Gospel indication, go on to give more special attention to the kerchief we may find that it has some particular message for us, since the kerchief, which was generally used to cover, protect, one’s head, and also for carrying money, was used in funerals to wrap the head in such a way that the jaw bone was prevented from falling open, thus preserving the dignity of the dead person.
 

The special mention of the kerchief can therefore be understood in line with its original function of preserving Jesus’ human and Messianic dignity in death, and now seen to be serving as a sign that Jesus’ proclamation of the Messianic News  of salvation will never be silenced: for, thanks to that kerchief the fruit of Jesus’ lips had never been shown gapingly vacuous in death, and so, when the Lord had risen, it was not found to have been thrown on one side but rather, appreciatively folded and neatly placed by itself, in its own place, bespeaking the enduring dignity of the Messianic Lord sent to proclaim and win salvation for those who will obediently hear Him.  For the Risen Lord will continue to speak: the enduring spiritual legacy of His Messianic life and teaching need only to be lovingly gathered, prayerfully matured, and faithfully and integrally handed down through the ages by His Church, established on the rock witness of Peter and the testimony of His chosen Apostles, and under the power and protection, inspiration and guidance, of His ultimate and most sublime Gift, His own most Holy Spirit.
 

The message of the grave-cloths, as with that of the closed and locked door in the upper room, was that the Risen Lord was now glorified.   Lazarus had been called back to ordinary earthly life; Jesus had risen to a new and glorious life not of this creation, but sharing in the glory of that heavenly Kingdom which He had proclaimed to be close at hand.
 

It is now time, therefore, to turn our attention to the supreme Christian mystery, that of the most Holy Trinity: God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Spirit; three divine Persons, one God.  How are we to think of this?
 

God the Father, to be a Father must have a Child -- His Son, the Bible says.  God the eternal Father, therefore, eternally begets His only begotten and beloved Son, Who is like Him and equal to Him in all respects, save that the Father is the Person Who begets whereas the Son is the Person begotten.  Thus the Father and His only-begotten Son are eternally One in the power of that begetting -- that uniting power of their mutual Love -- which is the Holy Spirit.  The Holy Spirit is called God’s Gift, for in and through Him the Father and the Son give themselves to each other in total knowledge, understanding, appreciation, and love; and that is why, when God – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit -- determined that the Son should become man in the Incarnation, He was sent -- as Son -- by the Father and conceived as a human being in the Virgin’s womb by the Holy Spirit.  Moreover, when His earthly life had run its course, we are told in the letter to the Hebrews, of the Holy Spirit uniting the Son to His Father in Jesus’ very act of dying:
 

Christ, through the eternal Spirit offered Himself without spot to God, (to) cleanse your conscience from dead works to serve the living God! (9:14)
 

Therefore, when the Son -- after His Passion and Death -- was raised to new and eternally glorious life, the Scriptures tell us that both the Father and the Spirit raised Him.  We read of Paul preaching the Gospel to the Jews at Perga:
 

We declare to you glad tidings -- that promise which was made to the fathers.  God has fulfilled this for us their children, in that He has raised up Jesus. As it is also written in the second Psalm: 'You are My Son, Today I have begotten You.'   (Acts 13:32-33)
 

Yet when writing his letter to the Romans (1:1-4) the same Paul also says:
 

Jesus Christ our Lord … was born of the seed of David according to the flesh, and declared to be the Son of God with power according to the Spirit of holiness, by the resurrection from the dead.
 

St. Peter (1 Peter 3:18) likewise mentions the Spirit:
 

Christ also suffered once for sins … being put to death in the flesh but made alive by the Spirit.
 

Through His Passion and Death, as the letter to the Hebrews tells us (5:8-9), Jesus had been brought to perfect Sonship in His humanity:
 

Though He was a Son, yet He learned obedience by the things which He suffered; and having been perfected, He became the author of eternal salvation to all who obey Him.

And now, the Risen Jesus, having being raised by the Father and glorified in His human flesh by the Spirit -- perfect man and perfect God -- has become the perfect channel through Whom we are able to receive the divine Spirit into our poor, sinful, lives.  For Jesus, Son of the Father and Giver of God’s Gift, comes to us now in the Eucharist so that we, who are of earthly flesh and blood might, by receiving His glorious Flesh and Blood, be enabled to lovingly receive and humbly commit ourselves to His Holy Spirit.
 

As of old, the Ark of the Covenant had tabernacled God’s Law for His chosen People, so, when He Who had been long-promised came, it was Mary who housed and nourished Jesus in her womb.  Today Mother Church is the treasure-house where Jesus is ever-present to His people by His Word in the Scriptures and by His Body and Blood in the Holy Eucharist; and it is Mother Church who, by the abiding presence of His Spirit and according to the model set for her by Mary, now treasures and ponders in her heart all that Jesus taught and did (Luke 2:19, 51); and all Catholics who, as children of Mary, live by faith in Mother Church’s proclamation of Jesus, receive the Gift of His Spirit so that they might be formed by Him into a true likeness of Our Lord and Saviour, and as adopted sons and daughters of the heavenly Father.   Mother Church’s proclamation of Jesus is thus by no means cold doctrine but the very food of life and love … for we know Jesus not by imaginary and emotional transports, but by loving and living the Doctrine of the Church under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.
 

People of God, wonderful things have been done for us this Easter: for through oneness with Jesus our Saviour and in the power of His most Holy Spirit, our Comforter and Strength, we -- as our second reading from the letter to the Colossians doctrinally said -- in all our daily endeavours to walk along the way of Jesus, are being offered union with the Father:
 

You (have been) raised with Christ, (so) seek those things which are above, where Christ is, sitting at the right hand of God.  Your (real) life is hidden with Christ in God, (and) when Christ who is our life appears, then you also will appear with Him in glory.

Let us therefore strengthen our faith, as, with deepened understanding in our minds and renewed joy in our hearts, we proclaim our own Easter hymn of praise and thanksgiving, saying: Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, in holy mother Church for ever and ever.  Amen.

Palm Sunday (Year B) 2015

PALM SUNDAY (B) 2015

The Passion and Death of Jesus which you have just heard according St. Mark’s Gospel contains a passage which is reported also by St. Matthew and most probably comes from Peter, generally regarded as the source of Mark’s Gospel account which Matthew closely followed when incorporating it into his own Gospel story.   St. Luke, who was not present at the crucifixion of Jesus, does not have this section; neither does St. John who, though present at the Crucifixion, experienced it in his own younger, perhaps more innocent, way.

People of God, we must never forget that though John is universally recognized as the disciple Jesus loved, Peter was the one who loved Jesus most, as John himself tells us (21:15):

Simon, Simon, do you love Me more than these?  Yes, Lord, You know that I love You

At the Crucifixion John was standing nearby Mary, you might say together with her under the Cross.  He was in no particular danger, being young and somehow personally acceptable to the High Priest’s officials and able to access his home or residence.  Peter on the other hand was a notorious disciple of Jesus, and indeed a Galilean!  Peter therefore would have been standing at a greater distance from the Cross, not so noticeable in the crowd around.

Peter had just denied Jesus – as His Lord had foretold – three times, and he was now heart-broken at what he had done: consequently, Peter, looking at Jesus from some distance, had eyes and ears only for Him, and he tells us only what he could gather Jesus was saying and doing.  John, on the other hand, not so heart-brokenly centred on Jesus, here omits what Mark (Peter) and Matthew tell us about Jesus and tells us instead about the Pharisees and Scribes abuse  and also about Jesus’ words to Mary and himself.

Here is what only Mark (Peter) and Matthew tell us:

And at three o‘clock Jesus cried out in a loud voice, “Eloi, Eloi, lema sabachthani?” which is translated, “My God, my God, why have You forsaken Me?” Some of the bystanders who heard it said, “Look, He is calling Elijah.” One of them ran, soaked a sponge with wine, put it on a reed, and gave it to Him to drink, saying, “Wait, let us see if Elijah comes to take Him down.”

Jesus gave a loud cry and breathed His last.

Jesus was, Peter tells us, reciting the 22^nd Psalm.  He was doing this long enough for that very gentle, personal and intimate sound first to be noticed and mentioned among the soldiers before one of them subsequently went (ran?) off to soak a sponge in some available wine, found a reed on which to put the soaked sponge, before then hurrying back carefully to show it to the others and finally offer it to the slowly agonizing … criminal as he thought.

Jesus had meanwhile been murmuring (not just, as in our days, merely been thinking of) the whole of that psalm to Himself.

Dear People of God, read the psalm for yourselves to appreciate why it meant so much to Jesus at that time!!

Jesus knew most intimately all the Scriptures and, indeed, every word in them … not one jot or tittle … however, it was the psalms that nourished His humanity most particularly.  The Law and the Prophets spoke of God’s will for the Chosen People giving direct strength and guidance for Jesus’ divine character.  The Psalms, however, tend to relate the recourse and response to God of His humble and faithful servants suffering from the ravages of sin still rampant among His Chosen People and these enabled Jesus to embrace the whole of Israel’s historically humble and faithful ‘anawim’, and afforded Him most wonderful divinely-human comfort, guidance, and strength for His own dying experience of human life at its most extreme.

Why did Jesus have to suffer so much?

Not because His Father was punishing Him for our sins!!  He had to suffer because sin had been given entrance -- through Eve’s welcome and Adam’s embrace -- into our humanity at its very source.  It could not, therefore, be just forgotten or ignored; neither could it be one-sidedly pardoned away, because sin is a reality, an instilled poison which, if not really destroyed in, driven from, men’s hearts will always be lurking and festering there, as Satan himself had been lurking and festering in the minds and hearts of Jesus’ Jewish adversaries after his initial defeat in the desert at the beginning of Jesus’ public ministry until this very moment.  Humanity in its original purity had to reject, overthrow, and destroy Satan’s power in a direct and immediate contest under the leadership of One far greater than Adam, One loving us divinely and therefore inexplicably, unimaginably, in the eyes of Satan who most foolishly despised Him because of such love and the perfect authenticity of His humanity.

Jesus had begun His public ministry and merited His Father’s manifestation of His loving approval by joining Himself to those penitents awaiting John’s baptism in the Jordan; and now, at the very end of that ministry and, indeed, of His life among us, He takes upon Himself our most sinful experience, that is, the most dreadful deceit and dangerous threat resulting from human sinfulness:

My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?

Jesus thus wills to be with us – whoever we are and whatever we may have made of ourselves and done with His gifts -- as Saviour from beginning to end.  He most deliberately and humbly lived and died among us and with us, under circumstances not always subject to His human choice but, as in our case, often against our wishes and subject only to our patient acceptance and loving prayer for God’s provident goodness and love.  Thus He ultimately died with us and for us that we might be able to turn to Him for hope and redemption even in the very last moment of our distressed lives.  Let us therefore take to our hearts and cherish most gratefully the final words of His dying prayer (vv. 20; 31-32):

But you, LORD, do not stay far off; My strength, come quickly to help Me.

And I will live for the Lord; My descendants will serve You.  The generation to come will be told of the Lord, that they may proclaim to a people yet unborn the deliverance You have brought. 

5th Sunday of Lent (B) 2015

 5^th. Sunday of Lent (B)                                   (Jeremiah, 31:31-34; Hebrews, 5:7-9; John 12:20-30)

My dear brothers and sisters in Christ, when relations between Israel and the Lord her God had, so to speak, broken down, with the result that the Lord determined to punish Israel’s faithlessness by sending her children into exile in Babylon, the Lord, nevertheless, took great care to assure Jeremiah, and through him the whole people of Israel that, despite the adversity and fear to be endured, there would be a future to look forward to, to hope for, after the years of exile and apparent abandonment.  He spoke of a new covenant -- the covenant to be ultimately ratified in the blood of Jesus -- saying:
 

“This is the covenant that I will make with the house of Israel after those days,” says the LORD: “I will place My law within them and write it upon their hearts; and I will be their God, and they shall be My people.”
 

Israel had not been faithful to the covenant God had made with her through Moses; she had sought to behave as did the nations around her, not truly wanting to be a chosen people, holy as her God was holy.  The present pleasures, pride, and pomp, of the surrounding nations having seduced her, she wanted to enjoy such things for herself.
 

After around seventy years of exile in Babylon, on returning to Judea thanks to Cyrus king of the Medes and Persians who had conquered Babylon, the contemporary Jews recognized their ancestors’ unfaithfulness to the Law of Moses and did try to reverse that infidelity by close, indeed minute, study of the Law and its implications, together with a scrupulous, and at times excessively literal, observance of all its prescriptions.  This resulted in them proudly exalting scholarly knowledge and extravagant observance of the Law, while gradually losing touch with the spirit of God’s Law and sympathy with their own humanity.  Their attention came to be centred on people’s awareness of their own Pharisaic knowledge and practice of all the Law’s requirements, of their exact conformity with each and every prescription whether given directly by God to Moses or deduced, inferred, and handed down by themselves or their Scribes. They had Moses’ Law, as it were, on an operating table, and like supremely skilful surgeons or morticians, they cut and dissected each and every individual passage and phrase of the Law for meticulous classification and documentation; but all the while, the over-riding meaning and significance of the Law was becoming more and more unrecognisable to them, for, having cut the body up into every conceivable constituent part, they were increasingly unable to put it together again as a vital and recognizable whole.   Instead of themselves being formed by the Law they were re-fashioning the Law according to their own ideology, preferences, and pride.
 

When the Lord spoke to Jeremiah of a new covenant, He had, most critically, said:
 

I will place MY law within them and write it upon their hearts.
 

God would Himself place His new Law of the new Covenant into man’s mind and heart to guide and inspire him: man would not be allowed to take charge of it in order to make it fit into his merely human categories; on the contrary, this new Law from within -- gifted us by the Father, through His Son, and under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit -- would raise man up, above and beyond himself, to the level of a true child of God and living member of the Body of Christ.
 

Surely this historical precedent is reflected in Our Lord’s own fundamental choice of Church before book: He could have written, drafted, or caused to be suitably prepared, an authoritative Personal account of His own life’s work, teaching, and intentions; but He made no such attempt.  Instead He chose to found a Church based upon the witness and testimony of Apostles chosen by Himself after prayer to His Father, and then established for all time by the outpouring of His Spirit.  This  choice ultimately determined the central importance of faith as the supreme means of man’s total gift of self to God: faith in accordance with the witness and teaching of a humanly visible Church -- the Body of Christ – and on the basis of the sublime promises and supernaturally enduring presence of Jesus to His Church, together with the intimate power and guiding wisdom of the Holy Spirit ever at work in and through her. Catholic, Christian faith is not an individual commitment to any independent understanding of chosen books; no matter how holy, of themselves, such books might be, no matter how authoritative that understanding considered by human standards.
 

Later on we were told of a voice coming from heaven in response to Jesus’ prayer, a voice some bystanders thought was that of an angel speaking with Jesus, while others considered it to have been nothing more than a peal of thunder.  Jesus knew it to be the voice of His Father, but He made it expressly clear that:

            This voice did not come for My sake but for yours.
 

For Jesus was always seeking to give His utmost for the greater glory of His Father; and loving Him in such a way -- utterly and absolutely -- He denied Himself, in the little things as well as the great ones, with a total and selfless commitment that would remain the most inspiring model for His future disciples’ life of faith.
  

And that choice and appreciation is mirrored in today’s Gospel reading by a most striking fact, for in the Gospel reading today we are told:
 

There were some Greeks among those who had come up to worship at the feast; they came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.”  Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus.
 

Thereupon, however, nothing whatsoever is said about any Personal contact between Jesus and these ‘first-fruits’ of the Gentiles!   How strange!  Why?
 

Jesus saw the saving power of His Father at work in the hearts and minds of these Greek pilgrims and from this He recognized that His own work was nearly complete: His saving Death, poured-out Blood, and glorious Resurrection on the third day alone could seal and ratify His new Covenant and enable His Church to take up and continue His saving work on earth, beginning with these Greeks (just given Him by His Father) and continuing throughout the rest of time among all nations and peoples of the world.   Now, with complete selflessness and total trust in His Father, He willed to hand over the fruit of His life’s work and imminent Passion and Death to His Church saying:
 

The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.  Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.  Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.  And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to Myself.
 

What significance does all this have for us, here and now?  Much indeed; because in today’s readings we have been given an outline of certain aspects of our human situation in the world today.
 

Christianity is spread world-wide today, and although, alas, many Catholics and Christians are known to be heroically suffering vicious persecution and even death  for Jesus, far  too many nominal Christians in nations with an  ancient and glorious Catholic heritage  behave like the Israelites of old: they do not want to belong to a chosen people called to be holy because their God is holy, they want to be free to taste whatever the world has to offer; they do not want a law which would forewarn them of, let alone forbid, unacceptable practices.  The irony of their situation, however, is that though they might claim, at times vociferously, to be advocates of freedom, they gladly abdicate their freedom of spirit by enslaving themselves -- becoming addicts indeed -- to pleasure and money, pride and vengeance, satiating themselves with excesses of all kinds while depriving their own fellows quite callously of security, peace, and sufficiency.
 

There are others who, apparently zealous like the Pharisees and Scribes of Jesus’ days, try to manipulate the Gospel and indeed God Himself, rather than allow themselves to be formed by the Spirit according to the way of the Good News of Jesus.  They seize upon some particular aspect or teaching of that Good News and then try make their choice the whole of the Gospel message: they rejoice in their own particular bit or version of the Good News but have no time or desire to let their minds be illuminated and guided by the whole Gospel.  The Gospel, some say, is Good news, which, for them, means that Christians should be make themselves seen to be continually rejoicing with clap-happy attitudes which worldly people can recognize.  Others seize upon the discipline of the Gospel and forget compassion, sympathy and understanding for others: strong in their own observance of that discipline, they give free expression to criticisms of the failings and weaknesses they think they observe in others.   Even more frequently encountered today is the idea that the Gospel is compassion and love to such an extent that forgetting that Gospel commands are direct expressions of God’s sovereign love for mankind, they want to adapt, modify, and ultimately twist and distort such divine commands into expressions of their own spurious love.   What is not easy, what is not popular, must be wrong … Jesus came to give comfort and solace to men (as we understand such things) not to restore and renew them (into the likeness of His own Son and our Saviour) by grace and discipline … such are some of our modern humanistic mantras.
 

People of God, the Father has drawn us to Jesus in Mother Church, and He has given us His Holy Spirit, not simply to save us from sin and death, but to save us from sin and death by re-forming us for heavenly life.  That re-newal extends to and involves the whole of our being: the way we think, the way we love; the hopes we cherish for the future and the ideals we try to realize here and now; the joys we gratefully embrace and the sorrows we patiently accept; the service we seek to give and the selfishness we try to reject.   Because we are being formed for a life we cannot yet see, a heavenly life, therefore we who are, as Jesus explicitly said ‘evil’, cannot prescribe for ourselves.  On the contrary, we have to pray the Holy Spirit that He will guide us in the way of Jesus; and, having prayed thus, we must have the humility and the courage to accept life as coming from Him, and the patience to respond with love for Him in whatever situation we find ourselves involved:
 

Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life.  Whoever serves Me must follow Me; and where I am, there also will My servant be. The Father will honour whoever serves Me.
 

Perhaps the greatest, most difficult and yet most beautiful lesson we have to learn from the Gospel is love of the Cross, because the Cross seems to contradict all that is natural within us.  We have to be willing, therefore, to accept, with Jesus, that we are here for a purpose which is not of our own choosing, but for God’s purpose and plan for each and every one of us individually, in Jesus: a purpose and plan which, even though it involves the Cross, we must seek to personally embrace and sincerely fulfil throughout our life; for it is a purpose and a destiny that is already – even here on earth -- our greatest privilege, and one that, ultimately, will be  our  supreme glory in heaven:
 

“I am troubled now. Yet what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour’?  But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour.  Father, glorify Your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”

In order that God’s name be glorified and His purpose be fulfilled in and through us, we have to be totally informed by the presence, and reformed by the working, of His Holy Spirit in our lives.  Let us therefore beseech the Spirit to form us in Jesus for the Father, to the extent that being brought to cry out with Him, Father, glorify Your name, we may hopefully be so wonderfully privileged as to hear, with Him, that heavenly response:
 

            I have glorified it (in my Son), and I will glorify it again (in you, my child).