Easter Sunday 2023

 

Easter Sunday (2023)

(Acts 10:34, 37-43; Colossians 3:1-4; Saint John’s Gospel 20:1-9)

 

You have just heard that both John and Peter ran to the tomb and how John first glanced inside and saw that Jesus’ body was not there:

He bent down and saw the burial cloths there, but did not go in.

Next Peter came up and, characteristically, went straight into the empty tomb where:

He saw the burial cloths there, and the cloth that had covered Jesus' head, not with the burial cloths but folded up in a separate place.

The author of John’s Gospel tells us that John was the first to look into the tomb and see the strips of burial linen lying there, and that is all.  He does not say that John believed at that moment.  It was only on entering the tomb after the slower-running Peter and then seeing the face-cloth that had been around Jesus' head folded up by itself and separate from the other linen, that we are told that he believed.

On the other hand, Peter -- an older and much more humanly-experienced and emotionally-developed man than the young John -- on catching up, with John, had straightway entered the tomb and saw. What he saw caused him thoughts so deeply personal that he did not make any comment to his younger companion, fellow-disciple though he was.  No, Peter seems to have just slowly left the tomb and walked away quietly, lost in deep, absorbing, thought -- like Mary’s own behaviour – treasuring in his heart what his eyes had just seen. The face-cloth, which had been placed around Jesus’ head to preserve His human dignity by preventing His jaw from sagging in death, was not with the other linen cloths.  Why had Jesus  lovingly rolled up, what He had earlier --  so decisively and carefully -- removed from around His head? And why had He then placed it so clearly apart from the other burial cloths?

At His trial, Jesus had told Pilate:

For this was I born, for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth.  Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to My voice. (John 19:27)

And now that He was risen from the dead it would seem that He wanted to make it perfectly clear that He had removed the face cloth and thereby set His mouth free, in order to symbolise the enduring proclamation of His truth.  That seems to have been His first symbolic-statement on rising from the dead: never again would His truth be silenced!  It was a statement He expected these two special disciples – Peter the disciple who loved Jesus most, and John who was most loved by Jesus – to be able to puzzle out, and understand that His voice, His teaching, was to be heard throughout all ages to come, thanks to their – and to their fellow Apostles’ -- continuing and enduring proclamation of HIS truth, under the guidance and protection of HIS Spirit, to all mankind, in and through HIS Church!  

The Risen Lord was glorious, not of this world; but HIS VOICE, HIS GOSPEL, had to be proclaimed to this world and it was for that very reason He had called His chosen Apostles!

Let us now consider the Resurrection no longer from the point of view of Jesus the Son of Man but from that of Jesus the Son of God, and glimpse something of the supreme Christian mystery: 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 our Risen Lord in that respect?   God the Father, to be Father, must have a Son.  God the Father eternally begets His beloved Son Who is like Him in all things save that the Father begets and the Son is the only-Begotten.  The Father from all eternity loves and most intimately knows the Son He begets, and the Holy Spirit is that power of begetting, that Bond of infinite knowledge and love, uniting Father and Son.  That is why the Holy Spirit is called Gift;  for, in and through Him, the Father and the Son give Themselves to each other in total love.  Therefore, you will understand that when God determined that the Son should become man, the Son, sent by the Father, was conceived of the Holy Spirit; and that is why, when the Son -- after His Passion and Death -- was raised to new and eternal life, we read in the Scriptures that both the Father and the Spirit raised Him.

Paul preaching the Gospel to the Jews at Perga said:

We tell you the good news: What God promised our fathers He has fulfilled for us, their children, by raising up Jesus. As it is written in the second Psalm: 'You are my Son; today I have become your Father.'  (Acts 13:32-33)

Yet when writing his letter to the Romans (8:10-11) the same Paul said:

But if Christ is in you, your body is dead because of sin, yet your spirit is alive because of righteousness.   And if the Spirit of Him Who raised Jesus from the dead is living in you, He Who raised Christ from the dead will also give life to your mortal bodies through His Spirit, Who lives in you.

And in the letter to the Hebrews (9:14) we see the Holy Spirit again uniting the Son to His Father in Jesus’ very act of dying:

Christ, through the eternal Spirit offered Himself unblemished to God, to cleanse our consciences from acts that lead to death, so that we may serve the living God!

Jesus rose from the dead because He was glorified by the eternal Spirit of glory, love and power, Who is One with the Father and the Son, the eternal Bond in the one living God.

The human flesh of Jesus had been brought to perfect Sonship through His Passion and Death, as the letter to the Hebrews (5:8-9) tells us:

Although He was a Son, He learned obedience from what He suffered and, once made perfect, He became the source of eternal salvation for all who obey Him.

Jesus, learned that obedience as Man for our sake, for our example and consolation; and His human flesh --  now glorified by the Spirit -- is the channel through which we can, in full confidence and hope, receive the divine Spirit into our poor, sinful, lives.  In the power of the Spirit, the humanity of Jesus Itself becomes a bond, uniting us sinners -- as adopted children in Jesus -- with the All-Holy God.  Jesus comes among us today offering us His Eucharistic Body and Blood in order that, by receiving His glorious Flesh and Blood, we -- who are of His flesh and blood -- might receive His most Holy Spirit, so that God’s Spirit of holiness -- abiding in Mother Church and now given to us -- might gradually form us in the likeness of our beloved Lord and Saviour as children of God.

Dear People of God, may Easter praise and gratitude fill and rejoice our minds and hearts!   Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit in holy mother Church for ever and ever!!  And may these Easter joys find abiding refreshment through the faith -- the Catholic and Christian faith -- which has been bestowed on us, which we have embraced, and to which we now re-commit ourselves with most loving and grateful hearts.  Amen.

(2023)

 

Good Friday 2023

 

Good Friday 2023

 

Today we are called to look an absolutely essential aspect of our Catholic, which means universal, Christian faith.  We should not, and indeed cannot, identify Christian values with those currently prevalent in our Western world, because our present, faithless and deeply secularized, Western society and culture is quite perverse, often doing materially and socially good things for purposes we consider at the least perverted or even evil at times.  All such tendencies can be summed up conveniently in the exaggerated emphasis and value Western culture puts on living long to experience and enjoy all that life has to offer.

This fixation on satisfying human desire for pleasure – of even the most vulgar kind -- and worldly fulfilment – even of the most blatant kind – has led our Western society to regard death as the end of everything that is desirable or credible, and consequently death, with all its concomitant forms of suffering, is to be regarded as something to be avoided above all else. 

We Catholics and Christians, however, need very much to remember that we celebrate today, this holy FRIDAY, as GOOD beyond all measure, because on this day Jesus, Our Lord and Saviour, embraced suffering and death in their most horrific Roman form, out of, because of, love.  We celebrate this day with soul-shuddering wonder and joy because, on this day, Christ’s LOVE overcame mankind’s SIN, and thereby destroyed mankind’s subjection to sin and death, and offers us eternal life and beatitude with Him, in Him, in His Father’s heavenly Kingdom,

What is that wondrous, life giving, beauty-revealing-and-restoring, Christ(ian) love?  It is a flame, first lit when the Son of God chose to become, by the power of God’s most Holy Spirit, a man.

           Just as the Father knows Me, I KNOW THE FATHER; AND I WILL LAY DOWN MY LIFE FOR THE SHEEP. This is why the Father loves Me, because I lay down My life in order to take it up again.   (John 10:15–17)

Who were those sheep?  Humankind, created in the image and likeness of God whom, though vitiated by their collusion with Satan, were eternally loved by the Father, and whom the Son -- for love of His Father -- willed to become  a human-being named Jesus through Mary of Nazareth, the most beautiful flower of God’s Chosen People.

Jesus came to live among us, one of us thanks to beautiful Mary, but not like us thanks to His heavenly Father; for Jesus came as perfect God and perfect Man to be our Saviour.  As Perfect Man He obediently embraced death for love of His heavenly Father, for the perfection of  God’s original creation, and for the salvation and redemption of sinful mankind, now flesh with Him and potential members of His glorious Body, to be freed by the grace of His blood poured out as one with us for love of the Father of us all.

Yes, People of God, today we celebrate Jesus’ death.  We embrace, rejoice in, Jesus’ death, Jesus’ way of dying, Jesus’ use of death, for us.  We regret, we mourn, we weep for, our own sins, and for mankind’s hatred, killing, self-centred and self-seeking disregard, of Jesus, His truth and His love.

Looking now, on this Good Friday, at the crucified Jesus, we recognize that, for Him, death was not the end but rather the climax of His life on earth; it was not the loss of all that He had loved, but rather the sublime moment when He was at last able to give supreme expression to the love which had filled His life.  When Jesus said, “It is finished”,  He was aware, and filled with joy that He had finally and fully completed the task His Father had given Him when sending Him into this world.  What was it that was finished?  Not simply the work of our redemption, because the full fruit of that has still to be gathered in over the ages by His disciples working in the power of His Spirit in the Church and in the world.  What then was finally and fully finished?  It was Jesus’ constant desire to give Himself entirely to the Father in His earthly life; to express, as much as the limits of His human body would permit Him, the consuming love He had for His Father (Luke 12:50):

          I have a baptism to undergo, and how distressed I am until it is accomplished! 

On Good Friday Jesus was finally able to say, “Father, into your hands I commend my Spirit” and then He deliberately breathed His last.  Life did not just slip listlessly out of His grasp: He wholeheartedly gave over His life -- in total trust and absolute confidence -- to His Father as He breathed His last.  This final and total gift of Himself to the Father was, in that way, the fullest expression He had ever been able to give of the love that filled Him.  For Christians, therefore, death can be supremely desirable, should be supremely reverenced, because it offers us the supreme opportunity to express our love for the Father, our trust in Jesus, our hope in the Spirit.

We can gather some impression how Jesus longed, how long He had longed, to be able to give total expression to the depth and the intensity of His love for His Father when we recall that as a young boy, having been taken up to Jerusalem for the Passover feast, afterwards He had totally forgotten to set off back home to Nazareth with Mary and Joseph in the caravan, because of His absorption in His heavenly Father:

          After three days they found Him in the temple, sitting in the midst of the  teachers, both listening to them and asking them questions. (Luke 2:46)

Such a Son had forgotten all about Mary, His mother, about Joseph, and the journey back home, because He was totally absorbed in discussions with the teachers in the Temple concerning His Father in heaven!  There He was only 12 years old …. how great that blaze of love for His heavenly Father must have become by the time He was 30!!  And finally, the consuming intensity it must have attained over the last two years of His life, when He was occupied in His public ministry expressing and trying to communicate His love for the Father to the Chosen People of Israel, is, indeed, beyond our conceiving, for Jesus Himself found human words inadequate for His needs, since the only way He could begin to describe it, was, as you heard, “how distressed I am until it is accomplished“!

Now, however, on the Cross, that work has indeed been accomplished, that longing has been fulfilled: He has, at last, been able to give Himself entirely to His Father in total love and trust, to give Himself completely, not only with and in His human mind and heart, but also with and in His human body, given over, totally and completely on the Cross, for the Father’s glory!  Jesus had never tried to direct His own life, He had always tried to do His Father’s will and to follow His Father’s lead: even in the choice of one to serve as the foundation rock for His future Church.

To do His Father’s will had been the whole aim of Jesus’ life on earth, because, as Son before all time, His whole heavenly Being was a response of total glory, an expression of total love, for the Father.

That is how disciples of Jesus should regard their lives too.  We know that God has a purpose for us to fulfil: we believe that each of us has a distinct role to play in the realization of God’s Kingdom.   We do not know what that purpose is; no; the disciple has, like Jesus, only one aim: and that is, under the guidance of the Spirit of Jesus, to fully live out the Father’s will, going wherever He indicates, doing whatever He wills.  The disciple of Jesus knows that life is not, as with the animals, just for living; life has been given us for a purpose which God has planned, a purpose which, if followed out to the end, will lead to a revelation of the ultimate significance and glory of our being.

Dear friends in Christ, I can think of nothing better to take home with us from this holy hour, than a desire to die with dispositions like to those of Jesus, freed from the fear of death, loving and trusting our heavenly Father totally; and despising those ideals of love and prosperity being instilled into so many in modern western societies, and which have been recently formulated by one such ‘successful’ couple boasting:

“ We have sex four times a week and twelve holidays every year; we don’t have any kids, they would get in the way!”

 

(2023)

 

Passion Sunday 2023 Year A

 

PASSION SUNDAY 2023, Year (A)

(Isaiah 50:4-7; Philippians 2:6-11; Matthew 26:14 – 27:66)

 

 

In Matthew’s presentation of the Passion and Death of our Lord Jesus Christ we heard some words that are not to be found in the other Gospel accounts:

Jesus said to him, "Put your sword in its place, for all who take the sword will perish by the sword.   Or do you think that I cannot now pray to My Father, and He will provide Me with more than twelve legions of angels?   How then could the Scriptures be fulfilled, that it must happen thus?"

Those words show us that Jesus was indeed, living His life, as St. Paul puts it, ‘according to the Scriptures’:

I delivered to you first of all that which I also received: that Christ died for our sins according to the Scriptures, and that He was buried, and that He rose again the third day according to the Scriptures.

And Jesus Himself confirmed this explicitly when, after His Resurrection, He appeared to His disciples on the way to Emmaus, and said to them:

“O foolish ones, and slow of heart to believe in all that the prophets have spoken!   Ought not the Christ to have suffered these things and to enter into His glory?"   And beginning at Moses and all the Prophets, He expounded to them in all the Scriptures the things concerning Himself.   (Luke 24:25-27)

Therefore, Jesus understood and lived His life in accordance with the Scriptures, because, as He publicly declared:

I have come down from heaven, not to do My own will, but the will of Him who sent Me (John 4:34),

My food is to do the will of Him who sent Me, and to finish His work (John 6:38).

Now, the God and Father Who sent Him had been preparing Israel for some 2000 years  -- through her inspired prophets and Scriptures -- to become first of all a fitting ‘seed-bed’ where the Son-of-God-made-man could take root, so to speak; and also a Chosen People able to recognize, appreciate, and respond to Him when, ultimately, He would be manifested publicly.  Surely, then, for us today as for the Apostles of old, Jesus can only be meaningfully recognized, rightly appreciated, and spiritually encountered when we understand Him ‘in accordance with the Scriptures’, both Old and New.

Immediately before the coming of Jesus as Israel’s Messiah and the world’s Saviour and Redeemer, the Roman World -- well-nigh at the pinnacle of its power -- was looking for peace after ambitious and costly campaigns of aggrandizement, self-satisfying revenge-taking, or just the regular wear-and-tear of put-down’s here and there to ensure ‘peace, established order, and plenty’.  But more recently, after civil wars rending Rome itself and culminating in the aftermath of Julius Caesar’s assassination, the Roman Senate and traditional Roman society -- the mighty and most-important patricians, and other serious and most necessary political, social, and military people -- whom the Senate represented and for whom they ‘ruled’,  actually LONGED for peace to such an extent that the very young and inexperienced pseudo-son of the most famous Julius Caesar was allowed and enabled to become himself Caesar under the name of Augustus; a position he would soon amplify to being recognized and acclaimed as divine Augustus (‘Divi Filius’ … god's son) was one of his titles, and giver of peace!

Dear People of God, that Augustan worldly peace, that peace in the Roman world of Augustus and his immediate imperial successors, lasted only long enough for Our Lord Jesus’ Christian peace to be born and take firm foothold in the Roman world itself, first of all.  From there, however, the Christian faith quickly discovered God-given flocks to pasture in the uncivilized world of the surrounding pagan nations, guiding, leading, and teaching them in their aspirations for God’s gift-and-promise of spiritual, eternal, peace for all men and women of good will.

Our modern age, our traditional Western world, has reneged on that Christian inheritance of over 1500 years and now finds itself – like the Roman world of Caesar’s times – longing for what it has not, and must search for:  that is, justification and hope. And in that process our world, our society is now grasping at self-justification, and fleshly hope. 

Self-justification, by the ‘woke’ who will not see their own sins, but whose keen eyes will to seek out and find personal and social failings past and present, and remedy them without truly knowing either past or present human situations; and fleshly-hope, by those who want immediate and enjoyable results for whatever commitment they may give to anyone other than themselves. 

Dominated and dazzled by science and its achievements, our world approaches Jesus in an objective manner, seeking to scientifically examine and test whatever words or actions of His it might feel inclined to investigate, and then to formulate and pronounce thereupon a merely rational, impersonal, judgment; a judgment invalidated not so much by its rationality – because reason, after all, is God’s great gift to human kind – but by its illogicality: for Jesus is, above all, One Whose Personality remains divinely mysterious until it is freely revealed in a mutual relationship with those who seek to believe in Him; and yet those investigators in no way seek personal communion with or commitment to Jesus.  Again our  society seeks an object for scientific study, not One Who only reveals Himself in order to be appreciated by those wanting to embrace Him by humble faith and obedience in the waters of baptism, by those who, thereby sanctified, will receive His Most Holy Spirit as the Guide and Light of their subsequent lives.

The whole purpose of the Jewish Scriptures was, as I have said, to prepare and lead the people of Israel to embrace their promised Messiah, the Son of God, and Saviour of mankind.  And those Scriptures are still valid for that purpose today.   For us Christians, the Old Testament is still living and necessary, not so much in its provisional prescriptions but in its divine foreshadowing and orientation. The Spirit of God was given provisionally to Israel in and through her prophets and in her Scriptures; now, the same Spirit – the Holy Spirit -- is given in supreme fullness to Mother Church, and, through her to all the faithful, by her proclamation of the Good News of Jesus’ Gospel, and her celebration and ministration of the sacraments of the glorified flesh of Jesus, and the copious gifts of His Most Holy Spirit.

A meeting with Jesus – sent by His Father for our salvation -- arranged by modern scholars thinking themselves able and qualified to objectify and rationalize all that comes before their mind, could in no way be a saving encounter.  The real, true, and saving Jesus is not to be thus coldly encountered, but ardently desired in prayer, and patiently sought, in the Scriptures and the Eucharistic Sacraments, before being lovingly embraced through faith and understanding by those who, under the guidance of the Spirit, are seeking forgiveness and redemption, New Life, through the total gift of self in loving obedience to Jesus.

Dear People of God, consider closely in your heart what sort of meeting you are seeking to set up with Jesus this Easter.  If you wish it to be, indeed, a personal encounter involving both heart and mind, then pray that with Mary’s help you may learn to recognize something of Jesus in the swaddling clothes of the Old Testament Scriptures, and in His full beauty and glory in the Gospel; so that they may help you open up your hearts to Him in the Eucharist that His Spirit may become the deepest joy and hope, the abiding peace and strength, of your lives.