2nd Sunday of Easter (B) 2015

 2^nd. Sunday of Easter (B) 

(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 come to believe because you have seen Me?  Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed."  Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this book.

What precisely is John’s intention in that passage from today’s Gospel reading?   For among the evangelists John is unique in designating certain miracles of Jesus as ‘signs’ because he considers them as being most important and eminently conducive to faith (cf. v. 31!); they are by no means ‘ordinary’, they are in fact, John thinks, quite special.   John picks out four of those miracles which he calls signs of Jesus, explicitly designating the wedding feast at Cana as being the occasion for the first of them:  

Jesus did this as the beginning of his signs in Cana in Galilee and so revealed His glory, and his disciples began to believe in Him. (John 2:11)

He then goes on (John 4:54) to explicitly call another of Jesus’ miracles (the healing of the son of a royal official) as being the second of those signs he wishes to bring to our special attention:

             Now this was the second sign Jesus did when he came to Galilee from Judea.

How then can he at the beginning of his Gospel account start to pick out for special notice certain miracles which he regards as worthy to be called ‘signs’, and then, at the end of his Gospel, tell us that has decided to omit ‘many’ of such signs that reveal His glory?

Could it be because of those words of the Risen Lord to Thomas, ‘Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed’?   But, after Jesus’ Resurrection, could ‘many’ signs somehow be no longer necessary for faith, or perhaps even somewhat detrimental to it? 

The fact is that Jesus performed all those many signs:

            In the presence of His disciples, and His disciples began to believe in Him.

Those disciples, apostles, who were to be sent out to the whole world were starting with no background awareness of death being followed by ‘Resurrection’ (whatever that might be) other than Jesus’ words of warning concerning His own destiny.  The many signs had been judged necessary by Jesus in order to fully prepare and ultimately convince those who, in His Name, would proclaim His Gospel to the world.   And yet, even then:

Later, as the Eleven were at table, He (Jesus) appeared to them and rebuked them for their unbelief because they had not believed those who saw Him after He had been raised.

Nevertheless, knowing the depths of their minds and hearts and the grace of His guiding and sustaining Holy Spirit, and looking to the future:

He said to them, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.” (16:14-15)

Now, it is that new vision of the Good News being proclaimed to the whole world by Holy Mother Church -- in His Name and with the persuasive power and saving grace of His Spirit – that is the key for our understanding of those most comforting words of Our Lord for all future disciples:

            Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.

John could omit certain signs of Jesus from his public Gospel because, henceforth, they would be made up for, subsumed, by Jesus’ greatest sign before the nations: Holy Mother Church -- the Body of which He is the head, and the Temple of His Most Holy Spirit – proclaiming in His Name and witnessing to His Gospel, by the grace and power of the Holy Spirit for the salvation of all men.

Moreover, as you have just heard, in his letter John also says: 

Who indeed is the victor over the world, but the one who believes that Jesus is the Son of God?  

There he is again taking up his Gospel teaching, and saying that whosoever believes the Church’s proclamation of Jesus as the Son of God and Saviour of mankind, that is, whosoever is thus to be praised 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 worldly proof other than the witness and the proclamation of Mother Church.   Indeed, need for worldly proof could only prove an insuperable obstacle for the spiritual life of any aspiring Christian.

Now, why does John praise such a response to Mother Church’s proclamation of Jesus?  Not, ultimately, to praise any human being for his or her own individual spiritual perspicacity or strength, but to show just how sublime and divinely spiritual is Catholic Christian faith, since, ultimately, only God the Father Himself can introduce us to such faith, as John tells us in his Gospel:

Jesus said to the Jews, "Do not murmur among yourselves.  No one can come to Me unless the Father who sent Me draws him; and I will raise him up at the last day.  It is written in the prophets, 'And they shall all be taught by God.' Therefore everyone who has heard and learned from the Father comes to Me.   (John 6:43-45)

Acceptance of the Gospel message on the basis of worldly evidence would be no true substitute for faith given in response to God’s inspiring of our heart, enlightening of our mind.  It is not that John is against us using our natural intelligence in response to the Gospel of Jesus, after all, he expressly tells us why he wrote his Gospel:

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

Rather is it that, for St. John, the supreme function of the Gospel message is to promote our awareness of, our contact with, and our response to, God Himself; and that contact, that response -- though based 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 extends higher, than the stark words of the Gospel; that is why we Catholics accept the Tradition of Mother Church and acknowledge true development in the doctrine of Faith; all, however, on the basis of, and never against, the original Gospel proclamation.

Here we have an essential characteristic of our Catholic and Christian resurrection-faith.  It is not simply a faith to be learned, it is not even just a faith to be loved; it is a faith to be experienced and lived: not simply in the sense of obeying its commands and fighting for its rights, but as communion with the Father, in Jesus, by the Spirit.   The Catholic and Christian Church, as the Body of Christ living today, is not limited to receiving its faith from a book written in the past, nor can it be restricted to the use of merely human reasoning in its appreciation of such book-based teaching; the Church, which is the Body of Christ living by the Spirit of Christ, is endowed and enabled, through her vital communion with God, to receive ever greater fullness of His grace and guidance that she might yet more deeply appreciate and appropriately understand the Good News of Jesus’ Gospel.  Mother Church today is still called to prepare and allow herself to be inspired by God: not, indeed, to write or proclaim a new revelation, but to understand ever more fully and to appreciate ever more deeply and intimately the revelation originally and finally given to her by God through the Apostles.

This is why the Catholic Church can never be or become a university Church in which the teaching of God is established by and subject to merely rational justification and argument, a Church in which only teaching intellectually sifted and boasting a majority vote of accepted scholarly approval, could be considered as provisional doctrine.  Mother Church, though august in her dignity and truly admirable for many of her achievements while presiding over centuries of human growth and social development is, essentially, a mystical Church wherein human learning and practical expertise, though so deeply appreciated, are also necessarily subject to the transcendent authority of a divine commission for and  spiritual awareness of, the true and ultimate human good, only to be gleaned -- under the guidance of the Spirit -- from communion with, and in response to, the transcendent God.

All this is contained in those words of our Creed which say: ‘I believe in one, holy, catholic, and apostolic Church’; for those words do not simply state that we believe the Catholic Church to have been uniquely founded, established, by Jesus Christ and 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 fully able to breath as Christians, empowered to recognize and appreciate 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.  (1 John 5:4)

            The Spirit is the one that testifies, and the Spirit is truth. (1 John 5:6)

Oh you believing Catholics, appreciate and be grateful for what you have been given!  For your faith has been given to you by the heavenly Father Himself Who has Personally called and introduced you to Jesus; and that faith is being continually nourished and purified -- even to this very day, and at this very hour – in the womb of Mother Church, in view of your ever-fuller sharing, as a member of the Body of Christ and by the Spirit of Christ, in the life of Christ before the Father.   

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.