4th Sunday of Eastertide Year C 2016

4^th. SUNDAY OF EASTER (C)

(Acts 13:14, 43-52; Revelation 7: 9, 14-17; John 10:27-30)

Dear Brothers and Sisters in Christ, today our Easter joy continues by centering us on Jesus as our Saviour from sin and the Lord Who offers us and all believers Life eternal.

In the episode partially recorded in our first reading, Paul proclaimed Jesus to fellow Jews in the following words:

The one whom God raised up did not see corruption.  You must know, my brothers, that through Him forgiveness of sins is being proclaimed to you, (and) in regard to everything from which you could not be justified under the law of Moses, in Him every believer is justified.  (Acts 13:37-39)

Those Pisidian Jews rejected Paul’s Good News about Jesus’ ability to save believers in Him from sin and to offer them new and eternal life:

Both Paul and Barnabus spoke out boldly and said, “It was necessary that the word of God be spoken to you first, but since you reject it and condemn yourselves as unworthy of eternal life, we turn to the Gentiles.

Our second reading also spoke of the gift of life through forgiveness of sins:

These are the ones who have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb.

Jesus Himself began His Gospel proclamation along the path prepared for Him by John the Baptist, after whose arrest we are told (Mark 1: 14-15):

Jesus came to Galilee proclaiming the Gospel of God, “This is the time of fulfilment. The Kingdom of God is at hand.  Repent and believe in the Gospel.”

Jesus met great opposition to His teaching on eternal life, due, in part, to the fact that He claimed the ability to raise – by His offer of Life – not only some already in the tomb but also others still apparently living (as proud leaders of a stubborn people) who did not know they were already spiritually dead.

(If you are the Messiah tell us plainly.)  I have told you and you do not believe Me.  The works I do in My Father’s name – (and) I have shown you many (such) good works -- testify to Me but you do not believe.  My sheep hear My voice; I know them and they follow Me.  I give them eternal life.  My Father, Who has given them to Me is greater than all.  The Father and I are One.  (John 10:24-30)

Amen, amen, I say to you, the hour is coming and is now here when the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God and those who hear will live.  For just as the Father has life in Himself, so also He gave to His Son the possession of life in Himself.    (John 5:25-26)

                I give them eternal life and they shall never perish.

Jesus expected of His hearers and questioners both a fundamental sincerity of purpose, aspiring to attain what God was actually promising (as distinct from their own imaginings or deeply hidden personal aspirations or desires), and also an understanding of good-will which would seek to correctly hear and faithfully interpret those promises:

The works that the Father gave Me to accomplish, these works that I perform, testify on My behalf that the Father has sent Me.   (John 5:25s., 36.)

My teaching is not My own but is from the One who sent Me.   Whoever chooses to do His will shall know whether My teaching is from God or whether I speak on My own.  (John 7:17)

Jesus came to share His life and destroy our sin by the sacrifice of Himself and the GIFT of His most Holy Spirit.

Wouldn’t it be wonderful if we knew with absolute certitude that eternal life and blessedness would be given to us, individually!  How truly wonderful!!  And yet no one, no matter how holy, has such certitude.  That is the Church’s teaching: no one is sure, absolutely sure, of avoiding sin let alone gaining heaven, outside a special, personal, revelation and promise from God.  We think that we would do better, be better, with the peace, strength, and joy of such certitude.  But God doesn’t think on those lines.  He offers us a salvation won at the cost of His own beloved Son’s earthly suffering and death; therefore He wills that we both earn and learn how rightly to accept such a blessing from His most Holy Spirit, Who forms us in accordance with the teaching and example of His most beloved Son, our Lord Jesus Christ.  He does this because He wants us to live by His mercy, indeed, but as His truly adopted children able to hold up our heads as authentic members in Jesus of His heavenly family.  He wants us to risk our human all for Him, by a humble willingness to repent of past sins and to hopefully commit ourselves in a leap of faith that responds to the Father’s leap of mercy and compassion when sending His Son for our salvation and to the Son’s obedient leap of faith in the One Who sent Him and of love for those to whom He was thus sent.

What are our modern attitudes to that Gospel duo of saving grace and eternal life, repent and rejoice in the Lord?

We hear so much today about the evangelization of sinners.  There are some who speak in such a way as to imply or at least suggest that really there are no sinners, only people who are medically sick in one way or another (faulty genes, mental or emotional disorders, pressures of life, lack of necessary education or living resources etc.), together with a present-day insensitivity of medical science which, they confidently insinuate, is as yet regrettably unable to correctly identify other quite natural afflictions still mistakenly thought of as a basis for sinful actions.

Today I read in a Catholic paper: ‘The Church needs to understand families and individuals in all their complexity’.  And then I think of Jesus speaking with the woman taken in adultery after being called upon for His opinion: ‘Woman, has anyone condemned you?  Neither do I.  Go, and sin no more.’ Jesus simply stated the reality of sin, condemned it, warned the woman against any further such sin, and then bade her go away and listen to God’s grace whispering to her in her heart.  Did Jesus ever have a heart-to-heart talk with Judas Iscariot (in all his complexity), or did He again trust His Father’s love and acknowledge His Father’s wisdom and power to knock on the door of Judas’ heart for any possible opening?

Today there are far too many words of men crowding out the words of God!  Jesus word ‘repent’’ is not normally one of them.  Is that due to it being religiously incorrect today?  Explanations are given which make ever broader, push ever further away, the boundaries traditionally known to have been set by God.  Public punishments were, at times in the past, sadly and wrongfully meted out (children referred to as ‘bastards’, gays publicly ridiculed and criminally punished etc.), especially when the political power was regarded, and relied upon, as the civil arm of the Church.  Today, however, getting rid of such past evils (we can speak of ‘sin and evils’ when apparently accusing or implicating the Church but not when speaking of types of modern behaviour or of modern social laws and structures!) puts us in most serious danger of ‘losing the baby with the bathwater’.

Jesus repeatedly and most explicitly spoke of the supreme need to recognize and repent of personal sin, none being good but God alone.  Such personal sins result, of course,  from personal and willed acts, often external actions which the Church has the right and the duty to label (for the guidance and protection of her people) as sinful actions, but which God alone can definitively and eternally judge as sinful acts by any individuals concerned.

When we turn to the Scriptures, we do not find any of the slate-washing of sin so popular with the modern opinions-givers:

The rest of the human race who were not killed by these plagues did not repent of the works of their hands, to give up the worship of demons and idols made from gold, silver, bronze, stone, and wood, which cannot see or hear or walk.  Nor did they repent of their murders, their magic potions, their fornication, or their thefts.  (Revelation 9:20-21)

Where in popular human estimation and for the sake of pride or pleasure sin cannot be accepted as a reality, and when such a disturbing idea as ‘sinful’ is only to be mentioned with words of ridicule or countered by excuses, when emotions are allowed to justify human actions to such an extent that they by-pass or even deny the existence of any ruling human will and therefore of any real responsibility before an imagined God, then everything goes: there is no longer, for such people, any truth; only opinions, and ultimately only popular opinions are worth holding.

Dear People of God, hold fast to a saving awareness of the reality of sin, thanks to which we can aspire to a life which is promised and indeed already being made recognizable and irresistibly attractive and desirable for all called to believe in the goodness, beauty, and truth of our Lord and Saviour Jesus Christ.   Repent, learn to live, and find true delight in loving aright the one God and Father of us all.

Third Sunday of Easter Year C 2016

Third Sunday of Easter (C)

(Acts 5:27-32, 40b-41; Revelation 5:11-14; John 21:1-19)

The Apostle Peter -- helped by John -- will hopefully stimulate us this day to better understand, love, and respond to Our Lord, as His true disciples in Mother Church and before the world.

Peter was a strong and undeniably impulsive character as we have just heard:

When Simon Peter heard (from John) that it was the Lord, he tucked in his garment, for he was lightly clad, and jumped into the sea.  The other disciples came in the boat.

Jesus said to them, ‘Bring some of the fish you just caught,’ so Simon Peter went over and dragged the net ashore full of 153 large fish.  Even though there were so many, the net was not torn.

However, it is Jesus’ three-fold questioning of Peter that is the most striking and significant feature of the Gospel reading for us today:

        Simon, son of John, do you love Me? Do you love Me?  Do you love Me?

That three-fold insistence of Jesus is understood by many as His way of giving Peter the opportunity to revoke what had recently been his hasty, fear-driven, three-fold denial of Jesus.  Such a possibility cannot be gainsaid and its divine beauty strongly recommends it.   And yet, since nothing is simple about Peter, it may also be the case that here Jesus, witnessing to His Father’s great mercy, is also preparing the coping stone for His future Church in line with diverse aspects of Peter’s own make-up.  For example, let us consider the very first question of Jesus:         Simon, son of John, do you love Me more than these?

Peter was both head-strong and self-assertive; and yet, surely, our blessed Lord was not inviting him there to assert that his own love of Jesus was greater than that of the other apostles present?  Peter did not and could not know the inner dispositions of his fellow-apostles to any degree that might allow him to make such an assertion; and although he was self-confident, he cannot be said to have shown himself arrogant enough for such behaviour.  It would seem, therefore, that Jesus was inviting and encouraging Peter to declare, in all truth and humility, that he loved Jesus far more than he loved any, or all, of the other apostles.

And why might Jesus have wanted such a declaration from Peter?   Well, as I have already said, Peter was a strong and, should we say, ‘multi-layered’ character: he was a prominent local business-man and being a natural leader and dominant personality, he might also have been somewhat ‘prone to shoot off his mouth’, to use modern jargon; but, dangerous though such attributes might easily be, he was not – apparently -- prone to making notable business mistakes or personal gaffs thereby, which would explain why his fellow business-associates and future co-apostles unquestioningly accepted him as their spokesman and, indeed, frequently showed themselves as willing, and even eager, to follow his personal initiatives.   Now that could, of itself, have insinuated into Peter’s psyche a certain vanity, and with it an accompanying reluctance to knowingly do or say anything that might put a strain on such a relationship of accepted dominance with regard to his fellow apostles, and that, I say, could possibly have been part of the motivation behind Jesus’ question, do you love Me more than (you love) these?  There are, throughout the Gospel accounts, several instances of a particularly close personal relationship between Peter and John, and it is quite striking that, immediately after Peter’s protestation of supreme love in today’s Gospel:

        Lord, You know everything, You know that I love You,

Jesus thought it necessary to -- deliberately and quite pointedly -- make absolutely clear to Peter the implications of such words, by demanding their prompt and full observance; for we are told (cf. John 21: 19-22) that:

After signifying by what kind of death Peter would glorify God, Jesus said to him, ‘Follow Me.’  Peter turned and saw the disciple whom Jesus loved following them; ... (and) he said to Jesus, ‘Lord, what about him?’  Jesus said, ’What if I want him to remain until I come?  What concern is it of yours?  You follow Me.’ 

There are, however, other scholars who see in Jesus’ three-fold questioning of Peter a then widely-recognized social procedure for conferring and confirming before witnesses, a ‘legal’ right -- one fully approved and legally binding -- on someone:

                Feed My lambs; tend My sheep; feed My sheep.

Most probably, therefore, we have a remarkable instance of Jesus’ great and most compassionate wisdom: He wipes out the memory – in Peter’s own mind and in the minds of the other apostles – of Peter’s moment of weakness and shame while at the same time, quite dramatically and most emphatically, establishing him as the uncontestable head of His nascent Church in accordance with His Father’s will.

There are also, in our Gospel, revealing words of Jesus about Peter’s future crucifixion:

Amen, amen, I say to you, when you were younger you used to dress yourself and go where you wanted; but when you grow old, you will stretch out your hands, and someone else will dress you and lead you where you do not want to go.

Jesus is there telling Peter, with remarkable openness and sympathetic appreciation, the truth – knowable only to Jesus at that moment -- concerning Peter’s facing of the prospect of death after years of labour and suffering for Jesus and the Church.  Very many modern Catholics and Christians find it difficult to appreciate such words of Jesus, since they are, themselves, not sufficiently humble in their own self-estimation or simple in their relationship before and with God.  As moderns they are complicated by far too much self-love, and fear of what other people might think; and, augmenting such natural  tendencies and frailties, they may also have yielded far too easily and extensively to the requirements of political correctness ... which all inevitably leads to a frequently observable and widespread tendency to pretence in matters of religious devotion.  Few would be humbly willing to acknowledge in themselves or could patiently accept for themselves similar true words of Jesus about their own not wanting to go to death for Him.

At this juncture, however, we should recognize that there is no question of Jesus implying that Peter would refuse to face up to his future crucifixion, only that Peter would not want to go; and, in that regard, we should recall that John tells us that:

Jesus said this signifying by what kind of death he (Peter) would – in fact -- glorify God.

Now, human pretence -- no matter how pious it may seem or present itself – never glorifies God or truly recognizes Jesus.  Peter, as foreshadowed by Jesus, had -- in the intervening years of struggle and suffering for and in the service of the Church, and after countless hours of soul-opening prayer before God -- become both humble and patient to a degree that most find it difficult to imagine nowadays.  He would in no way pretend to himself or to others that he wanted to go where his captors were leading him, and in that he was sublimely close to Jesus Whom he had personally – though with little comprehension -- witnessed praying to His heavenly Father and struggling with His human nature in the Garden of Gethsemane.  How much, indeed, did He now, at this climax of his discipleship, admire Jesus and glorify God!  For only Jesus wanted, only Jesus could  have wanted to walk with such love – so wholeheartedly and eagerly – to His crucifixion!

Oh! What wondrous love Jesus had conceived for those coming sufferings of His crucifixion after His agony of blood-sweating-prayer in the Garden of Gethsemane!!  There He had fought in prayer to, and before, His most beloved Father; and when His Father – after such urgent and Personal prayers -- still left the task on His shoulders, He, Jesus, knew without any doubt, that He would find His Father in those very sufferings.  And that is why, when carrying His cross, He always -- after each individual fall on the way – endeavoured to get up immediately, totally oblivious to everything but His desire to love and glorify His Father in every detail of what was being asked of Him by His most loving and lovable Father, though being wickedly and cruelly demanded of Him by those who so deeply hated Him.

Peter was a most wonderful disciple of Jesus and he had come to find no difficulty in acknowledging, admitting, his own nothingness: of himself he did not want to go on that journey to his crucifixion because he did not, of himself, love like Jesus the most beloved Son alone could love; but he most fully trusted in Jesus his Brother and Saviour that He could and would draw him after Himself, that He could and would help him, Peter, humbly follow where He, Jesus his Lord, alone could lead.  For only one fully aware of, and appreciative of, his own nothingness could then totally commit himself into God’s care:

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

                Father, into Your hands I commend My spirit.

It is finished!

Dear People of God, let us most seriously pray for the simplicity of heart to admire Peter’ example, and, above all, for the Gift of the God’s Holy Spirit; that, of His great goodness and most subtle grace, we may embrace Jesus’ teaching and follow ever more closely His most precious example by offering truly humble praise and self-less glory, honour, and power, to God, the Almighty and all-loving Father in heaven.