Weekly Reflection 043006AD

Sunday, April 30, 2006AD

Third Sunday of Easter

Where to Begin?

We hear today of the Return of the Risen One to His disciples on Easter Sunday night, as it is recorded for us in St Luke’s Gospel. This is a similar account of the Gospel of last Sunday, but Sts Luke and St John each present the account differently.

Agreeing with St John, St Luke tells us that there was a wider group present than the Eleven. He just told us that the Eleven were gathered together with “the others” when the two disciples returned from their experience with Jesus on the road to Emmaus.

Likewise, St Luke tells us that Jesus first appeared to the group on Easter Sunday night, probably around dinner time (since there was fish on the table). He showed them His hands and feet. (Jesus’ side was not pierced in St Luke’s account of His death.)

Then, Jesus speaks to them about the Paschal Mystery that He underwent (and all of us undergo in, through and with Him) and of the Divine Necessity of descent and transformation built into the universe. Jesus then opens their minds through the gift of faith, explaining to them how the entire Hebrew Tradition had been speaking about Him, viz., in the Law, the Prophets and the Psalms.

Next, in agreement with St John, Jesus also speaks of forgiveness and the preaching of a new attitude by His followers to the world. He hints that since they have been forgiven, they must also preach forgiveness and attitude adjustment to all the world, beginning at Jerusalem.

Think about it. Here is Jesus greeting His followers three days after Peter denied Him, the group abandoned Him and He had met cruel torture and death, rejected by both Temple and state. Jesus does not mention their cowardice and abandonment. By human standards, that is exactly what we would expect.

In addition, He commands them to go and tell the world to get a new attitude, to snap out of it and to smell God’s coffee. I forgave you; now you go and proclaim the same message.

As Chicago priest, John Shea, wrote, “The only new thing in the world is people’s trying to forgive one another” by letting go of hatred, anger, grudges, and violence. Sad that so few buy into that Easter message.

We celebrate this week the 23^rd Anniversary of the US Catholic bishops landmark document, the Challenge of Peace, God’s Promise and Our Response, authored in part by John Cardinal O’Connor. Three big thoughts become part of standard Catholic vocabulary from the letter. The New Moment in Human History, means that humanity can destroy what God has been creating for eons in the world. The Consistent Life Ethic (aka the Seamless Garment theory), proclaims that all human life is sacred. All life is the gift of the God of Life. No one or no institution has the right to abridge this basic right. (To do so is to insult the God of Life.) Finally, they taught us the Path of Disarmament of the Human Heart. They asked us to try, with God’s Help, to transform the hatred, anger and grudges of others, rather than transmit it. They admit that this is a project that can only be attempted by asking for God’s Help in each and every case. How impossible it is on our own. Yet, with God’s Help, all things are possible. A prayer to try to act non-violently in our dealings with one another is the necessary start to an ongoing process.

Sooner or later, when a critical mass is achieved by the Holy Spirit, 21^st century Catholics might not be hearing so much of the reality of torture, indiscriminate incarceration of others, external renditions, the restoration of the death penalty and xenophobia. What is happening to us?

And, what is too much to hope for in a culture that claims to be “under God”? Where better to begin with, with God’s Help, than with oneself. It’s all about letting go and letting God. 043006AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 042306AD

Sunday, April 23, 2006AD

2^nd Sunday of Easter

Doubting Thomas

The patron saint of Missouri, the “Show Me State” makes his annual appearance in our traditional Gospel for the Second Sunday of Easter. Thomas represents those who demand empirical verification that belief in Jesus is legitimate. When Jesus meets his demand, Thomas’ response is “My Lord and my God.” This is the highest title attributed to Jesus in the Gospels. It brackets Jn 1.14, “The Word was God.” (Recall, the author of The DaVinci Code says that Jesus was not pronounced divine until 325 AD. Funny that he got that fact wrong.)

Many think that the incident of Doubting (Skeptical) Thomas probably represented the last account in the original Gospel of John. If such is the case, Jesus’ words to Thomas at the conclusion of the Gospel today would have originally been the last words of the Risen One in the Fourth Gospel. What does Jesus say? “You believed, Thomas, because you have seen. Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.”

Is Jesus talking about us? With the Help of the Holy Spirit, indeed, He is. However, it is not that easy. We all experience, at times, the Left Hand of God. In our lives, there are experiences that challenge our faith in the God revealed by our Lord Jesus Christ. We all experience disappointments, rejections, absurdities, failures, troubles and setbacks in our lives. (If you have not yet, don’t look for them; they’ll find you.) Catholics and all Christians should be very circumspect in talking about the depth of our faith. We all want to be strong believers. However, sometimes the vicissitudes of life can challenge an easy faith and make our “credo’s” a little shakier. We might be strong believers one day and, then, on difficult days, “Yo” or “Nes” believers. We pray for the Strength always to be firm in our faith in God. Though we have not seen, may we always believe.”

40 years ago, Pope Benedict wrote about the difference between “believing God” and “believing in God.” The then Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger wrote, “Only in a lifelong conversion, can we become aware of what it means to say, “I believe.”

Each week, Catholics profess our faith (our belief in God) routinely as a conclusion to our Liturgy of the Word. We rattle off very quickly (hopefully, not mindlessly) the 14 articles of Christian faith which, we believe, unite us with Christians of the last two millennia. Someone asked another, noted theologian if it were time to change the Nicene Creed, which is, after all, over 1600 years old. The theologian warned against any change in the creed. It might be arrogant to assume that we know the true meaning of certain words. He asked, “What do you mean by “I”? by “believe”? by “God?” by “Father”? by “Almighty”? by “Creator of heaven and earth?” What makes modern people think that we could do the best job naming Christian reality? The same theologian wrote in another place, “The first article of faith equals the last article of faith”. If we believe in God, the Father Almighty, then, we believe in the last article of faith, the Resurrection of the Body and life in the world to come. They are two ways of expressing the same reality of belief in a God Who can give life in any situation, the God of Jesus Christ.

Jesus met Thomas’ challenge; Thomas believed. With God’s Help, may we who have not seen always believe, on good days and bad, in the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, our Lord and our God. 042306 AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 041606AD

Easter Sunday – April 16, 2006AD

Life in Christ – Before , During and Ever…

We pray Psalm 27, a prayer of confidence, at two critical points in our lives. First, when we are baptized into Christ, we proclaim, “The Lord (YHWH) is our Light and our salvation; whom should we fear? The Lord (YHWH) is our Strength and our Courage; of whom should we be afraid? Second, as we prepare to leave this world, Psalm 27 is frequently prayed at one’s deathbed.

When the psalm is prayed liturgically at a baptism or a funeral, the Easter Candle, so prevalent during the fifty days of Easter, burns brightly in the sanctuary. It is a reminder to us of Christ, our Light, the invocation sung at the Easter Vigil as the Paschal fire is lit. Once the Easter candle is lit, then, gradually throughout the Church, the community receives a light from the Easter Candle so that soon the darkened Church is lit by the Lumen Christi, the Light of Christ.

Psalm 27, a baptismal and funeral and Paschal psalm, is appropriate everyday of our life in Christ. The Lord (YHWH) is with us and in us 60-60-24-7-365 every moment of our life. Each nano-second is a religious moment. On Easter, we ask for the Grace to believe this and to act upon it in our everyday lives.

It is easy to be say thanx to God on good days, yet we often forget to do so. Still, it is difficult to be hopeful in dark moments of our lives, that we all have, moments when we experience pain, betrayal, denial, rejection, sickness, accident, old age, and loss. It happened to Jesus and to us.

The experience of these liminal (also called, threshold moments) is transformed by the Paschal Mystery Which we celebrate today. Jesus Christ, the image of the invisible God and the pattern of all creation, reveals through His death and Resurrection that the Paschal Mystery is integral to all creation (not just humanity, the pinnacle of creation). The Paschal Mystery is the Lord’s (YHWH’s) way of bringing new life to us in ways unimaginable. As St Paul tells us in Roman 4. 16, “God creates life where there was death and no life.”

We pray for the Grace to say yes to the Paschal Mystery revealed to us in the death and Resurrection of the Lord, which we all share through baptism into Christ. This Grace (also known as the Holy Spirit) emboldens us to live an alternate worldview, one in which the God of Life is capable of transforming all reality into something good, no matter what things appear to be. This is not easy when the going gets tough. One thinks of Jesus’ dying words, the words of Psalm 22, “My God, my God why have You forsaken me?” Sometimes, we feel like that.

The gift of faith in the Paschal Mystery gives us the strength to counter any of the down language in Psalm 22 (which alternates back and forth between despairing and hopeful language, but ends on a hopeful note) with the confidence of Psalm 27, a gifted trust enabling us to say each moment, “I believe that I shall see the good things of God in the land of the living. Wait for the Lord with courage. Be stouthearted and wait for the Lord.” Happy and blessed Easter to all. 041606AD jfq

Weekly Reflection 040906AD

Sunday, April 9, 2006AD

Palm Sunday

The Big Picture

On Palm Sunday, we hear some of the most powerful and memorable portions of the Bible. The haunting figure of the Crucified Christ speaks to us after twenty centuries. We all feel His pain.

The founders of other religions, Moses, Mohammed, Buddha, Confucius and Lao-Tsu all lived to ripe old ages. What happened with Jesus? Why did He meet such a horrific end?

One answer that has been offered for the enigma is to show us how much God loves us. We are the ones who need to be won over to the forgiving love of God. Then, we are asked by God to transform the anger, violence and hatred in our own lives in imitation of the God-man who did not return hatred for hatred.

St Mark’s account of the Passion is the shortest and probably earliest account of the last days of Jesus. In fact, St Mark’s Gospel has been called “a Passion Narrative with an extended opening”. The machinations that culminated in Good Friday (and Easter) began as far back as Mk 3.36, when the Pharisees and Herodians (political enemies) decided that Jesus was too much to handle.

We know now that St Mark combined one (and possibly, two) extended accounts of the death of Jesus. He also touched up the narrative with references from the Hebrew Bible (such as our first reading today, the Suffering Servant Poems) with Psalm 22 (our Responsorial Psalm today) and Psalm 69.

However, recently, a manuscript was discovered in a synagogue in the Mid East which spoke of the liturgy which the synagogue followed for the Day of Atonement, viz., Yom Kippur. In the manuscript was a description of a scapegoat (literally a goat) that was wrapped around in thorns in either a red or purple cloth. As the scapegoat, which bore the sins of the community was driven out of the synagogue and town, Jewish penitents seeking forgiveness for their own sins would spit upon the scapegoat or beat it with a reed. This Jewish liturgy gives a further insight into what St Mark is describing in the Death of the Messiah in today’s Gospel. The first Christians probably would have been familiar with the Jewish liturgy of Yom Kippur and recognized in St Mark’s account the similar pattern in the death of Jesus.

St Mark tells us throughout the Gospel that Jesus was recognized as God’s Holy One by the demons that Jesus expelled. In addition, St Peter also proclaimed Jesus as the Messiah, although he did not understand what he said. When Jesus immediately said that He was to be handed over and put to death and rise on the third day,

Weekly Reflection 040206AD

Sunday, April 2, 2006AD

5^th Sunday of Lent

Some Heavy Lifting (Up)!!

One useful tool in reading and reflecting on John’s Gospel is the fact that the Evangelist constantly plays with ironic language to present the paradox of the Christ Quantum. Often, language can be understood differently by different people.

There is a prime example in our Gospel this weekend when Jesus refers to the modus operandi of the universe in His being “lifted up”, viz., the Paschal Mystery. What is going? This is something that you might not pick up with all the televangelists or Chicken Soup books or New Age angelology.

To what does the lifting up refer? Does it refer to the crucifixion and/or the Resurrection and/or the Ascension (called the Exaltation by St Paul)? All three simultaneously?

Who does the lifting up? Is it the powers that be whose thugs carried out the execution? Is it YHWH doing the lifting up? Both simultaneously? The lifting up is the Fourth Evangelist’s way of describing the Paschal Mystery, which is the way the Universe operates. All creation is in process of dying and rising. (Even the sun itself is dying each moment.)

Dying and rising involves not only Jesus Himself, the archetype of creation, the image of the invisible God. It involves all of us who live and move and have our being in Christ.

On One’s answer depends on where the person is with respect to responding to the Paraclete-Spirit? Faith is God’s Gift. All believers are recipient of the Gift. How you handle the Gift is your decision?

In adult life, people go through two different phases. In early adulthood, most of us make our mark, try to take the world by storm and make the difference. In later adulthood, adults should learn (but do not always) that life is also about bearing pain, leaping in faith, surrendering, letting go and trusting the Paschal Mystery.

The transition point or Paschal Moment usually involves some type of suffering through which we find our egos destabilized. We learn through disappointments, rejections, absurdities, failures, sickness and sadness that a middle class life is not the reason God created us. There is something more involved, Which we call the Sacred, Who permeates and yet transcends our everyday life.

The pattern of death and transformation is the key to the universe and the Paschal Mystery of the Creator’s Son incarnate opens the door and reveals a Reality so close that we cannot see it without the Gift of faith.

St Peter’s first letter tells us that we all experience suffering in one form or another in life. He asks us to do so in Christ Jesus by sharing in the Paschal Mystery and entrusting our lives to the Faithful Creator in every situation. Sooner or later, we all find out that our lives are not about us. Ask Christ Jesus NOW for the Grace to surrender, let go and trust the Paschal Mystery. What a lift!! Just what we all need!! 040206AD jfq