Sunday May 4, 2008AD
Seventh Sunday of Easter
We Are All in This Together
Quantum physicists tell us that reality is so much about relationships among things that life is more a mystery than we can even imagine, let alone crack. This is what the Catholic religion has been saying ever since the first century, as we grapple to comprehend the Mystery of the Creator (God One in Three) with Creation (Reality).
Father Raymond Brown, a NY Catholic priest, one of the finest biblical scholars of the twentieth century, commented that in the first paragraph written in the Christian Scriptures, St Paul’s First Letter to the Thessalonians (dated c. 51AD) that the Mystery of the Trinity is referred to by naming All three Persons of the Trinity in St Paul’s greeting to the Church.
Today, in Jesus’ prayer at the conclusion of the Last Supper in the Fourth Gospel (Jn 17), Jesus prays to the Father celebrating His Relationship with the Father and for God’s including all of us (and all reality, ultimately) in this Relationship. The prayer is brief and sadly, 21st century Catholics miss what Jesus is saying because it is broken into three parts over the three year cycle of Sunday biblical readings. The prayer celebrates 1) the Relationship between Jesus and the Father; 2) the Relationship of those at the table with Jesus (and therefore, with the Father; 3) the Relationship between those who have met Jesus and the Father through the testimony of those at the table (That includes you and me and all of us!) with Jesus. What Jesus does, in essence, is celebrate the Relationship between the Creator and Creation, Which Jesus and the Paraclete Spirit mediate. How humbling and consoling it is to realize that somehow, Jesus was praying for us as well and placing us in the Great Inclusion!
We see how seriously our Christian ancestors (known as the PCC, the Primitive Christian Community) grasped the meaning of relationship. In our first reading from Acts, today, St Luke tells us the make-up of the group. They included the Eleven, the ladies who had come up with Jesus from
In the next section of St Luke’s account of the days immediately after Ascension Thursday, he describes the election of Matthias, as a replacement for Judas Iscariot, Jesus’ betrayer. The PCC presents two candidates. Then, they (the entire community of 120) prayed and cast lots and selected Matthias to replace Judas. This is known as the “Matthias Principle”, viz., where the Church prays and then, “pulls a name out of a hat”. This was the custom in some scenarios in the early days of Christianity. One might wonder why it changed. The important thing is that the community in relationship to God and Christ Jesus and one another did what they did.
Finally, as we hear today once again from an excerpt from the first papal encyclical, The First Letter of St Peter. The first Pope, the first Bishop of
Our Christian faith reminds us that God is a God of Life and of Love. The very nature of God is creational and relational. God brings all creation into life and relation through the Incarnation of God’s Son made human. On Good Friday, in our name, Christ Jesus said yes to God when He surrendered, let go and trusted the Holy Mystery. On Easter Sunday, God said yes to us when God brought Christ, the archetype of creation, to the Glory of the Resurrection.
When we live lives of offering Life and Love to those with whom we are in relationship (and that is all reality), then we realize that we have been swept up into the orbit of the Holy Trinity. Words cannot describe adequately. That is why we need faith in Christ Jesus. In every event in human living, He tells us to trust Him in faith. We walk in faith, and not by sight.
