Holy Thursday, April 1, 2021

John 13:1–15

Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end. The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over. So, during supper, fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God, he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel around his waist. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Master, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered and said to him, “What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.” Jesus said to him, “Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over; so you are clean, but not all.” For he knew who would betray him; for this reason, he said, “Not all of you are clean.”  So when he had washed their feet and put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, “Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

“He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end.”  This is a passage of surpassing consolation.  Those who belong to the Lord Jesus, “his own”, are those who are his through their baptism and through their earnest desire to do his will so as to return his love.  At the beginning of St. John’s Gospel we learn that “his own” rejected him, that is, those who were physically related to him: certain members of his extended family, many of the people of his hometown of Nazareth, and his fellow Jews.  But there are those who are his own because they respond to his call to be with him, which he enables them to do through his grace.

“He rose from supper and took off his outer garments.”  The Lord shows his great love for us and his desire to save us by laying aside the glory that belonged to him as the Son of God.  “He took a towel and tied it around his waist.”  Further, he joins himself to our human nature and clothes himself with our flesh.  “Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet.”  He washes us from even our worst and most defiling sins.  “And dry them with the towel around his waist.”  He does this with his Flesh, giving up his Body for us in Sacrifice.  Peter, signifying the person striving for righteousness, tries to refuse out of holy fear of what the Lord is doing, but when he learns of the necessity of the Sacrifice, he gladly accepts it.  The Lord tells his Apostles — and all who are his own — to imitate him in what he has done.  Therefore we are to devote ourselves to service, that is, to sacrifice.  We offer ourselves to our God through the service we offer to others here on earth, especially by spreading the Gospel.

“So when he had washed their feet and put his garments back on and reclined at table.”  That is, when he rose from the dead and ascended into heaven, he reclined at the table of the great Wedding Feast in heaven with the Patriarchs and Prophets of old, awaiting the hour when we will go to the Father to be with him there.

 Wednesday in Holy Week, March 31, 2021

Matthew 26:14-25

One of the Twelve, who was called Judas Iscariot, went to the chief priests and said, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?” They paid him thirty pieces of silver, and from that time on he looked for an opportunity to hand him over. On the first day of the Feast of Unleavened Bread, the disciples approached Jesus and said, “Where do you want us to prepare for you to eat the Passover?” He said, “Go into the city to a certain man and tell him, ‘The teacher says, My appointed time draws near; in your house I shall celebrate the Passover with my disciples.”  The disciples then did as Jesus had ordered, and prepared the Passover.  When it was evening, he reclined at table with the Twelve. And while they were eating, he said, “Amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” Deeply distressed at this, they began to say to him one after another, “Surely it is not I, Lord?” He said in reply, “He who has dipped his hand into the dish with me is the one who will betray me. The Son of Man indeed goes, as it is written of him, but woe to that man by whom the Son of Man is betrayed. It would be better for that man if he had never been born.” Then Judas, his betrayer, said in reply, “Surely it is not I, Rabbi?” He answered, “You have said so.”

The Gospel reading for today’s Mass again brings Judas Iscariot to the forefront.  The Evangelists pay much attention to him and describe his movements in order to understand him and what he did.  For instance, Jesus is quoted as speaking of his Apostles and then saying that one of them is “a devil”.  For the early Christians and for those considering becoming a Christian in the early days of the Church, an important question would have been, Why should I be a follower of this man when one of his closest followers not only left him, but betrayed him?  It seems that the Evangelists sought to answer this question in various ways.  Matthew implies that Judas became disillusioned by the Lord’s words when the woman anointed him at Bethany, because directly afterwards he went to the chief priests.  We could speculate that Jesus allowing a woman unrelated to him to touch him might have caused the disillusionment; or the Lord’s words showing his lack of concern about money; or the Lord’s increasingly persistent words about his coming Passion and Death might also have caused it.  Perhaps Judas realized before the other Apostles that Jesus had no intention of reestablishing the Kingdom of Israel and as a result he felt Jesus had misled him.

St. Thomas Aquinas makes a good point about Judas going to the priests.  He says that we see how little he valued Jesus by asking them, “What are you willing to give me if I hand him over to you?”  Thomas says that when we believe we own something of great value and we wish to sell it, we tell potential buyers how much they will have to pay for it.  But if we own something we simply want to get rid of, we ask potential buyers what they will give for it, and we are glad to take their offer, whatever it is.  And this is what Judas did when selling Jesus.  He did not say, Pay me ten talents of silver and I will deliver him to you.  He asked, What would you be willing to give me?  He phrases the question almost as an apology: I know he is not worth much, but what would you give for him?  This also indicates for us how much Judas must have despised Jesus, that he would take so little for him.  This would go well with the idea that Judas felt himself betrayed by the Lord, whose kingdom was spiritual and not physical, as Judas and the others had expected all along.

What is Jesus worth to us?  What would we give to make him safe, to buy him back from his enemies?  What would we do to be with him forever?  We should think about his worth to us, and how would we show him this in our lives.

 Tuesday in Holy Week, March 30, 2021

John 13:21-33, 36-38

Reclining at table with his disciples, Jesus was deeply troubled and testified, “Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.” The disciples looked at one another, at a loss as to whom he meant. One of his disciples, the one whom Jesus loved, was reclining at Jesus’ side. So Simon Peter nodded to him to find out whom he meant. He leaned back against Jesus’ chest and said to him, “Master, who is it?” Jesus answered, “It is the one to whom I hand the morsel after I have dipped it.” So he dipped the morsel and took it and handed it to Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot. After Judas took the morsel, Satan entered him. So Jesus said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly.” Now none of those reclining at table realized why he said this to him. Some thought that since Judas kept the money bag, Jesus had told him, “Buy what we need for the feast,” or to give something to the poor. So Judas took the morsel and left at once. And it was night. When he had left, Jesus said, “Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him. If God is glorified in him, God will also glorify him in himself, and he will glorify him at once. My children, I will be with you only a little while longer. You will look for me, and as I told the Jews, ‘Where I go you cannot come,’ so now I say it to you.”  Simon Peter said to him, “Master, where are you going?” Jesus answered him, “Where I am going, you cannot follow me now, though you will follow later.” Peter said to him, “Master, why can I not follow you now? I will lay down my life for you.” Jesus answered, “Will you lay down your life for me? Amen, amen, I say to you, the cock will not crow before you deny me three times.”

““Amen, amen, I say to you, one of you will betray me.”  The Lord says these words to the Apostles not in order to rouse them to action against Judas, but in order to give him a chance to reconsider what he was planning to do.  The Lord gave Judas multiple opportunities to change his mind and to repent.  The Lord etting him know that he knew would certainly have scared off all but the most determined of men.  Only a true enemy would go through with his scheme after learning that the one against whom he was plotting was aware of it.  Again, when the Lord indicated that the betrayer would be the one to whom he offered food, Judas could have turned back.  The gesture should have reminded Judas of all that the Lord had done for him and for those who had come to him in their need.  Then, when the Lord said to him, “What you are going to do, do quickly”, Judas could have opted out, again knowing that the Lord could stop him or order the loyal disciples to stop him, or even that the Lord could slip away from him, as he had several times before from those who would have killed him before his time.  And then, in the Garden, when Judas approached the Lord with his band of thugs, and the Lord said to him, “Do you betray the Son of Man with a kiss?”, Judas could have whispered to him to get away, and he could have assisted his Master’s escape by hindering those with the torches.

Sometimes we see portrayals of Judas in movies or books which attempt to show him as confused, tricked by the chief priests, or even believing that he was helping the Lord bring about his Kingdom.  In reality, Judas was a deadly enemy set upon the Lord’s arrest and murder.  His later feelings of apparent remorse stem more from his fear of retaliation from the Lord’s followers than from concern for the Lord whom he had sold to the chief priests.  

We each receive multiple chances throughout our lives to repent of our sins and return to a God who is desperate for us, so much so that he sent his Son to die for us.  Let us truly turn from sin and from every attachment that yet binds us to the things of this world so that we may finish our lives here like Peter, and not like Judas.

 Monday of Holy Week, March 29, 2021

John 12:1-11

Six days before Passover Jesus came to Bethany, where Lazarus was, whom Jesus had raised from the dead. They gave a dinner for him there, and Martha served, while Lazarus was one of those reclining at table with him. Mary took a liter of costly perfumed oil made from genuine aromatic nard and anointed the feet of Jesus and dried them with her hair; the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil. Then Judas the Iscariot, one of his disciples, and the one who would betray him, said, “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?” He said this not because he cared about the poor but because he was a thief and held the money bag and used to steal the contributions. So Jesus said, “Leave her alone. Let her keep this for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”  The large crowd of the Jews found out that he was there and came, not only because of him, but also to see Lazarus, whom he had raised from the dead. And the chief priests plotted to kill Lazarus too, because many of the Jews were turning away and believing in Jesus because of him.

Mary of Bethany’s extraordinary action has been explained by some as that this is the same event as described in Luke 7, 37-38, and that Mary did this out of remorse for the sinful life she had led.  But the two events are clearly distinct from each other, and the women involved are not the same person.  Thus, these were two anointings.  Mary’s anointing of the Lord in this way might be connected with the raising of her brother Lazarus, as recounted in John 11: either as a sign of her repentance after reproaching the Lord for not coming before her brother died, or out of gratitude to the Lord for raising him up.  Mary also unwittingly performed a sign that pointed to the Lord’s burial in just a few days.  The pouring out of the ointment, which was actually pure spikenard costing up to a thousand dollars in today’s money, shows how her heart poured out unreservedly to the Lord.  The wiping of his feet with her hair is something that not even a slave would be expected to do.  It is a sign of her readiness to act on her faith in him no matter the consequences.  During all of this, she speaks not a word.

St. John presents a contrast of Mary with Judas, who objects: “Why was this oil not sold for three hundred days’ wages and given to the poor?”  John points that Judas said this not because he cared for the poor but because he was a greedy thief.  We see Mary, silent, performing her good work, and then Judas, making a great show of concern for the poor, but in fact doing nothing for them.  As a rule of thumb, the flashier a campaign to raise money for the poor, the less likely the poor will see any of it.  

“Let her keep this for the day of my burial. You always have the poor with you, but you do not always have me.”  The Lord makes this startling announcement in the midst of a feast to celebrate his raising of Lazarus.  This is most meaningful for us today because we will not always have the opportunity to serve the Lord in our world, not because he is leaving, but because we are, and we know neither the day nor the hour.  While we should perform charitable acts while we can, our primary work is the worship of the Lord and carrying out his will in our daily lives.  We offer this worship in our prayers throughout the day and most especially at the Sacrifice of the Mass.  The worship of God is central to our lives as human beings and as Christians.  If we worship God here on earth while we can, then we will always have the Lord, in heaven.  

“And the chief priests plotted to kill Lazarus too, because many of the Jews were turning away and believing in Jesus because of him.”  And John contrasts Mary with the chief priests who, rather than celebrating this unprecedented miracle by the Lord as a sign of his divinity, seek to destroy this sign as though they could destroy divinity itself.  Mary, in her humble, quiet way serves, and the chief priests, with all their learning and responsibility for doing good, rage.

 Palm Sunday, March 28, 2021

Mark 11, 2-7

“Untie it and bring it here. If anyone should say to you, ‘Why are you doing this?’ reply, ‘The Master has need of it and will send it back here at once.’  So they went off and found a colt tethered at a gate outside on the street, and they untied it. Some of the bystanders said to them, ‘What are you doing, untying the colt?’ They answered them just as Jesus had told them to, and they permitted them to do it. So they brought the colt to Jesus and put their cloaks over it. And he sat on it. 

Palm Sunday is celebrated with two readings from the Gospel.  The second reading is that of the Passion of the Lord, while the first, given at the very beginning of Mass, is that of the Lord’s triumphal entry into Jerusalem.

In the passage quoted above, the Lord orders his disciples to bring him a colt to ride into the city.  In the ancient world, people normally entered a city on foot, leading in their pack animals if they were merchants or traders.  Only a king or a conquering general would ride in, mounted.  The Lord signifies his Kingship in this way, but by riding in on the colt of an ass, and not on a horse, shows his humility.  

We can understand the human soul as the “colt” on which Jesus rides.  The Lord desires it, as he desires a soul, and he sends his disciples to free it and lead it to him.  Thus, the human soul is tied with the bonds of sin, tethered at the gate of death.  Bystanders, that is, the demons standing before the gate of death, demand, “What are you doing, untying the colt?”  They had seen the colt, that is, this soul, as their property, although they had no title to it. The Church frees it and leads it to the Lord by the reins of the conscience, saying to the demons, “The Master has need of it.”  The demons give way in fear, and the Church leads it to the Lord.  The Church lays the “cloak” of its intercession upon the soul, and the Lord seats himself on it, that is, he enthrones himself upon it.  He then guides the soul into the holy city — not the old Jerusalem, but the New Jerusalem which comes down out of heaven from God  (cf. Revelation 21, 2).  The Lord had warned the demons through his Church that he would “send it back here at once”.  And so he does, in the form of the soul’s prayers for those still tethered at the gate of death.

 Saturday in the Fifth Week of Lent, March 27, 2021

John 11:45-56

Many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what Jesus had done began to believe in him. But some of them went to the Pharisees and told them what Jesus had done. So the chief priests and the Pharisees convened the Sanhedrin and said, “What are we going to do? This man is performing many signs. If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.” But one of them, Caiphas who was high priest that year, said to them, “You know nothing, nor do you consider that it is better for you that one man should die instead of the people, so that the whole nation may not perish.” He did not say this on his own, but since he was high priest for that year, he prophesied that Jesus was going to die for the nation, and not only for the nation, but also to gather into one the dispersed children of God. So from that day on they planned to kill him. So Jesus no longer walked about in public among the Jews, but he left for the region near the desert, to a town called Ephraim, and there he remained with his disciples.  Now the Passover of the Jews was near, and many went up from the country to Jerusalem before Passover to purify themselves. They looked for Jesus and said to one another as they were in the temple area, “What do you think? That he will not come to the feast?”

Here, St. John shows us the inner workings of the movement that resulted in the Death of the Lord Jesus.  It is curious in that John identifies the moment in which the high priest and his circle made the decision to do this as that in which they learned of the raising of Lazarus.  John specifically shows the high priest himself as initiating this: “It is better for you that one man should die instead of the people.”  In other words, the high priest goes about his work of sacrificing a Lamb for the sins of the people.

Now, we notice the motivation.  The Jewish leaders spoke of their fear: “If we leave him alone, all will believe in him, and the Romans will come and take away both our land and our nation.”  That is, just as many of the Lord’s own followers expected Jesus, as the Messiah, to lead the revolt against the Romans, despite his earnest efforts to disabuse them of this notion, so did the Jewish leaders.  The Lord had fought against this materialist interpretation of the Messiah, telling the Jews who held it that they were “of the world”, while he himself was not.  Ironically, it is the greatest materialist in the land, Pontius Pilate, to whom the Lord explained that his kingdom was not of this world, who saw the Lord as a spiritual leader and sought to release him.  

But behind all this is the raising of Lazarus.  The panicked reaction of the Pharisees and the Sanhedrin to this news tells us of their obstinacy in the face of God’s glory.  They will let nothing change their minds about the Lord.  They see the gift of life as a threat to themselves.  Their reaction also proves that they never really wanted the Messiah to come, for his work would be to overthrow the Romans.  If the public raising up of a dead man was not a sign of the Lord’s ability to defeat the Romans, then there could be none.  All their teaching the people to await the Messiah was a sham, after all, and so we see the greatest reason why the Lord labeled them as “hypocrites”.  

“So Jesus no longer walked about in public among the Jews, but he left for the region near the desert.”  Not wishing to die at any other time than at Passover, the Lord withdrew until all was in readiness.  

“Many went up from the country to Jerusalem before Passover to purify themselves.”  This little detail, so easy to overlook, reminds us that it is a Jew telling this story to other Jews, that is, to Jewish Christians, and, in conjunction with other evidence, we know that St. John “is the disciple who is bearing witness to these things, and who has written these things; and we know that his testimony is true.”  Let us also be disciples whose testimony to Jesus is reckoned as true so that others “may have life, and have it abundantly” (John 10, 10).

 Friday in the Fifth Week of Lent, March 26, 2021

John 10:31-42

The Jews picked up rocks to stone Jesus.  Jesus answered them, “I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of these are you trying to stone me?” The Jews answered him, “We are not stoning you for a good work but for blasphemy. You, a man, are making yourself God.” Jesus answered them, “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, You are gods”‘? If it calls them gods to whom the word of God came, and Scripture cannot be set aside, can you say that the one whom the Father has consecrated and sent into the world blasphemes because I said, ‘I am the Son of God’? If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works, so that you may realize and understand that the Father is in me and I am in the Father.” Then they tried again to arrest him; but he escaped from their power.  He went back across the Jordan to the place where John first baptized, and there he remained. Many came to him and said, “John performed no sign, but everything John said about this man was true.” And many there began to believe in him.

The Jews to whom Jesus had been talking knew very well who he claimed to be, but they do not link his statements with the evidence in support of them — the signs, the miracles.  Those which the Lord had performed in Judea and Galilee showed beyond doubt that he was no ordinary individual.  Yet, when that individual tried to explain who he was, they rebelled with rage.  “I have shown you many good works from my Father. For which of these are you trying to stone me?”  This is a plea, but not one designed to save his life; rather, the Lord is trying to save theirs, to get them to reflect and to make the connection between what he has done and what he has said.  “You, a man, are making yourself God.”  The people understand that if Jesus really is the Son of God, then he is divine, he is equal to the Father, but they will not consider the evidence.  “Is it not written in your law, ‘I said, You are gods’?”  The Lord counters now that if they will not accept him as divine, they ought to grant that he, with all his power, is at least on the same level as those others whom Scripture regards as “sons of God”, namely, kings, prophets, judges, and priests, who possessed no such power.   

“If I do not perform my Father’s works, do not believe me; but if I perform them, even if you do not believe me, believe the works.”  If he was not the Son of God, he would have no power; only God could do what he had done.  The rage of the crowd is instructive.  The people do not simply walk away as though he were a mad man or possessed.  They have seen what he has done in terms of his miracles.  They have heard his claims.  But they do not want to believe him, and for fear that they will, they want to stone him, to silence him.  It is much like a guilty person trying to silence the incessant cry of his conscience.

“Then they tried again to arrest him; but he escaped from their power.”  Others among the crowd sought to detain him, to bring him before the chief priests, but as the Lord had often done before, beginning at his own home town, he evaded them.  When the Lord did this, time and again, he simply walked through the midst of the people seeking to harm them.  The angels cleared the way for him.  He loved these people too much to disrespect their free will choices, and went away from them lest they commit sin by causing him injury.  “He went back across the Jordan to the place where John first baptized, and there he remained.”  It is interesting that he went back to where he had started his Public Life.  Some of John’s disciples surely remained there, carrying out the work of their master even after his death, but it was a remote location, one where only those who wanted to find him, would.  The ones whose hearts felt the love and power of his Heart, found him.  “Many came to him and said, “John performed no sign, but everything John said about this man was true.”  People began to reflect, too, on the miracles and what they meant.  The Lord in the pause of his ministry here, was giving grace a chance to work on those who heard him and heard about him.  The call of the Lord is like a sliver that gets under the skin: a person can try to ignore it, but it gradually becomes all the person can think about and so has to do something about.

“And many there began to believe in him.”  They “began”.  They learned to believe, cooperating, little by little, with the grace they had received, until full faith blossomed.

 The Solemnity of the Annunciation, March 25, 2021

Luke 1:26–38

The angel Gabriel was sent from God to a town of Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin betrothed to a man named Joseph, of the house of David, and the virgin’s name was Mary. And coming to her, he said, “Hail, full of grace! The Lord is with you.” But she was greatly troubled at what was said and pondered what sort of greeting this might be. Then the angel said to her, “Do not be afraid, Mary, for you have found favor with God. Behold, you will conceive in your womb and bear a son, and you shall name him Jesus. He will be great and will be called Son of the Most High, and the Lord God will give him the throne of David his father, and he will rule over the house of Jacob forever, and of his Kingdom there will be no end.” But Mary said to the angel, “How can this be, since I have no relations with a man?” And the angel said to her in reply, “The Holy Spirit will come upon you, and the power of the Most High will overshadow you. Therefore the child to be born will be called holy, the Son of God. And behold, Elizabeth, your relative, has also conceived a son in her old age, and this is the sixth month for her who was called barren; for nothing will be impossible for God.” Mary said, “Behold, I am the handmaid of the Lord. May it be done to me according to your word.” Then the angel departed from her.

At the end of the Akathist hymn of the Greeks, we hear, “Gabriel was rapt in amazement as he beheld your virginity and the splendor of your purity, O Mother of God, and he cried out to you: By what name shall I call you? I am bewildered; I am lost! I shall greet you as I was commanded to do: Hail, O Woman full of Grace!”  To glimpse something of the nature of the Conception of our Lord in the womb of the Virgin Mary, we must resort to images such as that of the burning bush in Exodus 3, 2: “And the angel of the Lord appeared to [Moses] in a flame of fire out of the midst of a bush; and he looked, and lo, the bush was burning, yet it was not consumed.”  It is a contradiction, a paradox, an impossibility, and yet it is.  

God joined himself to a human nature and so joined himself to us, that we might be joined to him.  For this reason, St. Thomas Aquinas calls the womb of the Virgin Mary the thalamus — the marriage chamber — of God and human nature.  And this is a fallen human nature that receives him as Spouse, reminding us of the commandment of God to marry the harlot: “Go, take to yourself a wife of harlotry and have children of harlotry, for the land commits great harlotry by forsaking the Lord.”  This prophetic act was meant to present to the Israelites a living picture of their own relationship with God.  Hosea went and did marry such a wife, and he loved her and they had a son.  But she returned to her harlotry and broke his heart.  We can see here the Son of God marrying our nature in order to draw it away from its inclination to sin, and so to draw us away from it as well. 

The Virgin Mary shows us how to respond to God’s love and his offer of union with our souls.  May we imitate her mind and her life in our obedience and faith.

 Wednesday in the Fifth week of Lent, March 24, 2021

John 8:31-42

Jesus said to those Jews who believed in him, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples, and you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.” They answered him, “We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone. How can you say, ‘You will become free’?” Jesus answered them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin. A slave does not remain in a household forever, but a son always remains. So if the Son frees you, then you will truly be free. I know that you are descendants of Abraham. But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you. I tell you what I have seen in the Father’s presence; then do what you have heard from the Father.” They answered and said to him, “Our father is Abraham.” Jesus said to them, “If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham. But now you are trying to kill me, a man who has told you the truth that I heard from God; Abraham did not do this. You are doing the works of your father!” So they said to him, “We were not born of fornication. We have one Father, God.” Jesus said to them, “If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”

“Jesus said to those Jews who believed in him, ‘If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples.’ ”  In reflecting on this Gospel reading, it is necessary to keep in mind that the Lord Jesus is speaking to some of his own followers — not primarily to the Apostles, but to those who followed him regularly enough to be termed “disciples”, or, “students”.  

Here, the Lord says, “If you remain in my word, you will truly be my disciples.”  The present tense of the word translated as “remain” can also be translated as “are remaining”, “do remain”, and “keep remaining”.  The implication is if these followers persist in their learning from Christ, they will “truly” or “certainly” be his disciples.  The conversion of one’s life to the Lord is a lifelong process which must be actively carried out every day.  To call oneself a disciple of the Lord Jesus, then, is a very different matter from calling oneself a disciple of, say, the Pharisees, in which case a person would study their interpretation of the Law and come to know it well at some point.  As a consequence of the conversion of life which Christ demands of those who would become his true disciples, “you will know the truth”, that is, the truth about God and his plan of salvation, and the Truth, the Lord Jesus himself.  “And the truth will set you free”.  The truth about God and his plan of salvation will set his disciples free from ignorance, render them more resistant to sin, and enable them to give heartfelt praise to God.  The Truth, Jesus Christ, will set them free from their past sins and make them adopted children of the Father.

“We are descendants of Abraham and have never been enslaved to anyone.”  These descendants took the words of the Lord in a societal sense, revealing their belief in the Lord as a political and military Messiah.  If they had understood the Lord as a religious prophet or holy man, they would have continued listening or simply asked him what he meant by “freedom”.  We modern people must be careful reading here: there was only one kind of freedom in ancient times, that of freedom from slavery.  The idea that one could have human rights in our sense was more than a millennium and a half away.  To these Jews, the Lord was implying that since the truth would make them free, they must be slaves of the Romans.

“I say to you, everyone who commits sin is a slave of sin.”  The Lord clarifies his statement to them, but they fail to see that he is speaking of the spirit.  All they can think of is the political situation.  “But you are trying to kill me, because my word has no room among you.”  We ought to consider that his audience was not speaking with a single voice.  While there were some disciples among them who knew him as a “rabbi”, it seems that very many, or at least the loudest of them, were only interested in him as a leader who would lead the revolt against the Romans.  It is to these that he speaks now: his refusal to be their general makes him useless in their sight, and even suspect as a collaborator, this man who speaks of forgiving enemies.

“If you were Abraham’s children, you would be doing the works of Abraham.”  Their claim to be the “children of Abraham” is based on their biological heritage and not on their imitation of Abraham’s faith and virtues.  The question of who are the true descendants of Abraham becomes a key question for the early Gentile Christians, as we see in the Letters of St. Paul.  The biology, however, is coincidental, while the imitation is essential.  The more raucous members of the crowd claim to be “children of Abraham” as though Abraham’s bloodline contained some quality that made them incapable of becoming slaves.  In fact, the “children of Abraham” had been enslaved more than once in their history, and had been incapable of maintaining an independent political existence for most of their existence.  The kingdom they had once enjoyed fractured irrevocably within two generations of its founding, and neither of these could overcome the successive waves of the major powers of the time.  In short, their pride was seriously misplaced.

“We were not born of fornication. We have one Father, God.”  This is an intriguing retort on the part of members of the crowd,  some scholars think that this refers to doubts about the Lord’s human origins as the legitimate son of Joseph and Mary, and that Jesus was born of an adulterous union, as the pagan author Celsus (died ca. 175 A.D.) would claim in his book against Christianity.  Their assertion that God is their Father seems to collide with their previous assertion that Abraham was their Father.  But here, too, the Lord points out that their behavior is not in accord with God’s will.  But they are doing the works of their father.  Jesus will shortly identify their father as the devil.

“If God were your Father, you would love me, for I came from God and am here; I did not come on my own, but he sent me.”  If they loved God as their father, they would love Jesus, the Father’s only-begotten Son, whom the Father sent into the world to them.  The Lord confronts them with the reality that God is not their Father, although he may be their Creator, and they do not love him, the Son.

We who rejoice in our baptism are rightly called the adopted sons and daughters of God, but we must persevere in the word of the Son so that we may behave as God’s children, and so “truly” be his children.

 Tuesday in the Fifth Week of Lent, March 23, 2021

John 8:21-30

Jesus said to the Pharisees: “I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin. Where I am going you cannot come.” So the Jews said, “He is not going to kill himself, is he, because he said, ‘Where I am going you cannot come’?” He said to them, “You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above. You belong to this world, but I do not belong to this world. That is why I told you that you will die in your sins. For if you do not believe that I AM, you will die in your sins.” So they said to him, “Who are you?” Jesus said to them, “What I told you from the beginning. I have much to say about you in condemnation. But the one who sent me is true, and what I heard from him I tell the world.” They did not realize that he was speaking to them of the Father. So Jesus said to them, “When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me. The one who sent me is with me. He has not left me alone, because I always do what is pleasing to him.” Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.

“I am going away and you will look for me, but you will die in your sin.”  At first glance, the two parts of the Lord’s sentence do not seem to go together: he is going away but they will die in their sin.  If the conjunction were “and” instead of “but”, the sentence would make better sense because we could see that his going away was the cause of their dying in sin.  The key here is to understand the weight of “and you will look for me”:  you will look for me when I have gone away, but you will not find me and you will die in your sin.  The Pharisees and other unbelievers have the Lord before them at that moment and so they can still be convinced by him of the truth he came to proclaim, but once he has gone, their opportunity is gone too.  If they are not convinced by the Lord himself, they will not be convinced by the Church he leaves behind.  They will die in their refusal to believe.  The Lord emphasizes this finality by telling them, “Where I am going you cannot come.”  He is speaking of his own obedience to the Father, in which they cannot share because of their unbelief; into the “hands” of the Father, to which the Lord will commend himself as he dies; and, at the right side of the Father, after the Ascension.  On the other hand, the saints do go to these places.  The response of the Pharisees that the Lord is planning to do away with himself is both crude and unrealistic on their part, and they seem to be aware of this, but they do not ask him what he means.

“You belong to what is below, I belong to what is above. You belong to this world, but I do not belong to this world.”  St. John was fascinated by the Lord’s teaching about “of this world” and “not of this world”.  In his Gospel, he quoted the Lord using these terms whenever he could, and he used them himself in his First Letter.  This “world” is not so much the earth as the things that the bulk of people consider important or even necessary here that would be absurd to have in heaven, that other “world”: in a word, materialism, and all that pertains to it, such as lust, pride, and envy.  The Pharisees, then, belong to that world in which material wealth, physical appearances, and high positions in government or commerce are of prime importance.  For the people of this world, there is no other world, and when a person dies, they are no more.  The Lord, and his angels and saints, belong to a world that is eternal, unchanging, and forever beautiful.  A tide of the purest love engulfs all present in this world as they gaze with steady eyes at God himself.

“ ‘Who are you?’ Jesus said to them, ‘What I told you from the beginning.’ ”  They have heard him declare himself to be the Son of Man, and they knew what that meant from their familiarity with the Book of Daniel.  He is divine.  But they have rejected this title for him, this understanding of him, despite the miracles he performed which could only be done with the power of God.  The Lord is not going to rephrase what he has told them to something more to their taste.  “ ‘The one who sent me is true, and what I heard from him I tell the world.’  They did not realize that he was speaking to them of the Father.”  Jesus had spoken of his Father in this way often enough that the Pharisees did know of whom he was speaking here; they simply refused to accept it.

“When you lift up the Son of Man, then you will realize that I AM, and that I do nothing on my own, but I say only what the Father taught me.”  Interestingly, the Lord says to the Pharisees, “When you lift up, etc.”  He holds them accountable for his coming Death, not the Romans alone.  The “lifting up” was a euphemism for crucifixion, so common at that time.  The words “I am” are translated from the Greek ego eimi, which seems to be a translation of the name God gives himself in the Hebrew language when he first spoke to Moses.  The name means something like “I am”, or, “I am who am”.  It has to do with life and being.  Perhaps the Lord alludes to it when he calls himself “The Life” at the Last Supper.  Armed with this name, Moses went to Egypt to work and suffer for the freedom of his fellow Hebrews from their slavery.  The Lord Jesus, revealing himself thus, goes among the human race to work and suffer for the salvation of us all.

“Because he spoke this way, many came to believe in him.”  That is, many of the Jews who heard him on this occasion and on others “came to believe” in him — perhaps fully believing after his Death and Resurrection — because of his boldness of speech, and the solid certainty of his conviction.  There were none like him either in speech or in character.  Others possessed wisdom and courage: he appeared to be Wisdom and Courage personified.

We are to speak of him as his emissaries.  May we so speak of him that those who hear us come to believe in him.

 Monday in the Fifth Week of Lent, March 22, 2021

John 8:1-11

Jesus went to the Mount of Olives. But early in the morning he arrived again in the temple area, and all the people started coming to him, and he sat down and taught them. Then the scribes and the Pharisees brought a woman who had been caught in adultery and made her stand in the middle. They said to him, “Teacher, this woman was caught in the very act of committing adultery. Now in the law, Moses commanded us to stone such women. So what do you say?” They said this to test him, so that they could have some charge to bring against him. Jesus bent down and began to write on the ground with his finger. But when they continued asking him, he straightened up and said to them, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” Again he bent down and wrote on the ground. And in response, they went away one by one, beginning with the elders. So he was left alone with the woman before him. Then Jesus straightened up and said to her, “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?” She replied, “No one, sir.” Then Jesus said, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.” 

We see the cynical coldness of these scribes and Pharisees in using this woman in this way.  She meant nothing to them and they had no thought for her.  They intended to use her as a thing, as bait to trap the Lord Jesus.  The fact that they brought her before him instead of simply posing the question to him, as they had posed so many other challenges to him indicates their awareness of his mercy, and of his willingness to diverge, as they thought, from a strict understanding of the Mosaic Law.  

The Lord does not dispute the woman’s guilt and he does not act as her defender.  Rather, he sees how for these Pharisees the Law is nothing more than a noose with which they hope to choke him.  They bring him the woman and the question not out of zeal for the Law or justice but simply to find reason to denounce him in front of a crowd.  It is this that he addresses when he says, “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.”  His writing with his finger and seeming lack of interest in the case make clear his awareness of their bad faith.  Seeing this, and also feeling exposed by the Lord’s injunction for the one without sin to cast the first stone at her leave them powerless, and they leave, one by one.  Interestingly, the oldest leave first.

“So he was left alone with the woman before him.”  One day, it will be our turn to face the Lord, when, at the time of our death we appear before him naked,  our sins in plain view.  Shall we stand in silence and in fear, as this woman?  She did not leave, although nothing prevented her departing.  Perhaps this was because now she had nowhere to go.  All she had left to her was her life, not even a shred of clothing.  But there was also unfinished business between her and the Lord and she must have sensed it.  The Lord let her stand in silence as though giving her a chance to speak.  Then he did, when she did not: “Woman, where are they? Has no one condemned you?”  She does not know the answer to the first question but she can answer the second, her apprehension keeping her answer brief: “No one, sir.”  She says no more.  She offers no thanks, asks the Lord no questions, does not beg for help, and makes no excuses.  The Lord seems to wait for more from her.  When she makes no motion to speak further, he says to her, “Neither do I condemn you. Go, and from now on do not sin any more.”  We note that he does not forgive her — for she has not asked for forgiveness — but he releases her and advises her not to sin again.  But if she is to continue living, she must humbly ask for forgiveness from her husband or her family, and they must offer it to her, or she will have to make her living with the harlots outside the city.  The idea of asking if she could follow her Savior does not seem to have occurred to her.

 The Fifth Sunday of Lent, March 20, 2021

John 12:20–33

Some Greeks who had come to worship at the Passover Feast came to Philip, who was from Bethsaida in Galilee, and asked him, “Sir, we would like to see Jesus.” Philip went and told Andrew; then Andrew and Philip went and told Jesus. Jesus answered them, “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified. Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit. Whoever loves his life loses it, and whoever hates his life in this world will preserve it for eternal life. Whoever serves me must follow me, and where I am, there also will my servant be. The Father will honor whoever serves me. I am troubled now. Yet what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour’? But it was for this purpose that I came to this hour. Father, glorify your name.” Then a voice came from heaven, “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.” The crowd there heard it and said it was thunder; but others said, “An angel has spoken to him.” Jesus answered and said, “This voice did not come for my sake but for yours. Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out. And when I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.” He said this indicating the kind of death he would die. 

“Some Greeks who had come to worship.”  These would have been Jews whose first language was Greek.  They may have come from Antioch, a Greek city with a large Jewish population, or they may have come from further afield.  Their eagerness to see Jesus tells us that they had heard of the Lord in their faraway home town and had long nourished a desire to see him for themselves.  This fact helps to explain the rest of this reading.  These Greek Jews found Philip, an Apostle from Bethsaida, a town on the coast of the Sea of Galilee in what is now the region of the Golan Heights.  Due to its location, bordering Greek-speaking Gentile territory, the Greek language would have been in common use among the inhabitants.  The Greek Jews who came to Jerusalem may have heard Philip speaking Greek and so, learning that he was a close follower of Jesus, they came to him and asked if he would point the Lord out to them.  We note that St. John writes that they wanted “to see” Jesus, not that they wanted to meet with him.  It was enough for them merely to see him.  After pointing him out to them, Philip went and told Andrew about this interesting and potentially important development: that these people from a far off land had heard of the Lord, a sign that his fame was spreading abroad and was not any longer confined to Israel and the country immediately around it.  If the Messiah was thus gaining international attention, he might be able to make alliances and procure arms for the coming war to throw out the Romans and establish the new kingdom  of Israel.  And probably very excited, Andrew went to tell his Master the news.

At first, the Lord seems to respond in the way his Apostles would have expected, with his own excitement: “The hour has come for the Son of Man to be glorified.”  For the Apostles, this “glory” was of the earthly kind.  Their hearts rose up in hearing these words.  But the Lord was speaking of a different kind of glory: “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground and dies, it remains just a grain of wheat; but if it dies, it produces much fruit.”  He is speaking of his Death and Resurrection, which will initiate the conversion of the world.  He is saying that the interest of these Greek Jews is a sign, a premonition, even, of the efforts of the Apostles after he rises from the dead.  His glory is his Passion, Death, and Resurrection, which would be for the salvation of the world.

After speaking of the apostolic life, the Lord speaks of himself: “I am troubled now. Yet what should I say, ‘Father, save me from this hour’?”  He is troubled because of his full awareness of the suffering he will endure.  We see this graphically portrayed in the scene at the Garden of Gethsemane as recorded in Luke 22, 41-44.  Then, to answer his own question, he calls out his assent to his Father in heaven: “Father, glorify your name!”  That is, Let your will be done.  And the Father responds very physically, accepting his Son’s assent to his will: “I have glorified it and will glorify it again.”  The Lord Jesus clarifies that this exchange between him and his Father was meant to be a public one: “This voice did not come for my sake but for yours.”  It is his announcement to the world that he is prepared to die for the salvation of all, and of the Father’s acceptance of this Sacrifice.  This is not some secret deed, some hidden action, something only the initiated could learn about and understand.  The intention is stated and accepted, the arrest is made and an interrogation takes places in the presence of the Jewish leaders, the Victim is brought in broad daylight to Pilate, who condemns him, and finally the Sacrifice is consummated on Calvary.  This is history, not fable. 

The first result of the Lord’s Death: “Now is the time of judgment on this world; now the ruler of this world will be driven out.”  And then, “When I am lifted up from the earth, I will draw everyone to myself.”  That is, Greeks and Jews alike.  Let us also be drawn ever nearer to him who was lifted up for us,

 Saturday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 20, 2021

John 7:40-53

Some in the crowd who heard these words of Jesus said, “This is truly the Prophet.” Others said, “This is the Christ.” But others said, “The Christ will not come from Galilee, will he? Does not Scripture say that the Christ will be of David’s family and come from Bethlehem, the village where David lived?” So a division occurred in the crowd because of him. Some of them even wanted to arrest him, but no one laid hands on him. So the guards went to the chief priests and Pharisees, who asked them, “Why did you not bring him?” The guards answered, “Never before has anyone spoken like this man.” So the Pharisees answered them, “Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, which does not know the law, is accursed.” Nicodemus, one of their members who had come to him earlier, said to them, “Does our law condemn a man before it first hears him and finds out what he is doing?” They answered and said to him, “You are not from Galilee also, are you? Look and see that no prophet arises from Galilee.” Then each went to his own house.

St. John relates a debate which took place in Jerusalem concerning the identity of the Lord Jesus.  In fact, it is hard to look at a man and see more than a man.  It is hard for us even to look at an individual walking down the street or dining next to us and to know that this is a great musician or a learned scholar or even a highly regarded athlete.  It has been known to happen that wealthy owners of banks visit one of their branches while dressed casually, and the tellers who treat them discourteously, finding to their horror who this really is, are fired.  Many people who heard Jesus preach in the Temple area in Jerusalem or in places in Galilee never saw him perform a miracle and only heard about his miracles second- or third-hand.  The people here had just heard the Lord proclaim, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink.  He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heart shall flow rivers of living water.’ ” (John 7, 37-38).  They had heard him preach, but otherwise they seemed to know little about him.  Some question about the place of his birth arose.  Despite their incomplete knowledge, some folks proved ready at least to accept him as the long awaited Prophet of whom Moses spoke, or even as the Messiah, “the Christ”.  As this was only the second visit Jesus made to Jerusalem during his Public Life, during which he stayed only a few days, this is remarkable.  They did look at him and they listened to him and, perhaps influenced by news of his miracles, they believed at least this much.  These were people of good-will.  Even those who could not accept Jesus as the Messiah based their thinking on what little evidence they had before them.  The guards too, are shown to be of good-will and open minds.  They fail to arrest Jesus because they have heard him speak, and they reckoned that the words he uttered were not those of a criminal or a danger to the public good.

“Have you also been deceived? Have any of the authorities or the Pharisees believed in him? But this crowd, which does not know the law, is accursed.”  The Pharisees ask an interesting question here.  The very people who should have recognized him — the authorities and the Pharisees — did not recognize him because they were not of good will or open mind.  And they had heard him preach many times and seen him perform many incredible miracles.  They simply refused to believe.  They barred the door of their minds and hearts at the knock of faith, lest it enter in.  In addition. They convict themselves of failing to do the job they had set for themselves, for if the crowd did not know the Law, that was the fault of the Pharisees who purported to interpret it for them.  It is they, rather, who did not know the Law, for if they had, “they would never have crucified the Lord of glory” (1 Corinthians 2, 8).  

“Then each went to his own house.”  Those without faith do not go to God’s house.  They are not members of the Body of Christ.  They are alone, each of them, in solitude with their frustration, with their hopeless fight against the Truth.  

 The Solemnity of St. Joseph, March 19, 2021

Matthew 1:16, 18–21, 24a

Jacob was the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary. Of her was born Jesus who is called the Christ.  Now this is how the birth of Jesus Christ came about. When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit. Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly. Such was his intention when, behold, the angel of the Lord appeared to him in a dream and said, “Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home. For it is through the Holy Spirit that this child has been conceived in her. She will bear a son and you are to name him Jesus, because he will save his people from their sins.” When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home. 

“When his mother Mary was betrothed to Joseph, but before they lived together, she was found with child through the Holy Spirit.”  St. Jerome asks, “And who was this found by?  By Joseph alone.”  None but Joseph needed to know, although Mary’s cousin Elizabeth and her husband Zachariah also knew.  Mary would have told of her miraculous pregnancy to Joseph, and he had so high an opinion of her that he believed her the moment she told him of it, although much remained to be pondered and wondered at.  It seems to me that she would have told him very soon after the event of the Annunciation, even within a few hours, after she had thought and prayed.  Then, a few days afterwards, she went down to the Judean hill country to see Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist.  Joseph would have had six months, then, to turn over in his mind how he should act in the face of this tremendous news.

“Joseph her husband, since he was a righteous man, yet unwilling to expose her to shame, decided to divorce her quietly.”  A careful look at the Greek text and consideration of the comments of Fathers such as St. Jerome lead to a different translation for this verse: “Joseph, her husband, because he was a righteous man, indeed, unwilling to make public this secret, decided to separate from her quietly.”  Far from intending to divorce Mary, St. Joseph acted in a way that brings to mind Peter, who after the miraculous catch of fish, said to Jesus, “Depart from me, Lord, for I am a sinful man” (Luke 5, 8).  Such was his humility that he thought himself to be in the way of this staggering mystery of a woman who had conceived by the Holy Spirit.  His humility, in fact, makes him the perfect partner for “the Handmaid of the Lord” since they both thought of themselves as lowly servants of God.  It is this humility which makes him “righteous”, and not simply a person who obeyed all the rules.  Whatever the opinion of men, he was righteous before the Lord.  

“Joseph, son of David, do not be afraid to take Mary your wife into your home.”  The Angel reveals to us that fear has played an important role in his decision to step away from Mary and her Child.  Not the sort of fear that arises as the result of a threat, but the proper fear — respect — of God and of that which is holy.  This conclusively proves false the idea that Joseph meant to divorce Mary, because a man does not undertake this action out of fear, particularly if he believes his wife has acted unfaithfully.

“When Joseph awoke, he did as the angel of the Lord had commanded him and took his wife into his home.”  The righteous man obeyed the Angel who was sent from God.  

We marvel at Joseph’s holiness: his humility and his innocent and wholehearted trust in the Blessed Virgin Mary, and who alone, of all the men who ever lived, was worthy of this Woman and her Child.  A simple working man who was, with his wife, God’s choicest servant.

 Thursday in the Fourth Week Of Lent, March 18, 2021

John 5:31-47

Jesus said to the Jews: “If I testify on my own behalf, my testimony is not true. But there is another who testifies on my behalf, and I know that the testimony he gives on my behalf is true. You sent emissaries to John, and he testified to the truth. I do not accept human testimony, but I say this so that you may be saved. He was a burning and shining lamp, and for a while you were content to rejoice in his light. But I have testimony greater than John’s. The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me. Moreover, the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf. But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent. You search the Scriptures, because you think you have eternal life through them; even they testify on my behalf. But you do not want to come to me to have life.  I do not accept human praise; moreover, I know that you do not have the love of God in you. I came in the name of my Father, but you do not accept me; yet if another comes in his own name, you will accept him. How can you believe, when you accept praise from one another and do not seek the praise that comes from the only God? Do not think that I will accuse you before the Father: the one who will accuse you is Moses, in whom you have placed your hope. For if you had believed Moses, you would have believed me, because he wrote about me. But if you do not believe his writings, how will you believe my words?”

“But I have testimony greater than John’s. The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me. Moreover, the Father who sent me has testified on my behalf.”  The Lord speaks of his miracles and preaching as “the works that the Father gave me to accomplish.”  The miracle of the wine at Cana was predestined by the Father before all ages, as was the healing of the paralytic on the mat at Capernaum, and the healing of the woman with the blood disease.  Likewise, all the good we have received was predestined for us from before time began, that is, foreseen and planned.  The Father shows his love for each of us in this way, and he gives all things to us through his Son, who came down to us.  The powerful works which the Lord Jesus performed long ago proved his divinity at that time, and prove his divinity again to us through the historical record of the Gospels as well as in the lives of the saints.  He reveals himself as divine so that we may know him as a most trustworthy witness when he tells us about the Father and about the things of heaven.  Jesus, the Son of God, loves the Father with all his being, with unimaginable might, and glories in him: and like anyone in love, he tells us all about the one he loves.  In fact, he only talks about himself in order to talk about the Father.

“But you have never heard his voice nor seen his form, and you do not have his word remaining in you, because you do not believe in the one whom he has sent.”  In order to know the Father, we must know the Son.  That is, we can only know God as Father by knowing his Son.  Otherwise, the idea of God as Father is merely an abstract term.  God need not be a Father.  God as Father of the Son does not exist for the Jews or Moslems.  They only know God as solitary.  But to know God as Father of the Son tells us that this is a God of love.  The Father willed the begetting of his Son.  The Father did not “need” the Son.  He begot him because he loved him.  To know the Son as begotten by the Father tells us much about the Son, as well.  We can know that the Son is loved by the Father with a love beyond all telling.  That the Father sent his Son to die for our salvation, then, tells us how much we are loved by him.  These are truths worth dwelling on in the weeks before the Passion.

 Wednesday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 17, 2021

John 5:17-30

Jesus answered the Jews: “My Father is at work until now, so I am at work.” For this reason they tried all the more to kill him, because he not only broke the sabbath but he also called God his own father, making himself equal to God.  Jesus answered and said to them, “Amen, amen, I say to you, the Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also. For the Father loves the Son and shows him everything that he himself does, and he will show him greater works than these, so that you may be amazed. For just as the Father raises the dead and gives life, so also does the Son give life to whomever he wishes. Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to the Son, so that all may honor the Son just as they honor the Father. Whoever does not honor the Son does not honor the Father who sent him. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation, but has passed from death to life. 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 the Son the possession of life in himself. And he gave him power to exercise judgment, because he is the Son of Man. Do not be amazed at this, because the hour is coming in which all who are in the tombs will hear his voice and will come out, those who have done good deeds to the resurrection of life, but those who have done wicked deeds to the resurrection of condemnation.  I cannot do anything on my own; I judge as I hear, and my judgment is just, because I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.”

The Lord Jesus, the eternal Son of God, speaks here of the inner life of the Trinity of which he is a Person.  He speaks of his unity with the Father, and his procession and, hence, diversity from him.  What he reveals is almost too bright for the human eye to read, let alone the human mind to comprehend.  To gain some perspective on what he tells us, we should think of how the Son is “the image of the invisible God” (Colossians 1, 15), that is, of God the Father; and how we can only peer “through a glass, darkly” (1 Corinthians 13, 12) into these mysteries.

“The Son cannot do anything on his own, but only what he sees the Father doing; for what he does, the Son will do also.”  The Lord Jesus speaks of his unity with the Father.  In this way we can understand God saying, “Let us make man in our image” (Genesis 1, 26).  The Fathers tell us that this is God the Father speaking to the Son and the Holy Spirit.  We call the Father the Creator because he is the principle of all life, human and divine, but the creation of the world and of the human race was an action of the three Persons in union.

“The Father loves the Son”.  This unity is not something cold and abstract but is a bond of the deepest love, of the infinite love of the Persons for one another.  It is light pouring itself into light through the endless ages.  

“Nor does the Father judge anyone, but he has given all judgment to the Son.”  Here we see the diversity of the Persons of the Father and the Son.  The Father gives the authority and mandate for the judgment of the human race.  That is not to say that the Father disassociates it from himself, for the judgment the Son renders is in accord with the will of the Father and that of the Holy Spirit, but it is the prerogative of the Son to exercise it, as he was the Person who became incarnate.  

“I say to you, whoever hears my word and believes in the one who sent me has eternal life and will not come to condemnation.”  The Lord speaks now of the necessity for salvation of believing in him as the Son, and that he was begotten by the Father from all eternity.  One who truly believes this will be saved because through faith we are joined as members to the Son.  A person must believe in the Son as the Son of God in order to be made his member, as one cannot be a member of that which he does not believe.  “Hearing the word” of the Son comes through the good witness of those who are already his members.

“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.”  These were the souls of all who had died from the beginning of the world until the Death of the Lord: Adam and Eve, Noah, Abraham and Sarah, peasants and kings and queens, artists, soldiers, prophets and those who killed the prophets.  All heard the voice of the Son of God after his Death, when he descended to the place of the dead.  Those who lived justly followed him to heaven, while those who did not went hurtling into the everlasting fires of hell.

“I do not seek my own will but the will of the one who sent me.”  This is the will of the Son, to do his Father’s will.  It is the will, too, of all who would become saints: to do the will of the one who sent us into the world.  In this way, we are true members of the Son, and adopted sons and daughters of the Father.

Tuesday in the Fourth Week of Lent, March 16, 2021

John 5:1-16

There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem. Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes. In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled. One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years. When Jesus saw him lying there and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him, “Do you want to be well?” The sick man answered him, “Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.” Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.” Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.  Now that day was a sabbath. So the Jews said to the man who was cured, “It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.” He answered them, “The man who made me well told me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’“ They asked him, “Who is the man who told you, ‘Take it up and walk’?” The man who was healed did not know who it was, for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there. After this Jesus found him in the temple area and said to him, “Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.” The man went and told the Jews that Jesus was the one who had made him well. Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus because he did this on a sabbath.

One of the clues that tells us that St. John must have written his Gospel before it was destroyed by the Romans in the year 70 is the precise eyewitness descriptions that he provides, such as in the opening lines to the Gospel reading for today’s Mass.  Excavations carried out by archaeologists have confirmed the existence of the Pool of Bethesda and its porticoes.  It was a deep reservoir which served primarily as a source of drinking water for the inhabitants of the city.  From a text that is found in some Greek manuscripts and subsequently in the Vulgate, we know that many people attributed curative powers to the pool.  The sick and the lame would crowd about it in the porticoes in hopes of being cured.

“One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.”  The precise number of years John gives hints at his familiarity with the man, either before or, more likely, after, his cure.  It is a number that can be trusted, as it is not a round number nor one of the perfect numbers as accounted by the ancients.  The number also tells us of a hard life.  “I have no one to put me into the pool when the water is stirred up; while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.”  These words, spoken to the Lord’s question about whether he wanted to be healed, tell their own sad story of ebbing hope.

Now, John tells us that “a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled” had gathered near the pool.  Was it only to this particular lame man that the Lord Jesus spoke?  Did he speak to others, only to be waved away by people embittered by their conditions?  Why did the Lord speak to this man?  Was he the most pathetic of the people there? What we can know is that the Lord sought him out of the crowd, and from this we can marvel at the Lord’s particular and personal love for each of us.  He searches each of us out so that we might know his profound love.  This brings to mind a verse from the Song of Songs: “I will rise, and will go about the city: in the streets and the broad ways I will seek him whom my soul loves” (Song of Songs 3, 2).

The cure is no prolonged ritual.  Jesus simply tells him to take up his mat and walk.  It happened very quietly.  The man stood on his own feet for the first time in thirty-eight years.  He then picked up his mat and began to walk.  He seems not to have spoken, so amazed at what was happening, perhaps even fearing to breathe lest he break the spell and find himself on the cold floor again.  No uproar ensued, no fingers were pointed.  All the others who lay or sat on their mats were too engaged in their own business and conversations to notice the one among them who was made well.  We might wonder where he walked.  At first he made his way through the crowds on the floor until he came to a more open space, probably in a courtyard.  Before he could go far, he was accosted by men whom John only identifies as “the Jews”, which might mean some Pharisees.  They roughly informed him that it was the Sabbath and that he should not carry his mat because of this.

Now, the Torah actually speaks very little on what kind of activities were forbidden on the Sabbath.  One of these was cooking, so the day’s meal had to be prepared on Friday.  There is no specific law against carrying things about.  The Law prohibited carrying on with one’s trade, labor, or business.  We do find words of interest in Jeremiah, however: “Take heed to your souls, and carry no burdens on the sabbath day: and bring them not in by the gates of Jerusalem. And do not bring burdens out of your houses on the sabbath day, neither do ye any work: sanctify the sabbath day, as I commanded your fathers” (Jeremiah 17, 21-22).  Yet, the “burdens” spoken of here were merchandise to be sold on the streets.  The restriction against carrying anything at all was a Pharisaical interpretation, in fact, but very few knew the difference between what the Law said and what the Pharisees taught that it said.

Taken off guard, the man replied to those who had confronted him, “The man who made me well told me, ‘Take up your mat and walk.’ ”  These men should have been amazed at the man’s statement that a crippled man had been made well.  They demanded, “Who is the man who told you, ‘Take it up and walk’?”  The lack of wonder on their part ought to amaze us.  They had so fastened upon a supposed slight to the law that they could not be awed by a man who had been the recipient of a miracle by Almighty God.  Instead, they wanted to make trouble for a man who could perform miracles.  But the cured man did not know where Jesus was.  Later, when Jesus spoke to him, the man went back to these people and told them that it was Jesus who had healed him.  “Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus because he did this on a sabbath.”  These were the true sick and lame and blind, much more so than the crowd of folks around the pool.  They did not consider that a miracle can only be performed by the power of God, and if a miracle is performed on the Sabbath, then it is clear that the working of miracles on the Sabbath does not conflict with the Law.

“Look, you are well; do not sin any more, so that nothing worse may happen to you.”  We do not see the man’s gratitude to the Lord for curing him.  Rather than fall at his feet to adore him, he goes out an informs on him.  It is so necessary for us to give thanks to God for all the graces we have received, and for his dying on the Cross for us.  We can do this through prayer and almsgiving, but also through conversion from sin, as the Lord warned the man he had healed to do.