The Feast of Saints Philip and James, May 3, 2025

John 14, 6-14

Jesus said to Thomas, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father. From now on you do know him and have seen him.” Philip said to him, “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” Jesus said to him, “Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own. The Father who dwells in me is doing his works. Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves. Amen, amen, I say to you, whoever believes in me will do the works that I do, and will do greater ones than these, because I am going to the Father. And whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it.”

Philip of Bethsaida is said to have introduced his friend Nathanael, whom Jesus subsequently chose to be an Apostle, to the Lord during the Lord’s early days of ministry: “Philip found Nathanael and said to him: We have found him of whom Moses, in the law and the prophets did write, Jesus the son of Joseph of Nazareth.”  So overwhelmed was Philip by the impression Jesus made on him that when his friend wondered if anything good could come from Nazareth, all he could answer was a breathless, “Come and see!”   Many of the first followers of Jesus like Andrew and John, had been followers of John the Baptist, and Philip may also have been one of these.  He evidently spoke Greek well, since Greeks who wished to see the Lord came to him for aid (cf. John 12, 21).  Later writers confuse the Apostle Philip with the Deacon Philip, whose exploits are recounted in the Acts of the Apostles.  St. James was the son of either Alphaeus or Cleophas, and his wife, Mary, who both followed the Lord.  James became known as one of the “Pillars” of the Church, especially in Jerusalem (cf. Galatians 2, 9).  He was the first bishop of Jerusalem and reigned there until his martyrdom at the hands of the Jewish leaders in the years leading up to the revolt against the Romans in 70 A.D.  The early Christian historian Hegesippus wrote that James did not drink wine or strong drink, did not eat meat, did not bathe, and did not cut his hair.  He lived as an ascetic, very much as John the Baptist had lived.  He was well-loved by the Jewish Christians whom he led, and even the Jews of the city called him “James the Just”.  His Epistle reveals him as well-versed in the Scriptures, with an earnest desire to help the poor.  He styles himself “the brother of the Lord”, which may indicate a close family tie to Jesus.

In the Gospel Reading for the Mass of this Feast, Philip urges the Lord Jesus, “Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” Philip’s words must have dropped the jaws of the other Apostles, reclining with Jesus during the Last Supper: no one can see God and live.  This revealed a certain naivety on Philip’s part, but the Lord does not crush his desire.  He uses his request to teach about his own relation to the Father: “Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.”  Jesus is the visible image of the invisible God (cf. Colossians 1, 15).

Every day we encounter people who want to see the Father, most of whom cannot put their longing into clear words.  Often their lives are lonely, twisted, and torn, and their bodies and expressions bear witness to that.  They are helpless but for us.  As members of the Body of Christ we can also be visible images of the invisible God, to the degree that we live holy lives.  It is the saint who can say, “I am in the Father and the Father is in me.” Thus, the words and deeds which are done through the saint by the Father, are the meat and drink the people of the world hunger and thirst for.

Friday in the Second Week of Easter, May 2, 2025

John 6, 1-15

Jesus went across the Sea of Galilee. A large crowd followed him, because they saw the signs he was performing on the sick. Jesus went up on the mountain, and there he sat down with his disciples. The Jewish feast of Passover was near. When Jesus raised his eyes and saw that a large crowd was coming to him, he said to Philip, “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” He said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do. Philip answered him, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.” One of his disciples, Andrew, the brother of Simon Peter, said to him, “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?” Jesus said, “Have the people recline.” Now there was a great deal of grass in that place. So the men reclined, about five thousand in number. Then Jesus took the loaves, gave thanks, and distributed them to those who were reclining, and also as much of the fish as they wanted. When they had had their fill, he said to his disciples, “Gather the fragments left over, so that nothing will be wasted.” So they collected them, and filled twelve wicker baskets with fragments from the five barley loaves that had been more than they could eat. When the people saw the sign he had done, they said, “This is truly the Prophet, the one who is to come into the world.” Since Jesus knew that they were going to come and carry him off to make him king, he withdrew again to the mountain alone.

The feeding of the five thousand poignantly reveals to us the superabundance of God’s love and care for us, and it so impressed the Evangelists that all four of them provide an account of it.  

The feeding itself looms so large in these accounts that we often miss what preceded it.  Here, St. John tells us very specifically that the Lord Jesus first approached his Apostle Philip: “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?”  Now, the Lord asks him this upon seeing the crowd “coming to him”.  Philip does not protest and ask the Lord why he was asking him; nor does he ask why they should buy bread for the people at all; nor does he criticize the question.  He simply puts forward the quite rational observation that, “Two hundred days’ wages worth of food would not be enough for each of them to have a little.”  He makes the observation with the obvious intent of working to a logical conclusion.  John states that “[Jesus] said this to test him, because he himself knew what he was going to do.”  The Lord wanted the Apostles to think this problem through.  But it was a problem only because the Lord made it so, for he chose to present the coming of the people to him as of guests coming to a banquet, meaning that he, the Master of the Banquet, had the responsibility for feeding them.  Now, Philip had seen the Lord provide wine at the Wedding at Cana and he might have proposed that the Lord do something along those lines.  At this point in time, though, Philip and the other Apostles were still looking at the situation with earthly eyes, not heavenly ones.  They still had much growing to do.

Andrew points the way out, though unwittingly: “There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish; but what good are these for so many?”  The Lord proceeds to use what-there-is to make an overabundance of food for the people to eat.  He need not have done that.  He could have caused food to float down from heaven, much like the old manna of which he will speak in the coming verses.  Or, he could have made food to appear, ready to eat, in an adjacent field.  The fact that he took the food that was available and increased it signifies how he works in those who believe in him.  Philip, for instance, believed in the Lord enough to try and answer his question without throwing up his hands and saying that he was asking the impossible.  The Lord employed Philip, just so, in the settling of the crowd and the feeding of the people.  The Lord made him a participant in the miracle.  He played the part of one of the servers at the Wedding at Cana.  The bread and the fish multiplied in his hands just as the water had become wine under the hands of the servants at the wedding.  Philip, then, was quite aware of the insufficiency of what he had and so could not doubt that the Lord was working through him to feed these people.  

The Lord works in the same way in accomplishing his will in us and in answering our prayers.  He answers our prayers in his time and in his way so as to draw us nearer to him, to refine our faith, as it were.  He makes us excruciatingly aware of our insufficiency to help ourselves or others, and then provides his help so that we know that it could only be his help.  He teaches us not to rely on ourselves and on our false estimates of what we are capable of accomplishing, and to rely on him.  This is particularly true of our salvation.  On our own we can no more reach heaven and eternal happiness than we can stretch a few fish and loaves to feed five thousand people.  The Lord will make this possible if we rely on him.  First, we must look our insufficiency squarely and then turn humbly to our God.

The Solemnity of St. Joseph the Worker, Thursday, May 1, 2025

Matthew 13, 54-58

Jesus came to his native place and taught the people in their synagogue. They were astonished and said, “Where did this man get such wisdom and mighty deeds? Is he not the carpenter’s son? Is not his mother named Mary and his brothers James, Joseph, Simon, and Judas? Are not his sisters all with us? Where did this man get all this?” And they took offense at him. But Jesus said to them, “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and in his own house.” And he did not work many mighty deeds there because of their lack of faith.

“Is he not the carpenter’s son?”  The people of Nazareth, amazed at his teaching and by the reports they have heard of his miracles, look at Jesus, so familiar to them, and shake their heads.   Isaiah 53, 2: “There was no beauty in him, nor comeliness: and we have seen him, and there was no sightliness, that we should be desirous of him.”  How ordinary he seemed, just another child of the village.  And then he grew to manhood and the only thing noticeable about him was that he had not married.  He stayed quiet in the synagogue and did not speak up.  He seemed a little slow at times.  

His parents seemed strange, now that people thought about it.  The Mother kept out of the public eye but was always there when someone needed help.  She stayed very much in the background, but from choice not from shyness, for she possessed a strong personality.  And the father always seemed to be carrying around a secret, like a hidden weight.  He was very protective of his family.  He was an intelligent man, clever with his powerful hands.  He had no time for gossip or laughing at the misfortunes of others.  He was a righteous Jew who looked forward to the deliverance of Israel.  He was a man who worked with his hands for a living, fashioning or repairing plows or door frames just like his father before him.

And from this man and this woman, oddly detached from the people around them even while tied to them through their relations, came this wonder-worker who now opened his mouth and unexpected wisdom flowed out about God and his kingdom, at whose hands the lame walked and the blind saw, and at whose commands demons fled.  

Wednesday in the Second Week of Easter, April 30, 2025

John 3, 16-21

God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life. For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him. Whoever believes in him will not be condemned, but whoever does not believe has already been condemned, because he has not believed in the name of the only-begotten Son of God. And this is the verdict, that the light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to light, because their works were evil. For everyone who does wicked things hates the light and does not come toward the light, so that his works might not be exposed. But whoever lives the truth comes to the light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.

These words come at the end of the Lord’s conversation with Nicodemus, but because the Greek text does not feature punctuation, which was only developing at that time, it is not easy to tell whether these words are those of the Lord or John’s own commentary on what the Lord has just said.  Most scholars agree that these are John’s words.

“God so loved the world that he gave his only-begotten Son, so that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  While this verse is familiar and appears very simple, its implications are enormous.  First, we see that God loves the “world”, which contrasts with how Jesus often uses “world”, which is as that which is opposed to heaven.  This tells us that the world’s failings and even wickedness cannot prevent God from loving it: our own wickedness cannot keep the Lord from loving us, though it will keep us from experiencing his love and receiving his mercy.  However, not only does God love the world, but he “so loved” the world that “he gave his only-begotten Son”.  The Greek word translated here as “he gave” has many meanings, including “to offer”, “to command”, “to pour”, and, significantly, “to utter” — since from all eternity the Father spoke the Word.  “Gave up” actually works better here than simply “he gave”, since the Father’s will was that his Son “empt[y] himself, taking the form of a servant, being made in the likeness of men, and in habit found as a man” (Philippians 2, 7).  This tells us what kind of love the Father had for the world: it was not merely the regard of a Creator for his creation, or a love that would be repaid in kind, but a thoroughly gratuitous love which benefitted the lover in no way but benefitted the receiver in every way.  The verse reveals God as One who is much more even than all-powerful, all-knowing, and omnipresent: he is our Lover, and his love is infinite.  

“So that everyone who believes in him might not perish but might have eternal life.”  This part of the verse reveals the prime benefit of his love for us: that all who believe in his Son might have eternal life.  This means to take firmly into hearts what the Son teaches us, to obey his commandments, and to persevere in our faith in him. By doing this, we open ourselves up to his mercy, which leads to eternal life.  By refusing to do this, we close ourselves off from the life he so much wants to give us and turns us towards the darkness of eternal death.  We see this eagerness to give us life in the next verse: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”  Despite sins worse than those that brought on the great Flood, Almighty God continues to love us.  And yet, as John reflects, “The Light came into the world, but people preferred darkness to Light, because their works were evil.”  Despite all the signs of God’s love, manifested in the beauty and order of the natural world as well as in the words of his Prophets and the Life, Death, and Resurrection of his Son for our sake, there are many who reject him, preferring the darkness of their self-absorption to the light of love.  The irrationality of such a choice seems baffling, and would be hard to believe if it were not for the examples we see of it in the Scriptures, as in the very determined hatred of Judas and Caiphas, who were given multiple opportunities to turn away from their homicidal hatred of Jesus, and refused.

“But whoever lives the truth comes to the Light, so that his works may be clearly seen as done in God.”  The saints are those who “live the truth” revealed by the Lord Jesus, that is, the truth of the surpassing love of God, and who respond with joy to it.  This response shows itself in devotion to prayer, to penance, to alms-giving, and to giving themselves to God as they have seen God giving up his Son for them.  

Tuesday in the Second Week of Easter, April 29, 2025

John 3, 7-15

Jesus said to Nicodemus: “‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.” Nicodemus answered and said to him, ‘How can this happen?” Jesus answered and said to him, “You are the teacher of Israel and you do not understand this? Amen, amen, I say to you, we speak of what we know and we testify to what we have seen, but you people do not accept our testimony. If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things? No one has gone up to heaven except the one who has come down from heaven, the Son of Man. And just as Moses lifted up the serpent in the desert, so must the Son of Man be lifted up, so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life.”

We know very little about Nicodemus apart from what we find in St. John’s Gospel.  He was a Pharisee, a member of the Sanhedrin, the Jewish ruling council, which makes him at least middle-aged at the time he speaks to Jesus.  He was given a Greek name, a not uncommon practice among the Jews of that time.  From his conversation with the Lord we learn that he was eager to learn but careful in evaluating what he heard, and from working with Joseph of Arimathea we know him to be loyal to the truth once he accepted it.  His feast day — for he is considered a saint — is on August 31, although for centuries it was celebrated in the West on August 3.

St. John quotes the Lord Jesus as saying to Nicodemus, “If I tell you about earthly things and you do not believe, how will you believe if I tell you about heavenly things?”  John was fascinated by the way the Lord used ordinary “earthly” things to teach about heavenly things, and we see John giving several examples of this throughout his Gospel.  In fact, in his prologue to the Gospel, John refers to the Son of God as “The Word”, himself using a familiar “earthly” idea to talk about the divine reality of who the Word is.  We think of a word as an expression conceived by the mind, formed on the tongue, and spoken, accompanied by a breath: the Father, who conceived the Son from all eternity, speaking the Word — “generating” or “begetting” him — and the accompanying breath, the Holy Spirit (from spiritus, “spirit” or “breath”).  The Lord himself uses the wine at the wedding of Cana to teach about grace; the Temple in Jerusalem, to teach about his Body; the bread with which he fed the five thousand, to talk about the need all have to eat his Flesh; and the water in the Samaritan well, to teach about the water of baptism.  More examples could be given.  I would suggest that he also was teaching when he called his Mother, and also Mary Magdalene, “woman”. This was not a common way of addressing a woman, so when Jesus does this, it sticks out in our minds.  We ought to think of where the word comes from, and we should think back to the early pages of Genesis, where it says that “Adam said: This now is bone of my bones, and flesh of my flesh; she shall be called ‘woman’, because she was taken out of ‘man’ ” (Genesis 2, 23).  Perhaps Jesus, by addressing these women as “woman” was identifying himself as Adam, or, rather, the New Adam, as St. Paul would do (cf. Romans 5, 12-21).  And, in the case of the Virgin Mary, identifying her as the New Eve, as St. Irenaeus taught in the second century.

All around us figures of the divine cloak themselves in ordinary, earthly things: the sunrise, the wind, clouds that sometimes hide the sun, the sand of a beach, a mountain, a river, the rain, sleep and waking, birth and death.  This is not accidental but something we should expect from God, who leaves his tracks even for the godless to follow so as to find him.  By looking for the deeper meaning of earthly things we can begin to think with a spiritual mind which will allow us to grow in our faith and to see God here even before we see him in heaven.

Monday in the Second Week of Easter, April 28, 2025

John 3, 1-8

There was a Pharisee named Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews. He came to Jesus at night and said to him, “Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him.” Jesus answered and said to him, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.” Nicodemus said to him, “How can a man once grown old be born again? Surely he cannot reenter his mother’s womb and be born again, can he?” Jesus answered, “Amen, amen, I say to you, unless one is born of water and Spirit he cannot enter the Kingdom of God. What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of spirit is spirit. Do not be amazed that I told you, ‘You must be born from above.’ The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”

St. John notes that Nicodemus came to Jesus at night.  In modern times, people often meet professionally or socially after dark, but in the ancient world and until the Industrial Age, this did not happen.  He would have stolen through the empty, unlit streets of Jerusalem for the house where it was said Jesus was staying, like a conspirator or a thief going to meet a comrade.  He would not have made his plans known to anyone lest he be thought of by his peers as “that man’s follower”.  Still, Nicodemus had watched Jesus and listened carefully to his words.  He was puzzled and troubled, and where others let their uneasiness keep them from the Nazarene, Nicodemus had the integrity to go and talk to him away from the crowds and to learn for himself if this was the Messiah.

“Rabbi, we know that you are a teacher who has come from God, for no one can do these signs that you are doing unless God is with him.”  Nicodemus sums up in one line the argument Jesus was to make over and over to the Pharisees and Sanhedrin.  We can contrast the clear thinking of Nicodemus with the twisted, contorted denials of his brethren who would rather make the patently absurd claim that Jesus cast out demons by the power of the chief of the demons than entertain the merest possibility that he might be doing the work of God.  

“Amen, amen, I say to you, unless one is born from above, he cannot see the Kingdom of God.”  John quotes parts of the ensuing conversation, and not all of it, and so it sounds rather abrupt and cryptic.  But these are the words the Lord spoke to Nicodemus.  They may seem obvious to us, but they speak of a profound mystery.  Unless one is “born from above”, a phrase Nicodemus would have have heard before, a person cannot “see” the Kingdom of God.  The Lord is speaking of grace.  But how do we believe in the Kingdom of heaven before we receive grace?  The soul is drawn to God even while still walking in the darkness before grace and willingly goes to him to learn who he is.  At that time, the person is able to learn much about God, yet much remains in darkness.  It is possible by the moonlight to see outlines and this is enough to go on for a while.  But then curiosity gives way to desire and this in turn gives way to love, and then grace comes as the rising of the sun.  In the full light of grace we “see” with the eyes of faith — we believe.

“How can a man once grown old be born again?”  Nicodemus knows that the Lord is using ordinary words to speak of extraordinary things, but he needs the Lord to teach him the vocabulary of the Kingdom of which he speaks.  “What is born of flesh is flesh and what is born of spirit is spirit.”  Jesus teaches Nicodemus that he is speaking of spiritual realities.  To a man well-educated in the very physical Law of Moses, this is an entirely new way of thinking.  The idea of spiritual rebirth was prefigured in the Old Law through the sacrifice of the scapegoat and in the purification laws, but here it stands out, in its fullness, in the clarity of the daylight.  In an instant, the darkness becomes light, and we can see clearly what we could not even guess at before.  “The wind blows where it wills, and you can hear the sound it makes, but you do not know where it comes from or where it goes; so it is with everyone who is born of the Spirit.”  We cannot see the wind, but we can see its effects in the trees or on the dust that normally lays quietly on the street.  We cannot read people’s minds, but when we see a businessman hurrying to a merchant’s stall we can surmise that he is interested in a transaction.  Likewise, we cannot see the Holy Spirit, but when we see a person performing a gratuitous act of kindness for another, or we see a young woman giving up her life to God as a religious, we know that he is the prime Actor.

In the night of this life we stumble about for our Lord, urged on by our love for him, progressing towards him even now with the help of the Holy Spirit.   Finally, the darkness will be stripped away and we will stand in the bright glory of the Lord’s presence, seeing him as he is.  “We know that when he shall appear we shall be like to him: because we shall see him as he is” (1 John 3, 2).

The Second Sunday of Easter, April 27, 2025

John 20, 19–31

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”  Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.”  Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.”  Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.

“On the evening of that first day of the week.”  According to St. John, the Lord had appeared to Mary Magdalene in the morning of the first day of the week.  Two of the Apostles had looked for him in the tomb but only saw his carefully wrapped and rolled burial cloths there.  They did not see the Lord until that evening, which would have marked the beginning of the next day.  We might wonder that the Lord made his Apostles wait all those hours.  It must have been agony for them.  On the one hand, they were hiding in the house for fear that the leaders of the Jews would come for them next, and on the other, they had the report of Mary Magdalene that he was alive and that she had touched him, and the report of John and Peter that the tomb was strangely empty.  But if the Apostles had possessed greater faith, they would have stayed at the tomb, keeping vigil for a Resurrection the Lord had promised them more than once, and they would have seen the stone roll back from it and the Lord emerge.  Their faith and hope would have been rewarded with certainty, and they would have shared at once in the Lord’s victory.  Locking themselves in the house, turning over in their minds what they feared and the Lord’s message to them through Mary Magdalene: “I ascend to my Father and to your Father, to my God and to your God” (John 20, 17), they truly suffered his loss.

The long hours ticked by.  They spent the time praying and reflecting.  They had not gone to the Cross, they had not waited at the tomb.  Now they hid in a house that did not belong to them.  They did not see him because they had not remained close to him.  They had not persevered in their faith but had let their fears overcome them.  Self-preservation, a very natural motivation, had taken over, but at the risk of losing the Lord.  His words must have sounded clearly in their memories: “For he that will save his life, shall lose it: and he that shall lose his life for my sake, shall find it.  For what does it profit a man, if he gain the whole world and suffer the loss of his own soul?” (Matthew 16, 25-26).  So they had perhaps gained a few more hours or days or years of life, but had jeopardized their eternal salvation.

And then, as the sun went down and the earth darkened and lamps needed to be lit and their yearning for their Lord could hardly be borne any longer, “Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, ‘Peace be with you.’ ”  John tells us that “the disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord.”  He came to them with the blessing of peace, and while he would later scold them for the smallness of their faith, as he had done before, he had come back to them, and was involving them in his enduring mission to the people of the world: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.”  After all that had happened, he still regarded them as his Apostles, and they rejoiced both in his Resurrection and in his love for them.  Thomas had gone from them but would return.  He would wait in uncertainty a further week when the Lord relieved his doubts and gave him cause for exclaiming, “My Lord and my God!”

We are near our Lord through our faith, and experience his nearness to us through prayer especially before the Blessed Sacrament, the reading of the Gospels, meditation on his Life, Death, and Resurrection, and through the good works we do for his sake.  If we stay near to him, we shall surely see him when he comes.

Easter Saturday, April 26, 2025

Mark 16, 9–15

When Jesus had risen, early on the first day of the week, he appeared first to Mary Magdalene, out of whom he had driven seven demons. She went and told his companions who were mourning and weeping. When they heard that he was alive and had been seen by her, they did not believe.  After this he appeared in another form to two of them walking along on their way to the country. They returned and told the others; but they did not believe them either. But later, as the Eleven were at table, Jesus appeared to them and rebuked them for their unbelief and hardness of heart because they had not believed those who saw him after he had been raised. He said to them, “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature.”

The verses used for the Gospel reading for today’s Mass were probably not written by St. Mark because they mainly repeat what he has already said just before, and these feature a different style than the one Mark uses.  Also, these verses are not found in all the ancient manuscripts.  They are referred to collectively as “the long ending”, to distinguish this ending from the incomplete ending we do find in all the manuscripts for this Gospel.  There is also a “short ending” which consists of a verse or less.  Despite the lack of Mark’s authorship, the Church has always recognized the antiquity of these verses and that they result from divine inspiration, and so they are considered an authentic part of this Gospel.  Mark does seem to end his Gospel in an awkward way.  The last words he wrote were, “And they said nothing to any man: for they were afraid” (Mark 16, 8).  This refers to the women who went to the tomb of Jesus.  We know from the aorist tense of the verb “they said” and from the testimony of the other Gospels that they did not speak to anyone until they arrived at the house used by the Apostles.  Yet, while the other Evangelists give us accounts of appearances of the risen Jesus, Mark does not.  The “long ending” was written as a way of providing a more rounded conclusion to the Gospel.  And it does this without adding anything we would not know from the other Gospels.

We see in this “long ending” the persistence of unbelief in the Lord’s Resurrection among his closest followers.  This comes from the rock-solid human understanding that in order for a person to come into this world, he or she must be conceived and born, and that all those born into the world must die, and that the dead do not return (except perhaps for brief visitations as ghosts).  This understanding might be said to be part of human hardwiring.  And so, when Mary Magdalene tells the other women and later the Apostles, that Jesus is alive, they will not believe her.  It was inconceivable to them that her claim could be true.  This, however, leads us to conclude that the Lord Jesus did rise from the dead.  If the Gospels had been written in a way that did not mention the doubts and refusals — not to say, the inability — to believe, the Resurrection accounts would sound like the endings of fairy tales and could not be taken seriously.  But here we have an account of real men and women who could not or would not believe the unbelievable, and then they did.  This would be similar to believing that the sea had turned back on itself in mid course, or that mountains had leapt like rams (cf. Psalm 114, 3-4).  We would say today that the Resurrection could not have happened because it contradicts science.

Mary Magdalene and her companions and the Apostles and other disciples were not gullible peasants who believed everything they were told.  They were practical people of hard experience who wanted solid proof of extraordinary claims.  The Risen Lord himself met their demands for proof, eating ordinary food in their sight, allowing them to touch him, and even reasoning with them from the Scriptures that his rising must be true.  The greatest proof of the Lord’s triumph over death was his triumph over the doubts and convictions of those to whom he appeared.  It was not easy for them to believe, but once they did, they taught the truth at the cost of their lives and in the face of the doubt and ridicule of the world.  

The Lord Jesus paid with his life the price for our belief in him as God, and it cost the lives of those who knew him to pass on this Good News.  It costs something for us to believe as well, but how well do we believe?  Do we do our part in passing on this Good News as the Lord wants us to do?

 Easter Friday, April 25, 2025

The Feast of St. Mark

Mark 16, 15-20

Jesus appeared to the Eleven and said to them: “Go into the whole world and proclaim the Gospel to every creature. Whoever believes and is baptized will be saved; whoever does not believe will be condemned. These signs will accompany those who believe: in my name they will drive out demons, they will speak new languages. They will pick up serpents with their hands, and if they drink any deadly thing, it will not harm them. They will lay hands on the sick, and they will recover.”  Then the Lord Jesus, after he spoke to them, was taken up into heaven and took his seat at the right hand of God. But they went forth and preached everywhere, while the Lord worked with them and confirmed the word through accompanying signs.

St. Mark was the son of a woman named Mary who owned a large house in Jerusalem.  Since his mother is spoken of and her name given, the absence of any mention of his father leaves us to suspect that he was not alive by the time of the Lord’s last year of public ministry, at the latest.  During that time Mark would seem to have been young and not married, for we find later that he went off with the unmarried St. Barnabas and St. Paul to preach the Gospel in faraway lands.  His later break with St. Paul seems to have been caused by an urgent need to return to Jerusalem.  This may have come as the result of the death of his mother, who left him the house and other property.  While it is easy to take the side of St. Paul on this issue, Mark’s mother’s house was an important meeting place for the Christians of Jerusalem, and it probably served as a church for them as well.  Securing his rights as heir so that the house might continue to be used for this purpose would have made a compelling reason to return to the city.  St. Paul must have come around to this conclusion because we find him and Mark reconciled later on.  It is very possible that Mark became associated with St. Peter at his time.  Peter had made forays into foreign lands, such as to the Syrian city of Antioch, to preach the Gospel but regularly returned two Jerusalem before embarking a new expedition to preach the Gospel.  He may have been mindful of the Lord’s return in glory, which was thought for a long time to take place at Jerusalem or at the Valley of Jehoshaphat situated in the Judean wilderness, eleven miles of Jerusalem): “Let the nations come up into the valley of Jehoshaphat: for there I will sit to judge all nations round about” (Joel 3, 12).  Between the years 42 and 50, Peter made up his mind to go to Rome, and he took Mark, a seasoned proclaimer of the Gospel, with him.  St. Irenaeus (d. 206 A.D.) calls Mark “the interpreter and follower of Peter” which leads us to think that his Greek, if not his Latin, surpassed that of Peter, and to preach to the Romans would have required a fair ability in either language.  That may be so in terms of the spoken language, but his Gospel, written in Greek, is notable for its rough style.  It is clearly written by someone more comfortable In Aramaic or Hebrew than in Greek.  

According to Bishop Papias (d. 130 A.D.), whom the early Church historian Eusebius quotes, Mark wrote his Gospel at the request of the Roman Christians who desired a written record of St. Peter’s memories of the Lord Jesus.  Mark does this principally regarding the acts of the Lord, as Peter remembered them.  Mark tells the story of the very first part of the Lord Jesus’s public ministry’s beginning with his Baptism, then quickly moves through some of the early miracles and the calls of the first Apostles.  Much of his Gospel is devoted to the last journey of the Lord to Jerusalem, and his subsequent arrest, and Passion and Death.  His Gospel, as we now have it, tells us very little about the Resurrection of the Lord.  What we do have from him seems rushed and unfinished.  This may mean that he died before completing his Gospel, or that he suddenly had to travel and did not resume its composition.  Mostly it is thought that he finished his Gospel before Peter died and that Peter read it and neither praised nor condemned it, but let it be read by the people.  We might also conjecture that the people asked Mark to write the Gospel after Peter’s martyrdom in order to preserve his memories of the Lord.  

The Egyptian Christians have a firm tradition that Mark came to Alexandria from Rome and there are those who say he wrote his Gospel there.  By the time Mark arrived, the Holy Faith had already been introduced to the city and was spreading.  The Christians there, called the Copts, hold that St. Mark taught their ancestors how to celebrate the Mass, which was called “the Liturgy”.  This “Liturgy of St. Mark” is said to be the original Divine Liturgy of the Coptic Church In Egypt.  By the 500’s, however, the Copts composed liturgies in their own language (that of St. Mark being in Greek) and it fell into disuse, although it is still celebrated in certain places at certain times in the Church calendar.

St. Mark did not long survive his masters, St. Peter and St. Paul, and died in Alexandria in the year 68, dragged by a rope through the streets of that city by the pagans until he was dead.  His remains are said to be enshrined in Venice at the wonderful basilica.

The Church calls him an “evangelist”, from a Greek word meaning a messenger or herald of (usually good) tidings, especially regarding royal marriages, coronations, and battlefield victories. St. Mark is best known as the author of a Gospel, and you and I are also called to be evangelists, though we will never write Gospels.  We witness the Gospel that we have received.  We live out the good tidings we have heard.  We preach with word and deed that Jesus Christ is Lord.