Sunday,March 29, 2020, The Fifth Sunday of Lent

I received an interesting question yesterday from a parishioner: What do I do if I have the virus and I need to go to confession?  Working it out, it seems safe to say that the person would not want to risk infecting others by going to confession, and the sacrament cannot be done remotely.  Also, at this time, priests are permitted in the hospitals only when it is case of Last Rites.  The answer is very simple: After confessing our sins, we should not sin again.  Some folks look upon confession as a way of getting clean until next time, but we ought to intend for our last confession to actually be our last confession.  It is fully within our power, by the grace God gives the baptized, to reject temptation and to refuse to commit mortal sin, the only sin that must be confessed.  That is the answer to this question.

The Gospel reading for today is that of St. John’s account of the raising of Lazarus.  It is a long and detailed account, laid out very dramatically.  We can see in this how these events deeply affected John.  He writes as though he is still struck with wonder, and as though trying to understand what happened, even after the passage of years.  One of the most touching passages in his account is this, in John 11, 32: “When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, ‘Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.’ ”  John carefully identifies her as the woman who had washed the feet of Jesus with her tears.  Here she is at his feet again, and once more in tears.  Her faith brings her to his feet.  Her tears on these two occasions result from her heart-felt belief in him as the Savior of the world.  Her faith is as rock solid as that of the Apostle Thomas, who had urged the others, “Let us go, that we might die with him” (John 11, 16).  But she is torn: How could Jesus seem to deliberately let her brother die, despite the love she knew Jesus had for her and her brother and sister?

John shows Jesus answering this question: “That you may believe” (v. 15).  Jesus will show the Apostles his power to raise the dead so that they might believe he has the power to raise himself from the dead.  And if he can raise Lazarus after four days in the tomb, certainly he can raise himself after three.  And if he can raise himself, then we can believe that he will raise us from our graves as he has promised.  

This “sign” that Jesus works, as well as the sign from last Sunday, the healing of the man born blind, shows two individuals who have suffered from the results of original sin, and John shows how Jesus overcame these for them.  The greatest work against original sin that Jesus will perform is still to come as we near Holy Week: the overcoming of the eternal death which is the punishment for our own sins.  

Saturday, March 28, 2020

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.

The Gospels show the confusion of the people and their leaders as to the identity of Jesus.  They see the miracles he performs, they hear his words, but they struggle to understand what it all means.  Even the Apostles would ask each other, “Who is this, that both wind and sea obey him?” (Mark 4, 40).  The scribes and the Pharisees, witnessing the exorcisms he performs, are reduced to explaining his power by saying that he is Beelzebub.  Peter does get it right when he says to the Lord, “You are the Christ, the Son of the living God” (Matthew 16, 16).  Even so, he does not seem to understand what that means, to the extent that he denies him after his arrest.  It is only with the Resurrection and with Pentecost that we see understanding among the Apostles, and true faith, as when St. Thomas declares to him, “My Lord and my God” (John 20, 28).  

We Catholics of the twenty-first century have the benefit of knowing even as children raised in the Faith that Jesus is God, that he is a divine Person who has assumed a human nature.  And yet we struggle with what this really means.  For instance, if we believe that Jesus is the Almighty God who has created us and to whom we must answer, why would don’t we fill the churches at times when he is exposed in the Blessed Sacrament for Adoration?  Why do we not pray more?  Why are we not better missionaries?  Why are we not more active in parish life?  During this time of plague when we cannot go to Mass and when parishes are closed, we ought to consider more deeply the identity of Christ and our personal response to this reality.  And even now, we can go before the Lord in the tabernacle and confess our sins in the Sacrament of Penance.

Friday, March 28, 2020

John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30

Jesus moved about within Galilee;

he did not wish to travel in Judea, because the Jews were trying to kill him. But the Jewish feast of Tabernacles was near. 

But when his brothers had gone up to the feast, he himself also went up, not openly but as it were in secret. 

Some of the inhabitants of Jerusalem said, “Is he not the one they are trying to kill? And look, he is speaking openly and they say nothing to him. Could the authorities have realized that he is the Christ? But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.” So Jesus cried out in the temple area as he was teaching and said, “You know me and also know where I am from. Yet I did not come on my own, but the one who sent me, whom you do not know, is true. I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.” So they tried to arrest him, but no one laid a hand upon him, because his hour had not yet come.

St. John quotes some of the ordinary citizens of Jerusalem: “He is speaking openly and they say nothing to him. Could the authorities have realized that he is the Christ? But we know where he is from. When the Christ comes, no one will know where he is from.”  This stands in sharp contrast to what St. Matthew tells us.  In Matthew 2, 4-5, King Herod asks the chief priests and scribes where “Christ should be born”.  They tell him that he is to be born in Bethlehem, and they quote the Prophet Micah in support.  Why do the people in Jerusalem say they no one will know where the Messiah was to come from?  Perhaps this is merely popular opinion, that no one will know, a sort of urban legend.  Or maybe the people John is quoting belong to a sect that holds this as doctrine.  We might also wonder where they thought Jesus was from.  Since he was known as “Jesus of Nazareth” to many people they could have assumed he was born there.  Did anyone outside of his family know that he had been born in Bethlehem, at this point?  It would seem unlikely.

Jesus uses the occasion to insist that the people do not actually know where he is from: he is from the Father, and they do not know him.  If they did, they would know the Son as well.  “I know him, because I am from him, and he sent me.”  The Son, begotten of the Father from all eternity, knows the Father intimately.  He “comes down” from heaven in order to teach us who the Father is, not as a teacher speaking of what he has learned from other teachers, but as one who is the embrace of this Father, even as he speaks to the folks in Jerusalem.  But they do not want to hear him and they try to arrest him.  Jesus does not make his claims in a void but in the context of the countless miracles he has performed, especially the miracles he has performed in the temple area, where he is speaking in the Gospel reading today.  If Jesus was committing the blasphemy that he was accused of, making himself equal to God, then God would not enable him to perform these miracles.  They are signs, witnesses, that God the Father validates the claims of his Son.

To know the Father, we must know Jesus, and we can find him in our tabernacles now, even if we cannot see at present on our altars.

Thursday, March 26, 2020

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?”

Throughout the Gospels, Jesus seems more intent on concealing his identity as the Won of God that in revealing it.  This is most pointedly true in the Gospel of St. Mark.  Jesus forbids the demons whom he casts out from saying who he is; when Jesus heals someone, especially outside a city, he tells the person not to say that he did this; he even tells his Apostles not to talk to each other about what they have seen and heard, as in the case of the Transfiguration.  In Matthew 16, 16, when Jesus asks his Apostles who they think he is, and Peter answers correctly, he strictly forbids them from repeating this to others.  Why does he act this way?  How does preventing people from learning who he is further his mission?

In this passage of the Gospel of St. John, we hear Jesus saying, “I do not accept human testimony”, and “I do not accept human praise”.  The Son of God has come to announce to the world the Father’s love.  Jesus does this with words: “For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whoever believes in him should have eternal life.”  And he does this with deeds.  The deeds testify and validate the words he speaks: “The works that the Father gave me to accomplish, these works that I perform testify on my behalf that the Father has sent me.”  The Son does not seek love and worship for himself, but for his Father.  The crucifixion is the ultimate sign of the Father’s love, and Jesus, in his obedience, shows us how to love the Father, with all our heart, mind, and soul.  For the Son of God, everything was about loving and serving the Father.  He does nothing for himself, but accepts pain, derision, and misunderstanding in order to love and serve the Father.  When he does make himself known as the Son of God, it is in order to point to his Father: If this One who performs these great deeds for us is the Son, how great the Father must  be! 

For the Christian, the imitation of Jesus, which is the heart of the spiritual life, means living like this, for the Father.  The love of the Father must be our motivation for all that we say and do.  Jesus declares himself to be “The Way, the Truth, and the life”, and in this he lowers himself, in his human nature, to be the means to the Father.  We see this plainly when Jesus tells us, in the Gospel of John, to pray in his name.  And so the Church ends her prayers with the words, “Through Christ our Lord”.  In hearing the Son’s words and in seeing the Son’s deeds, we see the Father, and his infinite love for us.

We see this love reflected in the lives of saints like St. Margaret Clitherow.  She lived in England during the reign of Elizabeth I. She was arrested several times for breaking the law for her non-attendance at the mandatory Protestant services.  She also hid priests, who traveled throughout the country offering Masses in secret for small groups of believers, at a time when our religion was outlawed.  It was for this that she was executed, even though pregnant with her fourth child at the time, in the year 1586.  In a time such as now when society and even law presses us to be silent in the face of evil and to be content with merely being nice to one another, we ask St. Margaret to intercede with God for us, that we might be made strong to proclaim God and his love in our own words and actions.

Wednesday, March 25, 2020, The Solemnity of the Annunciation

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.

On this solemn feast day, we celebrate the Incarnation of the Son of God in the chaste womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary.  While we rejoice at a mercy we cannot imagine and could never deserve or repay, we also pause to reflect on the Lord’s chosen instrument in his coming among us.  The angel Gabriel descends from heaven and greets her in the traditional way, with Shalom, translated by Luke into the customary Greek greeting,  kaire .  In place of her name, however, the angel calls her by a word that acts as a title.  He calls her, in Greek, κεχαριτωμένη, which we might transliterates as kekaritomenei, with the accent on the next to last syllable.  This word is in fact a perfect passive participle, indicating that the action indicated by the root verb has been completely accomplished.  In this case, this word can be translated as “having been graced”, or, “having been transformed by grace”, since that is the implication of an action being performed on a person or thing in the past.  This is what Gabriel the angel calls her.  He has seen no human like her before, not even since Eve in the Garden so long ago, for this is not only a woman created free from sin, but a woman who has rejected sin throughout her life, setting her quite apart from our first parents.  Further, God called Adam and Eve to the vocation of marriage, but he called Mary to the even higher vocation of a Virgin consecrated to him.  We see this in Mary’s reply to the angel’s words, which literally translated, are: How can this be, since I am not knowing man?  That is, she  treasures her virginity.  Following the custom of the time for a young woman of her age, she had been engaged to marry, but still she felt deeply in her soul that she was called by God to virginity.  It was no wonder that she felt perplexed.  On the one hand, she felt the divine call to a state in which she would remain unmarried and childless, a state which the Jews of the time would have considered both mad and accursed, and on the other, the herald of God was telling her that she would be the Mother of his Son.  Gabriel restores her peace of mind by explaining that she would “conceive by the Holy Spirit”, that is, the Child would not be conceived with the help of a human Father, but by a heavenly One.  God had decreed that Mary would be both Virgin and Mother.  This revelation brought her total clarity regarding the vocation God had prepared for her.  Luke tells us how she gratefully accepts God’s will: “I am the Handmaid of the Lord.  Be it done to me as you have said.”  And then she rushes off to her relative Elizabeth.  Perhaps she had sought Elizabeth’s counsel previously, and now she wishes to share God’s revelation to her.  

Beginning with an anonymous Christian author in the year 236, ancient and medieval Christians associated this day with other important days in the history of mankind.  It was thought that March 25 was not only the day of the conception of our Lord, but also the date on which he died on the Cross.  This author further speculated that this was the date for the creation of the world, for the near sacrifice of Isaac by Abraham on Mount Moriah, where the temple was later built, and for many other events.  While improbable, what all this tells us is how Christians throughout the ages have seen this day as a sign of God’s mercy and of his marvelous providence for our salvation.  We too ought to rejoice, meditating on the joy the Virgin Mary found in serving and loving our God.  This is a joy which we can “catch” from her and which will carry us through these perilous times.

Tuesday, March 24, 2020

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.

St. John adds these words to his account of this miracle: “Because he did this on a sabbath.”  John takes for granted that his original readers, the Jewish Christians of the first century, would have understood his implication.  John is referring to the fact that the Pharisees — and this is who John means when he says “Jews”, here — understood the Sabbath in their own way, and taught this to others, insisting that this was the authentic teaching of the law.  Jesus challenged their interpretation on this and other points of the law throughout his public life.  We can thus read this Gospel account as Jesus proposing the proper understanding of the law regarding the Sabbath.  More than that, though, Jesus, indeed, is showing himself to be the Lord of the Sabbath himself (cf. Matthew 12, 8).  He tells the lame man, on his own authority, to pick up his mat and walk.  He doesn’t quote the law to show that this is permitted, he simply issues a command.  And let us note that it is a command.  Jesus does not heal the man and then walk away, leaving the man to decide what to do with his mat.  He tells him directly to carry it, knowing that this will attract the attention of the Pharisees.  Now, John does not show the Pharisees as praising God for his mercy to this man.  He shows them instead fastening on what they consider a breach of the law.  This ought to strike us as remarkable.  One would think that they would be so amazed at the healing that they would completely forget that he was carrying the mat.  As learned men, we might also expect that understanding the lame man to be healed, and that the healing could only be done by God, they should conclude that God would not have healed him if he knew the man was going to break the law immediately afterwards.  The miracle is quite extraordinary.  The attitude of the Pharisees is nearly so.  It reminds us that the Jewish leaders did not strive to kill Jesus because they didn’t know who he was, but because they did.

One of the reasons John and the other Evangelists include the disbelief of the Pharisees in their accounts of the Lord’s miracles is to show that the obstinate blindness that led them to demand the Lord’s crucifixion was also behind the early persecutions.  As the Lord tells his disciples in John 15, 20: “If they have persecuted me, they will persecute you.”  We Christians ought to keep this in mind as we go about our business in the world.  There are people who turn themselves inside out in their desperation to suppress our Faith.  While their actions are sometimes harmful and even deadly, these people themselves are actually rather pathetic.  They are like small children throwing temper tantrums and whom nothing will calm down.  While we pray for the strengthening of our faith and the peace of Christ’s Church, we pray also for the conversion of these unhappy folks.

Today is the traditional date for the Feast of St. Gabriel the Archangel.  It was moved to this date by Pope Benedict XV in 1921, after having been celebrated on March 18 for many centuries.  With the reform of the Church calendar after the Second Vatican Council, the feasts of the three archangels were merged into one, and their collective feast is celebrated on September 29.  It is appropriate for his festival to be placed on the day before the Solemnity of the Annunciation of the Lord, since he had carried the message of the conception of Jesus to the Blessed Virgin Mary and received her answer.  We also read of Gabriel in the Book of Daniel, where he shows signs to the Prophet.  His name, in Hebrew, means “God is my strength”.  He is thought to have been the angel who appeared to St. Joseph, confirming that the Virgin Mary had conceived by the Holy Spirit, and also to the shepherds at Bethlehem.  In addition, some speculate that he was the angel sent by the Father to comfort his Son in the Garden of Gethsemane (cf. Luke 22, 43).  Finally, the prayer, Regina Caeli, contains the words believed to have been spoken by Gabriel to the Virgin Mary in announcing to her the Resurrection of her Son.

Monday, March 23, 2020

I have gone long periods in which I was unable to offer Mass publicly, as in the months after the surgery to remove part of my pituitary tumor.  For some time afterwards I was not able to stand or even sit up long enough to offer Mass in public.  I could only offer it in my room.  This was very hard.  No priest gets ordained to say Mass only in his room.  Offering the Sunday Mass in private yesterday was hard, too, as I know it was hard for so many of you not to go to Mass.  We are made to worship God, and our worship of him here is our preparation for the eternal worship in heaven.  May our present circumstances whet our appetites to worthily offer God our adoration at Mass and to receive the Body of his Son in our churches one day soon!

I want to continue our discussion of the healing, the enlightenment, of the man born blind, from yesterday’s a Gospel reading.  It would be incomplete if we did not consider what Jesus was telling this blind man to do.  The temple, in which the Lord found this man begging, was built to the north of the old city of Jerusalem.  The Pool of Siloam is located to the south of the city and down a slope.  In order to get to the pool, the blind man would have had to pass all the way through the bustling old town.  Even if someone was assisting him, this would have been very time consuming and arduous.  But the man went, with only the assurance of a man he had never met before to urge him on.  Very many people would have seen him struggling down the streets of the city, and would have been knocked against or tripped over by him.  They would have known him to be a blind man, and his rags would have given him away as a beggar.  And they would have been amazed when this same man came running back, able to see, his eyes wide with sight.  He would be seeing the world for the first time, and he must have felt overwhelmed with the reality of the miracle.  He could have hurried back to his parents in the city to tell them the news of his cure, but he went back to the temple to look for Jesus, to give him thanks.

This should remind us of the story of the leprous Syrian general Naaman, who was told of the power of the prophet Elisha and went to him for healing.  Elisha, rather than heal him on the spot, sent him to wash in the Jordan River.  Having done so, he was healed (the story is told in 2 Kings 5, 1-17).  The Pharisees must have thought of this when they strove to show that no miracle had occurred.  We might ponder their reasons for doing this.  They certainly showed some desperation.  They questioned the man himself, they questioned witnesses, they threatened his parents, they even argued with the man as though to get him to deny that he had either been blind or that he had been healed.  Why not simply glorify the God who shows his mercy in this way?  But the Pharisees were trying to convince themselves and others that Jesus could not be the Messiah, for that was the meaning of the sign he had performed.  This might remind us of how Luke describes their reaction to the preaching of St. Stephen when he proclaimed Jesus as the Son of God, in Acts 7, 56: And they, crying out with a loud voice, stopped their ears.  

In our own way, we do this when we resist the prompting of the Holy Spirit to go to confession or Mass when we already have other things planned, or to pray the rosary or the Stations of the Cross, or to come before the Blessed Sacrament to make holy hours.  We note that the water did not come to the blind man, but the blind man to the water.  Jesus wants us to take trouble to come to him.  He wants us to take part in our own growth in grace and spiritual maturity.