There are a lot of legends about Saint George, who is the patron saint of soldiers, as well as the patronal saint for England, Georgian republic, and numerous other places. Today is also the day on which farm fields are blessed, and in the Carpathian Mountain region where our Church has its origins, this is the day when herds are moved into the pastures after a long winter stuck in barns. George is seen as a protector of livestock and domestic animals.
The icons show him as a soldier, and usually on horseback, killing a dragon while a princess looks on from a distance. What we can glean from the legends is that he was a popular officer in the Roman army in the early 4th century. When an edict of Emperor Diocletian ordered the persecution of Christians and that soldiers sacrifice to the gods and the statue of the emperor, George apparently refused. Because he was so well-liked, the judges subjected him to terrible tortures to force him to yield and to frighten the Christian troops, but he would not give up his faith in Christ and was finally beheaded on April 23, in the year 303.
As for the icon, the point is that he battled the devil, symbolized by the dragon, and saved the Christian Church, symbolized by the princess whose name is shown as Ecclesia, or Church. The white horse symbolizes God’s grace carrying him to the heroism of martyrdom. The qualities of George have been invoked ever since as a model for officers in the military: to be faithful to God, to treat soldiers well, and to do one’s duty but never to break with one’s well-formed conscience. Therefore, the truly good soldier is supposed to stand firm for what is right according to the moral law. It is tragic and ironic that the Russian soldiers who are blessed by the Russian patriarch of Moscow in the name of St George and other military saints have been accused of such awful atrocities.
So, what does this feast day have to say to us? Those who persecute the Church always think that violence, murder, robbery, and torture will destroy the faith of Christians. But the Church always goes on. Diocletian’s palace is in ruins, but pilgrims still visit the elaborate tomb of Saint George in Israel. When a French priest opened a church in Nagasaki, Japan, in 1865 he was astonished to be greeted by people who had kept the faith since 1683. When the Greek Catholic Church was legalized in the Soviet Union, the secret police assured Gorbachev that there were no more than a few thousand faithful in the Transcarpathian Oblast, but instead 300,000 came forward. There are always laypeople, clergy, and monastics who will refuse to give in to pagans, atheists, Muslims, or whoever is in power and thinks they can either control the Church of Christ or completely obliterate it.
We may not face torture and loss of property, but we do face a culture that has grown more hostile to God, more hostile to Jesus Christ. This country has a long history of being anti-Catholic, going back to the Puritans, as shown in the 1872 cartoon above, and it’s not so long ago that a Protestant Establishment dominated much of the political and economic leadership in America. The more that the Catholic Church proclaims ancient truths, the more hostility we as faithful believers who uphold those truths will encounter from some secular-minded people.
Soldiers in democratic societies are bound to a moral code of conduct, and officers are bound to exercise good leadership that both takes care of their troops, is not morally objectionable, and fulfills the mission. Our code of conduct is found in the Catechism, and we are each called to exercise good leadership as baptized members of the Body of Christ. May St George, and all of the great martyrs, pray for us that we will never forsake Christ and His Church, and that we will fulfill the mission entrusted to us at Baptism: to lead lives that will take us home to heaven, and to bring other souls along with us on the journey to God.
Letter of Saint Paul to the Romans 5: For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly. 7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person—though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die. 8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
The Catholic Church is born on the Cross. Catholic means universal, and Pilate had the famous inscription “Jesus of Nazareth, King of the Jews” written in the three languages used in Judea and Galilee at the time: Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. There is no division in the Church, which serves all people. The Church is rooted in the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, born from the wounded side of Jesus, in the blood and water which gushed forth from his side when the centurion pierced his side and his heart. That blood is the blood of the Holy Eucharist, that water is the water of the Mystery of Baptism.
Our Blessed Lady and the teenager John, the Beloved Disciple, stand near the Cross. Mary becomes the Mother of the Church, John becomes the brother of Jesus, in that famous verse of the Last Words, “Behold your mother, behold your son.” The Church is rooted in these two and the holy women standing with them as being founded on their loyalty, their discipleship, their dedication to Jesus even at the worst moment possible. The Good Thief achieves salvation by acknowledging his guilt, by stating the innocence of Jesus from the false charges, and by proclaiming his confidence in the ability of the Lord to save his soul from perdition, and Jesus assures him, “today thou shalt be with me in paradise.” The sun had disappeared at noon, in fulfillment of the writings of the prophets Joel and Amos and Zechariah who predicted darkness and despair at midday, and the whole crowd of Jews and Romans was struck with fear and anxiety, but Jesus never condemned those who put him on the cross that day. Rather he said, “Father, forgive them.”
God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Jesus does not wait for the Sanhedrin to convert, or for the leaders to apologize to him. He grants forgiveness in a profound act of love and mercy. Christ does not cry out in despair when he says My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken Me? It is rather a cry of triumph, for Psalm 22 which he quoted is filled with predictions of Jesus’ passion, from the terrible dryness of his mouth to the soldiers gambling for his clothing. But that psalm ends with the triumph of the messiah, whose name will be known for generations to come, and here we are 2000 years later, gathered like that little band of disciples at the foot of his cross and proclaiming his passion and death.
The Church is born out of Jesus’ suffering and death. The Church is based on the self-giving of Jesus – when He poured Himself out at the Last Supper in confecting the First Eucharist, that Eucharist we are privileged to make present at each liturgy; when he confronted the spiritual darkness of the world in the Garden of Gethsemane; when he endured false accusations in an illegal trial; when he was beaten and scourged and mocked by 200 angry Roman soldiers; when he carried his cross despite the tremendous loss of blood and being deprived of food or water through the hot streets of Jerusalem packed with pilgrims. He died on the cross as the true paschal lamb, the true redeemer of Israel, the true Son of God, and does so as the ultimate self-emptying act of divine love. Innocent, a miracle-worker, a preacher, who never hurt anyone, dies in great pain.
God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
It is the great paradox of Christianity that we proclaim both a God who willingly ascends the cross for the most shameful and frightening form of execution known at that time, and that this God allows this to happen as an act of love. The Gospel tonight and the Twelve Gospels sung earlier today give us the entire passion of Jesus, from his walking to Gethsemane to his burial. Out of all of the thousands who had benefited from the miraculous feedings, the miracles of healing, who had heard his powerful words in his sermons, we know of only the Virgin Mary, Saint John, Mary’s sister, Mary Magdalene, Salome the mother of John, and Mary of Cleophas. Beyond them are the people of the crowd, those who watched the long painful drama. Who am I when it comes to living my faith, proclaiming our faith, defending our faith? Am I part of the band of faithful disciples, or am I watching on the sidelines? Do I start my day in prayer, or rushing around? Am I the person who curses in busy traffic, or the one who lets the other driver into my lane? Do I open my bible or a scripture app to read the scriptures of the day, or does the bible collect dust? Do I learn about the faith, about the holy trinity, about the saints, or am I ignorant beyond what I was taught for my First Communion?
God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Jesus came into the world out of love – He came from heaven and became incarnate of the Virgin Mary through the Holy Spirit so as to reopen the doors of heaven, closed when humanity turned its back on God’s command and committed original sin. He came to give us not an option, but the true path to living with him forever. Simon of Cyrene came to faith carrying Jesus’ cross, while the bloody Savior staggered from pain. The Good Thief came to faith hanging on a cross on Jesus’ right side, and is so drawn to Christ that he is the only person in the gospels who calls Jesus by His Name only. The women and the young teenaged lad stayed faithful in front of the tragedy when the men who had walked with Christ for three years had fled.
God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
Golgotha was called the Place of the Skull. Not because it looked like a skull, but because it was said that Adam’s skull rested inside that hill outside of Jerusalem. The New Adam was crucified so as to redeem the Old Adam; on Holy Saturday, Saint Peter wrote, Jesus descended to preach to the souls of the righteous imprisoned in Sheol for thousands of years, and to deliver them into heaven and so to the true home of the human race. The Blood of the Lord trickled down the cross into the ground, announcing to Adam that redemption was finally at hand.
Our redemption is achieved on this cross. There is no salvation without the cross, there is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday. We are invited to accept this salvation, we are asked to realize fully what divine love is, how enormous it is, how generous it is, how gracious and merciful that love is on the cross. God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
We are saved by the life, death, and resurrection of the Lord Jesus. The invitation is extended to us by the pierced hands of Jesus on the cross, by those arms stretched out to embrace the entire world. Do I accept this invitation? How am I living my faith out? Perhaps one-third of American Catholics attend Mass every month. Two-thirds of Mormons go every week, 44% of Protestants do, 38% of Muslims go to mosque weekly. But we, who believe correctly that the Crucified and Risen Lord gives us His Body and Blood, have two-thirds sitting at home routinely. The darkness that Jesus faced at Gethsemane, when his blood became like drops of blood falling down upon the ground, has engulfed our country. It is up to you, the laypeople who are so good about coming to church, you who faithfully worship so regularly, to bring souls into the embrace of those arms stretched out on the cross. It is up to you to learn your faith well so that you can truly invite souls to the Lord. It is up to you, above all, to believe that God proved his love for you, for us, for the entire human race, while we were still sinners, by the saving death of Jesus on the cross. God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
So great is Christ’s love for us, that he would willingly endure the scourging, the beating, the mockery, the nailing to the rough wood of the cross, the piercing of his sacred heart, over and over again were it necessary so as to save each soul. But it is not necessary, for God has proven his great love for us in that one crucifixion, that one death, that one burial, that was done for us. People will take turns tonight to imitate Mary Magdalene and Mary of Clopas who stayed sitting in front of the tomb. When we kiss the wounds of Jesus on the holy shroud, when we sit in darkness, when we sit and pray, let us accept and own the fact that God loves each of us profoundly and deeply. Let us give thanks for this sacrifice. Let us resolve to be true missionaries of Jesus Christ in the world. Let us resolve to pray and do penance for the salvation of the world, the rebuilding of the Church, the conversion of sinners, and for the triumph of the Prince of Peace in the hearts of the world. God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us. Let us live, pray, and witness to that accordingly.
Rejoice greatly, O daughter Zion! Shout aloud, O daughter Jerusalem! Behold, your king comes to you; triumphant and victorious is he, humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey. Zechariah chapter 9, verse 9
By the time Jesus enters the holy city, most people knew about the resurrection of Lazarus after four days in the grave. Not even the great prophet Elijah was able to achieve that. But even with that stupendous miracle, that challenged the teaching of the Sadducee party so much that they decide not to convert to faith in Jesus as the messiah, but rather to have him killed. That is what we are entering into this week. The Sadducees would rather hold to their preconceived notions that there is no afterlife, no resurrection of the dead, and only preservation of the Jewish nation as the reason for existence than believe that Jesus has come to bring about the fulfillment of the Kingdom of God. Caiaphas and Ananias were so corrupt, that they ignored the power of that miracle and all of the miracles, and instead worked at destroying him and the growing movement around him.
In ancient times, when a king rode into a city, it was usually with a show of power and wealth. Christ is both the rightful king of Israel and the gentle king. Jesus comes to greet his subjects, not with pomp and circumstance, but with all humility and meekness. At the very least, one would expect Jesus to ride a horse. But instead of coming on a mighty war horse, he rides a lowly beast of burden. He is riding a donkey, of all creatures—and a borrowed donkey, at that! He came in on a colt that has never been ridden by anyone. Try to get on any donkey or horse that has never been ridden before, and the animal will buck and toss off the person, because it is not used to the feeling of weight on its back. Instead, it is clear that our Lord simply gets on the animal and rides into the city, because like the ox and donkey in chapter 1 of Isaiah, that donkey recognizes its Master, its Creator, and simply goes along gently. Both the Lord and the donkey are gentle, and Jesus conquers with gentleness. The people acclaim him, the children praise him, and Jesus warns that even the stones of the hillside would cry out in triumph if the people had not done so.
Western societies of today worship celebrities and politicians and athletes. We want glitz, we want bling, we want to see someone set a new record. Just like people in the ancient world, we want to see glamour and we want to see power. Politicians who try to give reasonable answers to complicated questions are routinely ignored by our media in favor of those who give angry, often ignorant sound-bites. What would our media make of a gentle preacher, a teacher who refused to condemn sinners, a rabbi who broke the rules but did so out of compassion and love? Jesus created a family based on those who acted upon His word, a family based on discipleship. The prophet Zechariah used the word daughter, reminding the Jews that God saw the Chosen People primarily and first of all as His children, not as an aggressive power.
Christ gave care of the Blessed Virgin on Good Friday not to his aunt who was standing with her, but to the teenager John, who had no possessions of his own but the love he felt for the Lord. The family of Christ, the family of Christianity, the Church itself, is meant to be a community rooted in loving the gentle teacher who would not condemn sinners, but who did condemn injustice and cruelty. The family of the Church is supposed to be rooted in following the Lord Jesus Christ and proclaiming His Good News to a broken world that is racked by violence and anger and hatred.
We rightly condemn Vladimir Putin and his atrocities, and the Russian patriarch who has simply become the altar boy of the Russian dictator. But are we equally appalled at those around us who claim to worship Jesus’ Name, but condemn people for being the wrong ethnic group, the wrong religion, the wrong political party, sometimes even supporters of the wrong team, and use the Holy Name of Christ as a curse word?
This week this gentlest of kings, who children flocked to and an unridden colt accepted instantly, is going to endure abandonment, torture, great suffering and pain, and do so all because of his great love for each of us. He is most certainly not a weak man – he spent three years preaching and performing miracles despite pressure from the leadership in the Temple to stop. He interacted with foreigners as easily as he did with Jews. And in His passion, he went from the Last Supper all the way to the Cross, shedding tremendous amounts of blood and suffering at the hands of violent men, with neither food nor drink to strengthen him. His kingdom is one of peace, and sometimes it takes more courage to proclaim peace than to declare war. The prophet Zechariah says in verse 10 that the Messiah “will proclaim peace to the nations. His rule will extend from sea to sea and from the River to the ends of the earth” and proclaim the good news to the Gentiles. Jesus in His great power, in His great love, in His great gentleness, brings truth and the victory of peace to all nations. He is powerful enough to save the entire human race, and loving enough to intervene on behalf of every single individual, to year for the redemption of all of His creation.
If we are saved by such a gentle king, then we should serve him with all gentleness. Gentleness is one of the marks of the Christian, the fruit of God’s Holy Spirit. Holy Week leads us to Easter Sunday, and Easter Sunday opens the door to prepare ourselves for the Descent of the Holy Spirit on Pentecost. We as Christian people, men and women and children, people of all ages, are called to transform a world that is currently dominated by violence, anger, nasty conversations, terrible wars into the world desired by God Himself.
Saint Paul proclaimed in his letter to the Philippians: “Let your gentleness be evident to all” (4:5). Jesus commanded at the Last Supper on Holy Thursday night, Love one another as I have loved you. The Blessed Virgin implored us at Fatima to pray for the conversion of Russia, not its destruction, and for the conversion of sinners, not their damnation. In waving palms and willow branches, let us be more faithful than the apostles were on Holy Thursday, more enthusiastic for Jesus than the crowd was on Good Friday, and more determined than ever to welcome the Resurrection on Pascha with converted hearts.
Matthew / Mark “He cried again with a loud voice/ scream and gave up his spirit.”
Luke 23: 46 Then Jesus, crying with a loud voice, said, "Father, intothy hands I commit my spirit!" -- and the centurion said: This man was innocent, and the crowd went away, people beating their breasts" (a traditional sign of sorrow and penance).
John 19:30 “Jesus had received the (vinegary) wine, and he said, “It is finished”; and he bowed his head and gave up his spirit.A better translation for this word is this: IT IS FULFILLED./ accomplished/ consummated.
Now – He breathes his last —- what does he breathe out? SPIRIT – the first breathing of the Holy Spirit to the church is this last sigh out of Jesus’ exhausted lungs, to those standing below, to the beloved disciple, to the mother of the Lord, to the small faithful band of disciples.
INTO THY HANDSI commend my spirit shows us that Jesus knows that He was never ever abandoned by God the Father, despite the great loneliness He felt on the Cross earlier. There is a theology of abandonment that is popularly preached today in Protestant churches and among many Roman Catholics: that Jesus looks over the holy city, under the darkened sky, with the wind howling around him, and that he despaired.That is NOT the tradition of the ancient Church. Rather, that Jesus spoke the opening words of the messianic psalm 22, a psalm which indeed lists aspects of the passion itself, and ends with the messiah’s triumph.
Preachers take the opening verse and use it to say Jesus understands us in our abandonment, he felt abandoned on the Cross. No, he was abandoned when Judas kissed him and all in the garden when all fled; when Peter refused to acknowledge Him in the courtyard of the high priest and then Jesus looked right at him, and Peter went out to weep — but not to stand next to Jesus. And after Jesus said that verse from Psalm 22 on the Cross, the earth quaked, rocks split, and the inner curtain of the temple was torn from top to bottom – by the hand of God the Father Who like His Jewish children tears his garments in grief – so did God at the pain of His Son, but the necessary pain which must be fulfilled and so God answered that prayer.
Jesus does not die to appease an angry God nor is he the object of divine anger. He is the recapitulation, the anakephaliosis of the human nature which all share. Thus, in Psalm 22 it is the voice of fallen human nature, but not a cry of despair. With the tearing of the veil, Jesus’ sacrifice is accepted.
And here – Jesus does not feel abandoned whatsoever. He instead says two things – it is finished – into THINE hands – the intimacy with the Father is still present – Now he bows his head – why? Out of exhaustion/ despair/ willing suffocation? NO, watch the motion! He gives of himself to those below, to his mother, St John, the other women, witnesses in the crowd. His head goes in a downward direction: He breathes his last onto them.
John 19 verse 34: “One of the soldiers pierced his side with a spear, and at once/ immediately there poured forth blood and water.”
The blood and water: John sees it is a miracle. After all the suffering of Jesus, how could there be anything left in Him? It is not dribbling, it is not serum from the lungs. The spear tore through the Body of Jesus, and likely pierced the pericardium of the heart, which is filled with water. But this is not about an anatomy lesson. It is about the Son of God giving in death, as foretold by the Prophets, from His wound that the icons always show in the right side, which fulfills Ezekiel’s prophecy and also shows us the brutality of that spear’s piercing through that sacred body to the sacred heart of Christ Himself.
Zechariah 14:8 On that day living water will flow out from Jerusalem
Ezekiel 47:1-2: water is coming forth from under the threshold of the temple eastward, for the front of the temple [is] eastward, and the water is coming down from beneath, from the right side, from the south of the altar.
The water is coming out of Jesus’s right side: He is the new Temple. In the First Letter of John we read: 6This is the one who came by water and blood—Jesus Christ. He did not come by water only, but by water and blood. And it is the Spirit who testifies, because the Spirit is the truth. 7For there are three that testify: 8the Spirit, the water and the blood; and the three are in agreement.
Here, John says that the water and blood gush, pour out. In one of the legends, it says that the centurion Cornelius was blind in one eye but the pouring water hits that eye with force and he is cured. It gushes from that dead sacred body – a sign of fulfillment of running water; the water equals Baptism; blood equals the Eucharist; his breathing of the spirit equals Chrismation / Confirmation – the traditional order of the three sacraments of initiation still preserved in all Eastern Churches and in the rite for adult converts in the Roman Church.
He has brought everything to fulfillment, to completion – and now? Here? Now it is up to each of us, for whom he suffered willingly, out of love that we just are beginning to understand, he has given each soul since the crucifixion life – and we must complete our lives.
He gave everything in the end to the Father – the father now is the mother. Jesus compared God to a mother hen, longing to gather the chicks of doomed Jerusalem under her wings. Now he puts himself into the hands of the Father – gentle loving motherly hands which receive his soul and a loving father who kisses away the tears and soothes the exhaustion of the human Jesus.
So, to the completion of our lives. We must embrace the cross. He was pierced for us. He pours out water and blood for us. He accepted all of this willingly, he entered the passion in full command of himself, and so in his death he is giving life. Jesus is the new human, the original human without sin. His innocent death is sacrificial and therefore saving. Death cannot hold this human nature any longer, thus the resurrection. We are in Adam thru human nature but we are in Christ thru Baptism and thus share in this renewed human nature of Jesus.
When we come to the end of our own lives, may we have the faith and trust to say into the darkness: Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit. And may we remember that Jesus, who suffered all this willingly, suffered it just for me – and so will be close at hand at that moment. Let us live as ones whose souls are loved passionately by God, and let us love others in fulfillment of the one commandment that Jesus gave to his disciples.
Let us give Him love, and not count the cost. Let us love others, and not count the cost. Let us work in the power of the Suffering and Risen Lord, through the working of the Holy Spirit, to transform this broken world into His Kingdom. Let us not flee from our cross, but embrace it, and realize this is the truth: Ave Crux, spes unica! Hail O Cross, only hope!
FIFTH WORD 5. After this Jesus, knowing that all was now finished, said (to fulfil the scripture), “I thirst.”
In all convents of Mother Teresa’s missionaries of Charity, there is a life-sized crucifix in the chapel next to the chapel with these two words painted on the wall under Jesus’ right arm. I thirst.
John tells us that the soldiers stick a long branch of hyssop into a jug of sour wine, or the word vinegar, and so we often interpret that as a bad joke from these rough men – the prisoner thirsts, let’s give him vinegar. Actually, this was basically the Roman soldiers’ Gatorade when serving in a hot climate like Jerusalem, and they put it up to His broken lips; or they put in a narcotic to ease the pain. They are most definitely aware of the drama and are being caught up in it more and more. Or it is an intervention by someone hoping to revive Jesus with this vinegary wine, to drag out Jesus’ life a bit longer so as to see if God was going to intervene for Him or if the Prophet Elijah was going to appear.
Even the most ignorant soldier on duty that day knew these things:
The priests have come out to a public execution site on the biggest Jewish holy day to watch this man suffer and die, and they have mocked him and cursed him;
there is a large crowd that is simply watching – no words from those people at all are recorded, but probably a steady stream of crying , a mix of sad sounds and curses on Christ.
darkness, wind, sand, the sun blocked out over the holy city;
no matter their religion they probably are frightened and worried – will they be caught in a massacre, is there going to be rioting, why this crowd that all the evangelists say just watches, why are the priests and elders coming out when even the Roman soldiers know that Jewish purity laws should be keeping them in the temple on Passover;
Prisoners on crosses screamed all the time, but not a scream in Aramaic to the Jewish God, quoting a prayer that suddenly got that big crowd moving around because the people were trying to interpret the words to one another. No matter how tough these soldiers are, they are all getting affected by this tragedy and the obvious religious elements that are present, as we know from the conversion of their leader which will happen when Jesus dies.
And so Jesus says I thirst, and they respond with the hyssop branch, they unconsciously recognized Jesus as the Paschal Lamb. Hyssop: a hyssop branch was used in Exodus to sprinkle the blood of the first Passover lambs on the doorways of the Israelites to shield them from the avenging angel of death, it was used in the temple by the priests for sprinkling of water, and it is symbolically used still today in Catholic parishes with the large aspergillum which the priest puts into holy water and blesses the people with at the beginning of Mass or in our rite for the blessings of people and items. You see, no detail is too small in the Passion narrative, or in any of the gospels. The soldiers didn’t use any kind of stick, or even a spear. They use a branch from the plant that is filled with such symbolism to assuage the thirst of this, the eternal Passover Lamb Who saves us from the death of sin and opens the doors of paradise to the thief, to the souls trapped in Sheol, and to the souls of those who believe in Him and do His will.
I thirst. He most certainly was thirsty. This is why the flow of the blood and water is seen as a miracle as we will hear next Friday night. He could not have had much water left inside him at this point. In psalm 22 that he had begun to quote, it says, “My throat is as dry as a pot shard and My tongue sticks to My jaws.” And he also says this word to fulfill Scripture: Ps 69:22 “and in my thirst they gave me vinegar to drink.”
He remains faithful to the will of the Father. Even what the prophets wrote about me are fulfilled as I fulfill my life to the Father. His anguished suffering is a mission, remember, a mission to save human souls and to restore the balance of broken creation. He came to fulfill the will of the Father, the Father whose will you and I promise to fulfill every single time we recite Jesus’ prayer, Our Father. He said in life to his followers walking those dusty desert roads in the hot sun, in the courtyard of the Temple in John 7:37-38 “If anyone 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”.
Saint Therese of Lisieux: “He has so much need of love and He is so thirsty, that He expects from us the drop of water that must refresh Him! Ah! Let us give without counting the cost.”
As long as you do not know in a very intimate way that Jesus is thirsty for you, it will be impossible for you to know who He wants to be for you, nor who He wants you to be for Him. St Therese was loved and is loved for her Little Way – the smallest things can be moments of absolute love for God. Consider though her words: He has so much need of love” – really! God needs my love! Why? Because He is Absolute Love, He is indeed thirsty, thirsting for love. God does not thirst for animal sacrifices; He tells the people in Isaiah 1 that He wants converted hearts, and that is the first reading for Lent in the Byzantine rite at the Sixth Hour. God needs our love –He who made me, wants me to love Him. Let us give to Him without counting the cost – oh let us do so!
Mother Teresa writes that we must end God’s thirst. She was asked when did you first feel Jesus’ thirst? She said, “My First Communion.” The Sister asked, “But as an experience?” And Mother Teresa answered, “It is reality – not just an experience that is felt, but reality.”He thirsts for souls – first our own individual and then those which we will lead to Him. He thirsts, and He ends all thirst. Water will come suddenly upon those who see Jesus naked, wounded, dried out, bloody, worn and ragged. Tonight, going to bed, tomorrow getting up, and every day thereafter, Jesus has a thirst that is for me, and for the world. It is in our ability, thru the waters of baptism, to bring souls to him and end his thirst. But we must feel it as Mother Teresa says, we must feel it as a reality that will drive us forward to Him and inward into His all-loving and all-forgiving Heart.
Let us give back to Him without counting the cost.
And when the sixth hour had come, there was darkness over the whole land until the ninth hour. And at the ninth hour Jesus cried with a loud voice, “Elo-i, elo-i, lama Sa-bach-tha-ni?” which means, “My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”
Mark writes that there was darkness until the 9th hour, or 3 pm, which is marked by Jesus’ scream: not a crying out, but a scream. Matthew writes that from the 6th hour to 9th there was darkness, and then Jesus’ scream comes from the Cross. Luke says that around the 9th hour the sun eclipsed, casting the city into darkness.
An eclipse cannot happen at Passover because the earth is between the sun and moon then. The darkness is rather of God’s making and direct intervention. God is intervening dramatically on Calvary now and in the Temple. This eclipse, this darkness only over the holy city, provides physical evidence to show God as the ruler of time and nature.
Darkness was invoked by some of the prophets predicting the messiah, and the first Christians were very aware of this. Zephaniah 1:15: day of wrath, a day of darkness and gloom.
Joel 2:2: It is near, a day of darkness and gloom.
Joel 3:4 The sun will be turned to darkness, at the coming of the great and terrible day of the Lord.
Amos 8:9-10: the sun shall set at midday, and the light shall be darkened in the daytime. I will make them mourn as for an only son and bring their day to a bitter end.
There is nothing worse for human beings than darkness, for with it comes fear of the unknown and unseen. Earlier remember that the Jewish leaders wanted a sign: Come off the cross. They wanted a sign? Now God gives a sign and He gives it bluntly. Darkness for three long hours causing anxiety and fear on that Passover day of joy, an earthquake, rocks ripped apart, and this incredible heart-rending scream from the man on the central cross in Jerusalem which to the ancients was the center of the world, from the cross whose wood stabbed Death in its heart.
Jesus’ screams in the darkness surely rocked the crowd and the soldiers, because this is not an ordinary tortured cry from a prisoner. Rather, all are sensing God’s wrath is upon Jerusalem. Darkness was one of the plagues on Egypt. Those who reject the Messiah say in Wisdom 5:6 the sun did not rise upon us. Jesus raised himself up on those pierced feet twisted by that huge spike and screams – he cries out with all the force he can possibly muster from those tortured lungs and that dry, dry throat and broken mouth. Those who mocked him wanted a sign – Mark says now here is their sign.
If someone speaks more than one language, usually in times of stress that person will revert to the one he considers to be his mother tongue. Thus, Jesus does this great cry, this awesome “why?” in Aramaic, and the gospels preserved it as such when written in Greek or any other tongue, as we do today in all modern bibles. Jesus showed absolute obedience, begun in Gethsemane, in this prayer. In Mark and Matthew, Jesus who has lived in such union with God the Father, for the first time feels his absence – at the worst possible moment. He does not say Abba. He uses instead the words of a servant. It is ripped out of him. Jesus is still praying though – out of all the possible ways of expressing this desolation, he chooses Ps 22, verse 2.
Why not one of those verses? I think because He wants us to know by using the first incredibly sad verse, He will identify with every one of us who faces doubts in the years after Him – He knows what we feel, and He points to the solution. After the scream and those painfully pronounced words, I think that He cries in that awful darkness, but He has expressed both utter loneliness that unites Him to every human who will die after him, but also it is truly the fulfillment of that traditional teaching: He trusts that the Father will hear Him, will act, will somehow deliver Him.
When Jesus was rejected at Nazareth, he could have called on his angels to help – but he walked thru them (the crowd parted, like the waters of the Red Sea). When Jesus was in the garden, he could have fled from the cup – but he does not, because the mission must be fulfilled. At Pilate’s court he says he could call for twelve legions of angels, an incredible amount of heavenly messengers and divine forces, but he does not. And now … no one can share in this death. No one can understand what it is to suffer like this for the entire human race and in such horrible agony in muscles, nerves, and bleeding.
The mockers had said he said the temple would be destroyed and he would restore it in three days – well, the temple is ripped apart now by the hand of God. God responds VIGOROUSLY to Jesus’ scream – Jesus is not forgotten at all. And he is angry and sad. Elisha, when Elijah departed the earth, tore Elijah’s precious cloak into two pieces, and now God tears the sanctuary curtain into two pieces with His hand for Matthew says it is from the top down. The sanctuary is no longer veiled as a holy place – God has left. In Ezekiel 10 God left because the Jews allowed idolatrous acts to take place in the temple, and then God used the Babylonians to destroy the desecrated temple. In a Jewish apocryphal work written after the destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70, an angel tears the veil and a voice says “Enter enemies and come adversaries, for He who guarded the house has left it.”
In the gospels there is no voice, but the sudden and immediate action of God ripping the curtain from the top down gives voice to the feelings of God. Those who read Mark’s gospel at the time of the Roman siege and then destruction of the temple surely believed that this was indeed fulfillment of Jesus’ warnings because that earliest of all gospels is written before the disasters of the year 70. In Matthew, the rocks are ripped apart and the tombs of the holy ones open up. In Luke the ripping happens before Jesus dies, joined to the darkness that engulfs the city and a positive response to Jesus’ cry on the cross. In Luke the tearing of the veil is a warning to the Jewish leaders that they cannot continue to reject Jesus and his teaching as brought by the apostles and first converts who went into the temple daily to pray as we see in Luke’s 2nd book, Acts of the Apostles. But they fail to heed the warning, and as St Stephen is being killed in Acts, he tells the leaders that God has left the sanctuary. There is a period of grace to understand what they did and to repent, and indeed thousands converted, but the main religious and political leadership do not, and thus Jerusalem will be destroyed.
Either way, the tearing of the veil is a vindication of the suffering Jesus alone, naked, whipped by the wind, struggling in darkness to see those who loved him and who were his own, and who screamed in fear and pain and isolation. When someone says to me, no one understands my pain – I tell them they are foolish, for God most definitely does since he understood the pain of Jesus in the worst dying possible. But remember: Psalm 22 is a psalm of triumph, for while it predicts the Passion of Jesus in great detail, it also is a song of how the messiah will conquer his enemies, how God hears the cry of his servant, and how God vindicates his suffering, and by extension, how God vindicates all of our sufferings.
Standing close to Jesus’ cross were his mother; his mother’s sister; Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary Magdalene. Jesus saw his mother and the disciple he loved standing there; so he said to his mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” And from that time the disciple took her to live in his home.
We have the soldiers at the foot of the Cross, the Jewish leadership passing back and forth mocking Jesus, and the “crowd” of people observing from a distance. Included in this is the large group of women, and of this group there is the smallest group of his disciples: Mary his Mother, assorted women who are relatives and disciples, and John – they are not near the cross as is shown in paintings – the soldiers would keep them away until death, so now He must push Himself up and shout from his dry throat to them. They are HIS OWN. We are HIS OWN as result of this Word.
There is a two-fold action in this word: 1. Mary is a widow without other children; Jesus is dying and so He makes a testament statement giving her to the care of John. Of all the apostles, John is the one. So, it is a buttress to the tradition that Mary had no other children, as obviously there is no one around to take her into their homes after the death of her Son
2. Why does this happen? St John’s gospel never names Mary and the Beloved Disciple – they are historical persons, but their importance is in their titles: Mother and Disciple. He is the youngest, a son of Zebedee along with James the Greater, a youngster of great emotion since Jesus called him and his brother “sons of thunder”, and the one who truly loves Jesus and whom Jesus can love. He is shown beardless always to emphasize his age – much younger than James the Greater and the last of the apostles to die, sometime around 90 AD. Galilean men were known to be devout, industrious, physically tough, brave, and valiant defenders of the Jewish nation. We see this when James and John want Jesus to call down lightning to destroy the Samaritan towns that reject the gospel, and when they want Jesus to punish a man using Jesus’ name to cast out devils: they most certainly are zealous for the Lord! Their mother Salome made the request to Jesus, in true motherly intercession, that they be allowed to sit at Jesus’ right and left in glory: to be his closest warriors and servants.
The other apostles were generally mature men in their 40s and had their own businesses. James and John are younger, and left their father Zebedee and his business: they are the prototypes of youth who ready to go into action for God as is shown in all four gospels. They are the ones who accompany Jesus at the most special moments along with Peter who is equally brave and emotional and strong. This James is called the greater which actually means the taller – James the Less who was the relative of the Lord and became first bishop of Jerusalem is the James who in his martyrdom forgave his killers just as Jesus did.
A common interpretation to this Word is that a Jewish widow with no children had few rights, and the Mother of the Lord is a widow whose son has been killed in the most horrible way known to mankind at that time, and he is a failed prophet. She needs to be taken into some man’s house. But Jesus, and St John in his Gospel, have far bigger concerns than that, and so does Mary: they are now the best examples of discipleship. Mary is the one who has pondered and meditated in her heart (St Luke), she is the one who knew that Jesus was ready to begin his signs of his public ministry at Cana, she is the faithful one who will be in the center of the company during the nine days of prayer waiting for the Holy Spirit (Acts).
Notice that the others were not jealous of John. Rather, they wished that they could love Jesus with that much single-minded devotion and could follow Jesus absolutely as John does. All who are young – develop now your love for Jesus, stoke it in a furnace of pure love and self-giving. All you who are young – keep the fervor you have now for God and maintain it all your lives. All of us who are older – set aside the stuff that clutters our minds and thoughts and prayers and retrieve the enthusiasm of this Galilean teenager, his love for God, his passion for what is right, his devotion to truth, so that others can say of us when we go home to God – truly he was God’s disciple.
In the Synoptic Gospels, Mary shows up unnamed during Jesus’ adult ministry, as his mother along with his “brothers” who either come to take him home or come to see him, but Jesus declares, in violation of all Jewish tradition, that his family consists of those who hear the word of God and act upon it or keep it in their hearts. “Whoever does the will of God is brother and sister to me” – that was a radical break from the Jewish family and Israelite family.
In Mark and Matthew, the disciples and the family are separated. In Luke’s gospel the mother and brothers take on the model of discipleship. This is what John does now with Our Lady and the Beloved Disciple. Now, the natural family (mother) comes into the realm of discipleship (John). She knew better than Jesus at Cana that it was time for him to start preaching, but now is the hour come – the hour in which Jesus embarks on a cataclysmic battle against the forces of darkness and sin in order to wrest the souls of all mankind from the broken world of sin and bring us into the healed world of redemption. And the disciple – if Mary is now his mother, then what is he to Jesus? Brother.
Let us ponder the awesomeness of this: the eternal God, maker of all things, calls us brother and sister thru our relationship to him in Mary. We say it casually but it is more than what it sounds like: a whole new family, united by His humanity, sustained by the Holy Spirit, at great cost to Jesus, and totally as a gift.
From that moment, he took her to his own –Mary is the New Eve, the mother of us who are his disciples. She now becomes mother of the church and the new Zion. She who is in mourning on Friday becomes the Mother of all.
And here is an IMPORTANT NOTE: Mary grieves, but not without hope. In the Gospel, she STANDS at the Cross, and this is how she is always shown in icons. She gives strength to Jesus, she stands as legal witness of the sacrifice, she stands as an eternal sign to all Christians, she stands in absolute faith and fidelity at this, the most terrible hour of all the hours. She does not faint away, this widow, nor does the teen aged boy. They stand – so must we, for Christ, for His faith, for the Church, for the gift entrusted to us by our divine brother can never be snatched away by any force on earth.
One of the criminals hanging there threw insults at him:"Aren't you the Messiah? Save yourself and us!" The otherone, however, rebuked him, saying: "Don't you fear God? Herewe are all under the same sentence. Ours, however, is only right, for we are getting what we deserve for what we did;but he has done no wrong." And he said to Jesus, "Rememberme, Jesus, when thou shalt come into thy kingdom." Jesus said to him, " Amen, Amen, I say to thee: this day, thou shalt be with me in Paradise.
The bible does not say that the two criminals crucified on either side of Jesus were thieves. Rather, they are bandits and wrongdoers – whatever they did, it was especially bad. That means that either they were large-scale robbers, like highwaymen who attacked caravans, or they were terrorists from the Zealot rebels who launched attacks against the Romans and supported various false Messiahs during the span of the first 150 years of the Christian era.
We forget in worshipping the Prince of peace that the region of modern Israel was about as peaceful then as it is now – there were sporadic and sometimes very well-organized assaults against the Romans, which would culminate in the prophecy of Jesus regarding the city of Jerusalem – its complete destruction and burial in the year 70, only 36 years after the death of our Lord. Jesus is mocked three times, but the mocking by the bandits is the shortest – they don’t have the air to spend on long sentences.
Jesus is truly alone – even they reject him. BUT Jesus will show great mercy to the wrongdoer, the lawbreaker. Mocked without mercy, Jesus now shows mercy. He saves the other bandit by staying on the cross and entrusting himself to the Father. Why? This one, the Good Thief as he is known, realizes who the Lord is, both in terms of his reputation and the reality of Jesus as the Son of God. First, he asks the other thief, “Have you no fear of God?” This is the first step to conversion. Then, he says this: “We have been justly condemned”– but Jesus is suffering wrongly. “He did nothing disorderly and is innocent.” He knows of Jesus, and like the wife of Pilate knows that he is a just man.
Thus far the thief has acknowledged the need to fear, respect, and honor God, and he has made a confession of his sins, recognizing his mistakes. When we acknowledge God’s power and sovereignty, and then acknowledge our own guilt we are experiencing a sincere change of heart.
Now what does this eloquent thief say? It is a shocking sentence – he says JESUS – the only man to address Jesus by name in ANY gospel – with no title – this is a sincere cry from his rapidly changing soul – remember me! He trusts that Jesus has the authority to help him and he anticipates the invitation Jesus normally gave to sinners to repent. Jesus answers with AMEN twice! A most definite pronouncement from the king of all and a solid promise. Luke does not have any AMEN sayings – only HERE! It is Divine graciousness beyond any human expectation! In Luke 11:9 Jesus said “Ask and it will be given” – the great merciful Jesus is going to indeed hear the prayer of this wretched sinner who asked to be remembered and Jesus says “thou shalt be w/ me this day” – the day which is going to close so quickly after the 9th hour, 3 pm, the day of absolute salvation. Jesus gives deliverance, Jesus gives intimacy. Jesus makes him a disciple, that precious role. And where will they be? In the presence of the absolute fullness of God. God exercises incredible graciousness thru the person of Jesus. How can Jesus grant such a thing to a sinner? But Jesus indeed came for that reason into the world, to save sinners, St Paul says, and this is echoed today in the Byzantine Rite before receiving Holy Communion – to save sinners, of whom I am the first.
Today thou shalt be with me in paradise – “today” in the Hebrew Scriptures stands for eternity. So Jesus promised eternal life to the thief. What is paradise, but the home of the Trinity, the angels, the Mother of God, all of the saints, all the people who have made it into the heavenly glory.
Why does the good thief convert? Roman historians said that those sentenced to crucifixion normally fought tooth and nail to avoid the cross, cursing the soldiers, struggling to escape their horrible fate. Jesus goes meekly, like a lamb to the slaughter, out of great love and so as to save the human race from being drawn into sin. Instead, Jesus ascends the cross willingly, as we sing in the troparion. Those dying on the crosses would curse the government and soldiers who put them there, but Jesus’ first word from the cross was one of forgiveness. This thief’s heart is transformed by Jesus’ last moments, not just to repentance, but to full awareness of exactly who Jesus is – the Son of God who offers eternal life to all. Ironically, being sentenced to die on Good Friday allows the good thief to be delivered from his sins and enter into heaven. Let us die to our own sins and go forward in trust to love the Lord and be with Him, fighting against sinful habits in this life and living in paradise after our deaths. Christ is among us.
The first of the Seven Last Words is spoken when the soldiers are gambling for J’s clothing. But “they” includes not only those men, but the leadership of the Romans and Jews who have put Jesus on the cross. At the station where the weeping women meet Jesus, he ministered to them, and remarking about his own suffering, he said “If in the green wood, they do such things” he means the leadership. And thus, he encompasses both the soldiers and the leaders in this first word. No matter how much plotting, no matter how evil they were, they really did not appreciate God’s great goodness or his plan of salvation, really they do not know what it is that they are actually doing. Jesus wanted this prayer to be imitated by his disciples – he does not give the forgiveness, but asks the Father to forgive them.
In the Nag Hammadi scrolls, there is an account of the killing of St. James, the first bishop of Jerusalem. James was the hero of the Jewish Christians, and there is a very strong tradition that he prayed for God’s mercy on his killer, in the spirit of Jesus His kinsman. And we find this in the bible among the Greek-speaking Christians: very quickly after Pentecost – when Stephen the deacon is being stoned to death, another horrible way to die, he prays for forgiveness of those doing the deed, after he sees the Son of Man, Jesus, at the right hand of God – in heaven, fully equal to God the Father.
Ever since Jesus’s utterance, and Stephen’s and James’ – all martyrs try to imitate Our Lord on the Cross and extend forgiveness to their persecutors. People still find it remarkable to hear someone grant forgiveness in situations of incredible violence and terror. I knew a survivor from the Communist era who heard her priest-father forgive those who turned them in to the KGB and the prisons of Stalin: if you don’t forgive, one said about the man who betrayed her father’s hiding place to the secret police, the hate will eat you up from inside, a spiritual cancer.
So here is a question for all of us in this Lenten season of conversion and repentance and healing: is there someone who I have not forgiven? Am I angry at someone – a person I know, a political or religious movement? Have I failed to forgive those who have damaged me? Society tells us too often that we should not forgive, we should not reconcile, we should hold onto our pain or anger. We know it is not physically or mentally healthy to do so – we know from the Lord Himself that we must ask God to forgive them. We also know from the Lord Himself that we must individually forgive.
After the resurrection, Jesus makes breakfast for the apostles while they are fishing. After they eat, he sits alone with Saint Peter. He asks Peter three times: do you love me? Three times Peter answers – it is the opportunity Christ gives to Peter to atone for denying Jesus three times during the Passion. If Jesus could forgive those who put him on the cross, if Jesus could forgive the close friend who denied and abandoned Him practically to His face, who am I to hold on to my anger, my hurt, my pain? Like that woman who had to forgive the neighbor who betrayed her father to the secret police, we know deep down that holding onto pain and anger is a physical and spiritual cancer eating away at us. It prevents us from loving God fully, from accepting His love, and from loving as He loves.
It is not easy to forgive someone who may not deserve it, who may not even want it, who continues to hurt others or even continues to hurt me. But if the martyrs could do it while they were suffering their own passions, so too can we. If I am holding onto something, this is the year to ask Christ our God that through His life-giving suffering and death, I be freed of it once and for all.
Today obviously is the Sunday of Icons, also known as Sunday of the true faith, or Sunday of Orthodoxy. It commemorates the final restoration of sacred images in the churches on the first Sunday of Lent in 843 in the Eastern Roman Empire. The procession recalls when the people, monks, and nuns carried icons that had been hidden during the persecutions and destruction of holy images into their parish churches to be used again in prayer. The heresy of iconoclasm, of breaking sacred images, was rooted in the denial of the incarnation, that God became Man, one of the central teachings in Islam. To this day you can go in old churches in Turkey or in territories that used to be ruled by the Turks in Europe and see how the Muslim warriors scratched out the faces on frescoes of the saints or shot up statues and icons.
We know that Nazareth was a small town, home to a completely Jewish population. Archaeology shows that the Jews of Nazareth in the first century kept to the strict orthodox rules regarding food and lifestyle. But as the Pharisees pointed out to Nicodemus in denying that Jesus was a prophet, there were absolutely no writings about anyone wonderful coming out of Galilee. The region was mixed with Jews and Greeks and other pagans, a bustling commercial area but with no religious significance at all. Nathaniel asks a logical question of Philip – how can anything good come from Nazareth?
Jesus answered, “Before Phillip called you, when you were under the fig tree, I saw you.” Sitting under a tree was not just something people did when they found shade in the heat of the day. Sitting under a fig tree was a particularly important thing to do when one was praying, or thinking deep thoughts. The fig tree was a symbol of God’s blessing and peace. It provided shade from the midday sun and a cool place to retreat and pray. The leaves are large, and an old fig tree can be quite large, protecting a substantial patch of ground and providing a protected space in which to pray or teach or just sit and think. Whatever it was that Nathaniel was pondering underneath that tree, it had to be something very important, because when Jesus says I saw you under the fig tree, he reacts with that powerful statement, Truly you are the son of God! He makes a gigantic leap of faith, not because he realizes not that Jesus could see him sitting under a particular tree, but rather that Jesus knew what was happening in his soul.
Christ sees us. In icons, the eyes are among the most prominent feature. Look up at the fresco on our ceiling – Jesus is looking down at us. In the window on the south side, he is looking out at us. In the icon of Christ the Teacher on the iconostas, he is looking straight out at us. Jesus sees us – God sees us. Think of the compassion in the eyes of Jesus; for these are the eyes through which God looks at us today. What compassion must have shown in His eyes when, looking at Jerusalem, He wept over it. What compassion must have shown in His eyes when He healed the sick and when He wept before the tomb of Lazarus, His friend.
People can look at someone else with hardness, gentleness, even indifference. Or we can look at someone and see beyond their body and notice something within them. This is the way God looks at us, and not just to see us, but to affect us. Jesus looked at the rich young man who was consumed with owning stuff, looked at him with love, but let him walk away when he wouldn’t get rid of the stuff. Jesus looked at the blind, the crippled, the sick, the lepers, the suffering and had compassion. Jesus looked and he truly saw into people, just like he does with Nathaniel. And Nathaniel also sees in a different way – he meets Jesus, and goes far beyond what Philip or Andrew or Simon could do – he is able to proclaim the truth of the Incarnation. “You are the Son of God.”
Icons can be made because of the Incarnation – Jesus was flesh and blood as well as divine, and therefore people truly met him, truly experienced him, truly encountered him. He was not a ghost, he was not some vague demigod, he was and is the Son of God as well as the Son of Mary. Christians have rooted all of their religious art in the reality of the incarnation, as is made clear in the teachings of the ecumenical councils that defined that mystery and that defended the making and veneration of icons. My experience has been that those who usually attack the use of sacred images tend to have a pretty limited vision of Jesus Himself. The Muslims deny the incarnation of God in Christ even while admitting the virginal conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary. The Jews believe that no one can depict the divine, and in that sense they’re right because no one can adequately paint God. But Christians should be able to depict the Lord, and therefore the Virgin and saints, because it is both an affirmation of the Incarnation and of the goodness of God’s created world and the elements inside it.
We are meant to not only pray with icons, but allow ourselves to use icons so as to see God, try to understand God better, let ourselves be opened to God’s mercy and grace. Philip proclaims to Nathaniel, “Come and see!” And Nathaniel does come, and does see, and sees far more than Philip had seen. This is our job as Christian people, as members of the true faith, as faithful participants in Catholic life, to come and see and to invite others to come and see. People think more about God during Lent, even those who are routinely indifferent to religious practice. The sudden prevalence of fish sandwiches at Blake’s and MacDonald’s as “spring specials” or “seasonal meals” make people wonder and then say, Oh yeah, it’s Lent. Take the opportunity to invite someone this year to worship with you. Use your icons at home to see God differently, to look at the large profound eyes of Jesus in an icon and see Him in a new way. Ask the Lord tonight and every day this week, help me to see you and recognize you more deeply this Lent. Make it a Lent that will be a Lent to remember, a Lent to be transformed during, a Lent to be made whole in.
This Lenten season of 2024 I will be preaching on the Seven Last Words of Jesus from the Cross on Friday evenings at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, at 6 pm during the Liturgy of the Presanctified Gifts.
Bear in mind that the Gospels make clear that Christ is in complete control of His Passion, from the Agony in the Garden up to his death on the Cross.
Since the 16th century these sayings have been widely used in the preaching on Good Friday; physicians and scientists who have studied the crucifixion concluded that the sayings had to be short because crucifixion causes asphyxia and shock. That and the physical posture of the victim nailed to the cross made inhaling air difficult, and so it was very hard to speak. Jesus chose His words very carefully, and they are each loaded with powerful meaning and with allusions to Scripture.
There are seven short sentences recorded in the Four Gospels:
Father, forgive them: they know not what they are doing.
Today you shall be with Me in Paradise!
Behold your son; behold your mother.
My God, my God! Why hast thou forsaken Me?
I thirst.
It is finished.
Father, into Thine hands I commend My spirit.
The first of the 7 words is spoken when the soldiers are gambling for J’s clothing. But “they” includes not only those men, but the leadership of the Romans and Jews who have put Jesus on the cross. At the station where the weeping women meet J, he ministered to them, and remarking about his own suffering, he said “If in the green wood, they do such things” he means the leadership. And thus, he encompasses both the soldiers and the leaders in this first word. No matter how much plotting, no matter how evil they were, they really did not appreciate God’s great goodness or his plan of salvation, really they do not know what it is that they are actually doing. Interesting to note that some of the early Christian copyists do not accept this word, and they dropped the verse completely out of their editions of the gospel because they saw it as favoring the Jews!
In the Nag Hammadi scrolls, there is an account of the killing of St. James, the first bishop of Jerusalem. James was the hero of the Jewish Christians, and there is a very strong tradition that he prayed for God’s mercy on his killer, in the spirit of Jesus His kinsman.
And we find this in the bible among the Greek-speaking Christians: very quickly after Pentecost – when Stephen the deacon is being stoned to death, another horrible way to die, he prays for forgiveness of those doing the deed, after he sees the Son of Man, Jesus, at the right hand of God – in heaven, fully equal to God the Father. A question the early Church had in its first two generations was should they forgive the Jews who were organizing persecutions against them in Roman cities. So, we have the scandal of some copyists dropping this sentence of mercy from the gospel, so that their communities would not have to forgive the Jews around them as Jesus forgave the Jews around him. Fr. Raymond Brown points out that over the long history since, the problem has been not the absence of this prayer from the old manuscripts, but rather the failure to incorporate forgiveness into the heart.
Ever since Jesus’s utterance, and Stephen’s and James’ – all martyrs try to imitate Our Lord on the Cross and extend forgiveness to their persecutors. People still find it remarkable to hear someone grant forgiveness in situations of incredible violence and terror. I knew survivors from the Communist era who heard their priest-fathers forgive those who turned them in to the KGB and the prisons of Stalin: if you don’t forgive, one said about the man who betrayed her father’s hiding place to the secret police, the hate will eat you up from inside, a spiritual cancer.
So here is a question for all of us in this Lenten season of conversion and repentance and healing: is there someone who I have not forgiven? Am I angry at someone – a person I know, a political or religious movement? Have I failed to forgive those who have damaged me? Society tells us too often that we should not forgive, we should not reconcile, we should hold onto our pain or anger. We know it is not physically or mentally healthy to do so – we know from the Lord Himself that we must ask God to forgive them. We also know from the Lord Himself that we must individually forgive.
After the resurrection, Jesus makes breakfast for the apostles while they are fishing. After they eat, he sits alone with Saint Peter. He asks Peter three times: Do you love me? Three times Peter answers – it is the opportunity Christ gives to Peter to atone for denying Jesus three times during the Passion. If Jesus could forgive those who put him on the cross, if Jesus could forgive the close friend who denied and abandoned Him practically to His face, who am I to hold on to my anger, my hurt, my pain? Like that woman who had to forgive the neighbor who betrayed her father to the secret police, we know deep down that holding onto pain and anger is a physical and spiritual cancer eating away at us. It prevents us from loving God fully, from accepting His love, and from loving as He loves.
It is not easy to forgive someone who may not deserve it, who may not even want it, who continues to hurt others or even continues to hurt me. But if the martyrs could do it while they were suffering their own passions, so too can we. If I am holding onto something, this is the year to ask Christ our God that through His life-giving suffering and death, I be freed of it once and for all.
Why 40 days? Forty always signified that something big was coming, a change. 40 days of the great flood – the human race started over. 40 days of Moses on Mount Sinai, alone with the Lord. 40 years of wandering in Sinai – the adults who left Egypt and doubted God died and the new Israelite people entered the promised land. 40 days of Elijah traveling from the wrath of Jezebel to Mount Horeb to meet God. 40 days of fasting in the wilderness – Jesus began his public ministry. Forty was always a time for testing, for growing in faith, for trusting in God and His merciful providence in a new way.
In these examples of forty – the people involved didn’t sit on a rock somewhere. They were in motion physically, going somewhere. They were in motion spiritually, having to put all their trust and confidence in the care of Almighty God. They were in battles – Noah and his family against fear, the Israelites against idolatry, Elijah against despair and Jesus was up against the devil himself.
We are on a journey every Lent – fighting idolatry of different passions, fighting against the forces of secular darkness or despair that offers little beyond here, fighting against idolatry from using crystals or astrology to the idolatry of money and success, and in all those battles we really are up against the devil himself. Satan knows our particular weaknesses, and uses those to tempt us away from God’s love and his constant, great, abundant mercy.
In the reading for Pure Monday for the sixth hour today from Isaiah, chapter 1, we read this:
Wash yourselves; make yourselves clean; remove the evil of your doings from before my eyes; cease to do evil, 17 learn to do good; seek justice, rescue the oppressed, defend the orphan, plead for the widow.
God is calling on the Israelites to transform their wicked and corrupted society, a society which still worshipped in the Temple but had abandoned the authentic practices of the Law which called the people to ongoing conversion, justice, and favoring the needs of the poor. The same holds true for us – we have to be alert, attuned to conversion, and focused on digging out our individual sins. When we dig out those sins, we have to replace them with their opposites, and in so doing we become the leaven that can transform the world around us. Our duty as Catholic Christians is to bring the world forward, to recall society to its original goals of building the Kingdom of God, and in particular to defend those at risk – the unborn, the poor, the unwanted, the dying, and anyone who is being persecuted. Christ died on the Cross to save the entire human race, not those who society says is supposedly deserving. Tonight, we are anointed to go forward into the 40 days of Lent and then Holy Week so as to be transformed by God’s enormous graces. With Him, all things are possible – without Him, nothing will change. Christ is among us.
Today might be better called Sunday of the Merciful Father. He is really the central character in the story. He is the one who is insulted by the younger son, who basically demands the money he would get when the father would die. He is the one abandoned by the younger son. He is the one who watches for the younger son, who runs to him when he returns.
He is the one who gives the orders to restore the son – he gives him the ring, showing that even though he wasted all the money, this wastrel of a son is still an heir to the family. He gives him not the robe left behind, but the best robe in the house. He puts shoes on the son’s feet, the ultimate sign of a free man. He gives the order for a feast, a feast that would normally be given at a wedding.
And he is the one who, after being yelled at by the angry older son, is the one who gives the message of love. As the father, he is happy that the lost child has returned, and not only returned, but he is so happy that he restores this child to the full stature as a member of the household.
This is what happens in every confession. People line up, acknowledging that they have gone into exile, drifted away, done things that interfere with God’s grace and mercy and love and energy, and instead have put their energy into wrong behaviors. Everybody in this church who is old enough and mature enough to decide between right and wrong, good and bad, has gone into exile at some point. Hopefully everybody who has done that has chosen to make a real act of repentance and come forward to be restored as a member of God’s household.
The point Jesus was making in this story is that the father in heaven is incredibly merciful, incredibly loving, incredibly gracious. It’s part of a series of parables listed by Luke – the lost sheep, the lost coin, the dishonest steward, the rich man and Lazarus. They are all stories of dramatic reversals. Would the shepherd leave the 99 to look for one sheep? No. Would the woman spend all day looking for a dime and then call in the neighbors to rejoice? No. The people listening to him would expect the rich man to go to heaven, not into the fires of hell. They would also expect the younger son to be yelled at, reduced to the level of a slave as punishment for the terrible insult he gave to his father and the sins he committed with the family’s money. None of those things happen in Jesus’ parables.
It is all about great, enormous, abundant, unending mercy, and a mercy that is rooted in generous, incredible, stupendous love. In the office of Matins today and through Cheesefare Sunday, Psalm 137 is added. This is from the time of Israel’s exile in modern Iraq under the Assyrians, when they would gather by the Euphrates and Tigris rivers and sing of their exile from the temple on Mount Zion and Jerusalem – By the rivers of Babylon— there we sat down and there we wept when we remembered Zion. 2 On the willows there we hung up our harps.
We have the American Byzantine Catholic hymn based on this, We Sat and Wept. What are we weeping for? Not Mount Zion, not the vanished temple. No, this psalm is used in the weeks before Lent because we are supposed to recognize that like the younger son, we deliberately go into exile away from the loving Father, from that Father whose love is generous, incredible, stupendous.
What do I choose for my exile? Anger? Disobedience? Cheating? Alcohol? Driving too fast? Swearing? Indecent behavior? We cannot be like the pharisee of last week and say well I haven’t murdered anyone or committed a great sin, and after all I give generously to the church so I’m in good shape.
The point is that each person, each one of us who is capable of choosing between good and bad, chooses some kind of exile. It can be a small step away, it can be many small steps, but whatever the sin, it is an action away from God and His commandments, from God and His mercy, from God and the standards He set for the human race.
We are invited to do what the younger son does – wake up! Wake up and realize what is the habit, the behavior, the choice that I make that I know God does not approve of, and ask the Lord’s grace to come forward and repent of that, and replace it with its opposite? Drive too fast? – slow down! Curse? – clean up my mouth! Eat too much? – it’s the season to eat less and realize that I will still live. Cheat in school or at work? Do my own work. Give television 5 hours and God 5 minutes? Change my orientation. Wake up and move away from Satan’s temptations and closer to God’s mercy.
There are 3 priests ministering in this parish, a parish of less than 200 people. There really is no excuse for not making a good confession with one of us, and receiving God’s great love and forgiveness. In receiving the Body and Blood of the Lord, let us ask Jesus for the courage to go forward, to have a blessed Lent, a Lent of repentance and return, a season in which I realize He wants to restore me to the fullness of love and His kindness, and not to be afraid. Christ is among us.
He is one of the most popular saints of the Eastern and Western Churches, so much so that he has two feast days, today and May 9th, the day that his body arrived in the city of Bari, Italy, in 1087. His relics rest in a shrine shared by Catholics and Orthodox, and both Catholics and Orthodox pray at his tomb and are anointed with the Myron that comes from his bones. He is the particular patron of the Byzantine Catholic Church, because the bishop lived at the monastery of Saint Nicholas outside of the town of Mukachevo. This was the site of an annual pilgrimage in honor of the Dormition of the Mother of God, and a stronghold of the Faith. Nicholas is quite busy in heaven as the patron saint of the poor, unjustly accused, children, students, travelers, sailors, pawnbrokers and merchants. In northern Europe he is the gift-giver, bringing presents to children on this, the anniversary of his death and birth into heaven, and of course Americans’ creation of Santa Claus is rooted in the original Dutch devotion to St Nicholas in New York City.
Stories abounded of his personal holiness and simple life, as a bishop who prayed devoutly and did not live in luxury. The various accounts of his life state that his wealthy parents died when he was young, and he spent his inheritance on the poor, sick, abandoned elderly by opening orphanages and old-age homes, following the example of Saint Basil the Great.
We know that he suffered for the faith in the last persecution under Diocletian – his relics in Bari show signs of him having been beaten and having a broken nose. Among the reasons for his popularity are the fact that he interceded for those falsely accused, defying unjust civil authorities and exposed the sins of those authorities; he protected children during his lifetime by rescuing them from dangerous settings and after his death parents prayed to him for the deliverance of their children from Turkish captivity; he went down to the harbor of Myra, praying successfully for the safety of sailors and blessing their ships.
One of the most famous stories of course is that he slapped the arch-heretic Arius during the First Ecumenical Council of Nicaea in 325. That story however only shows up in the 16th century, over 1300 years after the council of Nicaea. BUT the point is that he was passionate about defending the faith, and protecting the apostolic teaching of the divinity and humanity of Christ. It is important also to note that the story has gotten more violent in our day, with internet memes showing him punching Arius. But the Greek account uses a word for slap that means to call one to attention, to wake a person up from making mistakes. In that sense, Nicholas can call us all to awareness of the need to hold firm to the True Faith, especially now in a time when people mock the Catholic Church and so many have drifted away from the sacraments.
There is a quote attributed to Nicholas: The giver of every good and perfect gift has called upon us to imitate his giving by grace, through faith, and this is not of ourselves. In other words, when we give to others, be it Christmas presents or charity or an act of kindness, or simply by doing our duty without complaint, we are imitating God and we are doing so with His grace and His help. Going out of ourselves on behalf of others imitates our Lord Jesus Christ, who poured Himself out as the Eternal Word of God to become incarnate in the womb of the Blessed Virgin Mary so as to save us from sin and lead us to safety in heaven.
If we live a life of charitable sharing, if we call on God to help us at all times and in all things, we will do well and be Christians who live in the spirit of Saint Nicholas. Christ is among us!
This happens right after Jesus has warned “Truly I tell you, anyone who will not receive the kingdom of God like a little child will never enter it.” That is when the rich man asks, Good teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” Jesus looks at the ruler and tells him exactly what he must do if he wants to go to heaven – he has to sell everything, give all of the proceeds to the poor, and walk away from it, and follow Jesus. When he heard this, he became very sad, because he was very wealthy. Not only is he sad, but the apostles are stunned, since they presumed that wealth and power are a sign that one is blessed by God now and in the life to come. Unlike in Mark’s gospel, the ruler does not walk away, but stays in front of the Lord.
As a result, he hears the dialogue initiated by Peter, who basically says, Hey, what about us? Truly I tell you,” Jesus said to them, “no one who has left home or wife or brothers or sisters or parents or children for the sake of the kingdom of God30 will fail to receive many times as much in this age, and eternal life in the age to come.” But immediately after that, Christ withdraws with the Twelve and issues his prediction of what he is going to endure in Jerusalem: that the Son of Man will be delivered over to the Gentiles. They will mock him, insult him and spit on him;33 they will flog him and kill him. On the third day he will rise again.” That is what will happen to the preacher whom they loved with all their hearts – the Passion and Death must come before the joy of Easter Sunday.
We have all been conditioned, like it or not, to think that financial success brings happiness. As Americans, we have also been touched by the Calvinist heresy of the prosperity gospel – have money in this life, and joy in the life to come. American Protestantism in general, a lot of Evangelicals, a lot of Reformed Christians, have been taught through John Calvin’s heresies that financial prosperity and good health is a sign of God’s blessing of the righteous. By the same logic, those who are poor and struggle with sickness must be sinners. When my physical symptoms first began to really interfere with my daily life in a more visible way to outsiders, I had a Catholic Sister actually tell me that “your whole problem is you don’t pray properly” and she saw my illness as a punishment from God. There are preachers around the world who take money from the poor, live lavish lifestyles, and tell their congregations that God will bless them if they keep on giving money to them. Those preachers have given Christianity a bad name in Africa, Asia, the Americas – everywhere. It is the work of Satan himself.
Throughout the Gospels, throughout the Old Testament, in the Epistles, God blesses the poor, the anawim, the people at the edge of society. On December 25th, Jesus will be born in a cave and worshipped by shepherds, not the temple priests. In the epiphany, Jesus is adored by the pagan Magi, not King Herod. On February 2nd he is praised by the two oldest and simplest people in the temple, Simeon and Anna, and Joseph will be bringing in two birds to offer as a sacrifice, a sign of his poverty. When Jesus says it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for someone who is rich to enter the kingdom of God he is not joking. It is a dire warning that he gives in the presence of the rich ruler, in the presence of the crowd, in the presence of the apostles. He warns in verse 17, right before this gospel reading, that it is only if we approach God with the peaceful simplicity of a small child, the poverty of a small child, the pure love of a small child, only then will we enter into the kingdom of God.
In the epistle, Saint Paul uses the imagery of armor so as to protect the soul and fight against the cosmic forces of darkness and evil, those fallen angels who seek to seize human souls and drag them away from the gates of the heavenly kingdom and into the fires of hell. What kind of armor does he tell us we have to wear now, here, today? Truth, righteousness, readiness to proclaim the gospel of peace, and the shield of faith. Only then, he says, will we be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. 17 Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God.
Jesus comes into the world as a little child, as we will see on Christmas Day. He does not come as a king in a palace, he does not rip apart the heavens and descend surrounded by legions of angels, he does not reveal his divinity right away and scare people into submission. He comes as a baby, with arms outstretched, reaching to us, lying in a bed of wheat in a food trough. He comes as the eucharistic Lord, born in a town called House of Bread in Hebrew and House of Meat in Arabic. We must be people not caught up with power and money, but a people caught up with truth, righteousness, peace, faith and the power of the Holy Spirit in the word of God as found in the Bible. Know the Scriptures, and we will know Christ! Love God with a pure heart, and we will be on the path to the heavenly Jerusalem! Learn the Faith, and we will be able to defeat Satan and all his armies! In this season of Advent, Christ is living now in the womb of Our Blessed Lady, as she and Joseph begin their walk to Bethlehem, the house of bread and meat. As we walk down this aisle today to receive Him in Holy Communion, may we come with open hearts, on fire with that faith, caught up in the power of Jesus’ love, ready to be united to the Infant Child, that little boy who came to save the world and each one of us. Christ is among us – he is and always shall be.
The MISSION SOCIETY is happy to present this year’s Christmas card. It is the icon of the Mother of God of Igor or Igorevskaya. It takes its name from the Ukrainian prince Igor Olegovich, he was surprised by guards that kidnapped him and jailed him. Before facing death, he prayed before the icon. 100% of your Christmas card purchases & donations will go to “UKRAINE RELIEF”. The eparchy (diocese) of Mukachevo continues to serve thousands of refugees displaced by the fighting in the south and east who have sought food & shelter in the Transcarpathian Oblast of Ukraine. Your Christmas card purchases & donations helps refugees with these basic needs. The situation in Ukraine is dire – due to Russian land mines, the number of civilian & military amputees now exceed WWI levels! Go to this link in order to request cards: https://www.missionboronyavo.org/donate
Per usual, the cards cost $12 for a packet of five. Each packet contains 5 cards and you can purchase multiple packets of cards. The list of names you provide us when purchasing cards will be prayed for by Bishop Nil Lushchak at Holy Cross Cathedral in Uzhorod, Ukraine on Christmas Day. All orders must be in by Sunday, December 10th to insure that you receive them in time for Christmas giving. Thank you for your generosity, and please encourage family, friends, and other parishioners to order our cards. We remain an all-volunteer organization. We never sell or give your name or information to any other organization!
May the Infant Jesus bring you and yours many blessings this coming Christmas season, and may He rule in all hearts as the Prince of Peace, especially so that the war will come to a quick and just conclusion. You are all prayed for daily by the priests and students at the Romzha Seminary in Ukraine, and in the prayers of our volunteers in Albuquerque. Thank you again for your continued support and kindness!
Sincerely yours in the new-born Infant King,
Rev. Christopher L. Zugger, Chaplain
Mission Society of the Mother of God of Boronyavo
1838 Palomas Drive NE / Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA /87110-5113
Listen to the farmer’s words: my crops … my barns … my grain … my goods … my soul. If a Jewish farmer had an abundant harvest, he was supposed to give part of it to those in need: the poor, the widows, the orphans. He was supposed to be paying his workers a just wage, and providing for them and all those around him. There is no mention in the man’s thoughts of his workers, of his family, of his relatives or friends, or of his community. This fellow in the story is completely focused on himself, and gives himself all the credit – notice that at the beginning of the parable, Jesus says that the land brings forth plentifully, not the work of the owner or his employees. There is no gratitude expressed by the landowner whatsoever for what nature has produced, or what God has given to him. He uses the word “I” six times and the word “my” five times.
He is totally focused on himself, to the point of claiming ownership of his own soul. He asks no advice from his workers, from his rabbi, and certainly not from God, but does a complete dialogue with only himself. And sadly, I think that this parable is very appropriate for our times. We are taught to be focused on what we want, what we desire. Look at the messages given to our children by social media, by advertising on television or billboards. We are taught that self-fulfillment is what matters, personal joy is the ultimate good, acquisition of money and more and more stuff is our destiny and what will bring us happiness.
We begin the first full week of Saint Philip’s Fast, the 40 days of preparation for Christmas today. This is already the fifth day of the preparation, so we have only 35 to go. This week it so happens that we have the Church holy day of the Presentation of Our Lady in the Temple, and the American holy day of Thanksgiving, followed immediately by the second American holy day known as Black Friday when most people go shopping in the stores or online. In the midst of all the shopping, baking, mailing of cards, office parties, and upcoming vacations, it is very easy to forget what and who we are preparing for. God humbled Himself to become a tiny little zygote in the womb of the Virgin Mary on March 25th. Now in late November Mary would be in the last month of her pregnancy. She and Saint Joseph will soon embark on the long and difficult journey to Bethlehem, which will end with her giving birth in the cave amongst the animals.
It is worth pondering for ourselves the mystery of the Child Jesus living inside of Mary. This is the God Whom we worship, this is the Lord Who we will receive in Holy Communion, this is the One Who became flesh in Mary and of Mary so as to lead us into the heavenly kingdom. God became poor, the source of life took on human life in all its messiness, in order to lead souls to heaven. The man in the parable is focused on wealth, on power, on living comfortably for years to come, and only for his own benefit. We are here in church today because presumably we are people who think of God, who think of others, who think of the destiny of our own souls. We will stop on Thursday to give thanks to God for all that He has done for us, and for His great mercy. We will stop on Christmas Day to praise the Infant Jesus for coming into the world to save us.
The parable was given in response to a man who asked Jesus to order the man’s brother to give him his share of their inheritance from their deceased parents. While it was a matter of justice, Jesus uses the moment to give a warning. Because in the end, the rich fool’s wealth was going to become someone’s inheritance, and the brother’s ill-gotten gains from the parents’ estate would also become an inheritance. Today that parable is a warning that everything here is temporary, everything. Whatever I own, whatever I am used to seeing around me, everything including the sun and the stars and all the planets of the universe, everything is temporary. Even purgatory is temporary. Two things are permanent – heaven and hell. We are at this Liturgy today because we are planning, hoping, desiring, to end up in heaven, and not hell. God became incarnate so as to reopen the gates of heaven to the human race, so that we will live with the Holy Trinity and the angels and be filled with the glory of the Beatific Vision. That is only going to take place though if I am living my life here and now well, and in a spirit of charity, love, and wisdom.
In the parable, God condemns the man as a fool. What a judgement to receive at death! To be called a fool by the Eternal Judge, the one who knows the innermost workings of our hearts, would be the ultimate sorrow. I want to be welcomed into the kingdom of God at my death, not told that I’ve been a fool. This fallen world puts emphasis on money and power and self-promotion. When dictators like Putin and Xi Jingping die, will God be praising them for their palaces, or condemning them for causing the deaths of tens of thousands of innocent people, ruining nations, and repressing the hopes of people around the world? We can easily condemn those and other political leaders, but what God will say to me is a question that every human being has to ask, has to wonder about. I most certainly do not want to be known to the Lord as a fool!
So, what are we rich in, as individuals? What are we focused on? What do we acquire more of? Television time? YouTube or TikTok videos? Instagram scrolling? Stuff? Or prayers, reading, spiritual knowledge, charitable actions, love for others? Which way are we going? Jesus in His humanity relied on the Father’s mercy and love, and told the apostles and first disciples to do exactly the same thing when he sent them out two by two to preach the good news.
In the epistle today, (Ephesians 4:1-6) Saint Paul wrote from prison to the Ephesians, and to us: I urge you to live a life worthy of the calling you have received. Be completely humble and gentle; be patient, bearing with one another in love. Let us ask the Lord our God today for the grace not to be fools in His eyes, but rather to be fools in the eyes of the world, and to be focused on those virtues that Paul emphasized: humility, gentleness, patience, and loving all of those around us. If we do that, we will be truly wealthy, and not condemned fools. Christ is among us.
Angel of God, my guardian dear, To whom God’s love commits me here, Ever this day, be at my side, To light and guard, Rule and guide.
That little prayer really sums up the whole relationship that we are blessed to have with our angels. Today is the feast of Saint Michael and all of the holy angels. There are said to be nine choirs of angels, based on readings from Scripture: highest are the (1) the six-winged Seraphim (Is. 6: 2), (2) the many-eyed Cherubim (Gen. 3:24) and (3) the God bearing Thrones (Col. 1: 16); to the middle hierarchy belong (1) the Dominions (Col. 1:16), (2) the Powers (1 Pet. 3: 22) and (3) the Authorities (1 Pet. 3:22; Col. 1:16); to the lowest hierarchy belong the (1) Principalities (Col. 1:16), (2) the Archangels (1 Thess. 4:16) and (3) the Angels (1 Pet. 3:22). November is the ninth month from March (which originally was the first month of the year in the Roman Empire), and so the feast was put on the 8th day of the 9th month.
Besides the Archangels Michael and Gabriel, the following archangels are known both in the Holy Scriptures and Holy Tradition: Raphael, the physician of God (Tobit 3:17;12:15), Uriel, the fire or light of God (3 Esdras 5:16), Salaphiel, the prayer of God (3 Esdras 5:16), Jegudiel, the glorifier of God, Barachiel, the blessing of God,and Jeremiel, the exaltation of God (3 Esdras 4:36). It’s interesting that in the traditional story about the defeat of Lucifer and the angels who chose wickedness, it is the angels and archangels who drive them out of heaven and into hell, and Michael is called the angel-general in spiritual writing. In our modern military, it would be as if the privates and lieutenants suddenly became generals, rising up to save the nation by themselves. That can serve as a reminder to us that we should not think we are incapable of spiritual warfare because of our limited humanity; rather there are spiritual graces and forces present to help us fight and resist temptation.
We are all assigned guardian angels, as we read in Exodus 23, where God says to Israel “Listen attentively to his voice and do all that he says.” Their job is to lead us to our true homeland in heaven. In Psalm 91, we read that “God will command his angels concerning you to guard you in all your ways. On their hands they will bear you up, so that you may not dash your foot against a stone”; in Psalm 97 we find these beautiful words. “[God] guards to souls of the devout and rescues them from the clutches of the wicked.”
St John Climacus writes that the angels help us to stand our ground, and that our guardian angels will respect our endurance. Sure, we fall, but by continually getting up and doing better, the wounds of sins can be healed, especially if we are fighting regularly against sin. Fresh wounds are easily healed; it’s the wounds of habitual sin that can fester and lead us further and further away from God.
As I emphasize often, God desires each of us to be saved, He wants us to be with Him for eternity. The question always is, do I listen to His voice with the ears of my heart? Do I respond to the prompting of the guardian angel given to me, and hear the angel’s warnings and encouragement? That’s the little voice that nags when I think about sinning, when I ponder doing something that I know is wrong. Jesus says that the angels in heaven rejoice over one sinner who repents, so great is the desire of God and the angels that we get to heaven.
We are not abandoned; we have not been forgotten. The Lord has provided for us by giving us these invisible guardians, by giving us these intercessors in heaven, by giving us the fullness of revelation in the Catholic Church, and by strengthening us with His grace. On this feast of the holy angels, let us implore their continued intercession, let us thank our individual guardians, and let us ask Jesus in this Eucharist for His mercy and forgiveness so that we go forward always in His love.
This story is part of a series of parables that Jesus teaches to his disciples: the shrewd manager, the prodigal son, warnings about divorce or causing others to sin, the costs of discipleship. This one is unique to Luke, but different in that Luke’s gospel is known as the gospel of mercy. But here the rich man is not suddenly redeemed, like the son who wasted his inheritance, but remains in the place of torment. This parable is the only one where Jesus gives someone a name, and Lazarus means God is my helper. The rich man certainly was not a helper! In the parable, Jesus makes a point of saying that Lazarus lay at the gate, so the wealthy people passed him every day – but their sin was not that they abused him, rather their sin was they simply were indifferent to him. Only the dogs took care of him by cleaning his wounds, while the people simply went by day after day.
Lazarus was carried to heaven by the angels, but the rich man, Jesus says, was buried. What a difference – one was carried by angels, the other put into the ground and that was that. Surely it was an elaborate funeral with all of the proper rituals, but it is interesting how Jesus puts it. How are we living? We can be carried by the angels here and now, by being lifted up to God through our faith, through our prayers, through our charitable actions, by how we are fulfilling our duties in a Christian manner. Or we can simply be living with all kinds of pleasures, doing whatever we want, fulfilling our duties in a manner that the world may approve of, or find interesting or entertaining. But where is that particular road leading? Not the road of the angels.
Notice that the rich man is not sorry for what he did, only afraid that his relatives, who are equally indifferent to the poor and caught up in wealth and power and entertainment, will burn in hell with him, and he commands Abraham to use Lazarus as his servant to be sent back to earth. He is still arrogant, still focused on power, still indifferent to what Lazarus endured on earth. God wants us to be brought to repentance, to be convicted in our hearts of what we do wrong, to be transformed by the gospel, by the teachings of the Church, by the power of the example of the saints.
The parable ends with these striking words: He said to him, ‘If they do not listen to Moses and the prophets, neither will they be convinced even if someone rises from the dead.’” And of course, in the gospel of John, Jesus will indeed raise his friend Lazarus from the dead after four days in the grave. And notice what happens – when people go from Bethany to tell the Pharisees and priests about that miracle, they do not go out of the city to see for themselves, or to follow the Lord, but rather they plot how to destroy him.
What happens now in our culture where so many traditional teachings have been turned upside down by the media and Hollywood? When someone comes forward and re-proclaims authentic Christian teaching, we are ignored, or shouted down. People have days of rage, but not days of love or fellowship. What is the path that I am walking on? We are encouraged to walk the path of entertainment, of getting more money, of easy solutions, of anger toward whoever is the current “other.”
Christ’s path is the path of service, of radically loving, of looking at others with the eyes of a compassionate God, of choosing humility instead of power. Am I going to be lifted up by the angels? Or am I letting myself be buried and covered with the dust of the junk of a fallen sinful world? In the epistle to the Galatians, Saint Paul says that he is crucified with Christ, and that Christ lives in him. The living Christ has replaced the old Jewish law and its hundreds of commands and rules and regulations. The person of Jesus alive in me, through the sacraments, through my baptism, through my prayer, through my union with him in service and suffering and ongoing conversion – that person now fulfills the old law. We live the way we do as Catholic Christians because Christ lived and died in a way that gives us the ultimate example as to how to live, and indeed how to die. We are living by the faith taught by Christ, preserved in the Catholic Church, through Christ who loves ME, who died for ME, and who calls us to bring others to him.
If I do this properly, then I can be lifted up by the angels here and now, and be justified through our living faith, a faith that unlike that of the rich man, is manifested in how we treat those around us, those we encounter and those we may quickly pass by in a car or on a bicycle or the bus. Saint Teresa of Avila revealed to one of her nuns that God has greater love for one soul that is aspiring to perfection – to living in such a way as to be carried by the angels – than for a thousand others are may be in a state of grace but are comfortable being imperfect and are not on fire with love for Him.
Do I want to be carried by the angels to the house of the Lord, to rest in the bosom of Abraham, to live with the God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob and all the saints? Do I want to be on fire with love? Or do I want to be buried in the dust of the stuff I gave myself up to? It’s up to each one of us.
There was once a Muslim prince who had three hundred and sixty-five wives in his harem. He loved to eat and have a good time. One day he visited a Christian monastery. There he met a young monk. The prince looked at the monk with compassion and sorrow. “What a great sacrifice you are making,” he said to the ascetic. “You have given up marriage, children, good food, and drink for the rest of your life.” But the monk objected, “Your sacrifice is greater,” he said. “How’s that?” asked the prince. The monk replied, “Because I have renounced that which is temporary so as to gain eternal life, while you have renounced the eternal for what is temporary.”
So here is the question for us on the Sunday after the exaltation of the Cross. What do I value? What is truly important to me? What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul?
Forbes puts out a list every year of the 100 richest Americans. Most of us have no idea who they are. ESPN can list the 50 greatest athletes. How great will any of them be in 25 years? The New York Times has a list of the 25 greatest movie stars of the 21st century, a century that is not even 25 years old. The Hill publishes the names of the 10 most powerful politicians in America. Well given how long some politicians currently like to hold onto power, I guess some of them will still be around in 25 years, but not all of them!
Who among any of these people will be remembered in 100 years? Who will care in a century from now, as to who won the Grand Slam of tennis, or Super Bowl 25, or the World Series this year? How long can you stay on as Speaker of the House, or president? How much money can take to the Last Judgment? What good is it for someone to gain the whole world, yet forfeit their soul? Yet this is what we are taught matters: fame, money, physical strength, power. We are taught to accumulate all of those things, and lots of stuff, but Jesus says we have to lose our lives in order to save our lives.
At the end of the Gospel reading, Jesus says this interesting sentence: Truly I tell you, some who are standing here will not taste death before they see that the kingdom of God has come with power. Well obviously, Jesus was wrong – all of those people who were around that day have long since died and God did not come with power.
Or was He wrong? Because when did God come with power?
On the Cross and in the Resurrection. The pagan Roman centurion proclaims after the Passion ends “Truly, this was the Son of God.” Ironically, it is in the great humiliation of the Cross that Jesus is revealed completely as the self-giving love of God. It is in the darkness and wind of Calvary, in the silence of the tomb, in the awesome resurrection, that God’s full power is shown.
Muslims have trouble accepting that Jesus is God because they are taught that God disdains the human body, and is too powerful to be contained in the womb of a woman. And that is precisely the core of Christianity – that God so loves the human race, that he willingly enters into the womb of a woman, willingly takes on the human condition completely – along with hunger, thirst, pain, friendship, joy, love, family – in order to have us come to Him eternally.
Every morning I say a prayer which asks that after my death God will not reject me when I first see His glory but rather that He admit me into His presence. I do not want the Son of Man to be ashamed of me when he does return in glory, and I pray and hope that I live in such a way that at the end of my life I can live with God, and at the end of time, God will admit me into the presence of the life-giving Trinity and unite my soul and body to live with Him forever.
What have I given up? What is temporary, or what is eternal? We all have goals and hopes for this life. We are all called to do something with the talents and gifts that God has given us. But those goals and hopes must reflect what is eternal. We must treat others as God wants us to treat them. We must use our gifts for what will help others. We must be brave in the face of a fallen and sinful world that seems to have lost its bearings. We must be people who love, not condemn, and who love as God the Father loves.
Jesus loved us so much that He willingly went into the Passion and onto the cross. May we each have the courage to go forward, and upward for what is important for God, and thus for our own souls. May we live so as to transform this parish into a shining city on a spiritual hill, one that will cast its light on souls, and bring them closer to God. And may we never be ashamed of the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ.
Christ exhorted his followers to take up their crosses and follow him. To do so means to give up of oneself, just like Heraclius had to give up the signs of his power and wealth. Saint Barsunuphius the Great emphasized that when we carry our own crosses, we are mystically helping Jesus in His Passion when He carried the heaviest cross ever made, the cross through which the human race would be saved, and that by so doing, we are preparing to be His servants in the choir of heaven.
In the morning services on September 13, we commemorate the dedication of the Church of the Resurrection, known more commonly as the Church of the Holy Sepulcher. This shrine contains both Mount Calvary where Christ was crucified, and the adjacent grave donated by Joseph of Arimathea. Cross and resurrection are intertwined – there is no Easter Sunday without Good Friday, and the sorrow of Good Friday always leads to the joy and power of the Resurrection.
That promise of Saint Barsanuphius is most fitting therefore: what could be greater than to achieve eternal life with our Crucified and Risen Lord in glory? At the end of time, Christ will raise the dead, bringing the souls of those in glory to be reunited with their restored bodies that were left behind at death. The paradox of the message of the Cross is that it is not what it seems to be, an instrument of humiliation and death, but rather it is the instrument of joy and life, life that is eternal.
The Old Testament readings for this feast give a series of foreshadowing of the cross as our instrument of salvation, and the Christian looks at those events and sees that paradox of the Cross at work.
In Genesis we read about the tree of Eden, by which we were lost (the tree of the Cross saves us); Noah’s ark brings about the salvation of the just ( while the Cross offers salvation to sinners); Jacob crosses his hands to bless his grandsons Ephraim and Manasseh, the sons of the patriarch Joseph. In Exodus Moses repeatedly opens his arms in the shape of a cross, and uses wood. He extends his arms to open a dry path through the Red Sea as a door of salvation to the Israelites; he throws wood into the waters of Mara to sweeten its bitterness, as the Cross which should be a bitter instrument actually is healing; Moses strikes the rock with his staff to make life-giving water spring forth, as on the Cross Jesus’ life-giving blood and water pour out; Moses prays with hands crossed, for the victory of the Jewish people over Amalek. Aaron’s rod of dead wood blossoms into new life, just as the supposed dead wood of the Cross actually brings spiritual life; and the bronze serpent made by Moses brings healing to those bitten by the poisonous serpents, as the cross brings life to us who have been bitten by original sin.
In the early Church, making the sign of the cross was so important that it was considered as the 8th sacrament. Saint Cyril of Jerusalem exhorted his congregation to make it on their foreheads, over their food and drink, when going to sleep and getting out of bed, when traveling, even when going in and out of the house or shop. He called it the Sign of the faithful, and the dread of devils: for Jesus triumphed over them in it, having made a show of them openly for when they see the Cross they are reminded of the Crucified; they are afraid of Him, who bruised the head of the serpent.
The story of the discovery of the Cross in Jerusalem says that it was applied to a sick woman who was cured, and to a dead man who was restored life, showing that it is indeed the life-giving Cross: just as it gave life to those two people so it brings life to our souls. When the army of the Emperor Heraclius recaptured the True Cross from the pagan Persians in 614, the emperor tried to carry it back into the church of the Holy Sepulcher. But the story of that event says this: the Emperor, magnificently dressed and wearing gold, was stopped by an invisible force. Zachary, the patriarch of Jerusalem, said to him: “Be careful, Emperor, because with these ornaments of triumph, you don’t imitate sufficiently the poverty of Jesus Christ and the humility with which He carried His Cross.” The Emperor laid aside his splendid clothes to dress himself in an ordinary cloak, and with bare feet, he was able to continue on his way.
Once again, we see the paradox at work – power, gold, and wealth were actually what kept Heraclius out of the shrine. Only by lowering himself in the eyes of the world, by going barefoot and in plain clothing, could he return the True Cross to Mount Calvary inside the shrine. And that action raised him up in the eyes of God, so that the invisible barrier in the doorway was removed, and he could go inside and worship Christ our God at those two powerful places: the site where the Lord died for us, and the site where the same Lord rose for us.
The same holds true for us in the spiritual life – if we are keeping ourselves powerful in the eyes of the fallen world, if we are ashamed of wearing the cross or blessing ourselves with the sign of the cross, then we are going to lose our way. If we hold firm throughout all of our sufferings, if we hold firm despite the temptation to abandon Jesus and His teachings and His Church, if we hold firm through the power of the Cross, then we will find our way to glory, and into the waiting embrace of the Holy Trinity at the time of our passing from this life to the life that awaits us. Christ is among us.
Today is the first big event of the liturgical year. We start the liturgical year with the birth of Our Lady, and we end it in August with the Dormition and Assumption of Our Lady. One could ask why we celebrate the births of the Virgin and of John the Baptist. The Baptist, celebrated in June, is because he is the last of the prophets, and the one who announces Christ. Our Lady, the Blessed Virgin Mary, is of course the woman who will conceive, carry and give birth to Christ. But there is more to her role than that. She is also the New Eve, the Mother of the Church, and the first disciple of Jesus. Elizabeth praises her at the Visitation as recounted in Luke, when she affirms to Mary that she is the Theotokos, the Mother of God, when Elizabeth asks Who am I, that the mother of my Lord should come to me? The word used by Elizabeth is Adonai – the Lord our God – and so she gives Mary her first confirmation after the Annunciation that all that was promised by Gabriel is true.
The legend about Mary’s parents is exactly that, a legend. It is not in Scripture, but rather in the book called the Protoevangelium of James. That is a mixture of fantasy, some scripture, Jewish tradition, and Greco-Roman practices. But it captured the imagination of people, and is the origin of the names of Mary’s parents being Joachim and Ann, and that Mary is supposedly born from the house of David after her parents could not have a child. But like all religious legends, it communicates a message, and in this case, it is a message of marital fidelity, abiding love, and God’s faithfulness. According to the story, Ann could not conceive, but rather than divorce her or take a second wife, Joachim loves her too much to do so. Instead, they keep praying, and like Abraham and Sara and Zachary and Elizabeth, their prayers are finally answered in their old age. God grants them the gift of not only a child, but a child who will give birth not just to the messiah, but to the very Son of God!
Whoever Mary’s parents were, what we can say for certain is this, that the couple living in Nazareth who raised her, did so very well. They had to be devout Jews, they had to be loving parents, and they had to be supportive parents. Mary is conceived without original sin, but raised in a family that had to be so prayerful, so good, that she grew up surrounded by good examples of people who inspired her to continue in both physical and spiritual purity.
Saint Andrew of Crete says of this feast day that Mary is the created temple for the Creator of all; and creation is readied into a new Divine habitation for the Creator. Adam offers from us and for us the worthiest fruit of mankind — Mary, in Whom the new Adam is rendered Bread for the restoration of the human race.
Here is the key, that in our Blessed Lady we celebrate the beginning of the fulfillment of God’s promise to the original Adam and Eve in Genesis, that all will be made well through God’s mercy, and the doors of heaven reopened to the human race. As God was faithful in the legend to Joachim and Ann, and in Scripture to Abraham and Sara, Zachary and Elizabeth, He is faithful to us. All of those people persisted in praying and in trusting God, as must we. Mary herself fully trusted in God and His Word at the Annunciation, as must we.
God does what He promised to Abraham and David, and this birth is the dawn of that promise being fulfilled. This feast prepares us to fully understand the incarnation at the Annunciation and the complete meaning of Christmas as the birth of the Son of God made man. May we be faithful to God as Mary was, as her family surely must have been, as the patriarchs and matriarchs of the Old Testament were, and may we put our confidence in her for her intercession on our behalf.
How many inches are in one foot? How many feet in one yard?
How many feet in one mile? If I say there are 5 inches in a foot, and 2 feet in a yard, and 520 feet in a mile, does that make it true? No, obviously not.
In the same way, proclaiming that something wrong actually is good does not make it true.
John died because he insisted on preaching that Herodias and Herod Antipas were not married according to God’s law, and that by Jewish law and ethical standards not only were they not married, but their union together was a scandal to both the Jewish people and their neighbors. Herodias had divorced her royal husband and left with their daughter. This so-called marriage caused a war with the king of Nabataea, Rome had to intervene in the mess, and ultimately Herod and Herodias were deported to Europe where they died in exile. As for the unnamed princess who performed a dance that delighted the guests, the fact that the princess Salome from the royal family would perform any kind of a dance in front of the men at a birthday dinner shows just how wicked and corrupt the court of Herod Antipas had become. She should have been sequestered with her mother and the other women of the royal court in their own area, and certainly not performing in front of Herod Antipas and other men. When movies and operas show Salome dancing in a very suggestive manner and the men clamoring after her, it is unfortunately accurate as to what probably happened. John obviously condemned the conduct of Herodias, and so she demands his murder at the hands of the king. Herod did not have the moral courage to refuse the wish of his illegal wife and proclaim that murdering a prophet would offend God – as a result, John is considered a martyr for truth, and a martyr in defense of marriage.
Saying that something is so does not make it true, but that is a hallmark of the morally confused times that we live in. Pope Benedict XVI warned about “the dictatorship of relativism” and the denial of moral truths. The writer Aldous Huxley predicted in 1932 in Brave New World that the coming modern world would be one filled with false truths and be a world that would deny truth. It is incumbent on Christians therefore, and especially the Catholic Church, to hold the line when it comes to morality. Truth is not always popular, and that seems to be the case in our world today. But it’s interesting to note that there are now Protestants and of course most Orthodox who support Catholic teachings. We may feel like voices in the desert, but we are not truly lonely ones, since there are other Christians also holding to these values.
And of course, no Christian is ever alone – the Lord always stands spiritually with us, just as He did with the three holy youths in the furnace, with Peter in the storm, and with John the Baptist that day in the prison.
It’s a challenging time to be a Christian, a time when Western society seems to be drifting from its moorings, in the name of tolerance while ironically becoming more and more intolerant of the very Judeo-Christian religious tradition that created Western society and the requirement for tolerance. Going back to Benedict XVI again, though, here is another point he made. The truth comes to rule not through violence but through its own power. When Jesus stood before Pilate, Saint John the Evangelist tells us in his gospel that Jesus professes that he is the truth, not through legions of angels but through his Passion. The Church has to live out its own truth, the truth of Christ, and it is not easy to do that. May we have the courage to do that, in these odd times when in the name of tolerance, tolerance for the historic truths of the Church is abolished. Pope Benedict pointed out that we do not force people to become and live as Christians, and by the same token the new secularist religion has no right to force anyone to live by its new standards and make it obligatory for humanity.
Let us ask the intercession of Saint John the Baptist that we would be authentic missionaries of Christ Jesus and of the truths of the Church which Christ founded, even in these challenging times. Christ is among us.
One thing that the Catholic and Orthodox Churches are known for is their devotion to Mary. Catholics and Eastern Orthodox all pray to the Virgin Mary, asking her intercession with God. Another thing we are known for is an attachment to relics. There are first-class relics of saints, little pieces of their bones. There are second-class relics, items that belonged to saints, especially clothing. And finally, there are the little third-class ones, pieces of cloth touched to a relic. In Churches that have nurtured devotion to relics since the first century of Christianity, we have no first-class relics of Jesus or of his mother Mary. Right there are proofs for the Resurrection of Christ and the bodily assumption of Mary into heaven. There is a cloth, which is claimed to be her belt, that is kept in Italy, but that’s it. The Dormition refers to her falling asleep in the Lord, to her dying. The icons all show her lying on her deathbed, with Jesus holding her soul and coming to lift up her body and take it to heaven. That of course is the main part of this feast, her bodily assumption and reunification of her body and soul.
According to a very ancient legend when it came time for the Virgin Mary’s earthly life to end, all of the Apostles were miraculously brought to Jerusalem from around the world to be present for her death; but poor St. Thomas, however, was late again. After all, his angel had to bring him all the way from India. When she had died, they buried her body in a tomb in the valley of Kidron. St. Thomas arrived in Jerusalem, and wished to venerate the body. On opening the tomb, the Apostles discovered that it was nowhere to be found, but the tomb was filled with flowers and herbs, hence the blessing we are doing tonight. One legend speaks of the belt which the Virgin then gave to St. Thomas. One says that Mary, knowing Thomas’ propensity to doubt, appeared above the empty tomb as the Apostles stood around it, and then removed Her belt and gave it to him as an enduring proof of the Assumption, just as Her Son had allowed him to place his finger in the wound in His side. But another version, following the story that Thomas had believed in the Assumption before going to the tomb, appeared to him and gave him the belt as a reward for his faith. Either way, that’s the cloth that is still venerated in the town of Prato, near Florence. That garment is the only relic directly associated with Our Blessed Lady.
There are all kinds of blessings associated with this feast – in central Europe one can partake of blessings of fields, farms, and livestock; in Germany and Italy there is the blessing of herbs, and fruit; in southern Europe and parts of the American coast in places like Louisiana and Georgia there are blessings of boats; in Armenia it’s the day to bless the grapes harvested from the vineyards. The idea is that our Lady’s assumption into heaven, body and soul, should be an occasion of great joy and celebration, a time for the Church to really celebrate. The blessing of the herbs is a reminder that Our Lady intercedes for the sick because she is untouched by the decay of death, through the mercy of God, but like us, and like her Son, she had to die.
The Dormition of Mary is a sign to all of our destiny – to be raised in our bodies, and to be reunited body and soul, in fulfillment of what we profess in the Nicene Creed – that we believe in the resurrection of the dead. Although our Lady would have been rather elderly by the standards of the first century, in all of the accounts of her apparitions, from the 200s on, Mary is always described as being young, beautiful, and gracious. Here is the example of how we will be after the resurrection of the dead – our glorified bodies will not be restored to the condition they were at our deaths, but rather to the state of beauty without the disfigurement caused by the wounds of sin.
It also confirms science – mothers carry their children’s DNA in them after birth, especially in the heart and blood, and in particular male DNA is carried in mothers’ brains. Jesus was true God and true Man, and so Our Lady would have carried his DNA and fetal cells in her, from a body that could never decay or experience corruption. In the Divine Office it says that God did not allow her to undergo corruption, and that is certainly the case not only in terms of dogma but also of medical science.
Mary’s Dormition and Assumption confirm her immaculate conception – she went straight to heaven, body and soul, not subject to corruption. It confirms her unique connection with God, spared from the corruption of death that original sin brought about. It confirms her as the Theotokos – she is not subject to decay precisely because of her role as the Mother of the Incarnate Lord, as God honors her and preserves her. Jesus’ resurrection defined Christ’s victory over sin and death, and Mary’s bodily assumption after her death confirms her role as the first disciple, and her role as the mother of all Christians. She stands in heaven as the glorified Mother of God, but also as the model for all of us as to how we will live one day with God after the Last Judgment – soul and glorified body reunited, able to enjoy the Beatific Vision of the Holy Trinity forever. May we ask her intercession as our mother who perpetually prays for us to intercede for us, and to obtain God’s great mercy for us.
Christ used hyperbole a lot – it was a common thing in first-century Palestine. Authors and storytellers used wild examples to get people’s attention.
The parable from today’s gospel mentions 10,000 talents of silver – a spectacular amount of money that could never be paid back in full. The crowd would have laughed when they heard the servant say I will pay you back, just be patient. There was no way he could ever pay it back: it comes out to $226 million in today’s currency. Nobody could pay back such an amount. The other servant meanwhile truly did owe a fraction – about 100 days’ wages, which could indeed be paid back and was nothing compared to $226 million.
So too, can I ever pay back God for what Jesus Christ has done for me? Can I make up to Christ what He endured in His Passion and Death? It’s impossible. We are taught in our American culture to be tough, to be hard, to win. We may even have been taught to withhold forgiveness, to hold on to grudges, which in turn just feeds our anger.
Evagrius of Pontus wrote that anger is destructive, it is boiling up against the presumed wrongdoer all day long. Over time, anger will weaken not only the soul but even the body, and our anger will find its way into society and weaken the Christian world. Isn’t this what we see now? Everywhere I go, people mention how disturbing it is that folks get so angry over basically nothing, how short tempers are. I know of families disrupted by politics, disagreements, fighting over topics. For what? To prove “I’m right”?
Saint Titus Brandsma was a Dutch Carmelite priest arrested by the Nazis in 1942. He was an unassuming fellow, nicknamed Father Shorty, wearing glasses, and he came to the attention of the Nazis after they occupied Holland in 1940. He had started his anti-Nazi actions by writing against the anti-Jewish laws in 1935. He wrote that no Catholic publication could publish Nazi propaganda and still call itself Catholic. The attention paid to him by the Nazis gradually and dramatically increased. The Gestapo were following Father Titus continually. Wherever he went or whatever he did, the always-aware Gestapo made their presence known. One day, Father “Shorty” was on a mission to deliver a letter from the Conference of Catholic Bishops to the editors of Catholic newspapers. The letter ordered these publications not to print official Nazi documents (a new “law” passed by the Nazis demanded they do this). Father Titus had delivered the letter to 14 editors when the Gestapo arrested him.
Father Titus was moved from prison to prison until finally, on June 19, 1942, he was imprisoned in Dachau. This was the Nazis’ first concentration camp, and it had the “priests barracks,” where more than 2,500 priests and religious were confined there. Father’s health quickly deteriorated at Dachau. The lack of food, daily beatings, and harsh, unimaginable living conditions all combined to break a person quickly. Within a few weeks of his arrival, he was so sick that he was transferred to the camp “hospital” and he was used for medical experimentation. When he was too sick for that, the doctor ordered that he be killed. On July 26, 1942, a Nazi camp nurse who had abandoned her Catholic faith was ordered to give him an injection of carbolic acid. Father Titus handed the woman his rosary. He forgave her for following the order, and for her treatment of him, and he said to her, “What an unfortunate girl you are. I shall pray for you.” She was so impressed by him that she returned to the Church, and attended the Mass in which he was declared a Blessed in 1985. Whose forgiveness did he give? God’s. Whose forgiveness do I give when I let go of a grudge? God’s. We say “I forgive” but we as Christians, as children of God, as brothers and sisters of Jesus Christ, cannot forgive unless we have had God’s mercy first. Jesus used hyperbole, but not when he was talking about God’s love and mercy. That he never exaggerated. God’s forgiveness is enormous – when a person comes to confession it can be after 10 or 20 years, or it can be after a few days, but God’s mercy still happens. God waits for us – one of the key elements in the parable of the prodigal son is that the father is watching, waiting for the son to return home. Titus Brandsma did not have to forgive that nurse. He could have just said I’ll pray for you. But he not only forgave her for killing him, he gave her the most precious thing that he had saved from the Nazi guards through his suffering in Dachau, his rosary. Forgiveness is not weakness – it shows courage. Titus Brandsma was exceptionally brave to defend the freedom of the Catholic press against a wicked system that he had fought against for seven years. Jesus knowingly and willingly entered into the Passion on Holy Thursday night. The first two words in the first sentence of Jesus’ Seven Last Words on the Cross was what? Forgive them. Yet we as Americans now too often see forgiveness and charity to others as a sign of weakness instead of bravery and generosity of spirit.
Every martyr since Christ has done the same thing, forgiven those killing them. To hear someone say I will never forgive should be painful to our ears, to our hearts, to our consciences, to our souls. No matter how awful, no matter how unjustified it is what was done to us, if we hold on to a grudge, if we hate, if we stay angry – we are not imitating Jesus, we are not in union with God Himself. We are only feeding the armies of Satan, and contributing, as Evagrius of Pontus warned, to the weakening of the Christian world.
If you are holding onto some anger, let go. If you aren’t, then pray for those who are, and implore God’s mercy to pour into their hearts. And pray for our nation, to be healed of the many hurts that seem to linger after the years of Covid. The Roman Empire was converted to Christ and His Gospel because Tertullian wrote in the late 200s, pagans would constantly say See how they love one another how they are ready even to die for one another. The early generations of Christians fulfilled the commandment that Jesus gave to the apostles at the Last Supper: Love one another as I have loved you. May we all have the courage to forgive, and to do so with a willing heart. Christ is among us.
9th Sunday, 1 Corinthians 3: 9-17 and Matthew 14:22-34
This event happens right after Jesus has fed the thousands of people in the wilderness. The disciples are sailing to Gennesaret but Jesus wants to go and pray alone. The Sea of Galilee is nearly four and a half miles wide. Saint Mark says of this that they were “in the middle of the sea,” so they are far from land, and Matthew tells us that it was during the fourth watch of the night: i.e., between 3 a.m. and 6 a.m. So, these experienced fishermen have spent most of the night stuck in a windstorm, trying to cross the sea and failing to do so.
Per usual, Peter is the impulsive one in the boat, the boat that to this day is used as a symbol of the Church, and is the only one brave enough to call out to this apparition and then to walk on the waters. Christ’s answer to all of them when they are panicking, Ego eimi is important: It is I is better rendered as I AM or HE WHO IS. He uses the name of God from Exodus chapter 3, verse 14 where God says to Moses “I AM WHO AM.This is what you are to say to the Israelites: ‘I am has sent me to you.” These are the words that are so often inscribed in the halo around Jesus’ head in three Greek letters in icons, Ὁ ὬΝ emphasizing to us that He is the Son of God, the second Person of the Trinity, the Eternal Word, the Logos of God. He is declaring to them His full divinity, an outrageous statement, except here He is, walking atop the waves of a very stormy sea, out in the very middle of it all, walking to them far from the shore.
For Matthew, and for the apostles that scary night, the image that came to all of them was this, from Psalm 107, and this is why when Peter and Jesus get into the boat, they worship Jesus.
The psalm reads like this: Some went down to the sea in ships, doing business on the great waters; they saw the deeds of the Lord, his wondrous works in the deep, For he commanded, and raised the stormy wind, which lifted up the waves of the sea./ They mounted up to heaven, they went down to the depths; their courage melted away in their evil plight / they reeled and staggered like drunken men, and were at their wits’ end. Then they cried to the Lord in their trouble, and he delivered them from their distress; he made the storm be still, and the waves of the sea were hushed.
Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven. Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to the sons of men!
So two things to consider here:
Peter, James, John, and Andrew were all fishermen, who had been through many a storm. But they were just as scared and worn out as the other apostles, and they knew that no one could walk on water in the middle of the Sea of Galilee. All of the apostles would know that psalm, and that moment when Jesus puts Peter into the boat and comes over the side is the moment when they kneel down to worship Jesus as God they are fulfilling those words: Then they were glad because they had quiet, and he brought them to their desired haven. Let them thank the Lord for his steadfast love, for his wonderful works to the sons of men! They knew that Jesus really was I AM WHO AM.
Peter was fine on the stormy waves until he looked around and realized fully what he had done. He could walk on the waves toward Jesus, he could step atop the water exactly as Jesus was doing, he was in the same state as Jesus, as long as he looked only at Jesus. Look around at the messy world and get caught up in the sins and brokenness of our stormy world, and we will most definitely fall down and risk drowning spiritually.
Saint Paul writes in the epistle from First Corinthians, chapter 3, today that No one can lay any foundation other than the one already laid, which is Jesus Christ. And in verse 17 Don’t you know that you yourselves are God’s temple and that God’s Spirit dwells in your midst?
As long as we keep Jesus Christ and His teachings as our foundation, all is well. As long as we remember that the Holy Spirit literally is living in us and among us, all is well. If I am rooted in solid Catholic teaching, by reading Scripture; by studying good theology; by participating in the programs offered in our parish, in the local parishes, on the internet; by being people who pray and turn to God regularly, every day, throughout the day – then all is well. Like Peter walking on the waves, we will be fine, no matter how crazy the world gets, no matter what sins I think about committing, no matter how foolishly I am tempted to act.
Remember that even though the apostles worship Jesus at this moment in the boat, even though they all recognized that indeed He was the living incarnation of God, of the one who said I AM WHO AM on Mount Sinai, when the Passion took place all fled. Only the youngest, the teenager John, only he would stay by the side of the Incarnate God Who willingly shed blood for us, who willingly endured the humiliation and thirst, Who willingly died for us. So just as our faith can be shaken, so was theirs. Just as we can abandon our foundational faith sometimes, so did they. But after the resurrection, Jesus did not rebuke them or punish them. Instead He breathed on them and poured out His spirit on them. And suddenly, once again, all was well.
These are readings that should give us tremendous comfort in hard, challenging, scary moments of sin, or fear, or just plain old spiritual exhaustion. Christ waits for us, extends his hand to us. He is always ready to give us His pierced hand, pierced on the cross for love of us, to save us from Satan’s power and to bring us closer to His heart and into the embrace of the Father through the power of the Holy Spirit. Let us truly rejoice in that reality in this Liturgy today, and give thanks to the Lord of Lords for loving us so much. Let us ask Him for the grace to show that love to our stumbling world that is filled with so many storms, and to go forward in the power of the Spirit, to give that world its true safe harbor in Christ’s Church.
After God shows his power and the destruction of the prophets of Baal on Mount Carmel (1 Kings 18), the wicked queen Jezebel set out to destroy Elijah. The once mighty prophet runs for cover-seeking refuge in a desert under a broom tree, begging God to take his life. There an angel comes to him, and gives him bread from heaven, bread that foreshadows the Eucharist. The angel brings him this unique bread, the bread that foreshadows what Jesus will bring to us, the bread worshipped by the angels at every altar in every Catholic rite around the world, the bread that is the summit of our lives, the heart of our existence.
With this bread, Elijah travels to Horeb, that is to Mount Sinai. He goes to where Moses met God, where ancient Israel once worshipped an idol made of gold, and where God revealed Himself in His full power and majesty amid thunder and lightning, and gave the commandments to Moses and to the people of Israel. Elijah saw the people reject those commandments and are worshipping idols and false gods again. But how does God reveal himself to Elijah, the greatest of all of the prophets?
“Then the LORD said, “Go outside and stand on the mountain before the LORD; the LORD will be passing by.” A strong and heavy wind was rending the mountains and crushing rocks before the LORD–but the LORD was not in the wind. After the wind there was an earthquake–but the LORD was not in the earthquake. After the earthquake there was fire–but the LORD was not in the fire. After the fire there was a tiny whispering sound. When he heard this, Elijah hid his face in his cloak and went and stood at the entrance of the cave. A voice said to him, “Elijah, why are you here?” (1 Kings 19:11 – 13)
Not in thunder, or earthquakes, or fire – but after all those dramatic moments, Elijah hears the thin small sound of silence, and then he goes to the mouth of the cave and covers his face and his head, because he knows that God is there.
Why are we here? Not just here, tonight, in this church. Why are we here? We are here to learn, to grow, to love, to grow in love and truly learn how to love God and be loved by God. The Eucharist is our principal food, our main food, the food that carries us. That heavenly bread, the bread of the angel, that first panis angelicus, carried Elijah for 40 days to Sinai, to meet the Lord God face to face.
Holy Communion, the true angelic bread, the true panis angelicus, brings us face to face with God here and now.
Why are you here?
He was there to learn, and after all of the spectacular things recorded in the first book of Kings – of calling in drought, of destroying the false prophets of the false god, of raising the dead back to life, of ending the drought with the torrential rains that poured out of a single little cloud, escaping Jezebel’s plan to kill him, of feeding off the bread from an angel – after all that, he finds God in the thin small sound of silence, of a tiny whisper of a sound. Elijah hears God, because he surrendered and let go.
There is a mystery here, deep and profound, as simple as a whisper. God is searching for men and women who will surrender their lives in love to Him. Often, it takes the depletion of all of our own efforts and resources before we are willing to give up – and give in – to Him.
In this liturgy tonight, let us ask the Lord when we receive Him in Holy Communion that like Elijah, we will surrender ourselves to Him. Let us strive to listen to Him, to hear Him. In all of the spectacular miracles that Elijah performed, he never once covered his head and face, in all of the times that he proclaimed what the Holy Spirit revealed to him, he never covered his head and face. He only does that in the thin small sound of silence at the mouth of the cave because he has learned to truly listen.
The apostles asked Jesus when had Elijah returned, and he tells them that it was through the mission of John the Baptist, that fulfilled what the angel Gabriel had announced to Zechariah. The angel had said then in Luke chapter 1 that John will turn many of the children of Israel to the Lord their God. He will also go before Him [Jesus] in the spirit and power of Elijah, ‘to turn the hearts of the fathers to the children’ and the disobedient to the wisdom of the just, to make ready a people prepared for the Lord”.
Am I prepared for the Lord, or am I overly attached still to certain things of this fallen world? Am I obedient in the wisdom of the just, or am I attached to the disobedience of sin? Elijah made mistakes, got scared, ran away. But in the end, he surrendered his own will to the will of God, and then he could meet God. Let us try especially hard tonight to meet God when we receive the panis angelicus, the bread of angels, in this Eucharist, and may Saint Elijah the prophet to pray for us all to do just that.
These two pillars of the Church were killed on this day in the year 67, during the first persecution of Christians ordered by a roman emperor. Nero was being blamed for the destruction of two-thirds of the imperial capital of Rome in a massive nine-day fire in the year 64, and he shifted the blame to the new Christian Church. Peter was crucified upside down, and buried on the Vatican Hill, which was a large cemetery outside of the city. Saint Peter’s basilica is not only built over his grave, but the high altar is in a direct line with his tomb. Paul was a Roman citizen, so he was beheaded, and he is buried in the altar of the basilica of Saint Paul’s, outside the city walls.
Confessio leading to tomb of St Peter in Rome
Paul was erudite, well-educated, born as a Roman citizen, conversant in multiple languages, able to debate with the Greek philosophers in Athens. Peter was a middle-class fisherman, impulsive, emotional, probably older than Paul. Peter had walked with the Lord throughout his public ministry, Paul was brought into the service of the gospel by Jesus Himself during the famous apparition on the road to Damascus.
Tomb of Saint Paul in Basilica in Rome
The two great Apostles
When they are shown together, Peter has the keys, given to him by Jesus as a sign of his stewardship over the Church on earth and Paul with a sword, but both hold books that represent their epistles. Paul’s theology is key to the Christian faith, Peter’s role as leader and guide literally provided a solid foundation for the early Church to build upon.
What are the names of popes who were heretics?
None.
There were heretical patriarchs in Constantinople, Alexandria, and Antioch, but never in Rome.
Pope Liberius condemned Saint Athanasius after he had been jailed and tortured, but he refused to sign a heretical statement of faith. Pope Honorius failed to condemn the Monothelite heresy because he did not grasp the Greek grammar involved, The gift of the Holy Spirit has protected the Catholic Church throughout its history, a history that is unbroken and rooted in Jesus, not in Peter or any other man.
Christ’s promise to Peter and the apostles has remained intact ever since that dramatic day when he promised that the gates of hell would not prevail against the Church built on the rock of Peter. We have had corrupt popes, weak popes, popes who failed at their job, but never a heretical one.
The Church has been entrusted to Peter’s care – that is the symbolism of the keys. Peter and all those who have followed Peter in the seat of Peter have lived out their responsibility as Jesus’ vicars, his stewards responsible for the kingdom, for the proclamation of the Good News to the nations of the world.
Paul’s theology remains critical to prayer, spiritual writing, church structures, and how we interact with one another. And both were so profoundly affected by Jesus and their encounters with Him, so transformed, that they were willing to die on His behalf.May we have the courage to stand firm in the Catholic faith, and to go forward in faith. Let us ask Saints Peter and Paul to imitate them in their fidelity to Christ! Their faith and fidelity inspired the first Martyrs of the Church of Rome, who suffered so grievously under Nero. May we be as strong in faith as they all were.
Leaving Nazareth, Jesus went and lived in Capernaum, which was by the lake in the area of Zebulun and Naphtali— and in doing so, He fulfilled what was said through the prophet Isaiah:
15 “Land of Zebulun and land of Naphtali, the Way of the Sea, beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the Gentiles— 16 the people living in darkness have seen a great light; on those living in the land of the shadow of death a light has dawned.”
Jesus made Capernaum his base, a city of Jews and pagans, in Galilee, a territory that the Pharisees and Sadducees mocked as being ignorant and damned because of the presence of so many Gentiles. This is where the Son of God chose to live, alongside the families of Peter and Andrew, James and John, and seven other apostles. Now here we have the ultimate representative of the Galilean pagans approach the Lord, a Roman centurion, an officer in command of 100 soldiers of the hated empire. This unique event in the gospels has the pagan soldier come forward with great faith, asking that his servant be cured. Jesus’ response is in verse 7: “I will come and heal him.”
The statement is made by the centurion that he is not worthy for Jesus to come under his roof, but only say the word and the servant will be healed, a sentence so profound that it was incorporated into the Roman rite Mass, modified slightly to my soul shall be healed. It is not only that the centurion knows a rabbi would get into a lot of trouble for coming into a Roman house; he also realizes that despite his own exalted status in Capernaum, he is inferior to Jesus. He knew that he was in the presence of someone who was much more than a prophet, because he has full confidence in what this Jewish man can do – achieve a cure simply by stating it.
Jesus first praised his faith, and then predicted that Gentiles would take the place of many Jews in the kingdom. The praise is: “I have not found anyone in Israel with such great faith.” In His travels in the land, in His public ministry, Jesus saw every kind of response. But this one was the greatest demonstration of faith He had seen, greater than any Israelite’s faith so far.
Jesus experienced people who walked away from him when his sayings were too challenging, like in John 6. He experienced his own apostles being weak in faith during as simple a thing as a storm, let alone what would happen in the garden of Gethsemane. This soldier, this foreign officer, has faith far beyond that of so many of the Jewish followers. In Luke’s gospel the local Jewish elders intercede on behalf of the centurion, saying that he helped to build the synagogue and was kind to the Jews. But that’s not what convinces Christ to heal the servant. It is the man’s faith.
Ruins of the synagogue at Capernaum
Jesus has an interesting quote regarding Capernaum and the towns around it in both Matthew and Luke – And you, Capernaum, will you be lifted to the heavens? No, you will go down to Hades. For if the miracles that were performed in you had been performed in Sodom, it would have remained to this day. But I tell you that it will be more bearable for Sodom on the day of judgment than for you.” His lament is based on the fact that so many of the Galilean and Judean Jews would not accept him, would not listen to him. But here is a pagan Roman who comes forward. He is the only person in the four gospels looking for a miracle who does not ask Jesus to come to his house, or to touch the sick person, or who tries to bring the sick person near Jesus. He has complete trust and confidence that Jesus has the power and authority, given by God, to perform the cure at a distance, even a great distance. He has more faith in the power of Jesus to effect a cure than any Jew in the gospels does. He, a powerful Roman official, humbly accepted the fact that Jesus had authority. The majority of Jews did not accept that Jesus had authority over life and death, that He came in the full power of God. But this man did.
Matthew makes this the occasion for a stern warning to Jews, whose birth as Abraham’s posterity makes them “sons and daughters of the kingdom” (v. 12) but who nonetheless forfeit their birthright by refusing to accept Jesus as the Lord’s Anointed. The same holds true for Christians now – we cannot presume that we are saved just because we are baptized, or in the Catholic Church, or because our parents were believers. Christians must not simply address Jesus as “Lord” but humbly acknowledge his right to rule their lives day by day.
As sons and daughters of the kingdom, we cannot claim a birthright for granted. The Church today grows in Africa and Asia, but is declining in North America and Europe. People are entering the Church from different directions, while those born into the privilege of faith nurtured by generations of ancestors going back over a thousand years casually throw it away.
In 1969 a young German priest was interviewed on Radio Deutsche Welle, and he made this prediction: From the crisis of today the Church of tomorrow will emerge — a Church that has lost much. She will become small and will have to start afresh more or less from the beginning. As the number of her adherents diminishes, so it will lose many of her social privileges. In contrast to an earlier age, it will be seen much more as a voluntary society, entered only by free decision. As a small society, it will make much bigger demands on the initiative of her individual members. But in all of the changes at which one might guess, the Church will find her essence afresh and with full conviction in that which was always at her center: faith in the triune God, in Jesus Christ, the Son of God made man, in the presence of the Spirit until the end of the world. In faith and prayer she will again recognize the sacraments as the worship of God and not as a subject for liturgical scholarship.
That priest was Josef Ratzinger who became Pope Benedict XVI. We form part of that smaller Church in this small parish. You are here today because of faith, faith that hopefully is like that of the centurion. Some of you may very well throw away this treasure despite growing up in this parish and in this tradition. Hopefully most of you will hold onto this faith, this gift, and grow in it like the centurion did. That soldier had full confidence that what Christ said was true, a confidence that we can have: that Christ was God, that the sacraments are true, that the Church he founded on the rock of Saint Peter still exists today. May we turn to Him today, tomorrow, and every day, with the faith and conviction of the centurion, and may we be brave enough to bring others with us before the throne of the Son of God at the end of our lives. Christ is among us.
There are two particular Old Testament passages that reflect the ministry of Saint John the Baptist. One is from Malachi 3: 1
Behold, I send My messenger, And he will prepare the way before Me.
The second is from Isaiah 40:
The voice of one crying in the wilderness:
“Prepare the way of the Lord; Make straight in the desert A highway for our God.
Every valley shall be exalted And every mountain and hill brought low;
The crooked places shall be made straight And the rough places smooth;
The glory of the Lord shall be revealed, And all flesh shall see it together;
For the mouth of the Lord has spoken.”
Both Scriptures make reference to the fact that before the coming of the Christ, God will send a messenger to prepare the way. John is the messenger. But he is more than that – We see it laid out for us in what Zechariah has to say, who goes from being struck mute and apparently also deaf, to proclaiming the glory of God in his new baby son in the famous Benedictus that we still say daily in the divine office. Only after he acknowledges that the baby will indeed be called John, which means Graced by God, only then can he fulfill his role of being a prophet and foretell the future ministry of John.
John did not set up a new sect within Judaism, but rather, after he grew up, he left the hill country of Judea, the territory of the most devout Jews, the land of Jerusalem itself, and he went out into the desert. Jesus will do the same thing, and then Jesus would emerge from the desert to settle in Capernaum, the territory of Galilee. John’s time in the desert though, is different. He emerges from the wilderness, the land of wild animals but also the land where prophets would go to encounter God, and he would come into Israel 500 years after the last of those prophets and set the countryside on fire with his preaching. As the prophet of God, the last of the prophets, he truly came to pave the way for the Messiah. The desert then was home to the Essene Jews, who founded isolated monastic communities; it was home to Zealot rebels, who would follow different false Messiahs and launch violent rebellions. John doesn’t do either of these – he will call the people to radical conversion, and administer a ritual baptism of repentance and sorrow for one’s sins. This conversion is a conversion to prepare the people for the Lord, not just a ritual. John won’t get caught up in multiple ceremonies like the Essenes did, he won’t be emphasizing animal sacrifices like the priests, or fulfilling the 631 commandments of the law like the Pharisees.
John’s call is to prepare hearts, to make people listen to the essence of the Law – God is alive, God has not forgotten the Jews, God is sending fire upon the earth through His Holy Spirit, and that fire will be given by Christ.
This feast falls at mid-summer, just when the days begin to shorten. There are two reasons for this: firstly and mostly directly, it is clear from the Gospels that St John was born six months before the Savior (Luke 1:26), and so his Nativity falls six months before that of the Savior; secondly, the Nativity of the Savior was appointed at a time when the days begin to lengthen as a sign that He is the Light of the world, the Baptist’s Nativity is kept as the days shorten as a reminder of his own words: “He must increase, but I must decrease.” He comes to do God’s will, to move hearts, to make people think.
The same is true for any Catholic Christian today. We are entrusted with the gospel message of Jesus, with the fullness of revelation given to His Church. The great saints did not achieve holiness by accumulating power or fame – they did their job, they grew in the power of the Holy Spirit through conversion, and they stepped aside to let God work in their own hearts and the hearts of people around them.
When Saint Therese of Lisieux died, some of the nuns in her monastery said, What will we write about her? She died so young and never did anything. Then they read her magnificent journal, what we call The Story of A Soul, and their hearts were set on fire. Saint Anthony of Padua worked in the kitchen, happily scrubbing the pots, until he was asked to give a sermon on a feast day with no time to prepare, and everyone in the church was transformed by the power of his words. Saint Basil the Great was so close to God that Saint Ephrem said he saw the Holy Spirit speaking in his ear while he preached.
All of the saints and blesseds did what God asked of them, wrote what they were inspired to write, and stepped aside to let the Spirit go to work. The same is true for us – while we work at living out our salvation in fear and trembling as Saint Paul says, we have to do what we are each called to do in our particular state of life, and do it well, for the glory of God, and do it so that others will feel God’s love. We study well, we play the sport well, we love our spouse and our children and our parents, we do our work as a civilian or a soldier or a priest or nun and do it well, for the glory of God and out of love for God.
John comes into the world and in the very womb of his mother worshipped Jesus at the moment of the Visitation, when Mary met Saint Elizabeth, and spent his entire life worshipping and serving God. We can do the same, out of true love of God, if we listen to the Spirit and respond to the Spirit. Let us ask him for this grace, the grace to listen to the Lord and to be converted by that Holy Spirit, to go forward in love and mercy and in God’s power, not my power.
When I went to Catholic school, we studied the Baltimore Catechism. This was the standard catechism from 1885 until the 1970s, and was based on one written back in 1614 by Saint Robert Bellarmine, and done in a question and answer format so that one could memorize the basics easily. One of the first questions we learned was Number 6: Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him in the next.
Last Sunday we commemorated All Saints, that is all the people who responded to the grace of the Holy Spirit in their lives and have achieved our eternal goal of living in glory with God.
Today we see the first men who answered the direct call of Jesus. To whom did He go? He went out into His own country of Galilee, not to Jerusalem the holy city, not into the hill country of Judea, not out into the desert, the land of prophets. He did not go into the wild country where the Zealot rebels had their soldiers. Jesus did not go looking for those who felt that they were oppressed and exploited or bitter over their situation.
He did not collect rebels, or spiritual fanatics, or the clergy, or the angry. His revolution was going to be a spiritual one, a proclamation of God’s love for the Jewish people first, and then for all nations. He recruited Jews from the region called “heathen Galilee” who lived alongside Greeks, Canaanites, Romans, and Syrians, who knew the pagan world while followi
Jesus goes to men who are successful in their trade, who knew hard work, probably a mix of blue-collar and middle-class men of today, men who were independent, who had their own businesses. These are the first ones he calls.
Notice He doesn’t go after them in their houses, or sitting on the beach at the end of the day. They are throwing their nets into the water – Andrew who we know was a disciple of John the Baptist, and his brother Peter. Jesus uses His sense of humor, telling the fishermen that if they follow Him, he will turn them from fishermen into fishers of men. Two thousand years later, we still use the speech of the fishermen of the lake, and the instruments of their craft, as part of the vocabulary of Christianity.
Then he goes from two mature men, to two teenagers, James and John, who are also at work, fixing the nets of their father. Not only do these two immediately get up and follow the Lord, but soon their mother Salome will do the same thing. I have always wondered what their father Zebedee thought about his family following after this wandering teacher, how did Peter’s wife and children react to him disappearing to walk in the footsteps of an unknown rabbi from Nazareth.
These are all regular people, people who worked hard, prayed in the local synagogue, had relatives and friends. They were people who were happy, who got sick, who had their own personal happiness and sorrows. They were a mix of ages, and would form a mixed company of men and women. Each time that Jesus calls the apostles, the Gospels say that they got up and followed Him. There was no debating, no agonizing, no scenes of going to say goodbye to relatives. Rather they get up and follow – Matthew says that all four men got up immediately and left everything.
Christ calls us. He does not call us to do something spectacular, He is not here saying get up now, abandon your spouse, your children, your parents, your friends, your income. But He is saying Follow Me. He says it with love, with humor, with compassion, but He says it, and He directs it to each and every one of us.
Saint Paul writes in his epistle to the first generation of Christians in Rome about pagans who responded to the inspiration of the Holy Spirit, what we call in theology the natural law. When Gentiles, who do not possess the law, do instinctively what the law requires, these, though not having the law, are a law to themselves. 15 They show that what the law requires is written on their hearts, to which their own conscience also bears witness.
These are the people who know intrinsically what is right, and what is wrong. These are the elements of basic humanity that are enshrined in cultures around the world – you don’t murder, you protect pregnant women and their babies, you help poor people and sick people and frail people and you don’t go around encouraging suicide. Natural law commands that the rich and the powerful exercise charity on behalf of others, and respond to the needs of others.
Christ asked those four fishermen, and the other men and women who would follow Him for three years, to give of themselves. He demanded more than the natural law did, because He came with the command to love one another, to see each other as worthy and demanding of love, to love as God the Father loves. He commanded those men and women to proclaim the good news to the entire world, so that every person on the face of the earth, in every generation, will have the opportunity to respond to the Holy Spirit and become a saint. We are invited by Jesus to follow Him, to proclaim Him, to love Him above everything else. If we do this, we are offered one thing – eternal life with Him, His Father, His Spirit, and with all the saints.
Why did God make you? God made me to know Him, to love Him, and serve Him in this life, and to be happy with Him in the next.
Let us fervently ask Him in this Liturgy for the grace to do precisely that.
Scripture tells us that at nine o’clock in the morning on that Pentecost day, 50 days after the first Easter, there appeared many tongues as of fire, being carried above the heads of the Virgin Mary, the apostles, and the disciples who were gathered together to pray. The onion domes atop our church and on the tabernacle represent these very flames of the Holy Spirit – the parish community, is supposed to be on fire, in the power of that Spirit. We are meant to be a community that lives out the law of God in our hearts, in our actions, in our words, in our prayers, in our thoughts. Why fire? Why didn’t the Spirit come in the form of a dove, as at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan?
The Jewish feast of Pentecost, or Shavout, is a four-day feast also known as the “Feast of Weeks,” and takes place 50 days after the Passover. Passover and Shavout are intimately connected. Passover is the deliverance of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. Shavout commemorates the end of that initial stage of Israel’s journey out of Egypt, and their deliverance from idolatry, when Moses brought them to Mt. Sinai and gave the people the Ten Commandments, written by the hand of God, proclaimed to Moses by the Eternal Word of God, that Word which became incarnate in the Virgin Mary by the power of the Holy Spirit as we proclaim in the Creed.
The Law told the Israelites how they would live as a unique people, worshipping only one God and professing that their God was the only God for the entire human race. Passover celebrated their freedom from bondage, while Shavout celebrated the new covenant formed between God and Israel. It is a reminder that they were freed for something: to be God’s holy people, a royal priesthood, a light to the nations.
When Moses went up to Sinai in Exodus chapter 19, 16 On the morning of the third day there was thunder and lightning, as well as a thick cloud on the mountain, and a blast of a trumpet so loud that all the people who were in the camp trembled. 17 Moses brought the people out of the camp to meet God. They took their stand at the foot of the mountain. 18 Now Mount Sinai was wrapped in smoke, because the Lord had descended upon it in fire”. That’s why the Spirit descended on Pentecost morning in the form of tongues of fire and why we have onion domes atop our churches –
the fire that once touched Sinai to reveal God’s law, the fire that spoke once only to Moses, now descends on all of the men and women gathered in the upper room, to set them on fire for God’s new revelation, the fulfillment of the Law, the fulfillment of God’s plan, in the proclaiming of the New Covenant, first to the Jews, then to the Gentiles of the world. Jesus fulfilled the Law by His death and resurrection, as the true Lamb of God (John 1:29). Jesus’ death on the cross took place just prior to the beginning of the Passover, when the Passover lambs were being slain. In his crucifixion, Jesus is both victim and priest, offering Himself in atonement for our sins. One chief purpose of the Law of Moses was to provide the people of Israel ways to make reparation for their sins. Yet, as St. Paul points out in the Letter to the Romans, the sacrifices of the Law could not justify us. Jesus’ self-sacrificial offering, however, is infinitely perfect and we are justified through his Cross.
Jesus fulfills the Law by offering Himself as the pure sacrifice by which a new and eternal covenant (Jeremiah 31:31, 32:40) would be made between humanity and God. This new covenant is sealed not only with Jesus’ death, but with His resurrection, which shows that sin and death have been conquered, and that eternal life is offered to us.
The first Pentecost brought thousands to faith in Christ, Jews who spoke multiple languages, who each heard the good news proclaimed by Saint Peter and the disciples in their own languages; the Spirit that descended at Babel to scatter people now unites them. People were in Jerusalem from every part of the Roman and Persian empires, and probably beyond. That stormy noise from heaven brought the curious to the house, but Peter’s sermon brought people from all walks of life into the new faith. We teach that we have the fullness of God’s revelation, given to the Catholic Church. We have access to this once and final revelation entrusted to our Church, entrusted to each of us through the holy mysteries of baptism and chrismation. We are fed through the Holy Eucharist, we are forgiven our faults through confession, we are healed through the mystery of anointing. We have the opportunity, like the apostles, to encounter Christ through these sacred mysteries, to be transformed by Jesus Christ through our personal and liturgical prayers.
Pope Benedict XVI wrote that being a Christian is not the result of an ethical choice or a lofty idea, but the encounter with an event, a person, which gives life a new horizon and a decisive direction.” We are his disciples; we are entrusted with the mission and message of the gospel. The Holy Spirit can help us speak well, witness well, to the people around us, to bring them to faith in the Church of Jesus Christ.
Pentecost launched the Catholic Church into the world, proclaiming the Good News through the words of the very man who had denied Jesus three times in the courtyard of the high priest. Within two generations, Christianity was firmly entrenched across the Middle East, Italy, North Africa, Spain, France, most of the Middle East and into Iran and India.
The world then was pagan, worshipping many gods, Much of what used to be considered the Christian world now is losing its way, and it needs disciples, people who are on fire with the Holy Spirit. God has raised up multiple people in our time to inspire us to go forward, in faith and love for Him. Carlo Acutis ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carlo_Acutis ) was 15 when he died of leukemia, but his example and computer work set people on fire today. Luigi and Maria Quattrocchi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Luigi_Beltrame_Quattrocchi_and_Maria_Corsini
were the first married couple to be beatified together, and saved their daughter from dying in an abortion.
was a medical student and surfer who led other young men to Christ. We are blessed with a new cloud of witnesses, and we are called to imitate them in faith, by opening ourselves to personally meeting Christ in worship, in prayer, in the sacraments, in our reading and study.
Disciples today need to experience once again, or for the first time, this encounter. The Byzantine rite prays in the way that it does today to inspire the faithful to be open to the action of the Holy Spirit, to be open to that personal encounter, to be open to being missionaries, to be open to growing in faith. May we have a blessed Pentecost, and blessed lives, and be on fire always for Christ and His holy Church.
This crippled man after 38 years of waiting probably had no patient helpers left. He was degraded, weak and isolated. His condition was helpless, hopeless. For Jesus nothing is impossible if he is approached in faith. And it was the Lord’s habit to seek out the rejected and to approach them with merciful concern. This was what had inspired Tabitha in the reading from the Acts of the Apostles to conduct her own merciful activities: this was the early tradition of the Church, that Jesus did good, changed things by merciful action.
Locked in his isolation and misery, the paralytic needed such a shock. He excuses his inertia by saying that no-one is available to help him. Jesus ignores the excuse. He gives the paralytic his big chance.
‘Get up, pick up your sleeping mat and walk.’’ Jesus was fulfilling the prophets of the law; and the gospel suggests this in several ways. The 38 years in which the man had been waiting for a cure reminds us of the 38 years in which the Israelites had wandered in the wilderness (Deuteronomy 2:14). And the length of time we had traveled from Kadesh-barnea until we crossed the Wadi Zered was thirty-eight years, until the entire generation of warriors had perished from the camp, as the Lord had sworn concerning them. After that generation died, then and only then could Israel enter the Promised Land under the leadership of a new prophet, Joshua. Now with the true prophet, the true messiah, this man, who has been waiting just as long for deliverance, will find not only physical healing, he will be restored to the people of Israel, and introduced to Christ, the fulfillment of the Jewish faith. Remember that most Jews of the time period saw illness, and especially chronic long-term sickness like paralysis, as a punishment from God. People who were suffering like that were cut off from the nation – by being cured, by listening to Jesus, by picking up his mat and walking despite it being a sabbath, this man is showing his full restoration to Israel and his new place with God in the community of faith.
Do we want to be changed? Do we want to make a deep division between our old life and our new possibilities? Do we have faith? Christianity emphasizes Synergia –that is, spiritual synergy, the co-operation between ourselves and God. His grace cannot heal us unless we want to be healed, to be changed. Sometimes this is a very abrupt experience. The cure of the paralytic takes place on the Sabbath.
Do you want to be healed? His grace cannot heal us unless we want to be healed; and being healed may take us very far from familiar things, to something new and demanding.
The pool of Bethesda, John says, was in a building with 5 porticos. Commentators who rejected the authenticity of the gospels used this as an example of supposed biblical error, since having an ancient building with an odd number of porches was considered to be impossible. But then archaeologists discovered the pool in the late 1800s, with its five porches, and it was realized that there were five as a reference to the Pentateuch – the first five books of the Old Testament.
The pool itself we know was a double pool – a reservoir that poured into the lower pool, where the sick would go, but that lower pool also served as a mikveh, a pool for ritual cleansing. So, it was a place for the healing of both soul and body.
‘Do you want to be healed?’
In his sermon for this Sunday, St. John Chrysostom posed a similar challenge to his congregation in 4th-century Constantinople. He wrote that after the celebrations and joy of the Easter worship, there is a great stir, a great burst of activity, crowds of people enter the churches. There are wonderful services, vigils and hymn-singing. What comes of all this? What is achieved? Not as much as should be, I say, for many come simply out of curiosity and vanity. Pascha goes, activity abates, excitement subsides, and then there sets in the indolence which speaks of much fruitlessness.
What was he saying? He was giving a warning: Indolence equals laziness.
The same for us now. Lent is a time of conversion, movement of the soul, confessions, penances, fasting. But the paschal season is a time of what? Joyful liturgies, pretty much eat anything, no special weekday services, abstinence from meat on Fridays, but what else?
This Wednesday shows us exactly what should be happening. It is Mid-Pentecost – we will be marking 25 days from Pascha, and 25 days until Pentecost Sunday. The day is not called Mid-Pascha. It is Mid-Pentecost, halfway to Pentecost. The paschal season is a movement toward the coming of the Holy Spirit upon the disciples and apostles gathered in the upper room. Those men and women would be totally transformed by that descent, and the missionary work of the Church would begin, a missionary work that continues today.
The paralytic is transformed by his encounter with Jesus. The same should be true now for each of us, that we should be transformed by our encounter with the Risen Christ. We may be sliding backwards, and be getting discouraged. We may have broken a bad habit, but now find ourselves tempted to return to it. We may feel that we are not healthy anymore, not praying as intensely as we did, not embracing our crosses and challenges. Evil still abounds in the world – the war goes on in Ukraine, communism remains rampant in China, bad people still do bad things. I may have given up smoking or pornography or swearing during Lent and now suddenly find myself tempted to go back to those sins.
Chrysostom warned his congregation that spiritual laziness comes after Easter, and we can suddenly become fruitless spiritually despite having a truly fruitful Lent. Christ comes before us, the baptized, just like he did before the paralytic, and he asks each of us, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ Our answer of course, is Yes.
The paschal cycle of readings from Saint John and the Acts of the Apostles was devised to instruct the newly baptized converts, but also to strengthen the faith of the longtime baptized. The readings from the Acts, like today, show that the work of the Lord continued in the early Church, with cures of the sick, and raising of the dead, and conversions. Saul became Paul; Jewish priests became Christian priests; Jewish believers came to belief in the risen Lord as both messiah and Son of God.
The same is true today – the work of the Church as the Body of Christ continues: people are converted to the faith, believers who were lazy in faith become fervent in faith; people who were physically or spiritually sick still find healing, demons are expelled from those who are possessed, spiritual fervor still takes root in souls, the work of the Holy Spirit continues to show itself.
Christ will always be asking each of us, ‘Do you want to be healed?’ And sadly, there will always be a need to be healed of something as we progress through the stages of the spiritual life. There will always be difficult people popping up in our lives; there will always be international crises led by leaders who are not focused at all on bringing souls closer to God but rather achieving power for themselves or their countries or both; there will always be people who reject God and do the works of Satan instead the works of the Holy Spirit.
But we as Christian believers, we as Catholics entrusted with the fullness of revelation, we as people of faith, should always be looking to say yes to Jesus when he comes into our lives and asks, Do you want to be healed? We have 28 days until Pentecost – if we are having a good paschal season, then let’s build on that to go forward. If it is a fruitless paschal season, let us take the opportunity to get going again. The man had to acknowledge that he wanted to get better, and the Lord poured his grace into him. Let us be eager to work out that spiritual synergy with God, and once again step forward as warriors of Christ, ready to fight off sin and temptation and darkness, and go forward in the power of the risen Lord, wanting to be changed by the Holy Spirit and transformed by the power of God once more. Christ is risen!
This is an interesting incident in the gospels on several levels. It shows Christ’s great patience, the centrality of the Eucharist, and also a bit about Jesus’ sense of humor.
For the sense of humor, that we rarely think about, consider this: for a distance of 7 miles, Jesus walks with these two disciples, concealing who he is, when he could have just said, Hey fellows, it’s me. Instead, he shows up, and deliberately conceals himself. Partly this is so that he can unpack the scriptures to them and slowly reveal the mystery of the suffering servant to them; but partly I do think he rather enjoyed appearing in locked rooms, popping in and out of the lives of the disciples in over a dozen recorded resurrection appearances, and hiding his identity from these two.
His patience with us is enormous: Jesus walks with Cleophas and the other disciple to Emmaus – 7 miles. It would have taken about two and a half hours to make the trip, and he spent the whole time explaining the writings of the prophets and psalms to them, how the coming and suffering of the messiah was predicted over the centuries. By the same token, he walks with us spiritually here today, as we slowly continue to overcome doubts or as we slowly absorb the teachings of the bible and the Church. He is willing to take his time with us and walk with us. Their hearts were on fire – they went from being confused about what had happened on Sunday, to being on fire again as they understood that the messiah had to suffer, had to die, had to be buried, and now is raised again on the third day. They are hungry to learn more, as they insist that he must stay with them.
Seven miles is a long walk – probably it took them two and a half to three hours to reach Emmaus, maybe longer. But they finally arrive, and when does Jesus fully reveal himself to them? It is this marvelous phrase that Luke uses: in the breaking of the bread. He carefully repeats the words and ritual used at the Last Supper, and then they know who he is. His body, soul, humanity, divinity were made present in that breaking of the bread and he revealed himself completely, then disappeared from their sight. But their hearts were still on fire, now invigorated by the reception of that consecrated bread.
The holy Eucharist is made for us, given for us, presented for us, so that our hearts will be on fire. The liturgy prepares us for what is coming, just as Jesus prepared the two disciples with patient instruction. The early Church always saw this moment as a confirmation of the Eucharist, and rejoiced in the gracious love of the Lord for us. This is how the Lord stays with us – we don’t need his physical presence anymore. He rooted the disciples in scripture, he rooted them in love and service, but above all he rooted thm in the breaking of the bread and the awareness that he was with them always.
Let us ask him today, on this day of Emmaus, for the gift of recognizing him in this holy Eucharist. Let us rejoice in the gift of the Most Blessed Sacrament reserved in our churches. Let us above all live with fire in our hearts, fed by this Eucharist and nurtured in the bible and the teachings of the Catholic Church founded by our Lord on the rock of Peter, and be a people rooted in the power of the Risen Christ.
Today is a day of paradoxes: the Eternal Word of God is a servant; he who cannot be contained by the universe descends into bread and wine; the apostle who was given the body and blood of the Lord sells him for a few coins. Christ serves as the humblest, most worthless slave by washing the feet of the apostles. In the Cathedral Vespers we hear this verse: He who wraps the heavens with clouds now girds himself with a towel; he who once divided the Red Sea now pours water into a basin, and kneeling before them, he begins to wash the feet of the disciples.
This same humble Lord then proceeds to pour himself out in the institution of the Eucharist and the priesthood, conferring his ability to transform bread and wine into his living Body and Blood to the twelve, including Judas who will walk out of the room with that Body and Blood inside him, so as to betray the Lord for the cost of a cheap slave, the price of turning in a thief to the police.
He who gave of himself in the Eucharist, will soon, as we hear in the prophet Isaiah, chapter 50, offer his back to those who beat him, his cheeks to those who pulled out his beard; he will not hide his face from mocking and spitting.
We hear in the first letter to the Corinthians, chapter 11, that Jesus took the bread and broke it and said, “This is my body, which is for you; do this in remembrance of me.” 25 In the same way, after supper he took the cup, saying, “This cup is the new covenant in my blood; do this, whenever you drink it, in remembrance of me.”
Only 31% of American Catholics believe that Jesus is really and truly present in the Eucharist. Not even one-fifth of American Catholics now go to Sunday Mass every week. There is no hunger, no sense of starvation for Holy Communion. Ah, but we believe all this as people who come to a Byzantine Catholic church. We have no problem believing that. Do we? Do we really believe that the Eucharist is a great mystery, a powerful sacrament? And just what is it really? How do we explain our belief to non-Catholics who see it is a memorial meal, who say that Jesus did not mean that it really IS His Body?
Body – what did Jesus give? He would have said this word: BaSaR – His entire personhood, His living body. Blood – the blood he received from Our Lady, human blood, united to His divinity, POURED OUT as a sacrifice. When a host is changed into flesh, when a host gives off blood, and those elements are subjected to scientific tests, the results are always, always, the same – the Church has allowed scientists to test Eucharistic miracles from Lanciano in the eighth century and Argentina in the twenty-first century. The results are always the same: the flesh is alive, from a bruised heart, a heart that shows signs of terrible trauma and suffering, from the left ventricle, the ventricle that pushes out purified blood into the body. The blood is always AB blood, the blood type of Jewish men from first-century Palestine, the blood that is used for plasma for the healing of burns and wounds, pumped in a purified form from that Sacred Heart that has so loved us, as Jesus revealed to St. Margaret Mary Alacoque.
ZiKKaRoN – the bible was not written in English! Jesus did not speak in English! He did not say, remember me as somebody from the distant past. He used Hebrew and Aramaic – ZKKRN means to make real, NOT remember. When the Jews celebrated Passover this week, they did not say, “Why was this night different from other nights?” They say why IS this night different from other nights? They are THERE, in Egypt, in the darkness of slavery, waiting for the angel of death to pass over each Israelite house marked with the blood of the lamb. We, the spiritual and theological heirs of Judaism, are at the Last Supper, at Calvary, at the Resurrection. ZKKRN means to make the event real – do this in ZKKRN of me: Make Me Real: I will be there when you do.
Judas did not allow Christ to change him from his path of betraying the Lord. The Apostles themselves did not let the reception of the Eucharist transform themselves at the moment of crisis in the garden of Gethsemane. We must let Christ into our hearts, to pierce through our attachment to sin, to stir us up out of indifference or spiritual laziness.
Yes, we recite the prayer of St John Chrysostom before receiving Communion: O Lord, I believe and profess … But do we believe and profess this through our lives? do I let the power of Communion come into me and change me? If I am fed with the Body and Blood of the Lord, I can go forward, fortified with Him. His blood is healing, his body is strength, he who made heaven and earth can make a change in me, but only if I cooperate with the grace that he is pouring out on me, waiting to soak me with his abundant love that conquers all problems and fears.
All of the ancient liturgies of the Church build up to the great moment of the consecration of the gifts and distribution of those gifts in Holy Communion. And then the liturgies swiftly come to a close. An hour devoted to the buildup, and within fifteen minutes after Communion everyone can pack up and head out of the church. Why? Because we are filled with the living Body, with the healing Blood that can heal all spiritual and emotional wounds. We are each a living tabernacle, filled with the Holy Eucharist, with the most Blessed Sacrament. We are sent out into the world, to perform the liturgy after the divine liturgy, to change this broken world and hasten the in-breaking of the kingdom of God into time and so hasten His Second Coming.
Jesus gives one commandment, and he gives it at the Last Supper after he warns the apostles that his time is coming to an end. He says in John 13:“Love one another. As I love you, so you also should love one another. This is how all will know that you are my disciples, if you have love for one another”. He later reiterates in chapter 15, “No one has greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends”. We are his friends. In every celebration of the Divine Liturgy, we are his friends. Indeed, through the mystery of Baptism, we are his brothers and sisters, we are his children. Our Lady at the foot of the cross became our mother. We are a massive family, united with all Catholics around the world, who stand in the shadow of the cross but also at the door of the tomb, fed with the body of the Lord, washed in the blood of the true Lamb of God, the true Lamb of Passover. Tonight especially, let us rejoice in our union with Christ that we will experience through this holy mystery. Tonight especially let us ask with our whole heart that we be brave enough to let his body and blood transform our behaviors, our attitudes, our desires, so that we will walk alongside Him, our brother, our savior, our redeemer who willingly lay down his life for us, his friends.
Two opposite events happen today: Jesus is anointed at Bethany, and Judas confirms his betrayal with the priests.
Either Mary of Bethany, or an anonymous woman, breaks open an expensive jar of ointment, anointing our Lord with a spice so powerful that John says its aroma filled the whole house. Judas is furious, since it was so expensive, that it was equal to a year’s salary. But the gospels put in the telling detail of course that Judas was the treasurer of the apostles who embezzled from them, so a year’s wages would have been quite an addition to the pot. Yet he betrays Christ for 30 pieces of silver, the cost of a cheap slave. Like the innocent Joseph who was sold into slavery centuries before by his jealous brothers, Jesus is sold for next to nothing.
Christ of course rebukes Judas for his comments, and affirms that the anointing is preparation for his burial. After all he has been warning the apostles that he would indeed be betrayed, turned over to the Sanhedrin, suffer, and die on the cross. In the various readings of this week, we read about those who prepare for the Lord and those who don’t, in the parable of the wise and foolish virgins. We read of innocents who suffered: Job, whose wife makes the infamous comment “Curse God and die!” and Joseph, who was sold by his own brothers into Egyptian slavery. Moses loses his position of wealth and power and has to go out into the desert. Jesus is also innocent, and is sold to the high priest by one of his apostles, one of Christ’s chosen ones loved by Jesus.
So now the challenge lies before us as we enter the Triduum, the three holiest days of the calendar. Am I prepared for Jesus or not? Am I wise or foolish? Am I willing to give of myself completely to Jesus, the way the woman who anoints him does? Or am I letting some of my sinful habits hold me back from being fully embraced by Jesus, from fully embracing Jesus myself? What path am I walking on?
Christ suffers in order to save the human race. He will establish the sacraments of the Eucharist and the priesthood tomorrow night. When he dies on the cross, his pierced heart will gush forth blood and water, representing baptism and the eucharist, and he will breathe out his last, representing the sacrament of chrismation/ confirmation. He gives of himself enormously, completely. Like Job and Joseph he is innocent, but their sufferings led to triumph: Job’s faith in God is rewarded with multiple blessings, and Joseph’s role in Egypt will save the new nation of Israel from dying of starvation. Moses lost his position of power in Egypt, but through God’s grace will lead Israel out of a land of slavery and idolatry into Sinai to meet God. Jesus in his innocence will do more than that, providing the way for the Church to be founded, born from his passion and death, in order to provide the human race with a path to salvation and deliverance from idolatry.
The mystery of anointing is given tonight in commemoration of Jesus’ anointing. It is for healing of soul and body, for the gift of new life through the power of God. In coming up to be anointed, let us ask the Lord for the grace to come through the Triduum well, to let go of our sins, and to be healed not only physically, but also of whatever is holding me back from God’s love. Unlike Judas, let us not hold on to what we know is sinful, but turn it over to God’s power and mercy.
He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others: An unusual introduction to a parable in any of the four gospels. Usually, the parables are addressed to the crowd in general. Not this one.
Pharisees formed the dominant strain of Judaism, and they had contrast between demanding unyielding obedience to every rule and regulation while many of them were devout men who sincerely prayed. They were both honored for their devotion to the Law and disliked for the arrogance and hypocrisy of many of their members. Even so, the opening lines of the parable had the people prepared for the tax collector to be condemned and the Pharisee praised.
Why the reputation for hypocrisy? God, I thank thee that I am not like other men, extortioners, unjust, adulterers, or even like this tax collector. 12 I fast twice a week, I give tithes of all that I get.’ They set themselves above the rest of the population – he lumps all of the Jews into terrible categories: extortioners, unjust, adulterers, and traitors. What good is his fasting, his tithing, when combined with such arrogance? We have to be cautious – here is the first warning of the preparation for Great Lent. We must be humble, sorrowful for our sins, and cognizant of what we have to work on.
There is a famous story from the Desert Fathers of Egypt: An old man much given to simplicity questioned Father Ammonas: “Three thoughts occupy me, either, should I wander in the deserts, or should I go to a foreign land where no one knows me, or should I shut myself up in a cell without opening the door to anyone, eating only every second day?” Father Ammonas replied, “It is not right for you to do any of these three things. Rather, sit in your cell and eat a little every day, keeping the word of the publican always in your heart, and you may be saved.” What was the word of the publican? God, be merciful to me a sinner!
The Publican, as a publican, dwelled in the depths of sin: he worked for the pagan Romans. The publicans were tax farmers – they did not just collect the taxes due to the Roman state, but got their salary by charging extra. They charged far more than the tax rate. The publicans were generally rich, and because the rest of the Jews despised them, they hung out with other publicans and their families, they invited prostitutes and public sinners to their homes, they generally avoided going to synagogue out of shame and because they would be harassed. They were very much on the fringe of Jewish life, and thoroughly disliked. In paintings and icons of this parable, the publican is always shown in the background, in shadows, in darkness.
St Gregory Palamas writes: All he has in common with those who live virtuously is one short utterance, but he finds relief, is lifted up and rises above every evil. He is numbered with the company of the righteous, justified by the impartial Judge Himself. If the Pharisee is condemned by his speech, it is because, as a Pharisee, he thinks himself somebody, although he is not really righteous, and utters many arrogant words which provoke God’s anger with their every syllable.
Humility leads me to holiness but arrogance leads me to the depths of sin. The elderly monk I mentioned earlier surely wanted to be holy, but he is looking the wrong way – he actually was being proud by coming up with exotic and impressive penances. But Ammonas tells him that the only penance that will save him is this one sentence – God, be merciful to me a sinner!
It is so important a phrase that we have incorporated it into our prayer before Communion, it can be used as a short Act of Contrition, it is a prayer that can be used throughout the day.
God – Lord of my life, source of my existence, the one I can call on over and over again
Be merciful – soak me in your mercy, shower your love on me, pour yourself out over me, love me, love me, love me, love me
A sinner! – forgive me, for I know I’ve done wrong and I am truly sorry. No excuses, no mitigation, no explaining – just I know I’ve done wrong and I am so truly sorry for being a sinner.
God, be merciful to me a sinner! One of the great dangers historically of being a church-going Christian is hypocrisy, just like so many of the Pharisees and Sadducees in the time of Christ. There are way too many stories of arrogant believers who have exalted themselves and looked down on those known to be sinners; way too many episodes where some of those who condemned people turned out to be leading secret lives of sin themselves. Go back to the opening verse of this parable: He also told this parable to some who trusted in themselves that they were righteous and despised others.
It is very easy to condemn the politician I don’t like or the other team or fans of the other team or non-Catholics or non-Christians or whatever and whoever! It is very easy to become arrogant about what I know and what I have learned or read or studied. But the key element always in the gospel, in the Christian message, in Catholic teaching is this: to be humble, and to be loving.
God hears the prayer of the sinners who are sorry. God hears our prayers. God longs to hear us cry out to him. God wants us to love him, to change our ways, to come home to him. In the book of the prophet Hosea, God speaks to Israel when the people abandon their pagan gods and return to worship their true Lord. In chapter 14 he says: I will love them freely. The same holds true for us – when we sincerely confess our sins, when we sincerely repent, when we sincerely turn back to the Lord in all humility and trust, when we ask him to once again soak us in his love, he says to each one of us: I will love you freely, for my anger is turned away from you.
Let us make this coming Lent a Lent of loving sorrow, of loving repentance, of honest regret for our faults, and turn to the Lord our God with all our hearts, minds, and souls.
In the early Church, January 6 was the feast of the birth of Christ, the coming of the Magi, and the baptism of the Lord: three events separated in terms of natural time, but in liturgical time they were kept together. Why? Because the birth of the Lord led directly to his revelation to the Gentiles in the person of the Magi, and both events led directly to the baptism and the revelation of Jesus as the Son of God, Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and the beginning of His public ministry. While in the secular world Christmas has become its own big gift-giving extravaganza, liturgically the whole celebration of Christmas leads directly to the Theophany and the baptism. Just like Easter Sunday is meant to lead us to Pentecost, Christmas is meant to lead us to the bigger feast of the Baptism of the Lord.
First, we have the word today repeated over and over again. Why? The Church inherited many things from the Jews and Judaism, and one of those is the whole idea of sacred time. We are not repeating something from 2,000 years ago, but rather we are at the original event, and so are present at the baptism.
Secondly, it is a theo-phany. It is a manifestation of God, since, as the troparion makes clear, worship of the Trinity was revealed. Jesus steps into the Jordan River, and is revealed as the full Son of God. God the Father speaks, the Son is revealed, and the Holy Spirit descends like a dove, in the form of a dove.
Third, we have the transformation of water. Water can give life when we drink it, especially in a desert. It can bring death, as in a flood. Now the water, through Christ’s descent into it, and today through the power of the Holy Spirit, becomes a defense against the wickedness of the devil and the vehicle through which we are incorporated into the Holy Trinity. Water is used for baptism, and through the mystery of baptism, through that first sacrament that we receive, we are brought into eternal life. This is why the priest is invited into our homes to perform the annual rite of house blessings. The holy water sanctified today is used to sanctify the house, to bring God’s presence into the home, to drive away forces of evil. This is why holy water is so important, because the tap water is changed by the Holy Spirit so as to be used by Christ’s Church to bring salvation and protection.
Finally, we have the full revelation of who Jesus of Nazareth is. John the Baptizer, who worshipped Jesus when they were each in the wombs of their mothers, proclaimed how great Jesus would be. All four Gospels have a similar sentence:
Matthew: after me comes one who is more powerful than I, whose sandals I am not worthy to carry.
Mark: After me comes the one more powerful than I, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to stoop down and untie.
Luke: one who is more powerful than I will come, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.
John: among you stands one you do not know. He is the one who comes after me, the straps of whose sandals I am not worthy to untie.”
John is still revered as the last of the prophets by the Jews. There had not been a preacher like him in 400 years. In the gospels it is clear that many people hoped he was the messiah – that is how powerful his call to repentance was, the call to conversion. But he made it very clear that he was the voice in the wilderness, preparing the way for the Lord. Jesus himself says that John is the greatest man born.
As awesome as he was, as powerful a preacher as he was, he says in all four gospels that he was not worthy to undo the sandal straps of the one he was preparing for. That job was reserved for the lowest slave in a rich house, because shoes got filthy in the streets of the towns. The sandals could be covered in dirt, animal manure, garbage, all kinds of stuff, so that was the worst job in a household. But John makes it clear that compared to the one whose way he was preparing, he was the lowest of the low. There simply was no comparison between John and Jesus.
All of that is confirmed by the events of today. God’s voice comes from heaven, confirming that Jesus of Nazareth is actually His Son, and the Son who brings joy to the Father. The power of God, the spirit of the living God, comes down upon Christ’s head, in the form of a dove, the bird that represented both purity and God’s promises to the Jews. And as the song says, John humbly steps aside, sending his disciple Saint Andrew the first-called to follow the Lord, and Andrew of course will go get his brother Peter, the future rock of the Church of Christ.
We are baptized into the Trinity, and in Chrismation, Confirmation, we are given the gifts of the Holy Spirit. Baptism into the Trinity is not an end in and of itself – we are meant to be people on a mission. The apostles who are called by Christ are not initiated into a secret religion for the chosen few, but prepared by Him to be transformed by the Holy Spirit on Pentecost so as to preach the good news to the whole world. Our houses are not blessed by the priest so as to be little islands locked away, but to be strongholds of faith, houses of light and goodness and truth.
As Catholic Christians, we are empowered with the fullness of God’s revelation to proclaim the good news to the human race that salvation is at hand. Yes, we belong to a Church that has been rocked by scandals, but the Church has always been rocked by scandals, starting with the betrayals, not only by Judas but also the denial by Peter himself. It is home to sinners who are trying to become saints. It is the refuge of sinners, of sinners who are trying to fulfill the mission entrusted to them, of teaching and healing and guiding and loving the people of our broken world and bringing them into the embrace of our loving Father in heaven. Let us ask our Lord tonight in Holy Communion for the courage to go forward in mission, to fulfill the charge given to us to be His hands in the world. And let us be, through the power of the Holy Spirit who descended onto Jesus that day, people of prayer, and people who are not afraid to be converted away from sinful behavior into lives of goodness and faithfulness.
You can still enter the old city of Jerusalem through the gate of Saint Stephen. Though the city was destroyed by the Romans, when it was rebuilt, the wall was put up again and the gate restored, and it has been known ever since as Saint Stephen’s gate and is more than likely the place where he was martyred.
Like Jesus, witnesses were brought against him. Like Jesus, he was hauled off without a proper trial or defense. It was against the Romans’ law for the Jews to execute anyone, which was why the Sanhedrin had taken Jesus to Pilate. So like Jesus, he was attacked by breakers of the law. And like Jesus, Stephen remained firm in his commitment to the gospel, and like Jesus he forgives those who are killing him. And of course, the final blow, in the eyes of the Jews, was his sudden proclamation that he saw Christ sitting at the right hand of God, declaring that Jesus therefore is God.
Stephen’s day has been kept as a holy day connected to Christmas since the early 300s. Why? He is the first person to knowingly die for Christ, to die because of his Christian faith, and he sets the model for all future martyrs, down to our day, through his imitation of Christ. He does not waver in his faith, and he forgives those killing him. From then down to our own time with the Christians who are routinely killed by Muslim fanatics in Nigeria almost every week, martyrs do those two things.
It is significant that in Chapter 7 Verse 57 we read Meanwhile, the witnesses laid their coats at the feet of a young man named Saul.
Shortly thereafter, we read in the beginning of Chapter 8 verses 2-3 Godly men buried Stephen and mourned deeply for him. 3 But Saul began to destroy the church. Going from house to house, he dragged off both men and women and put them in prison.
Saul of course was known also by his Roman name, Paulus, and becomes Saint Paul, the great evangelizer and theologian. He will go from destroying the Church to building up and expanding the Church through his preaching, writing, and journeys. Stephen would not know that one of the official witnesses of his martyrdom was going to become one of the great pillars of Christianity. We have no idea what seeds we plant through friendships, relationships, and simply holding firm to our beliefs in the face of harassment or persecution. In the end, Stephen’s testimony and prayers surely helped Paul’s conversion since Luke makes such a point of stating that Saul was one of the legal witnesses of the killing.
The great Catholic martyr of Scotland is Saint John Ogilvie, who was put to death for the crimes of being a priest, converting Protestants to the Catholic faith, and offering Mass in Scottish cities. In 1615 he was executed in Glasgow, and this is what happened:
There were many brave Catholics who came to the execution site to support the saint with prayers and with shouts. They were fearless. John said on the scaffold “If there be here any hidden Catholics, let them pray for me but the prayers of heretics I will not have.” Then something spontaneous happened, by divine intervention and inspiration. Just before they tied his hands on the scaffold the saint quickly pulled out his rosary and tossed it to the crowd as a token of farewell. There was a Protestant Baron, John ab Eckersdorf, who happened to be in the crowd and the rosary bounced off his chest. The man tried to reach down for the beads but was beaten to them by the surrounding faithful anxious to get such a relic. Here is how the event is related, in the words of the Baron: “I was on my travels through England and Scotland as it is the custom of our nobility, and I did not have the faith. I happened to be in Glasgow the day Father Ogilvie was led forth to the gallows, and it is impossible for me to describe his lofty bearing in meeting death. His farewell to the Catholics was his casting into their midst, from the scaffold, his rosary beads just before he met his fate. That rosary, thrown haphazard, struck me on the breast in such wise that I could have caught it in the palm of my hand; but there was such a rush and crush of the Catholics to get hold of it, that unless I wished to run the risk of being trodden down, I had to cast it from me. Religion was the last thing I was then thinking about : it was not in my mind at all; yet from that moment I had no rest. Those rosary beads had left a wound in my soul; go where I would I had no peace of mind. Conscience was disturbed, and the thought would haunt me : why did the martyr’s rosary strike me, and not another? For years I asked myself this question it followed me about everywhere. At last conscience won the day I became a Catholic; I abandoned Calvinism – and this happy change I attribute to the martyr’s beads and to no other cause those beads which, if I had them now, gold could not tempt me to part with and if gold could purchase them, I should not spare it.”
Those rosary beads left a wound in my soul.
I wonder sometimes if Saul was so ferocious in his persecution because Stephen’s words left a wound in his soul. Surely as Paul, Stephen’s testimony right before he died strengthened him in his own sufferings on behalf of Christ.
We never know how our actions, our words, our constancy in the Catholic faith in the face of challenges and obstacles can affect someone. The smallest action can leave a wound in someone’s soul, a wound that will not heal until that person resolves the crisis by becoming a Catholic, or returning to the practice of the faith. Saint Wenceslaus, the king of Bohemia, famously celebrated the day by setting out an elaborate dinner for a poor man, and 1,300 years later we still sing about that. His act of charity is still remembered; Stephen’s faith is still remembered.
We should celebrate Stephen’s day with prayers, asking him to intercede for us with God that at this challenging time in western civilization, we will be faithful to Christ, faithful to his Church, and be brave enough to witness about Jesus, in the best way that we can. John Ogilvie led the baron to faith simply by throwing his rosary out; we can throw seeds of faith out in many different ways, if we are brave enough to do so, and thus we may leave a wound in someone’s soul for the sake and love of Jesus Christ.
Christ is born! In the book of the prophet Micah, chapter 5, verse 2, we read: But you, O Bethlehem of Ephrathah, who are one of the little clans of Judah, from you shall come forth for me one who is to rule in Israel, whose origin is from of old, from ancient days.
The Messiah of course is Jesus Christ, who is the ancient of ancients, existing before time as the eternal Word of God and then being incarnated in time in the womb of Our Lady, and born for us in little Bethlehem.
Bethlehem actually has two meanings. In Hebrew: house of bread but in Arabic: house of meat. Both names lead us to the Eucharist, the life-giving body and blood of the savior of the world. Under the form of bread, we have the flesh of the Lord Himself. Ephrathah means fruitful. So, we have the messiah incarnated, born in the house of bread and the house of meat, in the fruitful region. He will give us spiritual fruits, fruits which we still benefit from.
Jesus laid in the manger – the feed trough for the animals which is transformed into the feeding place for people who worship Christ. Luke emphasizes the location three times in the span of ten short verses, that the infant is laid in a manger by Mary; the angels announce he is the manger; and the shepherds themselves find him lying in the manger, in the presence of Mary and Joseph. The shepherds are invited to worship him, to adore him, in that feed trough. We are preparing now for the coming of Christ, as he does in every liturgy, to descend to the altar through the holy spirit, and he comes in answer to our petitions and prayers. Every altar, at every liturgy, becomes Bethlehem.
The Child will be our food spiritually and physically – the icon of St John the Baptist at the south end of the iconostas shows the Child Jesus resting on the diskos, in place of the bread, as a constant reminder to us of just what happens to the bread placed there before the liturgy during the rite of preparation. Saint John points to the Child as he proclaims “behold the Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world.” This little baby whose birth we have prepared for over the last forty days, this speechless child who is the eternal word of God, is the Lamb of God. The sheep and lambs in the shepherds’ field produced the wool for the vestments of the priests of the temple, but here we have the true High Priest. The spring lambs would be sacrificed for the Passover feast, but here we have the true Paschal Lamb, who will be sacrificed on the cross. No lamb can take away sins, only this lamb born of the Virgin Mary can take away the sins of the entire world.
Chrysostom preached that “Bethlehem this day resembles heaven; This day He Who is, is Born; and He Who is, becomes what He was not. For when He was God, He became man; yet not departing from the Godhead that is His. Nor yet by any loss of divinity became He man, nor through increase became He God from man; but being the Word He became flesh, but His nature, because of impassability, remaining unchanged.”
Jesus proclaims throughout chapter 6 of John’s Gospel the importance of eating his flesh and receiving his blood – he emphasizes that if we don’t do that, we won’t have life in us. And of course, he came to give us life, the opportunity to have the fullness of spiritual life and abundant eucharistic union with him that gives us a taste of eternal life.
Being here is a privilege, as I have said repeatedly this year. It is an enormous gift from God that we can come together to spiritually be in Bethlehem, at the cave, to be like the shepherds and come to worship the new-born King of the Jews, the true messiah, our savior. In Communist China, no one under 18 is allowed into the churches. In occupied Ukraine, all of the Latin and Byzantine Catholic priests have been expelled by the Russians or are in the jails of the secret police. In much of Africa, Siberia, and Latin America, because there are not enough priests, people gather not for the holy sacrifice of the Mass but for a service led by a reader, and maybe they can receive Communion. In many places this weekend in America, the storm has closed churches.
We are privileged to be able to come to church and be present at the Divine Liturgy; we are privileged to share in the Catholic faith; we are privileged to be given the fullness of God’s revelation through the teachings of the Catholic Church in the magisterium; we are privileged to have a pastor who came from far away to serve with such devotion; we are privileged to have produced two nuns, one monk, one seminarian and four priests from such a small parish; we are privileged to have a parish with so many children and young families; we are privileged to have active ministries to college adults and high school students; we are privileged to see a future ahead of us, lit by the fires of faith and devotion; we are privileged to have older parishioners who guide us through their fidelity; we are privileged in so many ways. The Mother of God has watched over this parish since 1974, and her Son whose birth we celebrate has been the core of this parish’s spiritual life.
This Child Jesus is a free offering, a gift of salvation that is wrapped in that little baby boy lying in the straw of the manger on that unique holy night. The gift continues in every celebration of the Divine Liturgy, in every offering of the Catholic Mass. Tonight is the night that is different from every other night, the night when God pierces the division between heaven and earth so as to reunite us, so that we can walk with Him and be with Him, and flourish with Him, and conquer with Him over the forces of darkness. The Child born at midnight in piercing cold in the cave of Bethlehem is the true light of the world, especially now in a world that faces so much darkness and pain.
Presents are great, but they are not eternal. Cards are lovely, but they are not eternal. Human bodies can do many things, but eventually they fall apart. The only thing we have of ourselves that is eternal is the soul, and later on the glorified body that we will receive at the resurrection of the dead. Christ came into the world to die, so as to open the door for the soul to live eternally with him after our own deaths, and for us to live body and soul with the Holy Trinity forever after the end of the universe. Let us enjoy being in Bethlehem, and let us rejoice in the privilege given to us in faith, and let us above all commit ourselves to Christ on this holy night, and serve Him always. Christ is born. Glorify Him. Have a Merry Christmas.
He is on every iconostas, always on the north side. He has been given the title of “Wonder-Worker” because of the many miracles performed during his lifetime and after his death through his intercession, miracles that God wrought in answer to his prayers because of the life he led. Nicholas was leading a life of constant conversion, a life rooted in Jesus Christ. The town of Myra had many bishops until the Turks drove out the last of the Christians in 1923, but in 1,800 years of Christianity it is this one bishop who became the model for all bishops, who left such a profound imprint on his parishioners then and on Christians around the world today. In the Divine Office, the canon in the matins for tomorrow morning starts with the proclamation of Christ’s birth, because Nicholas is considered to be so Christ-like. How did he show this?
He is the saint of charity, giving to others and doing for others in the Name of Jesus. He is the saint of justice, having saved those wrongly accused of crimes and exposing the corruption of government officials. He himself was imprisoned under the emperor Diocletian during the last big persecution in the Roman Empire, so he was a confessor of the faith.
Sailing in the ancient world was hazardous – as we see in the Acts of the Apostles when Paul had to sail to Rome, to go across the open sea was a frightening prospect, and there was no guarantee that a ship would arrive at its destination. As the bishop of the port of Myra, he would go down to the harbor to bless the ships and prayed in the church for those who were at sea. To this day he remains the patron saint of sailors and travelers, and his icons travel on the navy ships of majority-Orthodox countries like Greece.
Nicholas spent his inheritance helping orphans and abandoned children, building hospitals and schools, and giving relief to the poor. He’s famous for coming to the aid of three poor daughters who could not afford a dowry and so could not get married. Icons show him tossing three bags of gold through the window, landing in the stockings that were hanging up by the fire to dry. To this day, unmarried Italian women go to the shrine in Bari and put three coins into the collection box to ask his intercession in finding a husband.
A popular legend says that at the council of Nicaea, he was so scandalized about the heresy of Arius, which denies that Jesus is fully God as well as fully Man, that he got up and slapped Arius. The bishops then deposed him, saying he was out of control and offended those who favored Arius, including the imperial government. But that night, they all had the same dream, where Jesus and Mary restored the symbols of the bishop’s office, the Gospel book and the omophorion, to him. So in the morning they all contritely returned to him, and restored him to his rightful office. Unfortunately, we have the record of who attended that council, and Nicholas wasn’t there, and neither was Arius. But the point of the story is that Nicholas was solidly orthodox in faith, and having suffered for the Christian faith in Jesus Christ, he would not give in to the pressures of the government and the opinions of popular churchmen. Instead he held firm to the faith.
So, what does this enormously popular saint have to say to us?
1) he was honored in his lifetime not for spending money, but for giving of himself to others in the name of Christ
2) he was known for his holiness, for the time he spent in prayer and also the time he gave to others
3) he led a life that was simple, keeping the fasting seasons, not looking to build up his own wealth or power
4) he took risks so as to help others stay strong in faith, and he was willing to stand up for what he knew was right.
All of these are qualities that you and I can and should emulate. May Saint Nicholas intercede for us individually, our parish, and the Byzantine Catholic Church, so that we will reflect Jesus Christ accurately and well to those around us. And may we have the courage, like him, to stand firm for the faith and its truths.
Holy Infant Jesus, living in Mary! To Thee I surrender myself totally, with body and soul and all that I have and am, and all that I am capable of being and having. Grant me to partake of they innocence, and out of the fountain of Thy most sweet Heart, allow me to draw childlike simplicity wherewith to moisten the powers of my soul, and to fructify them with Thy Holy Spirit. Let me draw out of Thee, Thou primeval fountain of life eternal, divine strength in order to receive the spirit of Thy holy infancy, and divine power in order to preserve it.
And then come and reign within me through Mary, then through Thy greatness within me confound all earthly greatness; and through Thy wisdom in me let all carnal wisdom and worldly prudence be silenced; and through Thy goodness in me let all diabolical malice be dispersed!
To be truly grateful, we have to remember. When we are truly grateful, we are slow to forget what made us grateful.
The nine Jewish lepers in the gospel reading do not even remember to thank Jesus in the few minutes after they have left him, and they discover that they are healed. In the painting below, they run off in joy. Only the Samaritan man, despised by the Jews in general, goes back to the Jewish rabbi to thank him.
When the Pilgrims held their thanksgiving day, it was after half of them had died of hardship, yet they still celebrated in church and with a big festive meal. They were indebted to the Catholic Indian, Squanto, for their survival, and the forgiveness extended to them by the local tribes after the Pilgrims stole some of their cached food. Sadly, the English would launch terrible wars against those same tribes, and the Catholic Indians to the north. Their memory was all too short! We are invited to thank God not only today, but every day.
Secondly, we need to always recognize the goodness of God. When we are truly grateful, we come to understand that as we say in the psalms, and in the Matins service, God’s mercies endure forever.
We may not always be aware, we may be as foolish as the nine lepers, but God’s mercy lasts and is always present. Notice that in Ukraine, despite bombardments, lack of electricity and gas heating and water, people are still going to church. Despite their sufferings, they continue to worship God!
Finally, we need true humility. When we are truly grateful, we humbly confess that we are indebted to God, that we belong to him and that we are not our own.
The first thanksgiving service in America of Europeans and Native Americans was in 1565, when the colony of Saint Augustine was founded in Florida. Rather than the normal procedure of planting the flag and claiming land in the name of the king that had been done for the previous 70 years, the Spanish governor Pedro Menéndez de Avilés planted a cross, which he kissed, and then claimed Florida in the name of God.
If we were to focus entirely on the Holy Name of God, and recognize every day that everything comes from Him and through Him, surely our lives would be much different! I pray daily for the conversion of our government to Catholic principles, for the conversion and salvation of our country, and for my own ongoing conversion and salvation. We need to do this every day, not only on Thanksgiving Day, and root ourselves in the Cross of Christ, in the worship of God, and in humility, recognizing God’s goodness, and remembering always that His mercy and goodness endure forever.
In Old English the words Ghost and Ghostly were often used to refer to the Third Person of the Holy Trinity and to spiritual matters. Today, Ghost has come to mean only spirits of the deceased. So, the English translations have gone to the word Spirit. That is closer to the Hebrew original, in that the Holy Spirit is the Spirit of the living God, “ruach elohim.”
Did Mary ever commit a venial sin?
No. Our Blessed Lady continued to live her life in union with God. She is the New Eve, the Mother who exemplifies what the Old Eve was supposed to do. We were made to live in God’s Presence, and to be with Him always. The failure of Adam and Eve to do so introduced sin, and therefore death, into the human race. While Our Lady did die, and then was assumed into heaven body and soul, she did not sin.
Did Joseph ever commit a mortal sin?
I would say it is doubtful. Joseph is described in Scripture as a righteous man, and every time he has a message from God, he gets up and immediately fulfills what God has asked of him. Many theologians taught that Joseph did not commit any sins, and some have claimed that he was sanctified in his mother’s womb after his conception. But one must be careful of over-exaggerating someone’s holiness. We have a bad tendency to exalt all saints, and make them so otherworldly that we think we don’t have a chance at achieving holiness. I think it is sufficient to say that Saint Joseph was a man who achieved great sanctity, who treasured and protected the virginity of the Virgin Mary and his own purity, and who was the perfect role model for the Son of God.
Do we know the names of angels besides Michael, Gabriel, and Rafael? Why do we call Saint Michael a Saint when he is an angel?
Traditionally there are seven archangels listed: Michael, Gabriel, Raphael, Uriel, Selathiel, Jegudiel, and Barachiel. The suffix -el is the Name of God in Hebrew; each of them has a duty to God and an action they perform on his behalf. Michael is “he who is like unto God.” Michael serves as the protector of God’s people against evil in Daniel and again in the Epistle of Jude. Gabriel is “he who stands in the presence of God” and he appears as God’s messenger to Daniel, Zechariah, and the Virgin Mary. Raphael means “God heals” and he brings both spiritual and physical healing in the Book of Tobit, and it is presumed he is the angel at the pool of Bethesda. These three archangels are the only ones listed in the canonical books of the Bible. Jegudiel punishes sinners; Uriel is the angel of wisdom; Selathiel is the angel for intercession of prayer; Berachiel is the angel of blessings. These last four appear in the Eastern Orthodox and Ethiopian Orthodox traditions, some Catholic practices, and some Jewish traditions.
The word “saint” is French in origin, and simply means “holy.” It became a title of holy people in Old English. Michael is certainly holy, and thus he and the other two archangels are routinely referred to as Saints.
These are some of the anonymous questions passed to me at the high school and college groups.
What’s the best way to respond to a Protestant who asks, “Are you saved?”
Quote Saint Paul: I am working out my salvation in fear and trembling (Philippians 2). Salvation is not a one-time decision; in fact, some Evangelicals have even taken the deplorable attitude that “Because ‘I am saved’ I can therefore do whatever I want and still get to heaven.” That is most definitely not a Christian belief and certainly is unbiblical. A Catholic was saved (baptism), is being saved (working with the Holy Spirit for the transformation of my soul), and hopes to be saved by persevering to the end. The comment may then be made to us that no sin can separate us from Christ, so why do we think we have to still work at it? But Saint John himself pointed out the dangers of mortal sin (1 John 5:16-17). Jesus willingly ascended the Cross, yes, but He does not spare us from suffering and struggle. The Holy Spirit comes to us to help us conquer sin and so get to heaven, as we embrace our cross here on earth. Paul himself was still working at his spiritual life. So too should we, until the last moment of our lives on earth.
Did Mary ever commit a venial sin?
No. Our Blessed Lady continued to live her life in union with God. She is the New Eve, the Mother who exemplifies what the Old Eve was supposed to do. We were made to live in God’s Presence, and to be with Him always. The failure of Adam and Eve to do so introduced sin, and therefore death, into the human race. While Our Lady did die, and then was assumed into heaven body and soul, she did not sin.
In the story of Lazarus and the Rich Man, did the Rich Man go to Hell or Purgatory (Luke 16)?
Jesus was not giving a theological treatise on Hell and Purgatory. He was doing two things. First, he was warning the rich of their fate if they ignored the needs of the poor and the teachings of the Law and the warnings of the prophets regarding eternal life. Second, and more clearly, he was warning that Israel would reject him, even though he would rise from the dead in fulfillment of the Prophets. In fact, in the story the rich man knows the name of Lazarus, yet he treated a man whose name he knew abominably by leaving him starving and sick at the gate. Only the dogs come out well in this parable! Jesus is pointing out hell and heaven, damnation or salvation. But some have thought that the fact that the rich man is worried about the salvation of his family members shows compassion, and therefore the man must have been in purgatory. But hell excludes God’s supernatural love, not the affection that people may still hold onto. After all, the rich man longs desperately for a drop of water on his tongue. And Abraham points out that there is a chasm between heaven and the flames tormenting the rich man (verses 25-26). Those in purgatory go to heaven; those in hell are stuck there. For more on this, check out Jimmy Akin’s essay at: https://jimmyakin.com/2019/11/the-point-of-lazarus-and-the-rich-man.html
Jesus leaves, but with promises in the four gospels and Acts:
I will send you an advocate, and You will be clothed with power from on high
I am with you always, as it says in the kontakion, from Matthew chapter 28.
And from the two angels, who represent Moses and Elijah: He will come back.
When they go back to Jerusalem, they do not go back in distress, but in anticipation. They are already being transformed after the 40 days of Christ being with them on and off, from the group of frightened men to becoming the apostles who will transform the Roman and Persian empires with their preaching. They start their nine days of prayer but in full confidence – they don’t know if it will be 9 days or 90 but they go into the upper room and the temple and start praying joyfully. We know they spend a lot of time praying as on Pentecost the 120 men and women are praying together when the Holy Spirit comes upon them.
The messages of Ascension Thursday are a few:
Have faith and confidence. Jesus is with us always, until the end of the world.
He will indeed return.
His promises to the apostles were fulfilled, and so are His promises to us.
He shows the way we will all go: indeed, we will die, just as he had to die, but with a purpose, to go to heaven and to the Father.
We are made for more than this fallen, broken world. We are made to live a life of glory, a life that we can barely taste here. We are made to go forward spiritually, but not on our own. We are made for God, and to transform this world by being His disciples.
One of the big problems today is that people have forgotten that we are all made in God’s image, that we are all God’s children, that we all have a place as members of the human race, the human brotherhood, to be united in charity here on earth and to live in such a way that we will be transformed, and help others to transform themselves, through the power of God. We are plagued with violence, discrimination, hatred, crime, poverty, and various wild ideas while forgetting our unique status on this planet as God’s people. The liturgical year moves us toward Pentecost, when 120 people who had trusted in Jesus’ promises were praying together. We are meant to be a nation of prayer – not just America but the whole world as a nation of prayer – in order to live in such a way so that when it is our turn to die, the gates of heaven are opened to us individually. Christ is with us always, not just in good times but in all times. Christ invites us to accept the comforter, the Holy Spirit. Christ wants us to follow Him in our life style, and also to follow Him into glory. Now in these 9 days: what do I need to do in order to fulfill just that? We can make this time of the first novena an opportunity, a great moment in our lives, to move closer to Jesus, to be nearer Him, and more like Him, as we await His spirit. Christ is among us.
Father Christopher Zugger 