SCRIPTURE
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NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: WISDOM 1:13-15; 2:23-24
THIRTEENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME [B] USCCB link to all three readings here. God did not make death, nor does he rejoice in the destruction of the living. For he fashioned all things that they might have being; and the creatures of the world are wholesome, and there is not a destructive drug among them nor any domain of the netherworld on earth, for justice is undying. For God formed man to be imperishable; the image of his own nature he made him. But by the envy of the devil, death entered the world, and they who belong to his company experience it. All my sources place the composition of the Book of Wisdom at about 50 B.C. or just before the Christian Era. The work was composed in Greek, not Hebrew, even though the author sometimes speaks in the voice of Solomon, who lived a millennium earlier. Wisdom was written in Alexandria, Egypt, for Jews of the Diaspora or scattering that began at the end of the Babylonian Captivity in 539 B.C. when Jews did not all return to Jerusalem but began settling in other parts of the world. It is hard to conceive of a city with greater academic riches than Alexandria at the time of Christ; situated in Egypt and energized after the conquest of Alexander the Great around 300 B.C., Alexandria became a universal learning center, remembered for its famous library, the largest in antiquity, established by the Ptolemy dynasty. Marc Antony, by some accounts, gave his bride Cleopatra 200,000 volumes as a wedding present for the library. The goals of its founder in the mid-third century B.C. included assembling a copy of every book in the world; estimates range from 40,000-400,000 volumes. The Romans burned the library probably during the struggle between Marc Antony and Octavian for the Roman emperorship, in about 30 B.C. A sizeable community of Jews lived in Alexandria, and it was inevitable that their books of revelation and the thoughts of their scholars would fall under scrutiny and serve as the object of heated debate in the forums of discussion in this cosmopolitan setting of writing and research. What critics of Jewish belief attacked most strenuously was the Hebrew understanding of the workings of God. This was probably an extension of the debate over the nature of evil, which continues to the present day. The issue was the question of whether God created evil and suffering in the world. The response of the Jewish community is the Book of Wisdom, from which our first reading of this weekend is taken. Reviewing the text again, we see the very strenuous assertion that “God did not create death.” In fact, the Wisdom authors are lavish in their praise of God the Creator, proclaiming that all of creation is wholesome and nothing was made to hurt a human being, not even a drug. Wisdom declares that God’s ultimate act was to make man like himself, imperishable. Critics—then, and five centuries later when St. Augustine compiled a massive analysis of the question in his work on the Genesis creation account—could easily contend that there was plenty of evil in the world and that man was, claims to the contrary, destructible. Jewish and later Christian preachers and thinkers would have to square the circle, so to speak, and this is the purpose of Wisdom 2: 23-24. In Sunday’s concluding lines, the injection of evil into human existence is “the envy of the devil” who introduced death into the world. This model of anthropology is well established in Christian thought, for it removes God from the onus for sin and pain while at the same time making the cross of Christ a cosmic necessity. When Augustine addressed this question as a Christian bishop in the fifth century A.D., he ran askew on some of the basic point in the Garden Narrative of creation. For our purposes here, I will cite just one. Genesis 3 is very clear on the introduction of evil chaos: “Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the creatures God had made.” Over the centuries interpreters—including my third-grade teacher—have approached this conundrum with the idea that the devil usurped the identity of an earthly creature to counter the perfect intentions of God. To follow the logic of this, one would have to accept the contention that from the beginning there was a being powerful enough to derail the creating Will of God. The more disquieting attempt at an explanation is the assertion of Sunday’s reading is that God made man in his own nature, an assertion that humankind bears an incredible potency to create. And, looking around about us, we have not exercised it well.
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THIS SUNDAY’S FIRST READINGS
FEAST OF ST. JOHN THE BAPTIST USCCB link to all three readings SATURDAY VIGIL MASS: JEREMIAH 1: 4-10 (or the Sunday reading may be used) In the days of King Josiah, the word of the LORD came to me, saying: Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I dedicated you, a prophet to the nations I appointed you. "Ah, Lord GOD!" I said, "I know not how to speak; I am too young." But the LORD answered me, Say not, "I am too young." To whomever I send you, you shall go; whatever I command you, you shall speak. Have no fear before them, because I am with you to deliver you, says the LORD. Then the LORD extended his hand and touched my mouth, saying, See, I place my words in your mouth! This day I set you over nations and over kingdoms, to root up and to tear down, to destroy and to demolish, to build and to plant. SUNDAY FIRST READING: ISAIAH 49: 1-6 Hear me, O coastlands, listen, O distant peoples. The LORD called me from birth, from my mother's womb he gave me my name. He made of me a sharp-edged sword and concealed me in the shadow of his arm. He made me a polished arrow, in his quiver he hid me. You are my servant, he said to me, Israel, through whom I show my glory. Though I thought I had toiled in vain, and for nothing, uselessly, spent my strength, yet my reward is with the LORD, my recompense is with my God. For now the LORD has spoken who formed me as his servant from the womb, that Jacob may be brought back to him and Israel gathered to him; and I am made glorious in the sight of the LORD, and my God is now my strength! It is too little, he says, for you to be my servant, to raise up the tribes of Jacob, and restore the survivors of Israel; I will make you a light to the nations, that my salvation may reach to the ends of the earth. There are a few feasts in the Roman calendar that override the standard Sunday observance when these feasts fall on a Sunday. All Saints Day, All Souls Day, The Transfiguration (August 6) and the observance of John the Baptist all come to mind. The Baptist enjoys a preeminence in the observance of the saints. In the missal of my youth there were three feasts dedicated to John the Baptist: the vigil of his feast in purple vestments (June 23), the feast itself (June 24), and a separate observance of his martyrdom in red vestments on August 29. In 1970 the Missal dropped the separate day of vigil but maintained this June 24 feast we observe this weekend as well as the August 29 feast of his martyrdom. John the Baptist is one of the most highly visible characters in the Gospels. Scholarship today continues to examine his origins, his relationship to the Old Testament prophets, his relationship to Jesus, and his impact upon the early Church. Jesus talked of him frequently after John’s martyrdom, challenging his enemies to say publicly whether “John’s baptism is of God.” That Jesus himself submitted to John’s baptism has been a point of some disquiet for some, to the point that the history is retold with high levels of factual certainty, for who of the evangelists would have invented a story highlighting Jesus’ subservience to John and his ritual of forgiveness of sin? Defining John’s place in salvation in history is not easy. One can argue that he is the last great Old Testament prophet; one can also argue that the prophetic John is the first to announce the Kingdom of God in the fashion that Jesus would use in his own ministry. Although the two readings listed above come from different authors and times, they bear two common features: (1) that God preordains his special servants from their birth, or even in the womb; and (2) God works through his prophets, providing them with strength and success when all odds stack against them. Did the Hebrew Scriptures cited here predict the coming of John? Jeremiah begins his prophecy around 627 B.C. and holds the record for the longest span of prophetic activity, 45 years. During that time, he would have preached during the final days before the Babylonian exile, when Israel’s kings failed to carry out the reforms required on them to keep the soul of the Covenant with God alive. After the punishments had befallen his people. Jeremiah turned his gaze to “the hope that God would eventually restore his people.” (Boadt, p. 327) But the idea of restoration is multifaceted. Jeremiah gives indications that he sees the power of Babylon as limited, like Egypt’s, and that a better day lie ahead for God’s chosen ones. But Jeremiah’s later preaching is marked with a new moral stance. Israel had brought suffering upon itself by the ineffectiveness of its kings, whose primary failures boiled down to a failure to keep the Covenant delivered by Moses through the Law. It may have occurred to the prophet that the paradigm under which Israel lived and understood the Law needed a new theological expression. Again, to draw from Father Boadt, Jeremiah came to understand that the Law was not an objective rule carved in stone, but rather that the future would herald a writing of God’s moral commands on the heart of each believer with an accompanying grace of the Spirit to carry forth the personal living of God’s commandments. Without losing its corporate identity, Israel was being introduced to a personal sense of morality, where fidelity was not the full provenance of the king but of every son and daughter of Abraham. Jeremiah did not live to see the end of the Babylonian Captivity, but if he had, he would have seen a resurgence of a personal responsibility for fidelity to the Law, to the point that Jews cast off wives of foreign descent and rejoiced at hearing the Word once more to the point of deep personal emotion, a post-Exilic time described in detail in the historical Biblical books of Ezra and Nehemiah. It is not a coincidence that when John the Baptist began to preach and baptize along the Jordan, the crowds recognized him as prophetic, empowered by God’s spirit. John’s preaching cannot easily be connected to any branch of Judaism then in existence, but rather to a more universal call to personal holiness in the forgiveness of sins. St. Luke’s Gospel speaks of John’s words addressed to Roman soldiers as well as Jewish compatriots. The morality of John is highly personal in terms of accountability; he describes the judgment at the end of time as the separation of wheat from chaff, the latter burned in a great fire. It is unlikely that Jeremiah, or for that matter the author of Isaiah in Sunday’s first reading, had the specific character of a John the Baptist in mind in either of Sunday’s readings. But, given that both Gospels for the weekend Masses speak of the conception and birth of the Baptist in terms of Hebrew history, metaphor, and expectations, it is more likely that as was common in the early Church, Christians identified the profound meaning of Jesus’ message and ministry by a “rereading” of the Hebrew Scripture. The same is true in the fashion that Christians came to understand the Baptist’s identity and role in the proclamation of the Kingdom of God fulfilled in Christ. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: EZECHIEL 17: 22-24
ELEVENTH SUNDAY IN ORDINARY TIME [B] USCCB link to all three readings Thus says the Lord GOD: I, too, will take from the crest of the cedar, from its topmost branches tear off a tender shoot, and plant it on a high and lofty mountain; on the mountain heights of Israel I will plant it. It shall put forth branches and bear fruit, and become a majestic cedar. Birds of every kind shall dwell beneath it, every winged thing in the shade of its boughs. And all the trees of the field shall know that I, the LORD, bring low the high tree, lift high the lowly tree, wither up the green tree, and make the withered tree bloom. As I, the LORD, have spoken, so will I do. In reading for the Reformation posts, I came across a description of how young Martin Luther was taught the Bible in school. In 1500 the consciousness of “Bible” was quite different from our sense of a bound, unified collection. For much of our history the Bible, in the public mind and in the catechetics of the age, was a selection of texts that served Church worship and academics. Any text or reading was approached in a four-step process: (1) the literal sense, which in Luther’s day meant how a text applied to Christ; (2) the topological sense, its moral interpretation; (3) the allegorical sense, how the text applied to the Church, and (4) the anagogic sense, the text’s relationship to the end times. How this method came into being is a complicated story, but by the early medieval era the art of theology was essentially answering these four questions in Scripture texts, with the best responses published in books called “sentences.” The most famous collection, ultimately the definitive collection, was written by Peter Lombard between 1147 and 1151. Any prospective Church scholar was expected to write a commentary on The Sentences of Lombard. Luther himself, as normal for the times, was expected to master The Sentences. The integrity of The Sentences was proclaimed at the Council IV Lateran in 1215. What this boils down to is the medieval method of Biblical study, i.e., the mastery of earlier interpretations summarized by Peter Lombard. Not only was this a grueling exercise for hungry, idealistic young scholars, but a student could only penetrate the interpretations of Peter Lombard and his commentators. In Luther’s monastery—as in most others—monks were forbidden to read the stand-alone Bible, only the ivy-covered interpretations of select sections from previous centuries. The Renaissance—which encouraged men of letters to examine ancient texts for themselves—and the printing press led to more expansive study of the Bible, but Luther emphasized the freedom of any Christian reader to embrace the books of the Bible as entities unto themselves whereby God might speak directly to the heart of the reader. Luther himself was saved from possible madness when he broke from traditional interpretations and trusted his conscience on his personal interpretation of St. Paul that humanity is saved by the free grace of a forgiving God, and not through arbitrary works to buy one’s way into heaven. The history of Biblical interpretation brings up the question of how we embrace Biblical texts today such as our first reading this coming Sunday. May we bring our personal insights into “interpreting” what we read in preparation for Mass and direction in Christian living? I would answer that with a qualified yes. The medieval method of Bible study may have been stifling, but at the risk of throwing out the baby with the bath water, it is also true that the Church is filled with the Holy Spirit, so that its collective authority and scholarship serves as something of a safety net to keep the sincere reader in the family of united understanding. In approaching Sunday’s reading, two projects of importance are examining the relationship of the Ezekiel text with the assigned Sunday Gospel, from Mark 4, and assessing the Book of Ezekiel itself, particularly Chapter 17. The second task might be more formidable than the first, but it is the honest preventative from concocting an interpretation that is little more than empty personal projection. Since the first reading is almost always from the Hebrew Scripture, some introductory orientation is necessary. The USCCB’s introduction to each book of the Bible, such as an on-line overview of the Book of Ezekiel, gives us the time and the setting, as well as clues to what the sacred author(s) meant to pass along. On the Café title page, I have a link to Father Lawrence Boadt’s 2014 overview of the Old Testament for new readers, and major Catholic publishers such as Paulist Press and Liturgical Press offer individual commentaries on the various books if you are so inclined. The Prophet Ezekiel preached before and during the Babylonian Captivity (roughly 600 B.C.-540 B.C.). Ezekiel delivered powerful sermons warning Israel that its internal and external conduct together would bring a justified wrath from God in the form of foreign destruction and prolonged exile from the homeland. As the book progresses, and Ezekiel himself is forced into exile, he becomes more apocalyptic, uttering promises of hope for Israel at a time when this virtue was in short supply. If you look closely at next Sunday’s reading, you can see the prophet-poet at work; God will take a tiny branch and plant it on a high and lofty mountain where it will bear much fruit. This is a daring metaphor to put forth in the depths of hopeless slavery. So why did the Church, in its wisdom, pair this reading with Mark 4? Perhaps because Jesus, six centuries later, makes use of a parable or metaphor remarkably like Ezekiel’s. Jesus speaks of the mustard seed, the humblest of garden sowing, growing forth into a massive tree where various forms of life live safely and profitably under its canopy. The common themes here between the two readings are the unlikelihood or the mysterious process by which small plants become great despite incredible odds, and that these wondrous things will occur in the future after a period of trial. Ezekiel and Jesus preached at different times and at different stages in God’s plan: Ezekiel saw the future as the restoration of Israel, while Jesus has his sights on the Kingdom of God inexorably making its way toward the conquering of the kingdom of evil. So long as one has taken the time to address the setting of a text and the likely intention of the author, as best as we can determine that, one is free to “ponder these things in one’s heart,” to paraphrase the spiritual life of the Virgin Mary, certainly to a degree much greater than the young monk Luther was permitted to do. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: DEUTERONOMY 4: 32-34; 39-40
THE SOLEMNITY OF THE MOST HOLY TRINITY [B] USCCB link to all three readings. Moses said to the people: "Ask now of the days of old, before your time, ever since God created man upon the earth; ask from one end of the sky to the other: Did anything so great ever happen before? Was it ever heard of? Did a people ever hear the voice of God speaking from the midst of fire, as you did, and live? Or did any god venture to go and take a nation for himself from the midst of another nation, by testings, by signs and wonders, by war, with strong hand and outstretched arm, and by great terrors, all of which the LORD, your God, did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? This is why you must now know, and fix in your heart, that the LORD is God in the heavens above and on earth below, and that there is no other. You must keep his statutes and commandments that I enjoin on you today, that you and your children after you may prosper, and that you may have long life on the land which the LORD, your God, is giving you forever." Although the Easter Season ended formally at the end of Vespers II or evening prayer last Sunday, May 20, and Ordinary Time [in its seventh week] resumed where it left off on Mardi Gras Tuesday, there is still no shortage of feasts to observe over the next three weeks. In addition to Trinity Sunday this weekend, the Feast of Corpus Christi is observed on Sunday, June 3. The Feast of the Sacred Heart is Friday, June 8, and in 2018 the Feast of St. John the Baptist falls on Sunday, June 24. It is too bad, I suppose, that we can’t spread out the wealth into the dog days of summer to spice up Ordinary Time, but behind each feast is a long and complicated history. Trinity Sunday deserves considerable attention, because at its face the observance looks like a Feast of God. Presumably this is what every Mass observes, Sundays and weekdays, and as early as 1000 A.D. there was opposition to introducing this feast for universal observance. The first local observances began in Spain and Gaul (modern France) in the 600’s and the 700’s A.D. These regions worried about the ongoing heresy of Arianism, which denied the unity of three divine persons by asserting that God the Father had created Jesus, and thus Jesus could never be equal to God. The thought behind Arianism is still alive today in Unitarian churches, among others; Islamic theology holds a doctrine of one God and does not recognize Mohammed as a divine being. The French and Spanish clergy preached devotion to God as a Trinity through the end of the Dark Ages, though the doctrine had been defined in the Christological Councils of the fourth and fifth centuries (Nicaea, Constantinople, Ephesus, and Chalcedon). By 1000 A.D. a feast devoted to the Trinity was established in the far western reaches of the Church celebrated on the Sunday after Pentecost. Pope Alexander (d. 1077) probably spoke for much of the Church, however, when he discouraged such a feast, observing that if the Church instituted a feast of the Trinity, it would have to observe a corresponding feast of the Blessed Unity as well. Adolf Adam, The Liturgical Year (1981), p. 167. Pope John XXII would eventually establish this feast universally in 1334. Adams admits that the pastoral understanding of this feast has shifted over the second millennium, and not necessarily for the better. At the time of the institution of the feast on the first Sunday after the Easter Season, Trinity Sunday was a time to look back on the glorious work of all three persons of the Trinity in the glorious work of our Redemption. It was a day to reflect upon the Father giving us his Son, the Son offering his life for us, the Father raising the Son from death, and the Son breathing the Holy Spirit upon the disciples on Easter Sunday night. In other words, salvation was and is understood as a Trinitarian event. In fact, until 1970 Trinity Sunday was considered the final Sunday of Easter. I should interject here that since medieval times there is a Church Canon requiring all Catholics to receive Holy Communion and make a good confession at least once a year, and this was elaborated to completing these deeds during the Easter Season, i.e., from the First Sunday of Lent to Trinity Sunday. This is what I was taught in 1956, and as a first communicant it was hard for me to picture a guy rushing up to communion at the last Mass of Trinity Sunday. The new code of Canon Law, the 1983 revision, states in Canon 920 that all the faithful are bound to receive the Eucharist annually, optimally during the Easter Season. However, this law is universally regarded as a minimalist bar of sacramental separation. The new code makes no mention of Trinity Sunday. In medieval times and even down through today the concept of a unified working Trinity was deemphasized in favor of assigning functions to the members of the Trinity. God the Father is creator, God the Son is Redeemer, God the Holy Spirit is Sanctified. There may be a pedagogical advantage to teaching the Trinity in this fashion, but it is not good Biblical theology. As my pastor observed in his sermon last Sunday, the [Holy] Spirit brought order out of chaos in Chapter 1 of Genesis, the first Creation account. The Lectionary readings for the three-year cycle of the feast of the Trinity oscillate between the glory of the One God and the multiple glories of his manifestations. Our first reading on Sunday is from Deuteronomy; although it is just the fifth book of the Old Testament, it was written much later, perhaps 600 B.C., at a time in history when Israel was actively engaging with cultures and religions of multiple gods. The sacred writer pens a farewell address from Moses shortly before his death with emphasizes the unity of God, to distinguish the One all-powerful God from the panoply of domesticated gods of Israel’s neighbors. There is little hint here on a trinitarian theme, nor should we expect to find one at this stage of God’s Revelation. The Gospel from Matthew 28 is the first explicit mention of the idea of Trinity. In the closing of this Gospel, often called “The Great Commissioning,” Jesus dispatches his disciples to the corners of the earth to preach and to baptize “in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit.” Put another way, a candidate for baptism is saved by the intervention of all three persons of the Trinity, which is as it should be. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: ACTS 2: 1-11
PENTECOST SUNDAY [B] USCCB link to all three readings [Note: there are three different sets of readings for Pentecost: the Vigil, the extended Vigil, and the Sunday Mass. I am using the Sunday readings, as many parishes in my experience use the Sunday readings across the board.] When the time for Pentecost was fulfilled, they were all in one place together. And suddenly there came from the sky a noise like a strong driving wind, and it filled the entire house in which they were. Then there appeared to them tongues as of fire, which parted and came to rest on each one of them. And they were all filled with the Holy Spirit and began to speak in different tongues, as the Spirit enabled them to proclaim. Now there were devout Jews from every nation under heaven staying in Jerusalem. At this sound, they gathered in a large crowd, but they were confused because each one heard them speaking in his own language. They were astounded, and in amazement they asked, "Are not all these people who are speaking Galileans? Then how does each of us hear them in his native language? We are Parthians, Medes, and Elamites, inhabitants of Mesopotamia, Judea and Cappadocia, Pontus and Asia, Phrygia and Pamphylia, Egypt and the districts of Libya near Cyrene, as well as travelers from Rome, both Jews and converts to Judaism, Cretans and Arabs, yet we hear them speaking in our own tongues of the mighty acts of God." The New Testament authors Matthew, Luke, and John describe the outpouring of God’s Spirit in several settings after the Resurrection. Luke’s account in Chapter 2 of the Acts of the Apostles is clearly the most dramatic, capturing the imagination of catechists and artists alike. It is not surprising, then, that this account enjoys a place of honor on the feast which concludes the Easter celebration of our redemption. Luke sets this drama on the existing Jewish feast of Pentecost or Shavuot, originally a harvest thanksgiving but later an observance of God’s gift of the Law. Shavuot/Pentecost was one of three “pilgrim feasts” in the Jewish calendar which explains why so many people from distant lands and languages were present when the Apostles began to preach. Sunday’s text is the introduction to Chapter 2, a chapter which includes Peter’s remarkable sermon and the baptism of the 3000. It is worth reading Acts 2 in its entirety to understand Sunday’s text in its context. The heart of the chapter is Peter’s summary of God’s plan with its fruition in the death and resurrection of Jesus and the outpouring of God’s saving Spirit upon the face of the earth. If the feast of Shavuot honors the written revelation of God, Peter’s sermon serves up the new revelation embodied in Christ and enfolds Jewish notions of history into the wisdom of the new Kingdom of God. Our text above begins with the dramatic transformation of the Apostles. It is not clear from the text if anyone except the Apostles visually witnessed anything; the fire appeared “to them” and the wind “filled the entire house where they were.” The odds are that only the Apostles experienced this manifestation and the crowds in the Jerusalem streets were oblivious to it. It was not until the Apostles went into the streets preaching that confusion and amazement moved the crowds; the initial shock was the realization that a polyglot assembly could understand the single language of Galileans. Luke goes on to elaborate the diversity of this crowd. Over the years I have tended to glaze over this lengthy catalogue of nations and regions as it is read in church each year, but as I examine it now I have much greater respect for Luke’s genius. For one thing, this collage of nations is enormous, from at least three continents. Africa is represented by listeners from Egypt and Libya. Arabia is situated in southwest Asia, and the central power of imperial Rome sat as the crossroads of nearly all civilized lands in what we refer to as Europe. There is mention of Jews and converts to Judaism. In Acts 2:14 Peter will widen the reference beyond Judaism: ““You who are Jews, indeed all of you staying in Jerusalem. Let this be known to you and listen to my words.” The invitation to grace has gone far beyond residents of Jerusalem and Judaea, and even more remarkably, past the established boundaries of Jewish faith. Acts 2 has raised questions for scholars about its historicity. In my seminary days my professors shared the [not-unanimous] conclusion that while the Book of Acts was written after the Gospel in Luke, putting its composition in the mid-80’s A.D., it utilized earlier material, particularly the earliest evangelizing sermons of the Apostles and very early Church leaders. However, there were also those who believed that Luke was crafting a faith history driven by the needs of the Church of his time, a Church agonizing over its split from Judaism. Was Luke attempting to explain that Christianity’s mission was somehow destined toward a universal mission? If the projected date of composition is correct, the Church had already established itself in Rome for nearly 25 years when Luke penned the Acts. There is another Biblical point to make regarding Sunday’s reading. In the pre-history narrative of Genesis 11, the world is reported to have spoken the same language, and one group of nomads decided to build a city with a tower to reach the heavens. God thwarted their impudence by casting multiple languages upon them, and the Tower of Babel narrative came to be seen as God’s wrath for the world’s hubris. It is interesting, then, that when the Holy Spirit is poured out upon the world at Pentecost, the citizenry of the entire known world can understand Peter’s preaching in a single language. The scattering of the peoples at Babel is reconciled by the unifying impact of preaching in the Holy Spirit. The Easter Season of fifty days ends on Pentecost with Vespers or Evening Prayer on Sunday. The following Monday, May 21, marks our return to the green of Ordinary Time, the seventh week, though the new feast of Mary, Mother of the Church, will be observed on Monday next week. The Sundays of May 27 is the observance of the Feast of the Trinity, and Sunday, June 3, is the Feast of Corpus Christi. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: Acts 1: 1-11
THE ASCENSION OF THE LORD [B] USCCB link to all three readings In the first book, Theophilus, I dealt with all that Jesus did and taught until the day he was taken up, after giving instructions through the Holy Spirit to the apostles whom he had chosen. He presented himself alive to them by many proofs after he had suffered, appearing to them during forty days and speaking about the kingdom of God. While meeting with them, he enjoined them not to depart from Jerusalem, but to wait for "the promise of the Father about which you have heard me speak; for John baptized with water, but in a few days you will be baptized with the Holy Spirit." When they had gathered together they asked him, "Lord, are you at this time going to restore the kingdom to Israel?" He answered them, "It is not for you to know the times or seasons that the Father has established by his own authority. But you will receive power when the Holy Spirit comes upon you, and you will be my witnesses in Jerusalem, throughout Judea and Samaria, and to the ends of the earth." When he had said this, as they were looking on, he was lifted up, and a cloud took him from their sight. While they were looking intently at the sky as he was going, suddenly two men dressed in white garments stood beside them. They said, "Men of Galilee, why are you standing there looking at the sky? This Jesus who has been taken up from you into heaven will return in the same way as you have seen him going into heaven." The Ascension of the Lord was originally celebrated with Pentecost. The early Church understood the unity of Christ’s last supper, death, resurrection, ascension, and gift of the Spirit as a unique and united event in history. The liturgies of the season we call Easter drew from these four five acts of the salvation drama. The Gospels, particularly John, emphasize this unity in a number of ways. John describes a Pentecost event at the moment of Christ’s death on Good Friday, when he “handed over his spirit” to those at the foot of the cross, namely his mother and disciple, i.e. his church. While the Eastern Church maintained a consciousness of this unity, the Roman West divided the Easter Season into a series of stand-alone events, most notably the feasts of Ascension and Pentecost. This may be due to Sunday’s first reading from the opening of the Book of Acts, where Luke writes of Jesus “appearing to [the disciples] during forty days.” The term “40” in both the Old and New Testaments is shorthand for “a period of time.” There is no way to know how long Jesus remained with the disciples or when he ascended into heaven. Luke and John themselves differ on the time. Luke places the Ascension at forty days after the Resurrection, but John, on Easter Sunday morning, tells Mary Magdalene not to cling to him, “for I have not yet ascended to my Father.” He commands her to tell the disciples that he is going to his Father. That very night, however, Jesus appears to the disciples and allows them to venerate his wounds. Regardless of the details, the Feast of the Ascension is sacred as the time when Jesus returns to his Father in glory after rendering his act of perfect obedience upon the cross. The preaching of this event in apostolic times as well as today establishes the Father’s words to the crowd at Jesus’ baptism, “This is my beloved son; listen to him.” Those who professed faith in the Resurrection were comforted and exhilarated at the thought that their unity in Christ in baptism meant that they, too, would take their place in the heavens. Sunday’s reading is the opening of Acts and makes clear that St. Luke envisioned his Gospel and the Acts of Apostles as a “boxed set,” so to speak. Luke describes the post-Resurrection days as a time of intense instruction through the Holy Spirit during which Jesus elaborated on the Kingdom of God. Luke speaks of multiple appearances by Jesus and “many proofs” that he was alive after his suffering. All the Gospels allude to hesitation and difficulties by the disciples in believing that Jesus had risen from the dead. St. Mark, in the original Greek, states that Jesus “excoriated” his followers for their lack of faith in 16:14. The synoptic Gospels [Matthew, Mark, Luke] and the Acts of the Apostles agree that at some distinct time Jesus “left” them in a fashion that reflects divine glory. In Sunday’s reading Luke describes Jesus ascending upward until a cloud took him from their sight. The term “cloud” has divine overtones in both the Hebrew Scriptures and the New Testament. In Exodus 19 God tells Moses that “I am coming to you in a dense cloud, so that when the people hear me speaking with you, they may always have faith in you also.” Before his death Jesus would take Peter, James, and John to a mountaintop where they were enveloped in a cloud, from which the voice of God came forth: “This is my chosen Son; listen to him.” The Ascension, then, serves as the final seal of God’s love and total acceptance of the mission of his Son, and Jesus’ return to the glory that was his from the beginning. The commentary of the two men dressed in white garments reminds the disciples that they are not simply witnesses to the divine glory, but [1] participants in the glory of a Christ present but yet to return at the end of time, and [2] designated prophets to announce this good news to the end of the earth. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48
SIXTH SUNDAY OF EASTER [B] USCCB link to all three readings. When Peter entered, Cornelius met him and, falling at his feet, paid him homage. Peter, however, raised him up, saying, "Get up. I myself am also a human being." Then Peter proceeded to speak and said, "In truth, I see that God shows no partiality. Rather, in every nation whoever fears him and acts uprightly is acceptable to him." While Peter was still speaking these things, the Holy Spirit fell upon all who were listening to the word. The circumcised believers who had accompanied Peter were astounded that the gift of the Holy Spirit should have been poured out on the Gentiles also, for they could hear them speaking in tongues and glorifying God. Then Peter responded, "Can anyone withhold the water for baptizing these people, who have received the Holy Spirit even as we have?" He ordered them to be baptized in the name of Jesus Christ. Chapter 10 of the Acts of the Apostles is most profitably read in its entirety. As it is presented here in Sunday’s Mass, we have no context for the intentions of Peter or Cornelius. Without the full narrative, the Sunday passage above is badly disjointed and somewhat stripped of its impact. To set the stage liturgically, I would simply recall that last weekend’s first reading described the vision of the risen Christ to Saul, who undergoes a conversion to the following of Jesus and gradually embraces a preaching ministry in Jerusalem to both mainstream Jews and the “Hellenists,” those Jews whose world view was shaped by Gentile philosophy. Saul had a rough time of it; it was not enough that he was preaching “heresy” to traditional Jews but he was also addressing the call to a population with secular and Gentile sympathies. Neither audience accepted his word, and the Hellenists tried to kill him. This was new territory for the infant Church as well, and Saul’s persona and mission remained somewhat suspect. After the conversion and early preaching of Saul, the Acts turns the narrative back to the Jerusalem mother church and the awakening of Peter to the simultaneous idea of a Gentile mission. Acts 10 describes two distinct divine appearances which occur in tandem. The first is a revelation to a Roman centurion named Cornelius. Acts 10 describes him as a God-fearing man who extended financial generosity to the Jewish community and may have prayed with them. In a vision he is told to make connection with a Simon Peter presently in Joppa. Peter’s vision is a vivid literary metaphor. Acts reports that Peter, hungry, fell asleep before dinner. In his vision-dream, a large canvas drops to the ground before him upon which stood all the “four-legged” creatures and birds of the earth. God then commanded Peter to “slaughter and eat.” Peter, ever the observant Jew despite his Christian conversion, withstands God, rather indignantly, informing his Lord that “never have I eaten anything profane and unclean.” God rebukes Peter for referring to any of his creatures as unclean. [I thought of this sequence last summer in Holland when my Dutch hosts introduced me to raw herring.] Acts 10:16 records that Peter and God had three successive exchanges on the propriety of designating certain foods as “unclean,” a staple of Jewish observance and the basis of the term “kosher.” It is important to note that God in this context is not condemning Jewish observance; rather, He is advocating the universality of Jesus’ kingdom; as the breath of God rendered all creatures holy in creation, so too God rendered all people worthy of admission to the saving grace of Christian baptism and Eucharist. Peter is deeply troubled by the exchange and its implications. While he is contemplating this new revelation, the servants of Cornelius find him and ask Peter to return with them to Caesarea to meet the Roman. Cornelius had evidently invited his Gentile household and friends for a dramatic meeting in his home, and Peter arrives with his Jewish/Christian brethren. It is at this juncture that Sunday’s reading begins with Cornelius falling to his feet to venerate Peter. Here Peter begins a sermon that many scholars believe to be a template to the first Gentile audiences of the Christian mission. The sermon is not recorded in the Sunday text, however. The third paragraph of Sunday’s reading indicates that as Peter was preaching, a Pentecost event broke out and the household of Cornelius, filled with the same Spirit as the Apostles had received, began speaking in tongues and glorifying God. If this drama surprised Peter, it “astounded” Peter’s Christian companions that the Holy Spirit might pour out his gifts upon Gentiles. Peter’s response to them—and ultimately to the reader—is that saving baptism can be denied to no one, and Sunday’s reading concludes with the first recorded baptism of Gentiles. The issue of Christian identity as separate from Jewish membership was far from settled, however, and in several future chapters of Acts, as well as in the writings of Saul/Paul himself, the Church would wrestle with variations on this theme, such as the need for circumcision as a prerequisite. Acts 10 describes several key factors in the development of the Church, none greater than the influence of the Holy Spirit in assisting the Church to form its identity. Although the Church does have one feast entitled “Pentecost” [two weeks away] there are numerous Pentecostal events where God opens the eyes of the disciples to the fullness of the divine plan. We saw this on Good Friday in St. John’s Passion narrative, where Jesus gives the Spirit with his dying breath; when the soldier lances his corpse, the outpouring of blood and water symbolizes the lifegiving force of Baptism and Eucharist. On Easter Sunday, the risen Jesus breathes the Spirit upon the Apostles and empowers them to forgive sin. When we talk about the Easter Season and its liturgical observance, we are talking about the Holy Spirit as the ongoing power of Jesus during his post-resurrection sojourn on earth and particularly after the Ascension. Repeatedly the Spirit will lead the Church into new and difficult phases of self-understanding and missionary outreach. What is often forgotten is the Spirit’s continuing power within the Church to develop its identity and self-understanding until the Lord comes again in glory. This is the ultimate purpose of the Acts of the Apostles—as template to empower the Church in its life today. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: ACTS 9: 26-31
FIFTH SUNDAY OF EASTER [B] LINK to USCCB all three readings here. When Saul arrived in Jerusalem he tried to join the disciples, but they were all afraid of him, not believing that he was a disciple. Then Barnabas took charge of him and brought him to the apostles, and he reported to them how he had seen the Lord, and that he had spoken to him, and how in Damascus he had spoken out boldly in the name of Jesus. He moved about freely with them in Jerusalem, and spoke out boldly in the name of the Lord. He also spoke and debated with the Hellenists, but they tried to kill him. And when the brothers learned of this, they took him down to Caesarea and sent him on his way to Tarsus. The church throughout all Judea, Galilee, and Samaria was at peace. It was being built up and walked in the fear of the Lord, and with the consolation of the Holy Spirit it grew in numbers. While St. Paul is a major contributor to the Sunday Eucharist virtually every week in the second reading, this Sunday’s first reading from Acts is one of those rare occasions where he is the subject, not the author. The full account of Chapter 9 makes clear why the disciples in Jerusalem might be afraid of him. Saul [Paul], having witnessed the execution of Stephen in Jerusalem, seeks permission from the high priest in Jerusalem to become a bounty hunter of sorts among the synagogues of Damascus, Syria, with the expectation of rounding up Jews who had embraced “The Way,” an early term for Christian belief, and returning to Jerusalem with them in chains and presumably execution. The best way to describe Saul in his first appearance in the New Testament is as a religious fanatic. Traditionalists among the Jerusalem Jewish community were distraught by the continuing growth of “The Way” as the end of Sunday’s reading attests. Jews who did not believe in Jesus would have seen the growing influence of the Christ as a particular betrayal of brother versus brother. The conflict within the Jewish family was much more intense than a simple doctrinal point of contention. Chapter 9 emphasizes the intense personal love and devotion to the Risen Jesus that bound the Christians to him and to one another. Saul failed to appreciate this, and thus when he is struck down on the road to Damascus, he hears the voice of Jesus in a very personal and wounded fashion, “Saul, Saul, why do you persecute me?” Saul, as Chapter 9 indicates, does not know Christ [“Who are you, Sir?”], and as the Jerome Biblical Commentary (1990) observes, the Damasus road incident represents a conversion for Saul, not a missionary commissioning. That would occur much later. Certainly, two of Christianity’s unsung heroes have to be Ananias and Barnabas. The first, in Damascus, receives a vision from the Lord to seek out the blinded Saul and perform a healing miracle by restoring his sight. It is some measure of Saul’s notoriety that Ananias feels compelled to remind God that Saul was in Damascus precisely to arrest men as himself. It is here that God explains to Ananias the mission of Saul “to carry my name before Gentiles, kings, and Israelites.” [9: 15] Saul is healed and baptized, and immediately begins to preach the risen Lord Jesus in the synagogues of Damascus. Not surprisingly, Saul found himself in a no-man’s land of sorts. His reputation as a Christian persecutor had preceded him to Damascus, who now viewed him—not unexpectedly—as a Jewish apostate. The Christian disciples in Damascus, who learned that the Jews there planned to kill him, lowered him over the wall of the city of Damascus and sent him on his way to Jerusalem. Here is where Sunday’s reading picks up the narrative, where Jewish Christians in the holy city are also aware of Saul’s previous persecutorial intent, and the Jerusalem disciples are reluctant to take him in, too. To the rescue comes Barnabas, an early Christian convert who had sold a sizeable tract of land on behalf of the early Church. Barnabas seems to know the events of Damascus and “sponsors” Saul for the apostles. Saul establishes his bona fides with energetic preaching directed toward the Greek-speaking or Hellenist Jews. “Hellenists” would have been those Jews who embraced the Greek influence of pagan classicism, the ideas of Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle. The Acts [as well as non-Biblical sources] report a significant rift between Jews of a Hellenistic outlook and those with more parochial Hebrew upbringing; Acts 6 describes such a struggle within the Christian community. As happened in Damascus, the Hellenist Jews in Jerusalem also attempted to kill Saul, and he was again spirited out of the city with the destination being his hometown, Tarsus. Sunday’s reading concludes the portion of Acts devoted exclusively to the Jewish mission of the Apostles. Chapter 10 will describe Peter’s first foray into the Gentile mission with his conversion of Cornelius, the Mass text for April 6. This Sunday’s reading ends with a separate summary of the state of the Church after the conversion of Saul, notable for the spread of Christianity to Judaea, Galilee, and Samaria. The success of The Way in Samaria is notable, and it is recorded several times in the Gospels, such as the parable of the Good Samaritan [Luke] and the Samaritan Woman at the Well [John]. Samaritans were estranged from mainstream Judaism, which gives us a sense that the mission was expanding beyond the confines of Jerusalem “through the consolation of the Holy Spirit.” NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: ACTS 4: 8-12
FOURTH SUNDAY OF EASTER [B] USCCB Link to all three readings. Peter, filled with the Holy Spirit, said: "Leaders of the people and elders: If we are being examined today about a good deed done to a cripple, namely, by what means he was saved, then all of you and all the people of Israel should know that it was in the name of Jesus Christ the Nazorean whom you crucified, whom God raised from the dead; in his name this man stands before you healed. He is the stone rejected by you, the builders, which has become the cornerstone. There is no salvation through anyone else, nor is there any other name under heaven given to the human race by which we are to be saved." This is the fourth successive Sunday of Peter’s post-Pentecost sermons, and the flavor of this text is enhanced by its context, Acts 4 in its entirety. In the days following Pentecost the Apostles Peter and John continue to preach and work signs of healing. In Chapter 3, at the “Beautiful Gate” of the Temple, the two apostles healed a crippled man in full sight of the busy Temple precinct, and when a very large crowd gathered round, Peter delivered a masterful sermon, a call to baptismal forgiveness cloaked in the testimony of Moses and the prophets. Peter’s preaching, and the flurry of high-spirited piety it evoked, was now a matter of great concern to the Temple leadership—priests, Sadducees, [who did not believe in life after death] and the temple guard, the armed protectors of Temple faith and decorum. Acts 4 begins with the arrest of Peter and John by the guard, possibly in response to Luke’s information [Acts 4:4] that the “number of men [converts] grew to about 5000.” The Temple leaders demanded to know “by what power” they had performed these signs. Sunday’s text begins here, as Peter references the healing of the cripple and the popular response. For the Jewish officials, Peter quotes Psalm 118:22; the USCCB commentary on this verse observes “what is insignificant to human beings has become great through divine election. The ‘stone’ may originally have meant the foundation stone or capstone of the Temple. The New Testament interpreted the verse as referring to the death and resurrection of Christ.” In this text Peter draws a connection between the victory of the Risen Christ and the Temple, the most significant sacramental sign of Jewish worship. Given that the reading audience of Acts lived after the fall of Jerusalem and destruction of the Temple, Luke depiction of Peter here has the elements of a post hoc ergo propter hoc argument. Because the official clergy of Israel rejected the true cornerstone of its Temple, literally and figuratively, the Romans indeed destroyed the Temple. It is a curious thing that unlike his other evangelistic sermons, Peter does not urge his Temple audience to repent and receive baptism for its destruction of Christ. The reader already knows that Jesus would never be identified by his own people as the Messiah. Acts 4 continues after the Sunday text with a narrative about the confusion of the Temple authorities. As the Sunday reading indicates, there is no way that Peter and John are going to quit preaching the Resurrection. The authorities find themselves in quandary; they cannot deny the dramatic miracle of the previous day at their very doorstep, but they are worried about the spreading allegiance to Peter and John, which Luke has been careful to document. The final resolution of this confrontation is a futile warning from the authorities “never again to speak to anyone in this [Jesus’] name.” [Acts 4:17ff.] Future responses to the successful Apostolic preaching of the risen Christ would become more confrontational and would evoke stronger responses from the Jewish leadership, with arrests, floggings, and eventually the murder of James by King Herod around 52 A.D. [Acts 12] The preaching of the deacon Stephen so infuriated the Temple authorities that he was stoned to death [Acts 6:8-7:60]. Stephen’s death introduces the reader to the Jewish anti-Christian Saul of Tarsus. Saul’s appearance of the Risen Christ and his conversion under the name of Paul begins in Acts 9. By Chapter 13 Paul has become, in Luke’s narrative, the featured preacher of the Risen Christ and the first “theologian” to integrate the model of Jesus as Jewish Messiah to that of universal savior of the Gentile world. In two weeks, Sunday’s first reading will introduce us to Paul’s earliest Resurrection preaching, directed not to Jews per se but to Hellenists or Greek philosophers. The Gospel next Sunday comes from John 10. Next Sunday has been known for centuries as Good Shepherd Sunday, when Jesus identifies himself as such, stating “I will lay down my life for the sheep.” True to his promise, the chronicler Luke portrays in the Acts the courage of Peter, John, Paul, Stephen, and James, among others, who did indeed lay down their lives for their sheep. NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: ACTS 3: 13-15, 17-19
THIRD SUNDAY OF EASTER [B] USCCB Link to all three readings Peter said to the people: "The God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob, the God of our fathers, has glorified his servant Jesus, whom you handed over and denied in Pilate's presence when he had decided to release him. You denied the Holy and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to you. The author of life you put to death, but God raised him from the dead; of this we are witnesses. Now I know, brothers, that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did; but God has thus brought to fulfillment what he had announced beforehand through the mouth of all the prophets, that his Christ would suffer. Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be wiped away." This Sunday’s sequence of readings is unusually intriguing and provides a good example of how some pre-Sunday homework can enrich the public hearing of the Word in the Eucharist and private meditation in the solace of home. It is also a testimony to the importance of reading Scripture in its full context without cherry picking; the sequencing of the action in the Acts of the Apostles reveals as much as the individual events themselves. I am remiss in not providing a good stand-alone resource sooner. The commentary by Father William Kurz, S.J., is now in wide use and you can sample the text here at Amazon; it is available in Kindle format as well as paper, though for commentaries I recommend the latter, for ease of reference. I am going on the assumption that the Acts may not be as familiar to you as the Gospels, or even Genesis; I concede that even as a teacher I don’t own a stand-alone commentary on Acts and I refer to general commentaries like the Jerome Biblical Commentary when I need data. The case can be argued that Acts deserves “fifth Gospel” status, as its author [Luke] refers to his Gospel as “my first volume.” [Acts 1:1] It would seem that Luke is the first evangelist to drop the apocalyptic expectancy and take the long view of history, that the Church might be a universal venture extending across centuries, not a localized body waiting for the end times. If Luke and Paul actually crossed paths in ministry, as many scholars hold, then it is even more important to note that Paul, in the course of his epistles, adjusted his own apocalyptic time frame as well. Both of Luke’s works are dedicated to a certain Theophilus; his identity has been the subject of intense debate for centuries. We may possibly never know who this Theophilus was, or even if he was. But the Greek meaning of his name is “lover of God,” which may carry a generic meaning, an address to all followers of God and his son, Jesus the Christ. The Acts themselves throw out a large salvation net, and Luke, with his historical vision, may have wanted to provide for later Christians a detail of what happened after Jesus ascended into heaven, which would make him the first and only evangelist to do so. Again, by way of context, let me draw out a poor man’s sketch for the early timeline of the Acts of the Apostles: _____________________________________________________ Chapter 1: The Ascension, carried over from the Gospel of Luke; the reestablishment of the Apostolic leadership/the new Israel by adding Matthias to the Twelve to replace Judas. Chapters 2-5: The Jerusalem Pentecost Event; the preaching of Peter to the 3000 Jews who immediately sought baptism for forgiveness for their sin against Christ; the miracles and preaching of Peter and John and their testimony to the Jewish leaders. Chapters 6-7: The hostility of Jewish leaders and the ultimate martyrdom of the deacon Stephen witnessed by Saul of Tarsus. Chapter 8: First mission outside of Jerusalem, to Samaria. Chapter 9: Saul’s conversion, renamed Paul, and meets Jerusalem Christian leadership. Chapter 10: Peter and the first Gentile outreach. Beginning of controversy regarding the baptism of Gentiles—must they become Jews first, and undergo circumcision to become Christian? Chapter 15: The “Council of Jerusalem” in 49 A.D. Paul advocates an open position to Gentile converts; the leadership of the Church agrees and issues a letter to Gentile Christians in the newly formed Church of Antioch that it need not pursue Jewish initiation rites to receive baptism. Chapter 16ff: “The Mission of Paul to the Ends of the Earth.” _____________________________________________________ Sunday’s first reading is set in the very early stages of the Church’s mission, portraying Peter’s initial post-Pentecostal evangelization to the residents of Jerusalem. This is a more conciliatory sermon than his preaching in Chapter 2, the “Pentecost Sermon,” when Luke reports that his listeners were “cut to the heart.” In Sunday’s reading Peter acknowledges that his listeners acted out of ignorance, as did their leaders. Luke reflects the ambivalence of the early Christian era before the Gentile mission when the Apostles and deacons strove to convert their brethren in the temple. After the fall of Jerusalem in 70 A.D., the relocation of the Palestine population coincided with the Gentile Christian mission in the major cities of the Mediterranean and the animosity continued well into the future. The Church has paired this reading with Luke 24: 35-48, where Jesus appears to the full cluster of apostles (except Judas) on the evening of his resurrection. What becomes immediately evident is how the recording of Jesus’ sermon here compliments the preaching of Peter above. The early sermons of Acts bear considerable resemblance to Jesus’ post resurrection exhortations, such as the meeting with the two disciples on the road to Emmaus, the same two disciples mentioned at the beginning of Sunday’s Gospel. Jesus—and his successors—make the case that everything that has happened—from the beginning of Israel’s Revelation to the execution of Jesus on the cross—was ordained so by God. And, with the presence of the Holy Spirit, those things that would follow—the preaching, community life, conversions, and persecutions—will continue to manifest the will and plan of God. Peter will make this case in a Jewish idiom, Paul in a Gentile one, but the united mission will be portrayed in Acts for all “lovers of God” throughout the ages. The Acts of the Apostles is an interpretive key to the contemporary Church in any age, for Jesus will continue his presence through the “breaking of the bread,” i.e., the Eucharistic event. |
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March 2024
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