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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.”
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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. The external links are now operational as of Thursday Noon. I regret the inconvenience.
NEXT SUNDAY’S FIRST READING: ACTS 4: 32-35 SECOND SUNDAY OF EASTER [B] USCCB Link to all three readings The community of believers was of one heart and mind, and no one claimed that any of his possessions was his own, but they had everything in common. With great power the apostles bore witness to the resurrection of the Lord Jesus, and great favor was accorded them all. There was no needy person among them, for those who owned property or houses would sell them, bring the proceeds of the sale, and put them at the feet of the apostles, and they were distributed to each according to need. As I noted last week, the entire Easter Season of Sundays will draw the first readings from the New Testament and not the Old; this is quite a departure from the other 45 Sunday observances of the Eucharist throughout the year. The specific source for the first readings is the Acts of the Apostles, a volume intended originally as the second part of St. Luke’s Gospel. Luke himself, in Chapter 1 of Acts, describes what he hoped to accomplish in his previous work, the Gospel, taking his narrative to the eve of Pentecost. The Acts of the Apostles introduces the reader to a new era, when Jesus, from his glorified place at the Father’s right hand, will sustain his followers through the ever-present life of the Holy Spirit. The new story line begins with Acts 2, when the Holy Spirit descends upon the apostles in tongues of fire and the Christian preaching ministry begins in earnest. [Chapter 1 ties up several loose ends, including determining a replacement for Judas.] Acts of the Apostles is the subject of lively debate among scholars today, much of it surrounding how or if Luke was an eyewitness to everything he reports. This stems from Luke’s use of the pronoun “we” when he describes the exploits of the preaching apostles, notably St. Paul, who is the heroic figure of the narrative after his conversion in chapters 8 and 9. St. Paul’s missionary career runs roughly between 40 and 60 A.D. Luke’s Gospel at the earliest appears after 80 A.D. and the Acts would be later than that. The Jerome Biblical Commentary includes the theory that by the time the Acts were written, Paul was a true hero of the Church, even though later thinkers—which would include all four evangelists—developed a richer theology of the Christ that Luke would have incorporated in the Acts. Under the influence of the Holy Spirit, the Church in the Book of Acts would come to understand that the crucifixion was in God’s plan, and not a terrible derailment of divine providence, as the two Emmaus disciples seemed to think it was in Luke 24. The Church would come to see that its preaching of the risen Christ and the future apocalyptic judgment of that same Christ made it a vehicle for the forgiveness of sins of the entire human race, not only the Chosen People Israel. It is Acts which anoints Paul as the Apostle to the Gentiles, perhaps the biggest paradigm shift in the New Testament era. While the Acts contain several inspiring conversions and acts of courage under public fire, it is also true that Luke wished to depict a Church that lived what it professed. There are two separate “vignettes” of an ideal church community. The first is Acts 2: 42-47; the second is next Sunday’s first reading. Most commentaries are quick to point out that Luke intended these depictions of a pure socialist church as models of how the members should live in a faith-filled, familial way, not as a reflection of actual household tranquility. Acts itself describes trouble in the family, notably the sad tale of Ananias and Saphira, which follows immediately after Sunday’s text. In Sunday’s first reading, the primary message about community is its response to the preaching of the Resurrection “with great power” by the Apostles. Acts is very clear on this point, that no group, no family, no church can hope to survive without the fire of the Resurrection and the impulse of the Holy Spirit to inspire them to full time charity and unity. Luke has captured the full “theology of the Resurrection” in that the new life of Christ is a statement of all human destiny, and the community cited here is living in expectation that the Lord will come again in glory and judgment. This community cited here is future oriented, hoping that the Lord will find them in fraternity and self-sacrifice for the good of the mission of baptizing the world into eternal glory. In recent times the Church has celebrated the Sunday after Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday. The Lectionary of Mass readings was established several decades before the Divine Mercy Sunday designation came into being thanks to Pope John Paul II. The sermon in your parish may reflect the Divine Mercy theme instead of one drawn from the Lectionary readings. The readings linked on today’s post are the universal assigned texts for the Easter season. It is a mystery to me why Pope John Paul II did not designate the Fourth Sunday of Easter as Divine Mercy Sunday, as that Sunday has been observed as “Good Shepherd Sunday” for centuries. If you are confused on Sunday, take heart that you are not alone. The USCCB website recommends that devotions around the observance of Divine Mercy Sunday take place outside of the Sunday Eucharist, as on Sunday afternoon. |
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November 2022
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