East2C. Acts of the Apostles 5:12-16. “Many signs and wonders were done at the hands of the apostles.” When Jesus himself walked among the people, he called upon them to believe in him because of the miraculous works he performed. In John 14:11 Jesus said, “Believe me that I am in the Father and the Father is in me, or else, believe because of the works themselves.” The miraculous works of the apostles were signs that God the Father was as work in them.
John 20:19-31. The disciples of Jesus feared the physical violence that the Jewish authorities could inflicted on them as they did to Jesus. Jesus assures them saying, “Peace be with you,” since he was with them. He sends them forth with the divine power of the Holy Spirit to bring his redemption of sins to those whom they find worthy or withhold it from those they find unworthy. Jesus himself will no longer be physically and visibly here; and so he sends them in his place to do accomplish his mission and will in this world. Later Thomas announces that he believes that Jesus’ death on the cross was final and could not possibly be reversed. He was a man firmly grounded in the common sense ways of this world. He was not going to be swayed by what seemed to clearly be nonsense. Jesus could have easily said to Matthew as he did to Peter in Mark 8:33: “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” Jesus showed Thomas physical proof of his resurrection in the nailmarks in his body just as he demonstrated to the apostles that he was not a ghost or spirit but a real physical person when he ate the baked fish. When we see physical, material proof, then we have knowledge of that reality. They did not have to believe or have faith in what they did not see with their own eyes. I think that Jesus gave them this knowledge of his resurrection so that no one could reasonably claim that Jesus’ resurrection was figment of their imagination and not a genuinely reality. And so Jesus says, “Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” 1 Peter 1:8a says, “Although you have not seen him you love him; even though you do not see him now yet believe in him.” This Sunday’s Gospel finishes, “Now Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.” The Scriptures are given to us as a divine way to come to know that the love with which the Father loved Jesus may be in us and Jesus himself may be in us. (John 17:26b) The divine revelation that Scriptures make known to us is not so much words or sentences about Jesus but the presence of Jesus his very self in our lives.
Revelation 1:9-11a, 12-13, 17-19. This reading begins, “I, John, your brother, who share with you the distress, the kingdom, and the endurance we have in Jesus,..” As Jesus suffered physical violence so did many of his followers. Persecution for their faith caused them great distress. However, Jesus always accompanied them giving a sense that already they were a part of his kingdom. He gave them the strength to endure through it all. He gives us that same strength in our times of temptations and difficulties. Jesus says of himself, “Once I was dead, but now I am alive forever and ever. I hold the keys to death and the netherworld.” We ask him to protect us by keeping the doors of that world locked for us but rather open the doors to life forever in heaven.
EasterC19. Acts of the Apostles 10:34a, 37-43. God commissioned the apostles to preach and testify that “God anointed Jesus of Nazareth with the Holy Spirit and power.” “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree. This man God raised on the third day.” “He is the one appointed by God as judge of the living and the dead.” “Everyone who believes in him will receive forgiveness of sins through his name.” The man who died on the cross was Jesus in his humanity, not Jesus in his divinity. Divinity cannot die. If it could, divinity would not be divine. Nevertheless the humanity and divinity of Jesus were so intimately bound together that we can say that in Christ God the Son sacrificed himself through his humanity to God the Father to give the only divine level of sacrifice that would be the adequate sacrifice for our sins, since the One offended by our sins is divine. Only a sacrifice that was divine could satisfy for sins against divinity.
John 20:1-9. Mary of Magdala “saw the stone removed from the tomb.” She told Peter and John who went into the tomb. John and more than likely Peter also, “saw and believed. For they did not yet understand the Scripture that he had to rise from the dead.” What did they believe from what they saw? I understand that what they believed was what Mary said, “They have taken from the tomb, and we don’t know where they put him.” Before Jesus’ appearance after the resurrection, they, as with the disciples on the road to Emmaus, “did not yet understand that he had to rise from the dead.” Jesus had to actually to appear to them bodily and humanly so that he could, as it says in our first reading, make them witnesses, “who ate and drank with him after he rose from the dead.” Jesus was truly dead and truly came back to life here in this world. He was not present to them just as a memory from the past but actually physically returned to be with them as the Jesus, once dead but now risen back to life in this world. Our Jesus has conquered sin through his sacrifice of himself on the cross. He also conquered the death that came from sin. He has given his victory to us so that we may be former sinners come to a new life, as saints.
Colossians 3:1-4. “Think of what is above, not of what is on earth.” Paul calls to mind what Jesus said, “They do not belong to the world any more than I belong to the world.” (John 17:16) And once again, when Peter rejected Jesus’ prophesy that he had to die on the cross, Jesus said, “You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.” (Matthew 17:23c) As human beings from birth we become imbued with the ways of this world. Jesus and Paul call upon us to be like fish out of water, being more heavenly than earthly while we are still here on earth. In Luke 18:27 Jesus said, “What is impossible for human beings is possible for God.” God enables us to die to the ways of this world even while we are in this world, since he replaces our inner earthly life with a share of life from his divine life. We refer to that divine life within us as sanctifying grace. In a sense we die to a worldly life so to rise to a heavenly life. “For you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ your life appears, then you too will appear with him in glory.” We are sinners redeemed from our sins by his redeeming sacrifice on the cross.
PalmC19. Isaiah 50:4-7. This is the prophecy of the Suffering Servant, probably Isaiah speaking of himself but in Holy Week transferred to Jesus. “My face I did not shield from buffets and spitting.”
Psalm 22. Jesus repeats the first verse: “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” while on the cross as if to start saying the whole psalm. “All who see me scoff at me; they mock me with parted lips, they wag their heads: ‘He relied on the Lord; let him deliver him, let him rescue him, if he loves him.’” Jesus genuinely feels the excruciating pain of his body and the insults. This is not a sham sacrifice to the Father for our sins; this is the real thing wholly and completely. By this genuine sacrifice of himself to His Father, we are redeemed. It could be nothing less. How great is his love for us! In spite of the unfathomable horror he is enduring, he never losses faith in the Father, saying to him, “Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.”
Luke 22:14 – 23:56. Jesus, referring to the sacrifice he was about to make, offers up in the Eucharistic form his own body, saying, “This is my body, which will be given for you; do this in memory of me.” Although the bread visually appears to be only bread, it now comes in substance to be his body which he himself offers up and commands us to do likewise in our Mass. Jesus continues the tradition of the Old Testament Law of consuming the flesh of the sacrifice by those who offer it up. Leviticus 7:6 reads, “All the males of the priestly line may partake of it; but it must be eaten in a sacred place, since it is most sacred.” Leviticus 7:15a says, “The flesh of the thanksgiving sacrifice shall be eaten on the day it is offered.” The sacrifice on the cross happened then once and for all; the Mass re-presents that same sacrifice over and over again. Please read John 6:53-57. Jesus becomes the food and indeed the spiritual life itself of our being. “Then an argument broke out among them about which of them should be regarded as the greatest. Jesus makes it clear to them that service, love in action, is the measure of greatness. He proclaims to them they will have a special place in his kingdom in heaven. In the Our Father prayer Jesus teaches to pray, “Thy kingdom come” to God the Father, which I believe calls upon the Father to establish his kingdom here in the hearts of those who believe in his Son Jesus. Both Pilate and the ‘good thief’ find that Jesus is not guilty of any crime. Nevertheless Pilate allow Jesus to be put to death, since it was politically expedient not to have news of a big riot get back to the emperor. On the other hand, the ‘good thief’ rebukes the other crucified thief out of respect for what is righteous. As with the Apostles, Jesus rewards him with a place in heaven. That is the same reward that we seek because of our loyalty to Christ our King. We want to live eternally in the love of the Christ who loved us so deeply and dearly that he died for us on the cross.
Philippians 2:6-11. God, though magnificently almighty, out the depths of his love for the human beings he created, became a creature of his own creation, a helpless fetus and then infant, genuinely and totally dependent upon another creature, his mother Mary. “He emptied himself,” taking on humanity so that one day he could offer himself as the redemptive sacrifice on the cross. “Because of this, God greatly exalted him” so that “every tongue confess that Jesus Christ is Lord, to the glory of God the Father.”
5LC19. Isaiah 43:16-21 & Psalm 126. The almighty God has done wondrous things for his people, parting the sea and destroying the army that set out to destroy his people. To form a people for himself he led them through the desert, giving them water to drink and food to eat. His people praise him for the great things he did for them by leading them out of captivity from both Egypt and Babylon. They come back rejoicing. God saved his People!
John 8:1-11. The Pharisees and scribes brought to Jesus a woman caught in adultery so that they could test him. If he agreed that she should be stoned, then he could be brought before the Roman authorities who forbade executions without their permission. On the other hand, if Jesus refused to allow her to be stoned to death, he could be brought before the Jewish authorities for disobeying what Moses had prescribed. The genius of Jesus is that he put the decision right back into their hands with the stipulation that “Let the one among you who is without sin be the first to throw a stone at her.” That put the onus on each individual to declare by his action that he was without sin. That community of Jews knew one another well enough so as to know who was innocent and who was not among them. What Jesus wrote on the ground is not stated but I think we can guess that he wrote things that challenged their innocence. So they all left one by one. John the Evangelist often uses language on two levels of meaning, literally and figuratively or metaphorically. Here perhaps he is using the phrase “Jesus bent down” to say he went down to the lower level to deal with sin and then “Jesus straightened up” to say he went up to a higher level to raise the standards to a higher level that is virtue. The adulterous woman is sent off to live at that higher level. Jesus said in John 3:17: “For God did not send his Son into the world to condemn the world, but that the world might be saved through him.”
Philippians 3:8-14. Paul’s expression of his personal faith is a wonderful summary of what we should all be living for. Paul has come to know the invisible Jesus both personally and spiritually. Now living his life in Christ, anything else in this world that is not in tune with that relationship with Jesus feels to him to be just “so much rubbish.” Paul seems to me to be saying: ‘I am nothing if Christ is not my life; I have everything’ “since I have indeed been taken possession of by Christ Jesus.” In many of his epistles Paul reflects a rejection of the kind of religious life that many of the Jews seem to have had in his day that made the rituals and regulations of the Law to be as a god for them without actively having God himself as the supreme ruler of their lives. However, as long as we are in this world, the struggle is not finished. Paul writes, ‘I am’ “straining forward to what lies ahead, I continue my pursuit toward the goal, the prize of God’s upward calling, Christ Jesus.” Let us join him! As for the adulterous woman and Paul, Christ Jesus is our eternal salvation.
