L4A – Laetare Sunday.  1 Samuel 16:1b, 6-7, 10-13a.  In the choice of one of Jesse’s sons to be the Lord’s anointed, the Lord rejects all but the youngest who was left out of the selection process by being chosen, perhaps by Jesse the father, to stay in the fields to tend the sheep.  The Lord says to Samuel, “Not as man sees does God see, because man sees the appearance but the Lord looks into the heart.”  God sees differently than man sees.  Please think back to Peter’s testimony that Jesus is the Messiah.  Next Jesus says that he must suffer greatly, be killed and rise after three days.  Peter then rebukes Jesus.  Peter, as well as the other disciples, have the commonly held notion that the Messiah is to be a warrior king who will lead the Jews to drive the Roman occupiers out.  Mark 8:27-33(as well as Matthew 16:13-23) then continues, “At this Jesus turned around and, looking at his disciples, rebuked Peter and said, ‘Get behind me, Satan. You are thinking not as God does, but as human beings do.’”  The challenge for us is to plead daily with the Holy Spirit to think as God does even we are still human.                                                                          John 9:1-41.  The common presumption among the Jews in those days was that physical disabilities resulted from sin in the family or on the part of the individual.   “Jesus answered, ‘Neither he nor his parents sinned; it is so that the works of God might be made visible through him.’”  Although it says in Genesis that God made the world good, it does not say that God made the world perfect.  If this world were perfect, God would not have place the tree of the knowledge of good and bad in the Garden of Eden.  I believe that this world has its imperfections so that we need to go to God to make our situations here better or to help us make it better.

Throughout the gospel narrative the Jewish authorities seek a way to disqualify the cure of the blind man as a miracle; otherwise they would have to accept Jesus to be the Messiah or a prophet.  The cured man states the obvious, “If this man were not from God, he would not be able to do anything.” However, “they answered and said to him, “You were born totally in sin, and are you trying to teach us?”  This is what is called a ‘non sequitur’.  Whether the blind man was born in sin or not, does not bear on the goodness of Jesus action.  They have made themselves morally blind to the truth of Jesus as the Messiah.  They have chosen to wander around in the darkness of denial.

“When Jesus heard that they had thrown him out, he found him and said, ‘Do you believe in the son of Man? He answered and said, ‘Who is he, sir, that I may believe in him? Jesus said to him, ‘You have seen him, and the one speaking with you is he.’  He said, ‘I do believe, Lord,’ and he worshiped him.  Then Jesus said, ‘I came into the world for judgment, so that those who do not see might see, and those who do see might become blind.’” I believe that what Jesus is saying is that he  is the light of salvation to those who recognize that they are blind, i.e., that have not been seeing the truth because they have been living without the light that is Jesus, and those who think that they, without the help of God, know the truth, i.e., that they see are wandering around in the darkness and so are blind to their refusal to see the truth.  Their blindness is a moral blindness, a refusal to open their hearts and minds to the light that is Jesus the Christ and so through him to know the truth.  “But now you are saying, ‘We see,’ so your sin remains.”  Jesus is saying you have the eyes to see the truth, i. e. the capability to understand the truth that Jesus is the Messiah who has given sight to the man blind from birth but you refuse to accept the truth because you do not want to accept Jesus as Messiah and so you have made yourselves blind to the truth.

Ephesians 5:8-14.  “Brother and sisters: You were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.  Live as children of light, for light produces every kind of goodness and righteousness and truth.  Try to learn what is pleasing to the Lord.”  To live in the light is to live in the Lord daily.  It is quite natural to want to do our own will.  In order to do what we want, it is the world’s way for us to call what we want to do ‘the right thing’.  In this way we order our lives through self-delusion and self-deception, which is darkness, so that we may choose to perceive ourselves as doing ‘the right thing’.  We do not realize that we have made ourselves blind to the light that is Christ.  It is all too easy and attractive to live in our own little world and feel good about ourselves, until the roof that is reality or truth caves in on us.  Only God’s will is ‘the right thing.’  Life that is lived independent from God, in which we have made ourselves, or something or someone who is not God, into a god is self-deception, self-delusion or moral blindness.  Moral blindness is the normal worldly way to live.  We can all too often feel right at home with so many others who do the same.  Choose life!  Let us choose the Lord to be our life!  Everything else is death!

3LA23.   Exodus 17:3-7.   “The people grumbled against Moses, saying, “Why did you ever make us leave Egypt?”  The Israelites forgot the pain that they suffered under slavery to the Egyptians and, with the deprivations they were suffering in the desert, only remembered the few good things they once had in Egypt.  Sin can be delightful to our bodies and to our worldly spirit, leaving us mindless to the total destruction to which it is leading us.  When the Israelites saw the water flowing from the rock, they said, “Is the Lord in our midst or not?”  Occasionally the Lord does do spectacular things so to make clear his presence in a disbelieving world but for the most part we ought to have the faith that perceives his presence in everyday small things.

John 4:5-42.    Jesus said to the Samaritan woman, “The hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem.”  Jesus was declaring that the Old Testament Law or Torah was dead.  “But the hour is coming, and is now here, when true worshipers will worship the Father in Spirit and truth.”  Jesus was saying that, instead of God being present in the writing on a scroll, he will be present in the divine presence of the Holy Spirit and of the truth, the reality of God’s eternal design for us to guide us to heaven.  Jesus, in his humanity, was intensely immersed in the Holy Spirit when he said, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work.”  To live in the life that the Holy Spirit is breathing into us is the fruit of what God and we, as his co-workers, sow.

Romans 5:1-2, 5-6.  St. Paul wrote, “And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” How do we know that God loves us?  “God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”

3L20.   “In those days, in their thirst for water, the people grumbled against Moses.” “The place was called Massah and Meribah, because the Israelites quarreled there and tested the Lord, saying, ‘Is the Lord in our midst or not?’” Obviously, the Israelites were experiencing something of a lack of water and so they complained about not having an adequate supply of water.  In effect they were demanding that God miraculously supply the water.  In effect they were testing God to prove that he was with them and truly cared for his People.  It was then and still considered sacrilegious to demand that the Almighty must do what human beings tell him to do. This event was remembered often later to show the hard-heartedness and doubt that the Israelites had at times, despite the fact that the Lord had often show his goodness to his People.

John 4:5-42.   Jesus, tired because of his long journey, stopped to rest at the well that Jacob, long ago had given to his son Joseph.  The water from the well which God had given to Jacob to sustain human life is now superseded in importance by the grace that gives spiritual life that is given by Jesus, who sits at the same well.  John’s gospel often relates two levels of thought at the same time: the first, simply the plot of an ordinary event, such as just Jesus setting at a well; the second, a lesson with a deep spiritual meaning, such as Jesus is now the one who is giving the water or grace of eternal spiritual life which is infinitely more important than the water that sustains physical life.  This sinful woman does not dare draw water in the cool of the morning because the other women that draw water then would mock her for her sinfulness.  So she comes at noon in the high heat of the day to avoid them.  Her thirst for ‘the living water’ is even greater because of her sinfulness.  Jesus clearly reveals himself to be the Messiah, the Christ.  Jesus speaks on that deeper level of meaning, when his disciples try to get him to eat physical, saying, “My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work.”  Next he speaks of the one who sows the seed of faith, the sower and secondly, the reaper, who gathers the crops for eternal life, i.e. the people who have grown spiritually, who are ready to receive the rewards of eternal life.  Jesus then sows the seed of eternal life by preaching to the Samaritans “who began to believe in him because of his word.”

Romans 5:1-2, 5-8.  Jesus says, “Through our Lord Jesus Christ” “we have gained access by faith” to the grace of “peace with God” that gives us “hope in the glory of God.”  “And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” “God proves his love for us in that while we still sinners Christ died for us.”  The water that gives us grace, a share in his divine life, is the love that God has for us.  Jesus dwells in us giving us his love, his life to us so that daily we grow in him.

3LA.  Exodus 17:3-7.  The Lord said, “Strike the rock, and the water will flow from it for the people to drink.”  The Church gives us this reading as a preface, prelude to the gospel of ‘living water’.  God provides us with the water that we need to quench our thirst, but what is it we decide to thirst for: what this world tells us we must thirst for or the thirst for eternal purpose and meaning, i.e. the eternal love that God has for us.  The people whom God led out of servitude to the Egyptians did not know much more than the material world.  During their forty years in the desert God wanted them to come to know much more than this physical world, that they ought to choose belong to something greater than to a day to day material world.

John 4:5-42.  “Jesus, tired from his journey, sat down there at the well.  It was about noon.” His exhaustion shows that he was truly human, as well as divine.  “A woman of Samaria came to draw water.  Jesus said to her, “Give me a drink.” She was quite surprised because a Jew of Jerusalem Judaism would never address a woman of the Samaritan Jewish faith community, nor would a man of that middle-Eastern world ever speak to a woman who was not a part of his extended family.  The Holy Spirit was moving Jesus to take advantage of this opportunity to bring this woman to faith in the Messiah.  Jesus answered her question, “If you knew the gift of God and who is saying to you, ‘Give me a drink,’ you would asked him and he would have given you living water.”  She is lost as to his answer and questions him, “Where can you get this living water?”  He responds, “whoever drinks the water I shall give will never thirst; the water I shall give will become in him a spring of water welling up to eternal life.”  The spiritual water Jesus is promising is the grace that leads to the eternal life of heaven but she is still thinking of the physical water she needs to live from day to day.  Jesus reveals his messianic power to her when he reveals his divine capacity to know her past and so she runs off to the village to tell of the one who seems to her to be the Messiah.  Also,Jesus reveals to her, and to us all, that he has not come to establish a new Judaic sect but an entirely new religion when he says, “the hour is coming when you will worship the Father neither on this mountain nor in Jerusalem,” but when “true worshipers (of the one true God) will worship the Father in Spirit and truth.” “God is Spirit, and those who worship him must worship in Spirit and truth.” Spirit is the God who is infinitely greater than this world of physical things that will eventually pass away.  Truth speaks of the reality that God is infinitely greater than anything we humans can imagine because our thinking is hemmed in by the world we live in, and even by this spectacular God-created universe, that is itself so infinitesimal in relation to the God who is infinitely greater and more awesome than anything he has created.

After the disciples urge him to eat, “Jesus said to them, ‘My food is to do the will of the one who sent me and to finish his work.’” Jesus was hungry to do what the Father wanted him to do, bring all people of good will to heaven, to worship the God who loves us all so dearly.  Jesus says, “I sent you to reap what you have not worked for; others have done this work, and you are sharing the fruits of their work.” Jesus sent them (& sends us) to bring people to God in heaven.

The Samaritans there say to the woman, “We have heard for ourselves, and we know that this is truly the savior of the world.” In spite of her sinfulness but because of her simplicity and sincerity, she brought many to Christ.

Romans 5:1-2, 5-8.  “Since we have been justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ.”  Peace is that unity with God that gives a sense of security for eternity and a fullness of life that assures us we have the true source of inexhaustible goodness that is always available to us.  “And hope does not disappoint, because the love of God has been poured out into our hearts through the Holy Spirit who has been given to us.” The love of God, a share in the divine life of God has been the grace poured out into us through the Holy Spirit.  “But God proves his love for us in that while we were still sinners Christ died for us.”  God’s motivation for his love was not that we had done anything to deserve his love but that his nature is love so that out of who he is he loved in spite of the fact that we did not deserve it.

 

 

2LA23.    Genesis 12:1-4a.  “The Lord said to Abram: ‘Go forth from the land of your kinsfolk and from your father’s house to a land that I will show you.’  ‘I will make of you a great nation and I will bless you; I will make your name great.”  “Abram went as the Lord directed him.”  God was commanding Abram to leave his home land, what was comfortable, secure and familiar to make a new life totally dependent on the God in whom he put his whole trust.  He was leaving all that he had in hand for something completely unknown and unimaginable solely on the word of his God.

Psalm 33: 20, 22.   “Our soul waits for the Lord, who is our help and our shield.  May your kindness, O Lord be upon us who have put our hope in you.”

Matthew 17: 1-9.   In Matthew 16:20-23 Jesus tells his disciples that he is the Messiah and furthermore that he must suffer greatly, be killed and on the third day be raised.  Peter rejects that scenario for Jesus; but Jesus rebukes Peter for thinking as human beings think.  The transfiguration takes place soon afterwards in order to assert undeniably the Messiahship and divinity of Jesus.  The presence of Moses and Elijah declares that what God had begun in the Hebrew People was coming to fulfillment in the suffering, death and resurrection of Jesus.  God the Father was telling Peter to think as God thinks, since now God’s voice makes known to Peter what God knows, that Jesus is his beloved Son.

2 Timothy 1:8b-10.   “Beloved: Bear your share of hardship for the gospel with the strength that comes from God. He saved us and called us to a holy life.”  We live out our call to holiness in a world that generally rejects the invisible and the spiritual as not being genuinely real.  This requires that we live and act in the strength that only our God possesses and readily makes available to us.  What is visible and material passes away; what is invisible and spiritual lives forever.

2LA20.   Genesis 12:1-4a.   To Abram God says, “I will make of you a great nation, and I will bless you.”  In last week’s reading Adam and Eve had the potential of being the parents of a paradise world but they sinned and brought the great struggle against sin to all of us to be able to regain the paradise of heaven.    From Abram God promised a great nation who will be enabled to lead the world out of sin.  And in later times all peoples would find a great blessing in the Hebrew peoples that God established through Abram.

Matthew 17:1-9.  On top of the high mountain close to God, Jesus was transfigured before Peter, James, and John.  Moses representing the Law and Elijah, the prophets, were there conversing with Jesus.  Peter wished to give high honors to them. Then God the Father spoke from a bright cloud, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well pleased; listen to him.”  The word ‘listen’ here means, ‘Hear what he has to say, then go and do it.’   The authority of God himself spoke through the cloud.  God was to form a new people from Jesus who is still leading his followers, called Christians, though this world to heaven.  The great power of this mighty event left the apostles prostrate and fearful.  Jesus, who is the essence of peace, said, “Rise, and do not be afraid.”  This vision was probably given to these three apostles to prepare them for the resurrection to come.

Romans 5:1-2, 5-8.   “God saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according to his own design and the grace bestowed on us in Christ Jesus.”  We have been given salvation which  we struggle to hold on to every day in Christ because the forces of this world seek to tear it out of our hands.   Jesus calls us to a life that is not of this world.  A life that is without death, eternally filled with the brilliance that is his presence.

L2A.  Genesis 12:1-4a.  The Lord said to Abram, “I will make of you a great nation.”   “All the communities of the earth shall find blessing in you.”  The Hebrew nation is to stand as the only people of God in the midst of all the peoples of the world that truly has God’s blessing on them.  Through them God makes known what a great God he is.  It is through him, and only through him, that blessings flow on to the earth.  He is only true God through whom any real good can come to people on earth.

Matthew 17:1-9.  “And he was transfigured before them; his face shone like the sun and his clothes became white as light.”  These Apostles had always seen Jesus as just another human being.  They were locked in, so to speak, to the ways all humans thought and felt.  This experience of Jesus, as resurrected in the glory of his divinity, was to help shock them out of earthly, human thinking and feeling, so to see far beyond anything they could have imagined to get a glimpse into God’s world.  Just as Jesus real death plunged them into the depths of darkness, Jesus’ resurrection would explode them into the sublime magnificence of his divinity.  They were to be totally astounded and awestruck and so should we be!

In Exodus 34:27-35, God speaks to Moses,   “Write down these words, for in accordance with them I have made a covenant with you and with Israel.”  “Moses did not know that the skin of his face had become radiant while he conversed with the Lord.”  The radiance of Moses‘ face came from his direct meeting with God but Jesus’ radiance came from within because he himself is God.

Moses and Elijah appear speaking to Jesus.  In the first reading from Genesis, what God the Father began through his People and his Prophets, in the New Testament, Jesus was bringing to culmination, since Jesus now is the prime revelation of divinity to humanity.  God the Father attests to this, saying, “This is my beloved Son, with whom I am well please; listen to him.”  Jesus is the Father’s presence and voice.  God the Father is saying that his words are coming now through God his Son.  In the Old Testament God foretells his intention to raise up the Servant of Lord when he says, “Here is my servant whom I uphold, my chosen one with whom I am well pleased.”(Isaiah 42:1a).

The three Apostles did not understand the significance of what happened on the high mountain; where divinity had come down to communicate with humanity, but later they would get a chance through the work of the Spirit to understand. “Do not tell the vision to anyone until the Son Man has been raised from the dead.”

2 Timothy1:8b-10.  “He has saved us and called us to a holy life, not according to our works but according to his own design and grace bestowed on us.”  By his grace and according to his plan/Will, he has called us to his holy people, a great nation, a great blessing to all the peoples of the world to bring them likewise to be all God’s holy people, all the people of the world to be his kingdom, his great nation.  There is and continues to be great resistance to our calling but he assures us saying, “Bear your share of hardship for the gospel (the good news that I give to you) with the strength that comes from God.”

Our salvation comes to us through “our savior Christ Jesus, who destroyed death and brought life and immortality to light through the gospel” of the Cross and Resurrection.  We come to salvation by our daily embrace of the holy life, a life of listening to him and obeying him day after day.  H

e is the God of us, of our lives.

 

1LA23.     Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7.    In those times, “In the near East the serpent represented the deity who controls male and female fecundity.  Many women, in Israel and neighboring nations, turned to serpent-cult in order to ensure a fruitful marriage.”  “Hebrew prophecy objected to such sexual practices, claiming that Yahweh alone was the true source of fruitfulness.”  (Guide for the Christian Assembly, III, p. 9)  Consequently, in ancient Judaism, the serpent was not seen as achieving anything good but as the provocateur of evil.  In Genesis 1 everything that God made was good.  Genesis 3 reveals that the source of evil is man’s disobedience to God’s Will when he ate from the tree of which God had forbidden him to eat. (Genesis 3:17)  Before eating of the forbidden fruit, “the man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame.” (Genesis 2:25)  After eating of the forbidden fruit, “then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they realized that they were naked.” (Genesis 3:7a)  At first they lived in total innocence; later in the guilt of their disobedience and no longer having God’s protective presence, they knew shame.

Matthew 4:1-11.  “At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”  When the devil saw that Jesus was vulnerable because of his hunger after forty days in the desert, the devil took the opportunity to tempt Jesus.  Jesus had recently come from being baptized when the voice that came from the heavens said, “This is my beloved Son.” (Matthew 3:17)  So the devil began his temptation by saying, “If you are the Son of God.” The Holy Spirit was having Jesus baptized now with fire of the devil.  In his humanity the only source of strength Jesus could go to was the Holy Spirit himself who, in fact, gave him the resources he needed to fend off the devil with great effectiveness and grace.  “Then the devil left him and behold, angels came and ministered to him.”  Although the scripture text does not expound on how deeply this experience left Jesus, yet the indications are that it had a terribly wrenching effect on him.  The only other occasion that I can find in which God sent an angel to console and strengthen Jesus in his humanity was in the Agony in the Garden. (Luke 22:43-44)

Romans 5:12-19.  “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.”  The challenge for us is to join ourselves to the obedience of Jesus and to reject the disobedience of Adam.

1LA20. Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7.   In Genesis One, the first story of creation says: “Then God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our likeness.”  Genesis 1:27b & c says: In the divine image he created him; male and female he created them.” The second story of creation says in Genesis 2:7: “The Lord formed man out of the clay of the earth and blew into his nostrils the breath of life, and so man became a living being.”  After man’s creation, Genesis 2:22 says: “The Lord God then built up into a woman the rib that he had taken from the man.”  Genesis 1 & 2 relates that what God had made was good.  If everything was good, where did evil come from?  Genesis 3 relates that evil came from the first human beings that God had created, our first parents.  While they were still yet innocent and had not yet disobeyed God, Genesis 2:25 goes on to say: “The man and his wife were both naked, yet they felt no shame.” After they ate the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and bad, they lost their innocence and “they realized that they were naked.”  While they were innocent, they had no knowledge of evil.  Evil was not available for them to choose. Genesis 3:22 relates: “Then the Lord God said: ‘See! The man has become like one of us, knowing what is good and what is bad’”.  Our innocence was lost.  Now we must struggle to choose between what is truly good and the evil that the devil makes seem more desirable than what is truly good.

Matthew 4:1-11.  Adam was conquered by temptation but Jesus was victorious over temptation.  “Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”  Jesus was both God and man.  As a man he was vulnerable to temptation but in his humanity he had built up such a powerful relationship and union with God the Father through prayer, he became indestructible.  As with any human being, in his humanity he not only grew physically, yet even more importantly, spiritually.  As such Jesus in his humanity is the ideal, perfect model for what our spiritual growth should be.  Jesus taught us to pray: “Lead us not into temptation; but deliver us from evil.”  He wants us to be fearful of the power of the devil and so live every moment under the protection of our loving Father God. If encountered with a spiritual desire to advance in holiness, temptations force us more and more to live our lives growing every day in God’s grace.

Jesus had just gone through a terrible trial under the strain of forty days in the desert and the temptations.  God the Father recognized that Jesus needed to recover from all that he gone through.  So he sent the angels to minister to him.

Romans 5:12-19.  “For just as through the disobedience of the one man the many were made sinners, so, through the obedience of the one, the many will be made righteous.” “For if by the transgression of the one, the many died how much more did the grace of God and the gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ overflow for the many.”  Let us all claim our sinfulness so that we may claim Jesus Christ as the one who saves us from our sinfulness.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

L1A.  Genesis 2:7-9; 3:1-7.  The devil wins this round over humanity.  In Adam & Eve, humanity was given a choice by God to be obedient or disobedient to him: the tree of life to remain in a childlike faith & innocence, totally dependent on an all-loving & caring God the Father OR the tree of the knowledge of good and evil so as to live independent of God as a little god dependent on oneself, able to choose good or evil, opening the door to self-destruction and death.

“Now the serpent was the most cunning of all the animals that the Lord God had made.” The problem here is that the serpent advocates disobedience to the will of God to Adam & Eve, yet everything  that God made was good.  How did the serpent, though cunning, become evil?”  “It is only about the fruit of the tree in the middle of the garden that God said, ‘You shall not eat it or even touch it, lest you die.’” “But the serpent said to the woman:  ‘You certainly will not die.’” We think of the serpent as being the devil, as the angel Lucifer who tried to overthrow God and become God himself.  This Scripture does not say that.  Nevertheless, the serpent gets Adam & Eve to acquiesce to the temptation and so they were expelled from the garden in Eden, which God had planted for them.

Matthew 4:1-11.  The devil loses this round against Jesus . “At that time Jesus was led by the Spirit into the desert to be tempted by the devil.”  This may be why Jesus’ Our Father  Prayer says, “And lead us not into temptation.”  I think that God requires  that we do not remain static in our spiritual life; but demands that, by responding to the challenges of temptation and other difficulties, we are forced to depend more and more on him and to grow to be more fully the holy people he wants us to be.  Jesus is tempted by the devil, after he fasted 40 days and 40 nights, basically to be separated from God and even to reject God as the God over him.  At the end of this Gospel, it says, “Angels came and ministered to him.”  I have wondered if that may meant they gave Jesus the meal he needed to be relieved of his hunger.

Romans 5:12-19.  St. Paul writes, “In conclusion, just as through one transgression condemnation came upon all, so, through one righteous act, acquittal and life came to all.”  Jesus undid what Adam did.  The obedience of Jesus negates the disobedience of Adam.  Now we have the grace of God to journey passed our sins and consequent death to eternal life as one of the holy ones in heaven.  All we need now is to take advantage of the “gracious gift of the one man Jesus Christ” to gain heaven.