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.

 

 

 

 

 

7A23.   Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18.   “You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart.” “Take no revenge and cherish no grudge against any of your people.  You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  The Hebrew Law or Torah was concerned with fraternal love so that one does not hurt one’s kin.  However that love was not commanded for everyone but only those who were somehow related or connected to you.

Matthew 5:38-48.   Again Jesus changes the Old Testament Law or Torah as he says, “But I say to you.”  Now Jesus calls upon us to love everyone, just as God loves everyone for whom “he makes his sun rise on the bad and the good, and causes rain to fall on the just and the unjust.”  In the Old Testament God gave just Ten Commandments.  Now God commands us to do and obey everything he wants of us.  “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  This means we are to be in his image and likeness as God created us to be, holy as he is holy, love as he is love.  (Genesis1:26-27)  God the Father wants his child to the person he created us to be, what he had in mind for us when he first thought of us.  God the Father wants to be proud of how well, with his aid, we have turned out when we stand before him at the end of our life before the pearly gates.

1 Corinthians 3:16-23.  “You are the temple of God” because “the Spirit of God dwells within you.”  By our Baptism, the Holy Spirit dwells within us.  The God who died on the cross for us because he loved us so deeply and dearly loves us so very much that he lives within us.  Let us embrace the God who embraces us.  Let us belong to the God who wishes to belong to us, if we but open ourselves to him.  This world endlessly and at times overwhelmingly tempts us to belong to it.  The immediacy and strength of the physical presence of this world often dominates us so that we can lose sight of the God who is the foundation of goodness and eternal love.  However, everything that is not of God is worthless, if not, in the end, destructive.

 

7A20.    Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18.  The Lord commands Moses to tell the whole Israelite community: “Be holy, for I, the Lord, your God, am holy.”  Clearly God is telling his people to be as he is, holy and pure; not living as just another animal of this world but as a people close and dear to God, as his own.  In Genesis 1:26, “Then God said: “Let us make man in our image, after our own likeness.  Let them have dominion over” all the animals of this earth.  We are to live in his image and not in the image of the other creatures of this earth.  God in his holiness bears no hatred, grudge, nor revenge.  We must do as God does, because we have been made in his image and likeness.

Matthew 5:38-48.   God never says, “Do evil to those who do you evil.”  God never does anything evil; we do it to one another or the devil does it. In Genesis in its narrative of the creation, after God has done his work of creation we read: “God saw how good it was.”  In chapter 3 & 4 of Genesis we read that evil came into this world by what was done by Adam & Eve and then by Cain.

Jesus said, “Offer no resistance to one who is evil.” However, Jesus clearly resisted the temptations of the devil in the desert.  At Nazareth when the people became infuriated with him and brought him “to the brow of the hill on which their town had been built, to hurl him headlong, he passed through the midst of them and went away.” (Mark 4:29b-30)  Again Jesus resisted their evil intent.  My understanding of what Jesus meant by “offer no resistance” is that there are occasions when things work out better when one offers no resistance and so we do not offer resistance.  The best example of that is when Jesus did not resist his arrest by the band of soldiers and guards that Judas brought into the garden of Gethsemane because he (Jesus) had been brought into this world to offer himself up as a sacrifice for the redemption of our sins.  Jesus said, “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  God is infinitely perfect.  In our humanness we have a limited capacity to accomplish what is good.  If we are called to our judgment when we are on the life’s road doing our best in God’s eyes, all will go well.  The measure of the goodness to which we are called is God and God alone.  God’s love embraces us to be holy as he is holy.

1 Corinthians 3:16-23.    “Brothers and Sisters: Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and that the Spirit of God dwells in you?  If anyone destroys God’s temple, God will destroy that person; for the temple of God, which you are, is holy.”  By our baptism the Holy Spirit dwells in us and works with us to create that truly holy person that is to be a child of God made in his image and likeness. The Holy Spirit enables us to share in God’s holiness.  Remember that only saints are permitted in heaven.  It is our life’s work and goal to become saints by achieving holiness through uniting our life to the work of the Holy Spirit in us.

7A   Leviticus 19:1-2, 17-18.  “Be holy, for I, Lord your God, am holy.”  What does that mean for us?  Later God says, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself.”  Who is it that commands this of us?  “I am the Lord,” your God who is master over you.  What does it mean to love.  “You shall not bear hatred for your brother or sister in your heart.”  “Take no revenge and cherish no grudge.”

Matthew 5:38-48.  No longer “an eye for eye and a tooth for a tooth,” “offer no resistance to one who is evil.” Not only that but indulge and cooperate with the one strikes you, or wants your tunic or your service or to borrow from you.  Should we understand all this in strict sense?  In the Gospel for Monday of the Sixth Week of Ordinary Time (Mark 8:11-13), the Pharisees demand a sign (miracle) from heaven from Jesus.  He responds, “No sign will be given to this generation.”  The next day’s Book of Genesis reading (6:5-8, 7:1-5, 10) says, “When the Lord saw how great was man’s wickedness on earth,” God sends the flood to destroy those evil people, except for Noah who is not evil.  Obviously, Jesus’ words should not be taken literally but as examples of how far God’s love is willing to go, given the proper and appropriate situation and circumstance.  This gospel ends with, “So be perfect, just as your heavenly Father is perfect.”  This means that God is perfect according to his capacity to be perfect which is infinite and we are to perfect according to our capacity to be perfect which is, in contrast, finite.  As God is, so should we be.  His is our Father; we are his children, maturing more and more each day to grow in his image and likeness as we were first made to be (Genesis 1:26-27).

 

1 Corinthians 3:16-23.  Paul writes, “Brothers and Sisters (in Christ): Do you not know that you are the temple of God, and the Spirit of God dwells within you?”  We are no longer simply human but God lives in us and raises us above what is merely human by his power.  Do not think you are wise, if you belong to what is of this world.  “For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in the eyes of God.”  Everything that is good and wise belongs to God and to those who belong to God.  “All belong to you, and you to Christ, and Christ to God.” In the Parable of the Lost or Prodigal Son, the father says to the elder (older) son, “Everything I have is yours.” (Luke 15:31b)  This is what Our Father says to us.  Since we have it all because we are temples of God, it makes no sense to seek anything from a world that has nothing.