Thursday, March 28, 2024

Radical love (D. Haas)


   This version of the Last Supper story from John is centered not on a satisfying meal of bread and wine, but on the action and example shown by a servant. This is the command we are given. We are not called to possess or own anything for our own sake. We are being asked, actually commanded and given a mandate (“mandatum”), to follow and divest ourselves of all that keeps us from loving. 
   
   At the heart of this mandate is more than merely inconveniencing ourselves to bend down to wash feet. It is a command to bend more than our knee, but also our hearts - our very lives - to touch the most vulnerable places in one another; to help to make clean those places and bruises that are in most need of washing and purifying. It is to decrease so that others may increase; it is to be as loving as Jesus with a liberating and radical love that makes us all as full, complete, and holy as he is. 

   This washing of the feet is transubstantiation made real – a true change and transformation not brought about by magic, but made concrete by radical love. 

--D. Haas, Facebook,
April 18, 2019 

In the agony of Gethsemane (Fr. Ron Rolheiser)

    In the words of Karl Rahner, in the agony of Gethsemane and at the crucifixion, Jesus lets himself “sink into the incomprehensibility of God.” He surrenders to God whom he cannot at that moment feel or understand but only trust. Here’s where Good Friday turns from bad to good, Jesus surrenders himself not in bitterness, grasping, or anger, but in trust, gratitude, and forgiveness. In that surrender, the struggle between good and evil, the most epic of all battles, is won. 

--Fr. Ron Rolheiser OMI,
Facebook, Good Friday, 4/19/19 

Image source: Giovanni Bellini, Agony in the Garden (ca. 1459-1465), https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agony_in_the_Garden_%28Bellini%29#/media/File:Giovanni_Bellini_-_Orazione_nell'orto.jpg
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Wednesday, March 27, 2024

Did Jesus forgive Judas? (Nelson Mandela)

When you learn to sit at the table with your Judas, 
you will have learned the love of Christ.
 
--Unknown

   Nelson Mandela told this story: "After I became president, I asked one day some members of my close protection to stroll with me in the city, have lunch at one of its restaurants. We sat in one of the downtown restaurants and all of us asked for some sort of food. After a while, the waiter brought us our requests, I noticed that there was someone sitting in front of my table waiting for food. 

   “I told then one of the soldiers: go and ask that person to join us with his food and eat with us. The soldier went and asked the man to do so. The man brought up his food and sat by my side as I had asked, and began to eat. His hands were trembling constantly until everyone had finished their food and the man went. 

   “The soldier said to me: ‘The man was apparently quite sick. His hands trembled as he ate!’"

   "No, not at all," said Mandela. 

   "This man was the guard of the prison where I was jailed. Often, after the torture I was subjected to, I used to scream and ask for a little water. The very same man used to come every time and urinate on my head instead. So, I found him scared, trembling, expecting me to reciprocate now, at least in the same way, either by torturing him or imprisoning him as I am now the president of the state of South Africa. But this is not my character nor part of my ethics. The mentality of retaliation destroys states, while the mentality of tolerance builds nations.” 

Did Jesus forgive Judas? What do you think? 

Image source: Judas’ Betrayal of Christ, Goreme, Cappadocia (13th c.), https://www.cappadocianguide.com/destinations/goreme-open-air-museum
Notice that Judas has a halo in this image.
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Tuesday, March 26, 2024

Step into the sacred space of Triduum!


It's difficult to find the right words to describe the Easter Triduum –– its beauty and solemnity, its pregnant meaning... Those who have experienced it just once find themselves waiting impatiently for these three days throughout all the season of Lent. Triduum is the goal, the culmination, the extraordinary endpoint of our journey through forty days in the Lenten desert. It is unlike any other moment in the Church’s liturgical calendar – it’s almost like stepping over a threshold, out of chronological time and into kairos time, into a sacred space unique in the depth of engagement it offers, and in the beauty of liturgy that graces it. Nothing, nothing, is like the Triduum liturgy, three awed days of total immersion, body, heart, and soul, into the Passion, Death, and Resurrection of our Lord. If you have never participated before, now is the time: you will never forget this incredible experience of time-out-of-time. 

    Join us first on Holy Thursday evening for the Feast of the Lord’s Supper and recall Jesus kneeling humbly before his disciples to wash their feet, then blessing, breaking, and sharing bread – the first Eucharist – with his disciples… Process afterwards with us to O'Brien Hall for Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament… 

    Follow in Jesus’ footsteps on the Way of the Cross Friday afternoon, and venerate the Wood of the Cross in remembrance of his death at the most extraordinary Communion service of the liturgical year… 

    Witness the Light of Christ as it slowly fills Our Lady of Mount Carmel Church on Holy Saturday evening, and hear the story of salvation history, from Genesis to Romans… punctuated with a joyful Gloria that tells us that Resurrection is at hand… 

    And then, at last, on Easter Sunday, join in the joyful proclamation of Jesus Risen and know in the depth of your being God’s faithful and abiding love…. Alleluia! Come, step into the sacred space of Triduum!

Monday, March 25, 2024

This Holy Week we sit with Jesus (Cecilia González-Andrieu)


   As we step out of our comfort into the starkness of what is real, we transcend fear to see clearly that we must continue on to Jerusalem because that is where change happens. This Holy Week we sit with Jesus in the underground cistern, where he was likely kept overnight as he awaited trial and try to fathom how it is that he continued to love and work for love in spite of so much evidence that he should just give up. Humanity must have broken his heart. They were hopeless, mired in their own self-preservation, and yet, there were those women, his mother, the Magdalene, the others. Fearless they pushed on, wanting him to see them, to know their nearness. Like in so many of the stories of his Jewish community, they enacted God’s reign, the few who made visible God’s love, showing that humanity was not without hope. 

   Jesus is the last person in history who will die with the question of God’s abandonment. Where was God? In his flesh, because he stared down reality and transcended it through stubborn hope for who we could be, he forever transformed history. The God of love and of life was indeed present, real and alive in history, taking Jesus up into God’s arms, raising him for all to see: “this, humans, this unstoppable belief in your potential is the key to transformation. Jesus is leading the way, now follow him.” 

--Cecilia González-Andrieu 

Sunday, March 24, 2024

Jesus suffers in almost every way possible (Fr. James Martin)


   The perhaps more spiritual reason for the extended Passion Narratives was to show that the Son of Man suffered. The word “passion” comes from the Greek word paschō, meaning to suffer or experience. And it is here that Jesus’s life powerfully intersects with ours. 

   Jesus’s suffering is not confined simply to Good Friday. He would have suffered as any human being does—from illness and physical pain (after all, he had a human body) to the normal emotional suffering that accompanies any human life. Here I often think of the death of his foster father Joseph. When Jesus begins his public ministry, Joseph is not on the scene. Why not? Most likely he had already died. And so we can presume that Jesus suffered in that way too. 

   But on Good Friday we see that he suffers in almost every way possible. Emotionally, as he is betrayed by one of his closest friends and abandoned by his followers. Physically, of course, as he is nailed to a cross. But also spiritually, as he cries out, “My God, My God, why have you forsaken me?” 

   Jesus suffers. So when you pray to him, remember that you are praying to someone who understands you. And Jesus understands you not simply because he is divine and knows all things, but because he is human and experienced all things. 

--Fr. James Martin,
Outreach, April 1 & 2, 2023 

Image source: Norman Adams, Third Station: Jesus falls the first time, St. Mary Catholic Church, Manchester, England, photo courtesy of Fr. Patrick Michaels, https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=2290516807797167&set=pcb.3525178114425932
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Saturday, March 23, 2024

The Master has need of your gifts (Bishop Robert Barron)

   In the Palm Sunday Gospel reading proclaimed before the procession, the Lord instructs two of his disciples to go into the village and untether a donkey. If there is any protest, they are to say, “The Master has need of it.” This is true of every baptized person: the Master has need of your gifts, of you, of the whole of your life. Once we understand this principle, everything is revolutionized—and we are liberated to be of service to Christ and his people. 

--Bishop Robert Barron,
 Gospel Reflection, April 10, 2022
 

Image source: https://www.crosswalk.com/faith/bible-study/what-is-the-importance-of-the-triumphal-entry.html