Third Sunday of Easter

Dear All, Today’s readings are all about amazement, repentance, terror and joy.  The First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles is part of the famous Kerygmata Petrou (Greek for Preachings of Peter).  After curing a crippled beggar outside the temple (before what we read today - Acts 3:1-12), Peter testifies to the power of God at work in their midst.  His point is that neither he nor John cured the cripple, but God himself.  He goes on to point out how they also were ignorant of the true identity of Jesus.  They failed to recognize him, as they did not expect a Messiah who was going to suffer and die.  Peter calls them to conversion now as precondition for their sins to be wiped away. Luke’s Gospel follows the Emmaus story, after the two disciples had returned to Jerusalem recounting their encounter with the risen Jesus.  He appears among them offering peace.  Initially they were terrified thinking they were seeing a ghost.  To prove that He was real he ate baked fish in front of them.  Proceeding then to connect the teachings before his death with the reality of the risen Christ bringing forgiveness of sins.  At funeral liturgies we hear: In him, who rose from the dead, our hope of resurrection dawned; the sadness of death gives way to the bright promise of immortality.

On Easter Sunday, Jesus did not return to his former life, he broke the bonds of death forever and won for all of us a pledge of eternal life.  This is the good news (that is why we call these books Gospel) that we celebrate during the Easter season – news that is indeed amazing and fills us with joy. The Second Reading from the first letter of John talks in a very realistic way about our honest desire not to sin, yet as humans, we sometimes fall short.  The message is not to worry, for we have an Advocate who intercedes on our behalf.  The early Church used today’s passage in initiation rituals, starting with confession of sinfulness prior to welcoming converts into the Christian community. A complete text of the readings at http://scriptures-my-journey-oflife-andfaith.blogspot.com/2009/04/third-sunday-of-easter.html With God’s Love and Blessings, Rainer P.S. Prayer of Thanksgiving for my brother-in-law Andreas’ successful surgery!!!  Please include him in your prayers for complete and speedy healing.

Second Sunday of Easter

Dear All, We have now transitioned from Lent to Easter Season, a period of eight weeks through Pentecost.  In this Season the First Reading is always from the Acts of the Apostles, the second book attributed to Luke about the history of the early Church describing how the salvation promised to Israel in the Old Testament, accomplished by Jesus has now been extended to the Gentiles under the guidance of the Holy Spirit.  As the Second Reading during this Easter Season we read many passages of the First Letter of John, composed as a short treatise toward the end of the first century by John the Evangelist.  The Gospel according to John talks about the first hours of the bunch of ragged followers hiding frightened in a locked up room, after their leader had been executed on the cross and the body had vanished… the very morning of that first Sunday they had found the empty tomb.  Everything seemed to have gone wrong, including Peter’s denial and the others running away, now hiding and wondering when the Jews were going to come and get them.  In the midst of this angst Jesus appears to all of them and after raising from the dead the first thing he says is Shalom, meaning peace (much more than calm and stillness), communion with God, one’s neighbor and the earth.  This reminds me that when we wish peace to each other we do not mean absence of trauma or conflict, but fullness and fulfillment of life.  If you were astounded, like I was, that after coming back from death the first thing coming out Jesus mouth is Peace,  isn’t it amazing that right after that he gives the power to forgive sins as sort of the first instruction to the leaders of his community.  In my humanity I could imagine many other things I would have told my friends after such a unique experience.  I am in awe recognizing how clear Jesus knows of our human toiling making the first directive to his apostles (ambassadors) to forgive sins.  In the sentence between the Shalom and

forgiveness he officially makes them ambassadors (“as the Father has sent me, so I send you”). If the first passage of the Gospel created incredible amazement, the next passage made me feel right at home when Didymus (meaning twin in Greek) insists on proof from his fellows when they tell him of their first encounter with the risen Jesus.  We are all doubting Thomases, aren’t we?  We want to experience through our senses (see, touch, feel) before we believe anything.  In order to let us build our faith, in the second post-Resurrection appearance, and once the same Thomas (meaning twin in Aramaic) satisfied his sense (by touching the hands and side of Christ), Jesus blesses all of us who not having seen, we do believe.  Having as one of our key witnesses to the resurrected Christ someone so much like us, gives me a sense of comfort. The last passage of today’s Gospel reading is the end of John (before the Epilogue attributed to an editor), telling us that the few signs that were written, of the many Jesus performed in the presence of his disciples, were documented so that we may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Redeemer foretold in the thousands of years of Jewish tradition. A complete text of the readings at http://scriptures-my-journey-oflife-andfaith.blogspot.com/2009/04/second-sunday-of-easter.html With God’s Love and Blessings, Rainer P.S. Please include my brother-in-law Andreas in your prayers for a successful surgery on Monday (April 20th) and complete and speedy healing thereafter.

Easter Sunday

Dear All,

The First Reading from the Acts of the Apostles sounds like a Press Release from Peter about Jesus’ ministry, death and resurrection.  Beginning with His Baptism (we read about this on the second Sunday of this calendar year) and the anointment by the Holy Spirit, followed by his ministry doing good and healing all.  The whole passion is summarized in just one sentence: “They put him to death by hanging him on a tree.”  I once heard a homilist saying that God must have first confirmed with the devil that the death and burial of the son meant victory of evil over good.  Once reassured, God proved the devil wrong by instructing Jesus on the third day to “Be raised”, making real the good news of eternal life.  And to prove the point that the resurrected Christ was real, Peter reports about Him eating and drinking with the witnesses chosen by God in advance.  Ghosts don’t eat and drink.

The Gospel of John is one of the four accounts we have about the Resurrection.  While in most of the gospel stories we can relate up to four complementary views about the same story, with the Resurrection we can find several contradictory narratives.  It seems to be saying, they really don’t know the exact nature of the chronology of events leading to the discovery that Jesus is no longer in the tomb.  Interesting to note is that the first one to observe the empty tomb is Mary Magdalene, a woman.  We are going to come back to why it may not have been Peter and John, but Mary who gets first to the empty tomb and (in the Gospel of Mark, which we are not reading today) is the first one to see Jesus resurrected.

Towards the end of the 20^th century a random blind sample study on three thousand people in the US discovered that 94% of the interviewed people spend their entire lives looking forward to something or not accepting where they are, here and now, but expecting something significant to happen tomorrow, the next month, the next year, when everything will come together… looking forward to something and not living the today.  We may interpret this as the missing of an internalized construct to appreciate the resurrection other than cerebrally.  We want to believe it, we say we’re going to believe it, we in our minds decide that that’s the way for us to go.  But emotionally acceptance that we live out on a daily basis means nothing to most of us, at least to 94% of the sample.  Because if you believe that you’re going to rise from the dead, you can live like it, right here and now.

Peter and John hit the ground running when they hear about the empty tomb, just like today’s American society.  Kind of the reaction that most of us have in our daily lives, we wake up in the morning and we often hit the ground running, without stopping to think about why, or where, or what it all means.  In general we can’t stand silence, we have difficulties coping with quietude… while we claim we want tranquility, we often get anxious because we’re not “doing something”…. sometimes to the point of pain out of fear about what is going to happen in the future..  pain that comes from not putting the whole thing into a larger context in which the Resurrection of Christ is not just intellectually accepted as true but activated by the way we live… through the capacity to grow in love, which most of us know intuitively that it has an effect in our lives.  When we are in love, we get emotional and this is exactly why Mary is the first one to see Christ… because Peter and John, like most men, were living in their heads… while Mary in her capacity to love has the emotional ability to connect with Christ, by whom we identify our own resurrection.  We may or may not genuinely accept the reality of the Resurrection… but whether we realize it or not, we hope that it is going to happen to us.

If you want to celebrate this Easter different than perhaps others, open your hearts and not just your heads to the message of a redeeming Christ who demonstrates his love for us by giving us the hope of immortality.  Our mortgages, our jobs, our problems with all sorts of family members (children, parents, in-laws, remote relatives, etc.) whom we dislike or don’t get along with or don’t speak to and the neighbors and acquaintances that we despise, all that is related to the inability to see the loving Christ open himself to us in an act of immortality.  Opening one’s heart is difficult because we think that if we do that, we’re going to get hurt… but unless we take the responsibility for the possibility of being hurt, this life retains little meaning… and we get to those places we’re so afraid of, which we can symbolized by the empty tomb… the only thing that makes that suffering and pain and anxiety worthwhile is that the empty tomb means that Christ is risen.  The empty tomb of our lives has to be filled with something risen to make our lives make sense!

On the broader subject of faith, today’s Miami Herald reports on the front page about a University of Miami researcher suggesting that “people of all faiths, by a sizeable margin do better in school, live longer, have more satisfying marriages and are generally happier than their non believing peers”.  The complete story can be read at http://www.miamiherald.com/486/story/995989.html

Talking about hope of resurrection… there was an older lady whose husband had died a few months ago and she had not been out to visit the cemetery.  This couple had a very difficult marriage… they had made it but it was sort of the kind of relationship where they fought every day… getting along by fighting… as a way of communicating.  Of course when one of them dies, the other one always feels guilty… so they’re especially devoted to going to the cemetery.  While she was standing in front of the tomb one could see over her shoulder that the tombstone had something written on top of it:  “Rest in peace …”   and as you got closer you could see that at the bottom it read: “… until we meet again”.

May the smile (or loud laughter) enlighten your heart and open it for the love of the resurrected Christ!  Happy Easter!

The complete text of the readings can be found at http://scriptures-my-journey-oflife-andfaith.blogspot.com/2009/04/easter-sunday.html

With God’s Love and Blessings,

Rainer

Palm Sunday of the Lord's Passion

Dear All,

My child recollections of Palm Sunday are about incredible swing in mood.  I have memories of great joy during the entrance procession.  The Gospel of Mark telling us the secretive story about the two disciples fetching the not yet broken in colt and then Jesus’ triumphant entrance in Jerusalem with the people crying out “Hosanna! Blessed is he who comes in the name of the Lord!  Blessed is the kingdom of our father David that is to come!” is followed by a glorious entrance into the church with people waiving branches.  Incidentally, “Hosanna” is the Greek rendition of the Hebrew phrase Hoshi’a-na which means “Lord, grant salvation” that comes from Psalm 118 recited during the Jewish Feast of Tabernacles.  The people were celebrating the Lord’s entrance spreading cloaks and leafy branches on the road.  From these leafy branches comes our tradition of palm leaves, that are blessed with holy water during the entrance into the church, we take into our homes.

While I was ready for a big celebratory mass, I remember when I was a child to be wondering why the First Reading had a sad undertone.  The passage is from one of the Servant Songs from the Prophet Isaiah.  In our Christian tradition Jesus is understood as the fulfillment of the prophecies of the suffering servant, who speaks seemingly resigned to the suffering he experiences.  The servant is a disciple speaking the word of the Lord to those who are weary and receiving guidance from the Lord each morning.  He is faithful despite those who mistreat and do harm to him.  He does not despair, even in the midst of his suffering, for he acknowledges the Lord as his help and protector during times of trial.

My mood swung into total sadness during the Gospel account of the Lord’s passion.  Long before the Gospels were ever put into writing, they were told as stories and that is how they took shape.  The earliest and most frequently told story was about Jesus’ death, about that last hours of his life on the surface of this earth.  There are nine scenes in Mark’s Narrative:

·         Jesus’ anointing with perfumed oil at the House of Simon the leper, in Bethany.

·         The last supper foretelling his betrayal and instituting the Eucharist at a place shown to two of his disciples by a man carrying a jar of water.

·         Arrest in the Garden of Gethsemane (after three of his closest disciples, Peter, James and John fell asleep several times when Jesus went off to pray, accepting God’s will after asking for the cup to be taken away from him).

·         Jesus on trial before the Jewish Sanhedrin

·         Denials of Peter (“Before the cock crows twice you will deny me three times”).

·         Trial before Pilate and Mocking of Pilate’s soldiers.

·         The way of the Cross to the place of Golgotha, which translated means Place of the Skull.

·         The Death of Jesus (Mark records Jesus’ last words crying out “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?”).

·         The Burial of Jesus.

Today I reflect about my child memories, when Jesus’ death, like the death of any loved one, meant the end of everything, and realize that therein rests the great mystery of the Good News… but that is the Easter story, for which we’ll wait until next Sunday.

We wish you a Blessed Holy Week and pray for you to find some quite moments during the Paschal Triduum. 

The complete text of the readings can be found at: http://scriptures-my-journey-oflife-andfaith.blogspot.com/2009/04/palm-sunday-of-lords-passion.html

With God’s Love and Blessings,

Rainer