Category: Easter

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4th Week of Easter

Let’s be honest now – most homilies/sermons, whatever you wish to call them, are forgotten!.

There is the rare occasion when one might just be worth recalling, talking about in the car on the drive home, or over the morning cuppa, or perhaps telling to another.

Goodness, I have been offering such homilies/sermons now for 44 years and I cannot remember what I said!

Until I began these postings, I would never write out a sermon. The temptation then is to file it away and use it again.

Preaching from the Yellow Pages!

However, I am a great gatherer of stories that might provide a ‘stepping off point’ for my own and for others reflections.

I recall a time when I was studying in the US, and was present at a Sunday Mass in the Diocese of Trenton, NJ. The Gospel of the day was the gospel we proclaim today, about the Good Shepherd. (Jn. 10: 27 -30). It is, somewhat surprisingly no more than four verses long, however further proof that the best things come in small packages! The homilist began with these words:

“There was a practice among shepherds in Israel that existed at the time of Jesus and is still in use in parts today that needs to be understood in order to appreciate what Jesus says about God as the Good Shepherd. Sometimes very early on in the life of a lamb, if a shepherd senses that this particular lamb is going to be a congenital stray and forever be drifting away from the herd, he deliberately breaks its leg so that he has to carry the lamb until its leg is healed. By that time, the lamb becomes so attached to the shepherd that it never strays again!”

Through quite an extensive search I have found no evidence that such a practice ever existed, and in truth, for me anyway, sounds rather barbaric.

However, it has provided me with some worthwhile reflection. I am of the period when “you put on your Sunday best” to go to Church on a Sunday (and of course Holy Days of Obligation). The ‘dressing up’ I consider an important symbol – a symbol of bringing to your  ‘good self’, your ‘washed and polished self’, a self that would ‘prove acceptable’ in the presence of your God

When I read and reflect on the Gospel stories, I notice it is the broken people who come to Jesus, (deaf, dumb, blind, lame, issue of blood, demon-possessed, and many more). They arrive ‘in their brokenness’ and leave healed, some even leave their sleeping mat where it lies.!

Maybe there is a deliberately “broken bit” in me that actually is my conduit into my relationship with Jesus.

I, through my silly theology have desperately tried to hide away this “broken bit” to present an acceptable and pleasing face to Jesus.

The question may well be: will I let Jesus carry me, with my broken pieces, until I am healed?

Today is the World Day of Prayer for Vocations. Let us not reduce this day of prayer to a day of prayer for a select few discerning a call to the religious life, or to ordained ministry. Let us be broad and expansive in our prayer. Let us pray for a listening ear and a generous heart for women and men throughout our world, attentive to the vocational call of the Good Shepherd – a call to the single life, to life lived in the commitment of married love, to a life lived through the vocation of religious life, to a life lived through the vocation of ministerial priesthood. Let each of us hear again the foundational call of Christian women and men through the Baptismal grace which names us daughters and sons of God.

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3rd Sunday of Easter

“Do you love me?” Jesus asks Peter.

Jesus asks Peter the question three times and some commentators suggest the three questions may mimic the threefold denial of Peter in the courtyard as Jesus is led to his trial, ample food for reflection.

Personally, I consider Peter very lucky to get away with three questions, I am being asked that daily!

However, I wish to draw our attention to a detail that might get overlooked in our shoreline activity.

“Have you caught anything, friends?” Jesus calls out, and when the answer comes back a resolute, “no”, his call is to throw the net out to the right side. There is a similar instance in Luke’s Gospel (Lk. 5: 1 -11).

In the past, ships used to have rudders on their centre line, and they were controlled using a steering oar. As it is the case today, back then as well the majority of the people were right-handed. Thus, as most of the sailors were right handed, the steering oar used to control the ship was located over or through the right side of the stern.

For this reason, most of the seafarers were calling the right side as the ‘steering side’, which later was known as ‘starboard’. The word ‘starboard’ is the combination of two old words: stéor (meaning ‘steer’) and bord (meaning ‘the side of a boat’).

The left side is called ‘port’ because ships with steerboards or star boards would dock at ports on the opposite side of the steerboard or starboard. As the right side was the steerboard side or star board side, the left side was the port side. This was decided so that the dock would not interfere with operating the steerboard or starboard.

When casting out and hauling in fishing nets, the left (port side) would be used to prevent entanglement with the steering.

What Jesus is inviting/challenging the disciples in the boat to, is to do the complete opposite to what all their training and skills have imbued in them from a lifetime on the water – risk entanglement, risk losing the ability to steer!

As our Church continues in its process of Synodality, maybe todays Gospel has a strong image and metaphor for us all, namely dare to risk entanglement, to risk the inability to steer! Also, the port side is precisely that – the side nearest home, home being (for most) a place of security, safety and warmth. Jesus’, call from the shoreline is to do the exact opposite – to go fishing in places of insecurity, in unsafe places, in places without the comfort of warmth.

 

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2nd Sunday of Easter

If you are looking for a way to idle away a couple of hours (or more if you are really keen), in your internet search engine type in an entry that goes something like, “the Resurrection of Christ in Western Art.”

There will, of course, be many, many entries, however, they will have substantial similarities with each other, and that similarity is that Christ is ‘going up’ and away, and is usually alone; with those daring to hang around scared out of their wits.

An example is the oil painting by Anthony Van Dyck.

Painted c 1631 – 32, the oil hangs in The Wadsworth Atheneum an art museum in Hartford, Connecticut.

If, on the other hand, you do a similar search and change just one word a great secret is revealed.

The change is from ‘Western’ to ‘Orthodox’.

The secret, at least for many Western Christians is hidden in the other half of the universal church, in places like Syria, Turkey, Greece, and Egypt; the Eastern Orthodox.

In the Eastern Orthodox tradition, Easter is not usually painted with a solitary Jesus rising from the dead.

Jesus is always surrounded by crowds of people—both haloed and unhaloed.

In fact, in traditional icons, Jesus is pulling people out of Hades.

Hades is not the same as hell, although we put the two words together, and so we grew up reciting in the creed that “Jesus descended into hell.”

Instead, Hades is simply the place of the dead.

There’s no punishment or judgment involved. It’s just where a soul waits for God. But we neglected that interpretation.

So, the Eastern Church was probably much closer to the truth that the resurrection is a message about humanity.

It’s a message about history.

It’s a corporate message, and it includes you and me and everyone else. If that isn’t true, it’s no wonder that we basically lost interest.

An example is a fresco in the Chora Church in Istanbul, Turkey, (c 14th C).

Take a moment to look at the different energy of the persons in both illustrations; in the Van Dyck oil, the Risen Christ is heading up and away from; those present are cowering not in awe, but rather in fear.

In the Orthodox fresco, Christ is descending, and persons are clamouring for a touch, to be taken hold up, to be lifted out of that which holds them in place, inert.

Allow the Risen Christ to ”descend” to those places in my life which hold me bound; reach out, and be taken by the hand to a new and life-giving place.

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Easter Sunday

In the third book of JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings trilogy there is a scene that captures something of the joy experienced by the disciples when the resurrected Jesus appeared to them.

The realm of the Dark Lord, Sauron has been destroyed, and against all hope the world has been saved, at least for the time being.

Frodo, the hobbit, and his faithful servant and friend, Samwise, have also been saved. Sam wakes up, smells wonderful perfumes and sees Gandalf, the wizard he thought was dead. Sam gasps,

“Gandalf! I thought you were dead! But then I thought I was dead myself. Is everything sad going to come untrue?”

“A great Shadow has departed,” said Gandalf, and then he laughed, and the sound was like music, or like water in a parched land; and as he listened the thought came to Sam that he had not heard laughter, the pure sound of merriment, for days upon days without count. It fell upon his ears like the echo of all the joys he had ever known. But he himself burst into tears. Then, as sweet rain will pass down a wind of spring and the sun will shine out the clearer, his tear ceased, and his laughter welled up, and laughing he sprang from his bed.

“How do you feel?” he cried. “Well, I don’t know how to say it. I feel, I feel” – he waved his arms in the air – “I feel like the spring after winter, and the sun on the leaves; and like trumpets and harps and all the songs I have ever heard!”

Indeed, the feast we celebrate today does feel like Spring after Winter, and the sun on the leaves. “He is Risen.”