Sunday 13 March 2005
5th Sunday of Lent - I am the Resurrection and the Life
Today's gospel is about Our Lord's raising Lazarus from the dead. It's also, the key in the search for the meaning of our Old Testament reading Ezekiel may have been a young priest taken to Babylon in Chaldea (modern Iraq), along with 10,000 Jews, after the siege of Jerusalem in 598BC. There he was called by God to predict the total destruction of his country, but also its eventual, but definite, resurrection. His prophecy is famous for the vision of a valley of dry bones, representing the destruction of Israel. But bones are, as we know from Auschwitz and the Tsunami, the only human remains that survive death. So thanks to Ezekiel a theology developed about the remnant, the remains of God's people, coming back to life!Today's verses from Ezekiel (Ezekiel 37:12-14) are full of hope. Before the Chaldeans attacked them, the Jews had destroyed themselves by splitting into two kingdoms following Solomon's death. Many societies die from within before natural disasters overtake them. The seed of national spiritual death had been planted. Israel couldn't fulfill its mission to the nations while she, herself, was disunited. Even today, Israel is the key to Middle East and World peace! All the prophets had called for reform, again and again. They planted the seeds of resurrection.
Some commentators see the same process occurring throughout Church history. There's unfaithfulness one generation, a return to Gospel values the next. How does our diocese, our parish measure up?
Thanks to our religious educators, most of us are familiar with the Gospel story of Lazarus. 'I am the Resurrection and the Life'. This statement in John's version is at the centre of the Gospel of 'the raising of Lazarus' (John 11:1-45). To believe Jesus is Messiah and Son of God is already to have within oneself eternal life, which death cannot destroy. Jesus himself was under a death threat from the religious authorities in Jerusalem. They couldn't easily carry out that threat, unless Jesus came to them, in Jerusalem, where they had power through strong organisation. Jesus avoided them, as long as He could, by staying on the far side of the Jordan. But, he broke cover to visit his three friends, Martha, Mary and Lazarus in Bethany a short distance from Jerusalem. For John the Gospel writer, Lazarus represented and personified the person wounded by sin who is in the process of dying, spiritually, unless Jesus calls him to life. This noticeable miracle only foretells the real resurrection, which does not just prolong life but transforms our whole being. This is a spiritual resurrection, but physical, too. It begins when faith moves a person to give up wrong ways of living to become open to receiving God's own life. Australian Catholics, inheritors of this revealed truth, feel sad, like Jesus at Lazarus' graveside, when confronted with secular society's totally inadequate, and soul-destroying, culture of death and the Church's occasional lapse into self-destructive behaviour.
Sunday 20 March 2005
Passion Sunday - Local churches must be open and alert to God's spirit
The trials and tribulations of Jesus, as narrated in today's Passion Gospel, are the key to understanding the first reading from Isaiah. This prophet is the most important of them all. Jesus and his disciples often quoted from his writings.
Isaiah's own words are found in chapters 1-39 of the book bearing his name. The second part of the book, namely chapters 40-66, brings together the words of other prophets who wrote a century and a half later.
In today's passage (Isaiah 50:4-7), the speaker may be the prophet himself or a minority group of exiled believers, struggling and suffering to keep the true faith in the midst of awful loneliness and alienation. The invader had rolled through Israel, the northern kingdom and turned on the south, Judah, and its capital, Jerusalem. Miraculously, Jerusalem was saved. Isaiah insisted God would save the loyal, spiritually alert and robust servant (sometimes an individual, sometimes a faithful minority group). Such a person (or group) will be able to encourage others to stand firm because he, himself, will listen 'every morning' and 'keep his ears open'. JP2 does it. So does a mother or lover. To sustain others who are tired, spiritually, we must be trained by God: the true prophet is a prayerful person, open to God's own spirit.
In our own times, Catholics are called by God to encourage our fellow Australians, themselves spiritually tired. Local churches must be open and alert to God's spirit. Prayer and worship must be hotly pursued in case organization and business matters assume top billing. Each version of Jesus' ordeal and death has a particular, special point to make. Matthew's account (Matthew 27:11-54) gives us the beginnings of an elaborate theology of fulfillment. For Matthew, nothing involving Jesus was accidental. It formed a destined part of God's plan for each and every one of us. So true is this, that he was able to make of the Passion the end of the old era and the beginning of the era of the Church. The collapse of the old economy of salvation was heralded, according to Matthew, by the torn curtain in the Temple, the arrival of the spiritual age by the earthquake. Similarly the Boxing Day Tsunami could be the beginning of a new era of tolerance in the Indian Ocean. The conversion of the centurion was the first good result, pointing to the conversion of unlikely people throughout the ages. The priests, when they handed over Jesus' body to the disciples, showed they were giving up spiritual leadership, leaving the Church to be the sign of Christ within secular society. For Matthew, Jesus had won the title of Messiah by fulfilling the scriptures. It was Matthew's unique mission, as a converted sinner himself and old time religionist, to present to other 'old guard' Jews that they need look no further than Jesus of Nazareth for the fulfillment of genuine Judaism. After the Resurrection, he would write his version of the Gospel for convert Jews. They would need constant reassurance that they had kept the best of the old faith by accepting Jesus as Messiah of the God of Abraham and David and Moses.
We Vatican 2 propagandists didn't reassure strongly enough the 'old time' religionists between 1955 and 1975.
Sunday 27 March 2005
Easter Sunday - Christians must experience the emptiness of the world, secular society
Faith and hope in Jesus as Messiah didn't have an easy passage in the apostles' minds and hearts. While He was alive up to his death on the cross, that is the apostles wavered from belief to its very opposite. They never, at least, gave up trying to believe.Our first reading (Acts 10: 34, 37-43) illustrates that point perfectly, because it shows Peter, a waverer until the finale on Calvary, presenting himself with such confidence and in public, that an explanation is called for. The explanation, that Jesus is alive and influencing his church even now is the core of the Acts of the Apostles and the Book of Apocalypse. That's not the only point made in today's reading. There's another God has no favourites! The leaders of the early Church of Jerusalem, ie, Peter, James and John had naturally expected Christianity (the Way as it was first called) to be confined to the Jews. The Spirit intended otherwise. Cornelius, captain of the Italian Battalion based in Caesarea, himself not Jewish, called for Peter to visit him. Such a visit broke Jewish ritual laws. Imagine a gentile US Marine in a Baghdad mosque! Peter rightly discerned that the Spirit was using him to question Jewish prohibitions, even regarding non-kosher foods! Jesus had previously put the Sabbath law in its place, now Peter was to do likewise with discrimination involving ritual cleanliness. The reaction of the Jerusalem Christians shows us what a revelation was the baptism of Cornelius. If we're blessed, our own parishes will open up to neighbourhood outsiders.
John's gospel, today (John 20:1-9), is all about the empty tomb. It's just part of the story of the apostles' pilgrimage of faith in the Risen Lord. Up to this time, God had been referred to as Lord. From this earliest time in Church history, the Father will be called God and Jesus will be called 'Lord' to show the Church's earliest grasp of the unique divine relationship between Father and Son.
Mary Magdalene has been called 'apostle to the apostles' for her unique role in bringing good news from the tomb to Peter and others. She was the first to find the tomb empty. She was the first to whom Jesus appeared, according to the scriptures. (To be honest, this doesn't impress all Catholics). Another salient point is that Peter, himself, had to experience the emptiness of the tomb before he, too, was accorded the comfort of a personal encounter with the Risen Lord.
There is, of course, a lesson here for the Church in every generation. Christians must experience the emptiness of the world, secular society. Maybe, even, the emptiness of church. Spare a thought for Christians, following vocations, exercising missions, within secular society. We need to support them with prayer and pastoral care. They suffer deeply when confronted with the spiritual emptiness of public life. Even some parishes may experience, hopefully temporarily, the death of God among themselves. Someone, or ones, will always be called by the Spirit to 'roll back the stone' so the Risen Lord may again take His place at the centre of such local churches.
Read this Sunday's reflection or reflections from other Sundays by Father Maguire, or