Thoughts on the main thing

 The Apostle Paul’s message in First Corinthians 11 is surprisingly direct.

The greatest danger facing the church was not persecution from outside. It was selfishness growing inside. It’s amazing how all the issues that trip Christians up all these years later are the same basic issues that showed up immediately in the early church.

By the time Paul wrote to the believers in Corinth, their gatherings had become divided and unhealthy. Wealthier members gathered in exclusive groups with plenty of food, while poorer believers were left hungry and embarrassed. Instead of reflecting unity, the church reflected the same selfishness and status-seeking found in the world around them.

Paul’s response cuts to the heart of the issue.

The problem was not simply bad behavior.

The church had lost sight of the main thing.

And the main thing, Paul says, is what Jesus Christ truly means in everybody’s everyday life.

Not what people say publicly.

Not what they sing during worship.

But what Christ means when pride, anger, lust, selfishness, or division show up in your life.

To correct them, Paul brings the people back to the table and the Lord’s Supper.

On the night before His crucifixion, Jesus took bread and told His disciples, “This is my body, which is for you.” The bread symbolized that Christ Himself becomes the source of life for His people. Christians are not meant to live by self-effort, but through dependence on Him.

Then Jesus lifted the cup, representing His blood and the new covenant. The cup symbolized the death of the old self-centered life so that a new life could emerge.

That is the heart of the Christian faith:

The old life dies.

The new life begins.

He tells believers not to approach the Lord’s Table without counting on this.

Some in Corinth were treating it like an empty ritual while continuing to live selfishly and dishonestly. Paul says that attitude makes people “guilty of profaning the body and blood of the Lord.”

Paul warns that participating in communion carelessly turns it into an empty ritual. The issue was not become perfect first. No believer lives flawlessly. The issue was honesty.

People were expected to examine themselves truthfully, admit sin openly, repent sincerely, and receive God’s grace.

Paul even says some believers had become weak or sick because they ignored God’s warnings. His point was not that every hardship is punishment, but that God sometimes uses difficulty to slow people down and call them back to Him.

Pain often forces people to ask questions; success rarely does.

Am I drifting?

Am I becoming selfish?

Have I ignored what matters most?

Paul closes with a simple instruction: “Wait for one another.” In other words, pay attention to people. Care for each other. Let everybody catch up, at least in honesty. We all are together in God’s grace. There is no spiritual hierarchy. Act in all cases with love and humility. Wait for each other.

That was the missing ingredient in Corinth.

And it may still be the missing ingredient today.

We Christians can still become distracted by personalities, status, rituals, politics, divisions, preferences, and endless arguments.

But Paul keeps bringing believers back to the same foundation.

The bread.

The cup.

The death of the old life.

The birth of the new.

That is the main thing.

And if the main thing is lost, everything else eventually falls apart.

John Fischer

Thoughts on Mary as our Mother

The month of May allows the Church to honor Mary as the one in whom God’s plan of salvation is perfectly fulfilled through Christ’s transforming work. Her holiness is a cause for hope: what God promises in Christ is not only awaited but already accomplished in her.

In this Sunday’s Gospel, Jesus makes three promises to his disciples: that love for him will be expressed in obedience to his commandments, that the Father will give the Spirit of truth, and that he will not leave us orphans. These promises are already realized in Mary in a unique and exemplary way.



Mary shows that love is not primarily emotion or sentiment, but obedience. Her decisive “yes” at the Annunciation—her fiat, “Let it be done to me according to your word”—is the purest expression of Christ’s teaching: “If you love me, you will keep my commandments.” Her obedience is concrete and total, the offering of herself without reservation to God’s will.

Christ’s promise not to leave us orphans is fulfilled both in the gift of the Holy Spirit and in the gift of Mary as our Mother. From the Cross, Jesus says to the beloved disciple, “Behold, your mother,” entrusting Mary to all who belong to him. In moments of loneliness or abandonment, we can turn to her with confidence, knowing her maternal intercession and care. Marian devotion thus anchors us in the communion of saints, where we are never alone.

The promise of the Spirit of truth is likewise manifested in Mary’s “fullness of grace.” She is the Spirit-filled disciple par excellence, the one who hears the word of God and keeps it. Her life reveals what it means to receive the Spirit fully and remain faithful to the end.

To honor Mary is therefore to honor God’s redemptive work in Christ. To turn to her, Queen of heaven and earth, is to be led more surely to her Son. And in uniting our hearts to her Immaculate Heart, we come to know more deeply the heart of Christ himself—the human heart of God who loved us to the end.

-Fr. Richard Hermes, S.J.

Thoughts on joy

 

Fifth Week of Easter

John 15:9–11

Friends, the two most important words in our Gospel today are joy and commandments. “I have told you this so that my joy may be in you and your joy may be complete.” And “If you keep my commandments, you will remain in my love.” These are not terms that we would readily juxtapose. We usually associate commandments with the carrying out of duty and responsibility, or with moral rectitude, and that normally seems opposed to joy. However, in Thomas Aquinas’s treatment of human behavior, the first question raised is not about law or virtue, but rather joy. Thomas wonders what the nature of true happiness is. What all of us seek, whether we are young or old, Christian or non-Christian, male or female, rich or poor, is joy. The whole point of the moral life is to make us happy. So how do we become happy? Thomas’s answer, which is in line with the great tradition, is through the proper ordering of one’s desire, through learning how to desire the right things and in the right way. And that’s precisely what Jesus commands us to do.  Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on the incarnation

 

Fifth Week of Easter

John 15:1–8

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus declares that he is the vine and we are the branches who must remain in him. If we ourselves do not participate in who Jesus was, we miss the spiritual power that he meant to unleash.  If John’s Gospel is any indication, Jesus does not want merely worshippers but followers, or better, participants: “I am the vine, you are the branches; remain in me; my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink; whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” The beautifully organic images that John presents are meant, it seems to me, to communicate the life-changing power of the incarnation: the Logos became flesh, our flesh, so that we might allow the divine energy to come to birth in us.  Much of this is summed up in the oft-repeated patristic adage that God became human that humans might become God. Many of our great theologians and spiritual masters speak unselfconsciously of “divinization”—that is to say, a sharing in the symbiosis that is the incarnation—as the proper goal of human life.   Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on discernment

 

Seeing in a New Light

From: Discernment: Reading the Signs of Daily Life

When Christian community provides sacred space and times for discernment, we will gradually be lifted up into God's dwelling place and come to see ourselves, our neighbors, and our world in a new light. This “seeing” does not require intellectual knowledge, articulated insight, or a concrete opinion. No, it is a sharing in the knowledge of God's heart, a deeper wisdom, a new way of living and loving.

Reflection Question: Where do you find sacred space in community for discernment?

“You will bring them in and plant them on the mountain of your inheritance— the place, Lord, you made for your dwelling, the sanctuary, Lord, your hands established.” - Exodus 15: 17

Thoughts on prayer

 

Memorial of Saint Athanasius, Bishop and Doctor of the Church

John 14:7–14

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus says, “Whatever you ask in my name, I will do, so that the Father may be glorified in the Son. If you ask anything of me in my name, I will do it.”  When we pray in the name of Jesus, we are relying on his intimacy with the Father, trusting that the Father will listen to his Son who pleads on our behalf. In the Letter to the Hebrews, we hear that Jesus, like us in all things but sin, a fellow sufferer with us, has entered as our advocate into the heavenly court. Risking a crude comparison, it is as though Jesus is our man in City Hall, a representative for us in the place of ultimate power.  Mind you, this analogy breaks down in the measure that the Father must not be construed as a reluctant and distracted executive, annoyed by the petty appeals of his constituents, which are mediated by a persistent lobbyist. For the author of the Letter to the Hebrews, Jesus has become our advocate, precisely because the Father wanted him to assume this role for us; therefore, presumably, the Father delights in hearing us call upon him through his Son.  Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on the month of May

The month of May, dedicated to Mary, begins with a feast in honor of Saint Joseph the Worker. At every Mass, in the commemoration of the saints, Mary and “blessed Joseph, her spouse,” are named together. This liturgical pairing reminds us that the mission of Saint Joseph, Guardian of the Redeemer and universal patron of the Church, is inseparably linked to the mission of the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God.

Joseph’s place next to Mary in the Eucharistic Prayer highlights his closeness to her within the Holy Family and draws us into the incarnational mystery of God’s plan for our salvation. The Eternal Word takes flesh in the womb of the Virgin Mary and is nurtured, protected, and raised in Joseph’s home at Nazareth. Mary and Joseph, in distinct roles yet one household of faith, become humble servants of the Incarnation.

Since the mid-20th century, the Church has celebrated this dimension of Joseph’s life in the feast of Saint Joseph the Worker, established by Pope Pius XII as a response to May Day in communist countries. The intention was to reaffirm that ordinary human labor possesses dignity, because it participates in God’s own creative work. Joseph, a man of manual labor, knew the meaning of daily toil. Yet his greatest work was entrusted to him not in the workshop, but in the home of Nazareth: to care for and raise the Redeemer of the world.

God’s saving plan unfolds through the human family. It passes through the fiat of Mary and the quiet obedience of Joseph. That same plan continues in our lives—in our fidelity to daily responsibilities, patient work, and the hidden opportunities to love and serve God each day. So it is fitting that we begin the month of Mary under the patronage of her blessed spouse, the just man who draws us into the hidden life of Nazareth, where daily life is lived with Jesus at its center, as in the home of Joseph and Mary.

Fr. Richard Hermes, S.J.