Thoughts on Devine Mercy Sunday

 

Whoever lived through the twentieth century would have witnessed World War I and World War II, the Great Depression, the Cold War, the rise of communism, the decline of faith, the legalization of abortion, numerous genocides, and a host of other tragedies.  It thus stands as one of the darkest centuries in all of human history.  We should not be surprised then to hear that Heaven did not leave us without guidance or hope. In 1917, Our Lady appeared to the visionaries in Fatima.  She warned them of the impending travesties which would take place if the world did not repent and take refuge in her Immaculate Heart.  In this way, she gave us the warning, the cure of praying the Rosary and faithfully undertaking penances, and promised the triumph of her Immaculate Heart and Christ’s Sacred Heart. Additionally, in the first half of the same century, our Lord Jesus Christ appeared numerous times to St. Faustina Kowalska.

Throughout these visions, our Lord graced her with the Chaplet of Divine Mercy and the Divine Mercy image.  Christ knew that the world would be in desperate need of His mercy, and rather than leaving us to despair, He gave us the unshakeable promise of His love. If we heed Our Lady’s advice and turn to the Lord through prayer and penance, if we die to ourselves, then we may also enjoy the glory and victory of Christ’s resurrection.  It is by being washed in the blood of Our Savior which He so generously poured out for us that we can be cleansed from the sin and disorder which plagues our hearts and this world.  He is our only hope, but He is a most sure and beautiful hope! For this reason, the Church has decided that we should end the Octave of Easter today by joyfully celebrating Divine Mercy.  Let us then hopefully join our hearts in this prayer: “Eternal God, in whom mercy is endless and the treasury of compassion — inexhaustible, look kindly upon us and increase Your mercy in us, that in difficult moments we might not despair nor become despondent, but with great confidence submit ourselves to Your holy will, which is Love and Mercy itself. Amen.” In the Hearts of Jesus and Mary, Christopher P. Wendt International Director Confraternity of Our Lady of Fatima

More thoughts on Doubting Thomas

 

Second Sunday of Easter (Divine Mercy Sunday)

John 20:19–31

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Thomas says that he will not believe in the Lord’s resurrection unless he puts his finger in Jesus’s nailmarks and his hand in Jesus’s side. Thomas is a saint especially suitable for our time. Modernity has been marked by two great qualities: skepticism and empiricism, the very qualities we can discern in Thomas. And when the risen Jesus reappears, he invites the doubter to look, see, and touch. But then that devastating line: “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” If we stubbornly said—even in the area of science—that we will accept only what we can clearly see and touch and control, we wouldn’t know much about reality. This helps us to better understand Jesus’s words to Thomas. It is not that we who have not seen and have believed are settling for a poor substitute for vision. No; we are being described as blessed, more blessed than Thomas. God is doing all sorts of things that we cannot see, measure, control, fully understand. But it is an informed faith that allows one to fall in love with such a God. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on Doubting Thomas

On the Octave of Easter, this 2^nd Sunday of Easter, we always hear the Gospel of Doubting Thomas.

Thomas would not believe the testimony of the other Apostles, as he defiantly proclaimed, until he put his "finger into the nail marks" and his "hand into [Jesus'] side." To believe that Jesus was alive, Thomas needed to see and even to touch Jesus. And he does finally believe, becoming the very first of the Apostles to proclaim the Faith of the Church:  "My Lord and my God."

           What about us who have not seen and touched the Resurrected Lord? Why do we believe, and what do we believe concerning our Lord and the assertions of our religion? Do we believe only what the Bible says?

At the end of today’s Gospel, St. John says that “Jesus did many other signs in the presence of His disciples that are not written in this book.” In other words, Jesus said and did many things that are not recorded in the Bible.

           “Divine Revelation,” which means the truth God has revealed about Himself, is more than the Bible.

Divine Revelation is transmitted to us in two ways: through Sacred Scripture, the Bible, but also through what is called Sacred Tradition.

           It is Sacred Tradition that St. John is alluding to when he says that Jesus did many other things not specifically recorded in the Bible. After all, how could any book, or any number of volumes, contain everything? Sacred Tradition means the truths not contained in the Bible but still revealed by God through Jesus and the Apostles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit. Many of these truths are from the preaching and teaching of Jesus and the Apostles that have been handed down in the oral tradition.

Some examples of Sacred Tradition include:

·        The fact that Scripture itself draws from Sacred Tradition, because – think about it – the teachings of Jesus and the Apostles pre-date the Bible. It was the Church that had to decide what would be included in the canon of Sacred Scripture. The Church came before the Bible. The Gospel of Mark dates to around A.D. 70, and the First letter to the Thessalonians was written around A.D. 52. 

Other examples of Sacred Tradition include:

·        Immaculate Conception of the Blessed Virgin Mary

·      Assumption of BVM

·     Perpetual virginity of BVM (always a virgin, before and after Jesus’ birth; no other children)

·       Role of Pope, bishops, priests in Christian ministry

·        Infallibility of Pope teaching officially on faith and morals

·        The understanding of the sacraments and their place in Christian life

           Our Catholic Faith relies on the Bible, but not only the Bible. Much of the truth of what the Church teaches comes from Sacred Tradition, which together with Sacred Scripture, forms what is called the one “Deposit of Faith.” It is this Deposit of Faith that comprises all of Divine Revelation: the truths we must believe and the principles of conduct that we must live. The Deposit of Faith is taught, interpreted, and handed down by the teaching authority of the Church, the “Magisterium,” which is guided by the Holy Spirit and given to the bishops (successors of the Apostles) united to the Pope (successor of St. Peter).

           Thomas’s faith was formed and made firm by his seeing and touching the Resurrected Lord, which we read in today’s Gospel, from the Bible. But our Catholic Faith is formed and made firm by the entire Deposit of Faith, Sacred Scripture and Sacred Tradition, the truths not contained in the Bible but still revealed by God through Jesus and the Apostles under the inspiration of the Holy Spirit.

           May we always read and revere the Holy Bible. But may we also revere the teachings of the Church handed down in God’s gift to us of Sacred Tradition.    

                                       

Fr. Don Saunders, SJ

Thoughts on the risen Jesus

 

Thursday within the Octave of Easter

Luke 24:35–48

Friends, in today’s Gospel, Jesus appears alive again to his followers. Upon seeing him, “they were startled and terrified.” They are terrified because the one they abandoned and betrayed and left for dead is back—undoubtedly for revenge! Luke’s risen Jesus does two things in the presence of his shocked followers. The first thing is that he shows them his wounds. This move is a reiteration of the judgment of the cross: Don’t forget, he tells them, what the world did when the Author of life appeared. But he does something else; he says, “Shalom”—“Peace be with you.” In this, he opens up a new spiritual world and thereby becomes our Savior. From ancient creation myths to the Rambo and Dirty Harry movies, the principle is the same: Order, destroyed through violence, is restored through a righteous exercise of greater violence. And then there is Jesus. The terrible disorder of the cross (the killing of the Son of God) is addressed not through an explosion of divine vengeance but through a radiation of divine love. When Christ confronts those who contributed to his death, he speaks words not of retribution but of reconciliation and compassion. Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on the Resurrection

 

Tuesday within the Octave of Easter

John 20:11–18

Friends, in today’s Gospel, we find Mary Magdalene weeping by the tomb of the risen Lord. She then sees Jesus and doesn’t recognize him immediately. In a wonderful detail, she thinks he’s the gardener. In the book of Genesis, God, the gardener of Eden, walked with his creatures in easy friendship. Sin, the sundering of the loop of grace, put an end to those intimate associations. Throughout the history of salvation, God had been trying to reestablish friendship. Through the death of Jesus, through that tomb placed right in the garden, he accomplished his goal. So now, in Christ, he appears again as a gardener. “Jesus said to her, ‘Mary!’ She turned and said to him in Hebrew, ‘Rabbouni.’” Then Jesus says: “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father. But go to my brothers.” The not clinging has to do with the call to proclaim. The idea is not to hang on to Jesus but to announce what he has accomplished. The content of the proclamation is, once again, that we have become the intimates of God: “My Father and your Father . . . my God and your God.” Bishop Robert Barron

Thoughts on God's will

 

Doing God's Will

From: The Inner Voice of Love: A Journey Through Anguish to Freedom

Try to give your agenda to God. Keep saying, “Your will be done, not mine.” Give every part of your heart and your time to God and let God tell you what to do, where to go, when and how to respond. God does not want you to destroy yourself. Exhaustion, burn out, and depression are not signs that you were doing God's will. God is gentle and loving. God desires to give you a deep sense of safety and God's love. Once you have allowed yourself to experience that love fully, you will be better able to discern who you are being sent to in God's name.

Reflection Question: What would it look like today to surrender your agenda to God and trust that God's will leads not to exhaustion, but to love and peace?

“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light.”   - Matthew 11: 28 - 30

Thoughts on Easter Sunday

Alleluia! Christ is risen!

 

Those four words have been the heartbeat of the Church for two millennia, proclaimed in cathedrals and whispered in prisons, sung at dawn by monks and shouted in joy by new converts stepping out of the baptismal waters. They are the words that change everything — not only about what we believe, but about who we are and how we are to live. The resurrection of Jesus is not a coda to a tragic story. It helps us to understand the whole story, in a way that rewrites ours.

 

I find myself returning, every Easter, to the scene the Church gives us in John's Gospel this morning. Mary Magdalene arrives at the tomb while it is still dark — and finds the stone rolled away. She then runs. Peter and the Beloved Disciple then run.

 

There is something gloriously undignified about the image of two grown men sprinting through the early morning streets of Jerusalem because something has happened that — despite Jesus’ multiple prophecies that he would rise on the third day — dramatically defied their expectation.

 

The Beloved Disciple reaches the tomb first, peers in, and sees the burial cloths lying there. Then Peter enters, and John tells us something quietly extraordinary — he saw and believed. He did not yet fully understand, but he believed. The empty tomb and the burial cloths were enough for love to outrun grief, and faith to outpace explanation.

 

That same invitation is extended to us this morning. We, too, are asked to enter — to step past what we think we know, past our doubts and our losses and our unanswered questions — and to believe. The tomb is empty. Jesus is not there. He is risen, and the world has not been the same since.

 

The Church exists because those first witnesses could not stay silent, and because every generation since has found, in their own encounter with the Risen Lord, the same irresistible impulse to share what they have seen.

 

You and I are part of that long, unbroken chain of witness. Together, through the work of The Pontifical Mission Societies, we are part of how the news of Easter morning reaches men and women who have not yet heard it — in the highlands of Papua New Guinea, in the river communities of the Amazon, in the ancient cities of the Middle East, in Africa, Asia and every corner of the earth.

 

Christ has not just risen, but is very much alive, and journeys with us in time. The world is not the same. Neither are we.

 

I pray that, this Easter, God will fill you with a joy that does not fade, and that the Risen Lord will make himself known to you in the Holy Eucharist, in his Church, in the faces of those you love, and in every unexpected moment of grace that awaits you in the fifty days of the Easter Season that lie ahead.

 

Happy Easter!

Monsignor Roger J. Landry