Sunday Reading Reflections:

May 31st, 2009
by
Larry Gillick, S.J.
Deglman Center for Ignatian Spirituality

PREPRAYING

“I will pour out my spirit upon all,. Your sons and daughters shall prophesy, your elderly shall dream dreams, and your young see visions.” Joel 3, 1-2

PRE-PRAYERING

We pray for our making Jesus larger and more visible in this fractured and shrinking world.. We pray that all Christians become more the church based on the excitement and preaching of the early apostles. We pray that the Spirit of the One God will mend Christ’s splintered body and that all who speak various languages will one day understand each other more compassionately.

We need an inflation, an expanding economy of God’s Spirit and a more personal investment with high interest and great returns, that our world will be God’s kingdom.

REFLECTION

Fifty days have passed since the Jews, now gathered together for the second great feast of the agricultural year, had celebrated the first feast which is the Passover or Feast of the Unleavened Bread. The last of these will be a final harvest thanksgiving. Fifty days have passed for the spring wheat and grains to have ripened. Now these “first fruits” are presented before the Lord. All the farmers of this agricultural community acknowledge their radical dependence upon God’s care in sending rain and sun.

Luke pictures the raining down of God’s Spirit within the context of this Jewish agricultural festival. They are gathered to send up their prayers for all that has grown in their fields. God sends the Spirit of growth so that there will be even more produce, but of a new kind. The newness is that while the sun and rain bring forth fruit of the fields, the Holy Spirit will bring forth a completion of creation as the ultimate expression of God’s love. The people are gathered to praise and thank God. Luke will picture the Spirit moving them out and beyond the territory of the Jews so as to bless and bring about the final harvest of God’s peace and justice. They all speak different languages, which is a consequence of the Tower of Babble. They will continue speaking their various languages, but the message is to go out from them to all the world.

In today’s Gospel, we hear John’s account of Jesus’ sending, or “breathing” the Holy Spirit upon the Apostles. As in Luke’s account in Acts, there is a gathering. John’s version has the group hiding for fear, but both, upon reception of the Spirit, are blest and then “sent”. Jesus’ breathing the Spirit echoes Genesis’ description of the creating God breathing form out of the abyss of nothingness. For John, the process of creation is to extend God’s peace to the now “deformed” world.

The Holy Spirit comes constantly from the ever-loving Trinity. We are not praying in such a way that maybe God will breathe again upon our creation. We celebrate that we might be open to the Spirits work of giving Christ new dimensions, new visibility and new gestures of revelation within us as individuals and us as God’s people. We are praying in celebration that God is constantly sending the “breath” upon; this is not a maybe. What we do pray is that we may be more open to the Spirit’s creating of us.

We use an expression for those who think too highly of themselves. “That person has an inflated self-image.” What that means literally is that he/she is full of “air”, coming from the Latin word for wind, “flatus”. We might say, “hot air”. “Deflation” means the air has “run out”. What the early Apostles heard sounded like a strong wind and Jesus breathed air upon the hiding eleven. The Spirit was not in-flating, but in-carnating.

Pentecost is a celebration of the fruitfulness of the land, blest by the sun and rain and “breath” of God. In the Christian community, we celebrate how the Spirit, “wind” of God has “in-spirited” human hearts to live “highly” of themselves. The work of the Spirit is that all creation and that includes human beings, radiate, in-flesh Jesus. As the Spirit came upon Mary whose womanhood gave him flesh, so that same Spirit hovers over our bodies that Jesus might take new flesh. We think highly of ourselves all right, but not full of air but Spirit, not totally Jesus yet, but the Spirit is not done with us.

The early Apostles, “air-borne” in a sense, flew outward from hiding into humanity, from amorphous shame into figures of faith. No balloons or blimps are we. This day we re-up for loving the flesh-bound “bone house” that gives Jesus attractiveness to all whom he meets through us. As he went about blest by the Spirit at his anointing, so we do not float, but walk, run, limp, wheelchair, crawl, or sit, and give his light our personal refraction. The Church, as were the first Apostles, is not full of itself, but longs to be freed to inspire God’s good earth to bring forth fruits of holiness not hollowness, substance not emptiness and investments in acts of justice.

“They were all filled with the Holy Spirit, and they spoke of the great things that God had done, alleluia.” Acts 2, 4

Sunday Reading Reflections:

Solemnity of the Ascension of the Lord, Year B
Sunday, May 24, 2009

Acts 1:1-11

Loss is part of the human condition, and death is the most painful manifestation of loss. Today's feast of the Ascension invites us to face that experience of loss in a transformative way.

In Ordinary Time, we celebrate the life and ministry of Jesus. Over the period of Lent and Easter, we have been re-membering his death and resurrection. As we come towards the end of the Easter season, the liturgy draws us into another aspect of the Mystery, that of the presence and absence of the Risen One.

The Lukan Ascension story, as found in today's first reading, presupposes a pre-scientific, three-tiered understanding of the structure of the world. In this ancient view, God is in the heavens above and the prophet Jesus, like the prophet Elijah of old, is caught up into God's realm from whence the Holy Spirit will 'descend' upon God's people. This vertical (up and down) movement is balanced by a horizontal movement: Jesus' family and friends who grieve the loss of their loved one are told not to keep looking up to the heavens. They have work to do: they must return to Jerusalem for the present and be empowered by the Holy Spirit to continue the prophetic ministry of Jesus, to be his witnesses to the ends of the earth. They have to face the fact that the physical loss of Jesus means a new and different sort of presence and that they have a role to play in making him present in their world.

Like us, the early Christians needed time to grasp each dimension of the one great Mystery of God's life in their midst.

Mark 16:15-20

Today's gospel passage receives little attention in commentaries and classes because, along with verses 9-14, it is a much later addition to the original text of Mark's gospel.

The author of these verses is familiar with the similar commission to proclaim the good news to all nations and to baptise in the name of the Trinity, found at the end of Matthew's gospel.

In Mark, the command is to bring the gospel to 'the whole creation', a more inclusive vision than Matthew's.

This is our mission in the 'in between times'. There are also echoes here of John's gospel in the assurance that those who believe will be saved. Jesus continues to be present in the church despite his seeming absence. His return to 'the right hand of God' ensures a different kind of presence, one that enables the believer to continue the healing and re-creative ministry of Jesus through the ages.

by Sr. Veronica Lawson RSM (East Ballarat)

Sunday Reading Reflections:

Sixth Sunday of Easter, Year B
Sunday, May 17, 2009

Acts 10:25-26, 34-35, 44-48

The Spirit of God is poured out on all of God's people, a lesson that some of the earliest Christians were slow to learn and that some of us can be reluctant to accept.

While Acts 9:15 has shown Saul being commissioned to carry the 'name' of Jesus to the Gentiles as well as to the people of Israel, in the Cornelius story Luke wants to affirm the primacy of Peter in accomplishing this mission.

The story is set in Caesarea, a port city in northern Samaria, established by Herod the Great in honour of the Roman Emperor Augustus. It represents the final step in the progression of the gospel from Jerusalem to Judaea and Samaria (Acts 1:8), or more specifically to a Gentile and his family living in clearly defined Gentile space within Samaria.

Just as the Holy Spirit comes upon the Jerusalem community at Pentecost, so now the Spirit is 'poured out' on the Gentiles. Peter comes to realise that God 'shows no partiality'. Therein lies the challenge.


John 15:9-17

It is not easy to love unconditionally and without reserve. We see such love in organisations like Medicins Sans Frontieres and in the lives of those who volunteer their services in times of crisis, often at great personal expense. The growing unemployment here, as elsewhere, is spawning an extraordinary upsurge in volunteering activity.

In this Sunday's gospel, the Johannine Jesus talks to his disciples of the flow-on effect of love that is boundless and unconditional (agape). God, imaged in the gospel passage as 'the Father', loves Jesus.

Jesus remains or abides in that love so deeply that it flows on to his friends. They are to love one another as Jesus has loved them.

That means living for each other and putting their lives on the line for one another. It means being faithful to the teaching of Jesus as he has been faithful to God's 'commandments'. Remaining in the love of God or of Jesus and doing what God or Jesus commands seems to be one and the same thing.

In other words, love is not just an emotion: it is always expressed in action that is in tune with and for the sake of the other. The disciples need no further explanation. Jesus' whole life and his courage in the face of impending death have shown them what it means to 'love one another'.

by Sr.Veronica Lawson RSM (East Ballarat)

Sunday Reading Reflections:

May 10th, 2009
Fifth Sunday of Easter
by Larry Gillick, S.J.
Deglman Center for Ignatian Spirituality


PREPRAYING:

Conversion is in the air and not merely that of the sinner, but the community to which the sinner desires to return. Saul, AKA Paul, had a past with which he had to live, and live he did. The early Christian Community had its history as well; they had been persecuted as it tried to live and spread the Good News. Paul needs help to become one of the “boys”.
There is much of union and separation in today’s Readings. “Remain” and “prune” “without me”, “Thrown out”, “bear fruit”, are words of such oneness and division. We pray with the intimacy which a grape has with its stem branch, vine and roots. We can pray with our desire for and sense of the union Jesus offers us in the Sacraments, especially Baptism and the Eucharist. We pray also for the freedom of spirit to welcome into our union, those who have been separated, especially those who have hurt us.

REFLECTION:

The past four Sunday’s we have been listening to the preachings of Peter. In today’s First Reading, we hear of his partner Paul. The verses which precede our reading relate the event of his conversion, his being knocked off his high horse. When he comes to and realizes that he has been met by Jesus, he changes from persecutor to proclaimer. His being knocked down and raised up allows him to have a future which does not negate his past, but allows him to live with it peacefully. Paul is a good example of just how to live gratefully with the present we do not resent or continue harkening to the past which brought us to this present.

What we hear today is his having been preaching in the area of Damascus and threatened himself for doing so. He moves to Jerusalem and asks for admittance into the circle of the Disciples. They, of course, had heard of Saul, but not that he had been renamed and reframed. With a little help from his friend, Barnabas, the circle is widened and eventually”grew in numbers” through his living and preaching.

In today’s Gospel, we drop right into the middle of John’s famous five-chapter relating of Jesus’ “Last Discourse”. Last week Jesus pictured himself as the “Good Shepherd” and today we hear him say he is the “vine”. He is relating himself in a familiar image to his hearers, but intensifies the picture by claiming that the “fruit”- the “grapes” are united to him as vine and these grapes are his disciples.

In the first chapter of this “Discourse” Peter, who did not want his feet washed, was told that he would do nothing separated or apart from Jesus unless his feet be washed. This theme is picked up again as Jesus reminds them all to stay or remain in him by bearing fruit, or they will be cut off and burned up.

Jesus asks his disciples to “remain” which is different from “stay stuck”. Jesus is preparing them for their going out as he himself moves on. What does “remain” mean then for Jesus and his little cluster? What does “bearing fruit” mean and what does being separate mean?

In our American “culture” there is an increasing urgency to belong while remaining independent, which is quite a conflict. There is also a personal hunger to discover one’s depth, one’s singular personality. “Character” is a word which has come to mean more than a person in a play or movie. The term has something to do with strength, personal values and dedication. Accomplishments can reveal character, but there is also the danger of a “Pseudo-character” when one’s deeds become a cover-up for emptiness.

Being baptized into Jesus is not a single event, but a process of entering his “character”. He is asking his disciples to be so influenced by the relationship he offers that they will go out and do “something” which will reveal him by what they do and especially how they do it.

I have noticed over the years, a quality of “character” which is a blessing to me. I experience it most often with those persons who work or live among the marginal, injured and poor of this world. They “remain” well. Remain themselves; actually receive more of themselves by their being touched by those they touch. They seem to separate themselves from “accomplishing” themselves. They touch into the Jesus who remains deeply within them rather than finding their identity from polishing the fruit, they are producing.

These disciples separate themselves from “doing” and remain peaceful in their “being” or “remaining” in the Jesus who remains deeply inside them.

I am privileged to be close friends with three Religious women who work with the Aboriginal children who attend their schools and drop-in centre in Winnipeg, Canada. I am invited also to walk, in Spiritual Direction, with my Jesuit brothers as they “remain” with Jesus at the Holy Rosary Mission on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota. I live with men who work in the inner city of Omaha; one directs the Jesuit Middle School for African/American boys, one is the founder of Gesu Housing which is dedicated to building concrete houses for low income families in our neighborhood. Every morning they go off, but “remain” as they bear fruit. They “remain” faithful while all kinds of things happen that would make one wonder if Jesus had given up and left town.

These women and men “remain” in Jesus while the culturally conditioned illusions are pruned from their hearts and spirits. “Success”, "accomplishments”, “trophies”, and the various self-validating acquisitions drop slowly away. This “pruning” seems to deepen them in their “remaining” in Jesus and freeing Jesus to “remain” in them. So it seems that this “pruning” is part of the love which Jesus offers those I experience as having depth of soul, who grow in “character”. Naturally speaking, we do not like the thought or experience of being so pruned, but the church and the needy profit from their resulting fruitful lives.

This spiritual deepening which I refer to, as “character” is the growth Jesus offers those who are touched by the poor, the sick, and those Jesus called his Sisters and Brothers. God is not a bad “vine dresser” after all.

“I will praise you, Lord, in the assembly of your people.” Ps. 22