Reflecting on John 14:1-2

There are some things that the authors of the Gospels thought we knew.  But we read the ancient texts at a great distance, historically and culturally.  When Jesus says to his frightened disciples the night before his death, “In my Father’s house are many mansions” he isn’t speaking in metaphor!  He reaches into the most sacred vow a Jewish man can make.  He uses the exact words that a man speaks to a woman when he betrothes himself to her.

In Jesus’ day, as in ours, the betrothal of a man and a woman was a sacred celebration.  At the ceremonial meal the bridegroom said to his betrothed, “Do not let your heart be troubled.  In my father’s house are many rooms.  I am going now to prepare a place for you.  I will come back  for you, so that where I am you also may be.  If it were not so I would have told you.”

And then he left her.  He went back to his father’s house and built an extra room on to the family home where his new bride would live and they would raise their children.  A generation later, the sons born in that house would make the same solemn promise to their betrothed, and another room would be added on.

So that means that on the night before he died, Jesus the Bridegroom betrothed himself to us forever.  That’s what the author of John’s Gospel thought we knew.  And I guess that’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever learned in all my years of studying Scripture.

In what ways do you sense the covenant Christ has made with you?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 10:1-10

Several years ago, while traveling with a group of pilgrims into Bethlehem, our tour guide asked the bus driver to stop so that we could all flash our pictures of an extraordinary sight for all of us city dwellers: actual sheep, being herded by an actual shepherd!

Our guide then told us a very moving story.  When he came to Israel as a young man he was put in leadership over the small group of Christian churches in his particular denomination.  One of the elders of that group advised him that, before he ever tried leading anyone, he should intern as a shepherd for at least a week.  It was during that long week that he learned the tenderness of the shepherd in today’s psalm.

The good shepherd knows that sheep will drown in moving waters, and so leads them to still, restful waters.  In the dark valleys and steep mountains, the good shepherd calms the fears of the sheep by walking beside them, drawing them back from the cliff with his rod and staff.  At the end of the day, while the sheep rest in verdant pastures, he cleans the build-up of mucus out of their eyes with oil so that they don’t go blind.

Finally, at night, the good shepherd leads the sheep into the sheep gate, and then he sleeps outside the gate.  If any predators come looking for his sheep, they’ll have to get to them over his dead body.

Ah.  On this Good Shepherd Sunday, may you rest in the safety of the One who knows your voice, who knows your needs.  May goodness and kindness follow you all the days of your life.

In what ways do you feel tenderly cared for?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Luke 24:13-35

And so it comes around again, this most beautifully developed of all the appearance stories.  It’s not new to us, but our hearts burn within us as we hear again of those two disciples who left Jerusalem that Easter morning.

Caravaggio

We know the name of one—Cleopas—but the second disciple goes unnamed.  I think she was probably Mrs. Cleopas.  Might this traveler have been the very Mary, wife of Clopas who stood at the foot of the cross in John’s Gospel?  If so, then her companions that dreadful Friday had been no less than Mary Magdalene and Mary, the mother of Jesus.  And yet now she and her husband, after the terrifying event, are leaving the city and returning to their home in Emmaus.

The tomb is empty.  Where is he?  What can it mean?  Is there any reason to hope that he’s alive?

And then of course they are met on the road by a fellow traveler.  Hasn’t he heard of all the events in Jerusalem these past three days?  And they begin to let their hearts break a little as they tell the stranger about him whom they love.

I wonder.  What if, in these Easter weeks of First Communions and Confirmations, we walked with our children for just a little bit and told them about him whom we love.  Take a walk this week with someone and talk about Jesus.  I’ll bet you he’ll show up right there, on the road, on the journey.  Draw near to him and watch him draw near to you.  And then get ready for some heart-burn.

In what ways do you sense the presence of Jesus when you speak with others about him?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 20:19-31

Afterwards, people asked me questions for the rest of my life.  Why didn’t I believe the others when they told me the Lord had appeared to them that Easter morning? Wasn’t I ashamed to stand before him after I had demanded proof of his resurrection?

Caravaggio

I don’t remember any of that.  When he entered the room that night everything changed forever.  My Jesus, my Savior, my Risen One was alive.  And all my deepest hopes came roaring back.

He showed me his wounds—his pierced wrists and his gaping side—but all the things I thought I needed to see and touch melted as he stood before me.  His face was so radiant with love for me, so full of joy for me, because he knew that with the words from his mouth I would come back to myself.

And then, after he ascended to heaven, I traveled far outside the Roman Empire to preach my Jesus, who loved me enough to come back to the room where I waited, longing, afraid to hope, secretly bursting with hope.

Are you afraid to hope that he will lead you out of your grave, just as he knew the way out of his own?  Listen to my voice, reaching you right now from the ancient Gospel.  He’s alive.

Is there a part of you is wrestling with unbelief these days?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 20:1-9

There is, in the city of Jerusalem, a most peaceful garden.  It has a water cistern that dates back to the time of Christ, and in fact a first-century tomb is there too.  This “garden tomb” is close to a rock quarry, with a particular rock that resembles a skull.  This quarry would have been “just outside the city gates” in Jesus’ day.  Might it have been “the skull place”—Golgotha—where Jesus was crucified, and might the garden “nearby” have been the very one that was offered by Joseph of Arimathea as the burial place for Jesus?

Church of the Holy Sepulchre

It’s so peaceful to pray there.  The flowers are always in bloom.  The birds sing.  It’s exactly how you’ve pictured it all your life.  You want so badly for this to be the place.

But of course it’s not the place.  The actual site of the empty tomb is the huge, cavernous, ancient Church of the Holy Sepulchre.  Constantine’s mother St. Helena built this  iconic memorial over the very rock of Golgotha and the very ground in which Jesus was buried, and from which he rose.

Today, millions of people swarm in and around the church every day of the year. It’s loud, and it’s dirty, and it’s so, so old.  And it’s exactly the place.  They have taken the Lord from the tomb, and we don’t know where they’ve put him. We want him to be in the quiet, lovely garden.  But he is, always, just where we are.  He is risen, and he is with us, in the ages, in the suffering, in the clamor.  The tomb is empty, because he lives now with us. ALLELUIA.

Do you have a special place where you sense the risen Lord?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Matthew 26:14-27:66 or Matthew 27:11-54

Okay, can we please talk about something?  It’s that responsorial psalm today, My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? We sing it over and over after the first reading, and then we have to hear it again in the reading of Matthew’s Passion, when Jesus quotes from that very psalm (22) in his last agonizing breaths on the cross.

I hate that.  It hurts me every time I hear it, and have to contemplate that Jesus, in his last moments, experienced the betrayal of the Father.  But finally, after years of uneasiness with that portrayal of Jesus’ death, I learned something that healed that hurt immediately, and I wished someone had told me decades earlier what I now pass on to you:

In his agony, Jesus the Jew calls out the beginning verse of that well-known psalm of lament:  My God, my God, why have you abandoned me? There are some women “standing at a distance” who have followed him since he set out from Galilee to Jerusalem.  They surely know this psalm, and in synagogue style they respond to his introduction by reciting the rest of it, all 31 verses, including the triumphant end, when the suffering one proclaims that all will proclaim the Lord to generations still to come, his righteousness to a people yet unborn.  AMEN.

Jesus the Faithful One knows that he has not been betrayed, that the Father’s great love will be proclaimed to all generations forever.  He calls out the first verse Psalm 22 with his last breaths, knowing that “those standing at a distance’—and that’s us, too, isn’t it?―will respond by praying the rest of the psalm for him.  Jesus knows how it ends, and how it all will end.  Forever and ever.  AMEN.

Is there a psalm, a song, a Scripture or a prayer that will be on your lips as you die?

 What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 11:1-45 or 11:3-7, 17, 20-27, 33b-45

Through the years I have had the great privilege to visit the Holy Land many times, but the only souvenir I have ever kept from my pilgrimages hangs on my wall, directly over my parent’s wedding picture of October 31, 1938.  They smile out at me, these two young, beautiful, hopeful newlyweds, in the everyday clothes common to Depression-era weddings of the day.

Could they have imagined what the future would hold?  The war in Europe was just getting going.  They and everyone they knew would be changed by it.  In ten years their children would finally arrive, and eventually their robust youth would give way to middle age.  They would lose their parents and their siblings.  They would raise their children in the faith, and that faith would sustain them when their own son went off to war.

The beautiful bride and groom are gone now.  But their children live on, remembering them, loving them, knowing that at our own deaths we will see them again.  When Lazarus heard the voice of Jesus call him out of the cave he climbed, climbed up from his dark tomb.  I’ve seen that tomb.  I have taken a torch and climbed down into its belly, and imagined the sound of Jesus, calling into its depths Lazarus!  Come out! And the dead man came out.

So it was from here that I carried home my sole souvenir, a small mosaic that says “Bethany”.  It keeps watch over the young newlyweds on the wall, and all their children and grandchildren, whose pictures surround them now.  When our earthly bodies lie in death we’ll find an everlasting dwelling place in heaven.

What do you think it must have been like for Lazarus to come out of that tomb?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 9:1, 6-9, 13-17, 34-38

It’s the last line of today’s Gospel that’s the real zinger.  Jesus, you’re not suggesting that we are the ones who are blind, are you?  Because we know how God has set up the world.  Good things happen to good people, and bad people are blind from birth.  Okay, maybe this guy isn’t directly responsible for his blindness, but his parents must have been sinners, right?  And we know for sure that YOU are a sinner because you brazenly heal on the Sabbath!

Isn’t their response a little similar to ours when we hear about something terrible that has happened to someone we know?  Yes, it’s terrible that she has lung cancer, but she probably smoked, and I don’t smoke, so I’ll never get lung cancer. Yes, it’s horrible about the car accident, but I’ll bet he wasn’t wearing his seat belt, and I always wear my seat belt, so I’ll never be in a car accident.

There is something in us that needs to find a reason why bad things happen to very good people, because it’s too terrifying to admit that they could happen to us too. And if we can admit that, perhaps we are also ready to acknowledge that God can shake us from our cynicism, peel away our layers of bravado, and actually heal us too.  It’s not a trick.  It’s not a plot hatched years ago to make us think the man was blind when he really could see all this time.  His parents weren’t in on it, and he wasn’t in on it.  That man they call Jesus touched him, and now he can see.

And if we can’t believe that, we are more blind than the man who was born blind and now sees.

In what ways have you felt the healing touch of Jesus in your life?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on John 4: 5-15, 19b-26, 39a,40-42

One Sunday three decades ago I was distraught over the collapse of the strong parish community I had enjoyed for over a decade.  A new pastor had come in, and a better preacher had been installed in the parish down the road.  Within a few months the vibrant, warm, packed-to-the-gills Sunday Masses had deteriorated, and most of the friends with whom I shared Sunday had moved to the other parish.  It was so painful.

This particular Sunday I stopped by to visit a friend.  He did then, and still does to this day, spend the early morning hours in prayer with the Scriptures.  We talked for awhile about the dwindling numbers and the lackluster preaching, and then we fell silent for a few minutes.

What are you reading today? He looked down at the Bible on the table, open to the fourth chapter of John’s Gospel, and read the Samaritan woman’s challenge to Jesus:   Our ancestors worshiped on this mountain, but you people say the place to worship is Jerusalem.

Huh.  So questions about who’s got the best parish have been around at least since the day Jesus went out of his way to find that heartbroken woman, in the heat of the day, at a well that her great ancestor Jacob had dug.  He invited her into friendship with himself, and she left everything behind to tell the world about him.  Now that’s true worship, in Spirit and in truth.

Sharing God’s Word at Home:

Are there ways that you can build up your parish and the worshipping community?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).

Reflecting on Genesis 12:1-4a

All we ask you, God, is to speak as clearly to us as you did to Abram.  Tell us to get up and wander to a new land.  We’ll pack today.   Send us down to Egypt during a famine and we’ll book our flight.  Show up at our door with two angels at your side and we’ll rush to make a huge meal for you.  Just speak to us, God.  We’re so confused.

I will make of you a great nation

How does one discern the will of God?  God speaks to us through our own history, our memory, our understanding.   St. Ignatius of Loyola counsels us to notice what gives us peace, what gives us energy, what makes us unhappy, or burdened with guilt.  To paraphrase the old physical therapist joke, Does it hurt when you are cynical, or selfish, or lazy?  Then stop doing that.

Does it feel good when you end a conversation that is sliding into gossip and meanness?  Do that some more.  Does your spirit rejoice when you are the first to apologize, or to reach out for reconciliation?  I suspect you have wandered into the very heart of God.

Like Abraham and Sarah, we sojourn in a land that God unveils to us throughout our lives.  It’s a land marked by mistakes and bitter regrets, but shot through with grace and gradual healing.  Pay attention to what makes you truly happy, truly peaceful.  Abraham, at 75, lived one hundred more years after he discerned God’s call.  Let’s all keep listening.

At what times do you feel the most connected with God?

What would YOU like to say about this question, or today’s readings, or any of the columns from the past year? The sacred conversations are setting a Pentecost fire! Register here today and join the conversation.

I have come to light a fire on the earth; how I wish it were already burning (Lk.12:49).