Crooked Lines

Readings

“Master, we do not know where you are going;
how can we know the way?”

In the first chapter of John’s Gospel, John the Baptist saw Jesus and proclaimed, “Behold, the Lamb of God”. On hearing this, two of his disciples followed Jesus, and when queried by Jesus, they asked, “Rabbi, where are you staying?”  He did not tell them.

Instead, he invited them on a journey.  He said, quite simply, “Come and see.”  They still did not know where he was going.  They did not know where he stayed.  They certainly did not know that this journey would lead to the cross.  Yet, in response to that simply invitation, “Come and see”, they said yes for the first time to the one whom they would discover was the way and truth and the life.

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Readings

Whoever has seen me has seen the Father.

Can we ever grasp the mystery and awe-fullness of the Incarnation?  How can it be that whoever has seen Jesus of Nazareth has actually seen the Father?  How can it be that the second Person of the Most Holy Trinity actually assumed human nature and walked among us.

It is not surprising that Phillip and the other apostles struggled to realize what they were seeing when they looked upon the face of Jesus of Nazareth.  How can one wrap one’s mind and heart around the fact that this carpenter from Galilee was, while fully human, actually the Son of God.  St. Paul in Philippians says that he did not deem equality with God something to be grasped, but emptied himself, coming to us in human form.

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Readings

My sheep hear my voice;
I know them, and they follow me.

In the normal course of things, hearing voices is usually not a good sign.  Learning that someone is “hearing voices”, we might ask, what are they on?  And of course, hearing voices can be a sign of a debilitating and tragic mental illness.

Yet as we have been reading about Jesus the Good Shepherd, we are told over and over that his sheep “hear his voice”.  We do that in a variety of ways, primarily by listening to his words preserved for us in the Scriptures, and handed down to us through the Church.  Yet there are other situations when I think we hear his voice as coming from deep within our very hearts.

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Readings

The Spirit told me to accompany them without discriminating.

In the weeks since Easter, we have been taking our first reading at Mass from the Acts of the Apostles.  This has given us a window, if you will, into something of the life of the early Church.  Alongside the examples of courage and outspoken faith, we also stumble across various challenges that came their way in those early decades.

Today’s passage from the eleventh chapter of Acts touches upon one of those challenges.  What were they going to do with “those others” – the gentiles?  Did everyone have to actually convert to Judaism in order to follow Jesus?  Had the offer of salvation been extended beyond the bounds of the people of Israel?

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Readings

“There is a boy here who has five barley loaves and two fish;
but what good are these for so many?”

Our Gospel passage today, from the beginning of the sixth chapter of John, recounts the story of the multiplication of the loaves, the beginning of what is often called John’s “Bread of Life Discourse”.  It is of note that unlike the Mark, Matthew & Luke, John’s Gospel does not give an account of the institution of the Eucharist at the Last Supper.  For John’s Eucharistic theology, we often look to this chapter.

Jesus here too does what he does on the night before he died:  he takes, and blesses and breaks and shares.  In this case the elements are bread and fish, rather than bread and wine.  Yet it is the same Jesus, satisfying the hunger of the crowd.  In the discourse, he goes on to speak of himself as the “Bread of Life”, and the “bread that came down from heaven”.  He says, “For my flesh is true food, and my blood is true drink”, which statement caused difficulty for the crowd, some of whom simply went away.

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