Apollos is mentioned in Saturday’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles (18,23-28). He reminds us that Peter, Paul and the other apostles were not the only teachers in the early church. Others brought the message of Christ to the cities and towns of the Roman Empire. Apollos was one of them.
He’s an eloquent, learned teacher who came to Ephesus from Alexandria, one of the great centers of Jewish and Christian learning, and he drew a following by preaching about Jesus. But Apollos doesn’t know everything, so a Jewish couple, Priscilla and Acquila, “took him aside and explained to him the Way of God more accurately.”
They were disciples of Paul who supported him with a job in their tent business. They traveled with Paul and certainly listened to his teaching, but I don’t think they were ever considered teachers as he and Apollos were. They were considered “hearers of the word,” more likely. Well informed, for sure, but still among those we would call today “the faithful.”
Yet, let’s not forget what important teachers “the faithful” are, as Priscilla and Aquila remind us.
I remember a story a brilliant priest told me long ago about a baptism he was conducting for an infant born to a member of his family. His father was the baby’s sponsor and according to the rite then was expected to recite the Creed.
“Can you say the Creed, Dad?” the priest said to his father.
“Who do you think taught it to you?,” the father sharply replied.
Faith can’t survive in this world without the faithful, ordinary Priscillas and Aquilas explaining it and passing it on. It begins with parents, godparents and family passing on the faith to children. It continues in daily life as ordinary Christians share their faith with others. The church today needs to strongly acknowledge this key mission of the laity.
Pope Francis is urging the laity to speak out in his call for a synodal church.
Reinterpreting life is at the heart of the Easter mystery. It calls us to see life differently. Like the artist who reinterpreted the Cross on Calvary and made it the glorious sign we see above, we’re called to reinterpret the Calvary of our world today. Listen to the 4th century Saint Ephrem the Syrian:
Glory be to you, Lord, You raised your cross like a bridge to span the jaws of death, that we might go from the land of death to the land of the living. Glory be to you, Lord, You took on a human body that every human being might live.
You are alive. Those who killed you sowed your living body in the earth as farmers sow grain, and it sprang up and brought forth an abundant harvest of human beings from the dead.
Come, brothers and sisters, let’s offer our love. Pour out our treasury of hymns and prayers before him who offered himself on the cross to enrich us all.”
Reinterpreting life through the mystery of the Cross is at the heart of the charism of my community, the Passionists. In our Mary Garden here at the monastery, Mary stands with her Son on the stump of a cedar tree. A dead tree, yet brought to life by the presence of Jesus carried in Mary’s arms.
The Cross of Jesus helps us see life in our world, a “Faithful Cross” it’s called in an ancient hymn. And it is.
There is so much death in our world today. We need to reinterpret our time by the light of the mystery of the Cross of Jesus.
We celebrate a feast of the apostles each month. Why? Every family wants to find out how it began. Our church began with the apostles. Today, May 3rd, we remember two apostles together, Philip and James.They’re celebrated together because their relics were placed side by side in the Church of the Twelve Apostles when it was built in Rome in the 6th century.
Philip was called by Jesus to follow him the day after he called Andrew and Peter. (John 1:43-45) James, who is also called James the Less to distinguish him from James, the brother of John, was the son of Alpheus and a cousin of Jesus. He later became head of the church in Jerusalem. His mother Mary, stood with Mary the mother of Jesus and Mary Magdalen beneath the cross of Jesus. (John 19: 25) He was martyred in Jerusalem in the year 62.
On a feast of an apostle you expect to hear one or more heroic act or wise saying, but in today’s reading from St. John’s gospel we hear an apostle’s clumsy question instead. During his Farewell Discourse, Jesus says, “I am the way and the truth and the life. No one comes to the Father except through me. If you know me, then you will also know my Father.”
“Master, show us the Father, and that will be enough for us.” Philip says to Jesus, who responds:
“Have I been with you for so long a time and you still do not know me, Philip? Whoever has seen me has seen the Father. How can you say, ‘Show us the Father’? Do you not believe that I am in the Father and the Father is in me? The words that I speak to you I do not speak on my own.”
Can we hear exasperation in Jesus’ words? Better, perhaps, they point out how slow Jesus’ apostles were to understand him; how uncertain, fearful–even ready to betray him. Philip isn’t the only one who can’t fathom Jesus and his message.
Called by Jesus, they’re human. Their humanness and slowness makes us realize where our power comes from. “Not to us, O Lord, not to us be the glory!” The church’s one foundation is Jesus Christ.
But before we dismiss Philip, let’s remember he pointed Jesus out to Nathaniel at the Jordan River and he brought Greek visitors to Jesus as he was entering Jerusalem to die on a cross. ( John 12: 20-23) He never stopped pointing to the One whom he tried to understand. It’s an apostle’s gift.
The apostles make us realize the patience of Jesus, which is the patience of God. They reveal the different gifts and weaknesses found in the followers of Jesus.
Church of the. Twelve Apostles, Rome. Wiki commons
St. Catherine of Siena is a doctor of the church and Italy’s patron saint along with St. Francis.
The 24th child in a family of 25 children, Catherine was a saintly teacher and church reformer. As a young girl, she clashed with her father, who worked dying wool, and her mother, a hardy determined housewife, after she told them she wasn’t going to get married, but was giving herself totally to God.
She cut her hair and began to fast and pray. She joined a group of women who helped the poor in Siena, mostly widows associated with the Dominican order. They were suspicious of the pious young girl who kept to herself and at odds with her mother and father.
At 21 years old, Catherine went beyond the mission of the women’s group and reached out further to the church and society. Men and women, priests and laypeople, from Siena and its surroundings gathered around her. They cared for the poor– famine struck Siena in 1370 and a plague in 1374– but also they sought to reform the church and the society of their day.
At the time, Italian cities like Siena, Florence, Pisa and Padua were fighting among themselves as rival families clashed continuously over political power and economic advantages. In 1309 the popes fled the violence and factional riots in Rome for the safety of Avignon in France, where the papacy remained for almost 70 years. They call it “the Babylonian Captivity.”
Catherine and her companions pleaded with the feuding Italian cities for peace and urged the popes to return to Rome to exercise their mission as bishops of the city where Peter and Paul once led the Christian church. Catherine cajoled, warned and scolded the absent popes to do their duty as shepherds of their sheep and get back to where they belonged.
Without any formal education, Catherine learned to read and write only later in life, which made her an unlikely public figure. She was also a woman teaching and preaching– unusual for that day : “Being a woman, I need not tell you, puts many obstacles in my way. The world has no use for women in a work such as that and propriety forbids a woman to mix so freely with men.” (Letter) Despite those obstacles, Catherine traveled to the warring cities of Italy urging peace and to Avignon to plead with the pope to return to Rome.
Catherine had a deep experience of God in prayer, as the “Dialogue,” her mystical exchange with God, attests. God spoke with her and she shared those words. Her prayerfulness drew others to join her in her mission of peace-making and reform.
Jesus was her “Gentle Truth,” her guide and strength.
As a lay-woman in the church, she was not afraid to speak to power, once correcting a bishop for “ordaining little boys instead of mature men… idiots who can scarcely read and say the prayers. They consider it beneath them to visit the poor, they stand by and let people die of hunger.”
Tell the truth, God told her. Tell the truth because love impels you. “You must love others with the same love with which I love you. But you cannot repay my love. Love other people, loving them without being loved by them. Love them without concern for spiritual and material gain, but only for the glory of my name, because I love them.” ( Dialogue ) Loving God inevitably means loving others.
She died in Rome in 1378 and is buried there in the Dominican church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva. Her heart is in Siena.
“This is a sign that you trust in me and not in yourself: that you have no cowardly fear. Those who trust in themselves are afraid of their own shadow; they think heaven and earth are letting them down. Fear and a twisted trust in their own small wisdom makes them pitifully concerned about getting and holding on to everything on earth and throwing away everything spiritual…The only ones afraid are those who think they are alone…They are afraid of every little thing because they are alone–without me.” (Dialogue)
The gospel readings for the remainder of the Easter season are from the Farewell Discourse from John’s gospel. A good source to reflect on the presence of Jesus in the sacraments and how we meet him there.
“I will not leave you orphans,” Jesus says, yet he will not be with them as he was before, He will be with them in signs, as God is always with us. The Paraclete, the Spirit of truth, will teach them all things; Jesus will be present in signs.
The Acts of the Apostles continue to describe the church’s journey in time. This week’s readings describe the successful missionary efforts of Paul and Barnabas among the gentiles in the Asia Minor cities of Lystra, Derbe, and Pisidia. The mission raises questions in the Jewish Christian community at Jerusalem. Are the gentiles taking over? To meet what some considered a threat and others an opportunity, a council was called in Jerusalem, which has enormous consequences .
Conflict causes the church to grow, Pope Francis said some time ago: “But some in Jerusalem, when they heard this, became ‘nervous and sent Barnabas on an “apostolic visitation”: perhaps, with a little sense of humor we could say that this was the theological beginning of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith: this apostolic visit by Barnabas. He saw that things were going well.”
Previously in his homily, the pope said that persecution or crises bring growth, often hidden. In the 1960s and 70s, as the church in the western world experienced critical times and decline, tremendous growth took place in Africa, Asia, and South America. Today there are 1.2 billion Catholics in a world of 6 billion people.
Keep Peter and the rest of the apostles in mind when thinking about church leaders. In today’s reading from the Acts of the Apostles Peter finds himself called from Joppa to bring the gospel to a Roman centurion, Cornelius, and his household. Joppa, remember, was the seaport where Jonah began his perilous journey to Nineveh and the gentile world.
In Joppa, the tired apostle asleep on the roof of Simon the Tanner’s house overlooking the vast sea has a disturbing vision. Instead of the usual kosher food a gentile banquet is poured out before him; as a good Jew Peter pushes it away. Three times the vision invites the puzzled apostle to eat.
Then, messengers appear at the door from Cornelius, a gentile soldier stationed in Caesaria Maritima, Rome’s headquarters just up the coast, asking Peter to come and speak about “the things that had happened.” He’s invited to the gentile banquet he saw in his dream.
“As I began to speak,” Peter says describing their meeting, ” the Holy Spirit fell upon them as it had upon us at the beginning.” It was a gentile Pentecost. Peter baptized the Roman soldier, his friends and his household. “I truly understand that God shows no partiality, but every nation is acceptable to him,”
Did Peter know then where his visit to Cornelius would lead? Was the simple fisherman, who spoke Aramaic with a Galilean accent, who felt the pull of home, family and fishing boats, ever comfortable in a gentile world? Later, he traveled to Antioch in Syria and then to Rome, where he was killed in the Neronian persecution in the 60’s. Was he ever completely comfortable at a gentile meal and a gentile world?
Artists usually portray Peter in Rome as a church leader firmly in charge of the church, holding its keys tightly in hand. Clearly, he is a rock.
I saw another image of Peter years ago in the Cloisters Museum in New York. He’s softer, reflective, more experienced, not completely sure of himself. There’s a consciousness of failure in his face. He seems to be listening humbly for the voice of the Shepherd, hoping to hear it and ever surprised by the unexpected coming of the Holy Spirit.
Church leaders never fully understand the mysterious ship they’re called to steer. They have to listen for the Shepherd’s voice and look for signs of the Spirit.
The dark green around the Lake of Galilee you see in the upper part of this Google satellite picture of Palestine says there’s good farmland there now; it was good farmland at the time of Jesus.
Herod the Great and his son Herod Antipas, Galilee’s rulers then, appreciated the land then and they created a network of roads and lcities – Tiberius, Sepphoris and Caesarea Maritima on the sea– to export goods from Galilee to the rest of the world. Could this information help us appreciate the miracle of Jesus, feeding the crowd bread and some fish?
“I am the bread of life”, Jesus says in today’s gospel from John. I’m the source of blessings and everything that is. God the creator works through me. Moses asked for bread for his people journeying from Egypt. “I am the bread of life.” Jesus gives life to creation on its journey.
Jesus makes a divine claim in this miraculous sign, feeding a multitude. The crowd wants to make him king, (John 6, 15) but the kingship they see doesn’t approach the kingship that’s his. It’s much too small. Jesus rejects their plan.
In a commentary on Jesus as the bread of life, the early theologian Origen says that Jesus is bread because he is “nourishment of every kind.” He nourishes our minds and our souls; he also nourishes creation. When we ask “Give us this day our daily bread,” we’re asking for everything that nourishes our “true humanity, made in the image of God” and creation itself.
Jesus is the bread that helps us “grow in the likeness of our creator.” (On Prayer 27,2) Sometimes– perhaps most of the time–we ask only for ourselves, but our prayer should extend to the greater world we are called to care for;
Jesus prayed for the whole world. We are called to pray like him when we say;
The Cross flowers at Easter time. There’s a flowering cross brimming with life in the great apse of the church of San Clemente in Rome. Its branches swirl with the gifts God gives. It brings life, not death. Humanity is there, signified in Mary and the disciple John. We are there in the doves resting on it. Creation itself is there, drawing new life from it. The hand of God makes it so.
The sacraments offered in this sacred place bring life-giving graces to us.
An early preacher Theodore the Studite praises the mystery of the cross:.
“How precious the gift of the cross, how splendid to contemplate! In the cross there is no mingling of good and evil, as in the tree of paradise: it is wholly beautiful to behold and good to taste. The fruit of this tree is not death but life, not darkness but light. This tree does not cast us out of paradise, but opens the way for our return.
“This was the tree on which Christ, like a king on a chariot, destroyed the devil, the Lord of death, and freed the human race from his tyranny. This was the tree upon which the Lord, like a brave warrior wounded in his hands, feet and side, healed the wounds of sin that the evil serpent had inflicted on our nature. A tree once caused our death, but now a tree brings life. Once deceived by a tree, we have now repelled the cunning serpent by a tree.
“What an astonishing transformation! That death should become life, that decay should become immortality, that shame should become glory! Well might the holy Apostle exclaim: Far be it from me to glory except in the cross of our Lord Jesus Christ, by which the world has been crucified to me, and I to the world!”
San Clemente, Rome
See Children’s Prayers here for a children’s version of the Easter Tree.
The Passionists celebrate the Feast of the Glorious Wounds of Jesus on Friday of the second week of Easter. The four gospels tell the great story of the passion of Jesus, each in its own way. More than the others, John’s gospel focuses on his wounds, unlikely signs revealing the mystery of the Word made flesh.
On Calvary a small symbolic group stands beneath the cross of “the King of the Jews”– Mary, the mother of Jesus, the disciple whom he loved, and a few others. A gentile soldier joins them.
This group represents the “new Jerusalem,” “the inhabitants of Jerusalem who look on the one whom they have pierced…and mourn for him, as one mourns for an only child.” (Zechariah 11, 10 )
They receive a precious gift. “It is finished!” Jesus declares, and bowing his head, he pours out his spirit on them. A Roman soldier thrusts a spear into Jesus’ side. “Immediately blood and water flowed out.” (John 19, 34)
Blood, a sign of his life, flows on those standing beneath his cross. Water, signifying the Spirit within him, is poured out on the world they represent. Far from ending his life, his death is the moment Jesus shares his life.“This is the one who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ.” (I John 5,6)
Artists afterwards picture the wounds of Christ as cosmic signs. They place the grave of Adam beneath the cross — generations wait for the new life Jesus brings. Creation, symbolized by the sun and moon, looks on expectantly, for Calvary is where creation too is redeemed. Angels collect the blood and water from Jesus’ wounds in cups representing the mystery of the Eucharist. All days are found in this one day. On Calvary, the glory of the Lord is revealed in his wounds.
St. Paul of the Cross in his letters often wished the one to whom he’s writing to be placed in the “wounds of Christ” or the “holy Side of Jesus” or his “Sacred Heart.” “I am in a hurry and leave you in the holy Side of Jesus, where I ask rich blessings for you.”
These expressions may seem pious phrases until we read the story of Thomas from John’s gospel. Jesus shows the doubting disciple the wounds in his hands and side, and Thomas believes.
Belief is not something we come to by ourselves. God gives this gift through Jesus Christ. We all stand beneath the life-giving Cross of Jesus. May his life give new hope to us and our world.
Jesus engaged Nicodemus at night. Will he engage the hesitant visitors in our age, that growing group whom surveys say are leaving religious traditions they were raised in because they have stopped believing in their teachings.
Charles Taylor in his book “A Secular Age” may have insights into the “Nones”. Some become unaffiliated because they do not believe in God or the teachings of most religions. Many leave a religion because “they think of religious people as hypocritical or judgmental, because religious organizations focus too much on rules or because religious leaders are too focused on power and money.”
It’s interesting to see, Taylor writes, that “ far fewer say they became unaffiliated because they believe that modern science proves that religion is just superstition.”
The theory that religion will disappear as science advances doesn’t hold up, Taylor says, because there’s a search for “human fullness” for a “higher world” that doesn’t go away. Surveys indicate that’s the case among the unaffiliated today
But Taylor also recognizes that people find religions difficult today. In the western world, our secular age is an age of “expressive individualism;” people want reasons to believe and belong. They need religious places that meet them as they are. They’re looking for religious experience.
“Those who believe in the God of Abraham should normally be reminded of how little they know him, how partial is their grasp of him. They have a long way to go…Many believers (the fanatics, but also more than these) rest in the certainty that they have got God right (as against all those heretics and pagans in the outer darkness). They are clutching onto an idol, to use a term familiar to the traditions of the God of Abraham.” (p.769)
Churches need to engage the world with reasons, not with condemnations. Belief leads us to the mysterious Unknown, not sharp certainties. Jesus kept speaking to Nicodemus many nights, it seems. His story and the story of the disciples on the way to Emmaus says it takes time to believe. We’re slow learners. We have to keep talking to the “Nones” at night, praying they find him “in the breaking of the bread.”
The Victor's Place 