Our readings from the Acts of the Apostles this week tell us one thing about the early church: it doesn’t evolve from human planning but from God’s plan. The disciples certainly didn’t expect Stephen.
The church was pretty settled in Jerusalem after Jesus rose from the dead, according to Acts. The followers of Jesus, good Jews, continued to worship in the temple. Yes, there were occasional squabbles with the Jewish leaders, but they were mainly tolerated as they worshipped and preached in Jerusalem. This was their world. Besides praying in the temple, they met together, probably on Mount Sion where the Last Supper was celebrated or maybe in Bethany. They broke bread and prayed there.
They were mostly Galileans at first, then others joined them from elsewhere. One of them was Stephen.
Stephen was a new-comer. He may have been a Samaritan, which could explain his polemic against the Judaism of the day. The scriptures see him as one who follows Jesus in his passion. So many of his sufferings are like those Jesus endured. But he was also the cause of the first scattering of believers to other places. He was brash and undiplomatic. I would also think that some of the Galileans didn’t like him.
Yes, he was a saint, but a hard-nosed saint.
He brought change, or better, God brought about change through him. We would like change to take place smoothly, without disagreements, but our early church history says change doesn’t come so easily.
The dark green around the Lake of Galilee in the upper part of this Google satellite picture of Palestine points to good farmland. It was good farmland at the time of Jesus. Herod the Great and his son Herod Antipas, Galilee’s rulers then, appreciated the land and created a network of roads and cities – Tiberius, Sepphoris and Caesarea Maritime on the sea– for shipping goods from Galilee to the rest of the world. Here Jesus proclaims in John’s gospel: “I am the bread of life”,
All four gospels say that Jesus fed a great crowd near the Sea of Galilee by multiplying a few loaves of bread and some fish. Like the Passover feast, the miracle and the teaching that follows occur over a number of days in the gospels. We will read .John’s account (John 6) at Mass on weekdays from the Friday of the 2nd week of Easter until Saturday of the 3rd week of Easter,
The Passover feast commemorated the Manna God sent from heaven to sustain the Jews on their journey to the promised land. Jesus claims to be the “true bread,” the “living bread” that comes down from heave
Jesus is a commanding presence during the miracle and the days that follow in John’s account. “Where can we buy enough food for them to eat?” he asks Philip as crowds come to him. Then he directs the crowd to sit down, feeds them with the bread and fish, and says what should be done with the fragments left over. The disciples have only a small role in this miracle.
A sudden storm occurs as Jesus and his disciples return to Nazareth after feeding the crowd. Jesus rebukes the wind and the sea; the forces of nature obey him. All four gospels have some version of Jesus power over the sea and the natural world occurring with this miracle. All obey him.
As Jesus reaches Capernaum after the miracle, the crowds want to make him king. Their faith is imperfect; they are limited in their understanding of this sign from heaven. The disciples are also tested; some walk with him no more.
The miracle of the loaves and the fish reminds us that Jesus is Lord and we are people of limited faith. “Master, to whom shall we go? You have the words of everlasting life,” Peter says to Jesus at the end of John’s account. We share His response.
In his 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 all that nourishes the life of the world.
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 to Philip ? 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.
James, son of Alpheus, came from conservative Nazareth. He knew Jesus as the son of Joseph, the carpenter and probably played with Jesus as a child. He lead the Jerusalem church, while apostles like Peter and John embarked on missions to distant lands. James favored keeping the Jewish tradition as the Spirit’s means of spreading the gospel. James and his allies would certainly be early critics of Paul’s mission to the gentiles. He alienated Jerusalem’s leaders less than Stephen or Paul, but eventually he was put to death in the year 62, as the Jewish wars approached and Jerusalem was destroyed by the Romans. Jewish Christians fled the city for the safety of another place.
Called by Jesus, all of his disciples were 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 an apostle like 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)
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.”
Like the apostles we’re slow to understand the mystery of the death and resurrection of Jesus. The two disciples going to Emmaus are not the only ones slow to understand– we’re slow too.
Peter, who preaches to the crowds in Jerusalem at Pentecost, certainly was slow to understand. He speaks forcefully at Pentecost, forty days after the Passover when Jesus died and rose from the dead, but the days before he’s speechless. It took awhile for him and for the others who came up with Jesus from Galilee to learn and be enlightened about this great mystery..
Mark’s accounts of Jesus resurrection appearances, read on the Saturday of Easter week, stresses the unbelief of his disciples. They were not easily persuaded.
For this reason, each year the Lord refreshes our faith in the resurrection, but it’s not done in a day. We need time to take it in, like the first followers of. Jesus, and for that we have an easter season of forty days. Just for starters.
The disciples are slow to understand the mission they’re to carry out because it’s God plan not theirs, a plan that outruns human understanding. A new age had come, the age of the Holy Spirit, and they didn’t understand it. The fiery winds of Pentecost had to move them to go beyond what they see, beyond Jerusalem and Galilee to the ends of the earth.
The Holy Spirit also moves us to a mission beyond our understanding. Luke says that in the Acts of the Apostles. “The mission is willed, initiated, impelled and guided by God through the Holy Spirit. God moves ahead of the other characters. At a human level, Luke shows how difficult it is for the church to keep up with God’s action, follow God’s initiative, understand the precedents being established.” (Luke Timothy Johnson, The Acts of the Apostles)
“You judge things as human beings do, not as God does,” Jesus says to Peter elsewhere in the gospel. We see things that way too.
Peter’s slowness to follow God’s plan remained even after Jesus is raised from the dead. He doesn’t see why he must go to Caesaria Maritima to baptize the gentile Cornelius and his household. (Acts 10,1-49) It’s completely unexpected. Only gradually does he embrace a mission to the gentiles and its implications. The other disciples are like him; God’s plan unfolds but they are hardly aware of it.
One thing they all learned quickly, though, as is evident in the Acts of the Apostles. Like Jesus, they experience the mystery of his cross, and in that experience they find wisdom.
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 gospels tell us little about the twelve disciples of Jesus. Peter is the best known; Jesus gave him a special role and also lived in his house in Capernaum.
Then, there’s Judas. Matthew’s gospel has more information about him than any other New Testament source and so we read his gospel on “Spy Wednesday,” the day in Holy Week recalling Judas’ offer to hand Jesus over for thirty pieces of silver.(Matthew 26,14-25)
“Surely it is not I?” the disciples say one after the other when Jesus announces someone will betray him. And we say so too, as we watch Judas being pointed out. With Peter also we say we will not deny him. But the readings for these days caution us that there’s a communion of sinners as well as a communion of saints.
We are never far from the disciples who once sat at table with Jesus. We’re also sinful. We come as sinners to the Easter triduum, which begins Holy Thursday evening ends on Easter Sunday. We hope for the mercy Jesus gave to those who left him the night before he died.
“We who wish to find the All, who is God, must cast ourselves into nothingness. God is “I AM; we are they who are not, for dig as deeply as we can, we will find nothing, nothing. And we who are sinners are worse than nothing.
“God, out of nothing created the visible and invisible world. The infinite Good, by drawing good from evil through justifying sinners, performs a greater work of omnipotence than if he were to create a thousand worlds more vast and beautiful than this one. For in justifying sinners, he draws them from sin, an abyss darker and deeper than nothingness itself.” (St. Paul of the Cross, Letter 248 )
O God, who willed your Son to submit for our sake
to the yoke of the Cross,
so that you might drive from us the power of the enemy,
grant us, your servants, to attain the grace of the resurrection.
Readings
The gospels from Monday to Thursday in Holy Week take us away from the crowded temple area in Jerusalem where Jesus spoke before many of his avowed enemies. These days he eats at table with “his own.” In Bethany six days before Passover he eats with Martha , Mary and Lazarus, whom he raised from the dead. Mary anointed his feet with precious oil in a beautiful outpouring of her love.
The gospels for Tuesday and Wednesday bring us to the table in Jerusalem where he eats with the twelve who followed him. Love is poured out here too, but these gospels describe a love with great cost. “I tell you solemnly, one of you will betray me,” Jesus says to them. Friends that followed him abandon him. Judas dips his hand into the dish with him and then goes out into the night. Peter will deny him three times; the others flee. Jesus must face suffering and death alone.
Are we unlike them?
Does a troubled Jesus face us too, “his own,” to whom he gave new life in the waters of baptism and Bread at his table. Will we not betray or deny? Are we sure we will not go away? The gospels are not just about what’s past; they’re also about now.
We think the saints exaggerate when they call themselves great sinners, but they know the truth. That’s the way St. Paul of the Cross described himself in his account of his forty day retreat as a young man:
“I rejoiced that our great God should wish to use so great a sinner, and on the other hand, I knew not where to cast myself, knowing myself so wretched. Enough! I know I shall tell my beloved Jesus that all creatures shall sing of his mercies.” (Letter 2)
Almighty ever-living God,
grant us so to celebrate the mysteries of the Lord’s Passion
As Holy Week begins, today’s gospel brings us to a meal in Bethany honoring Jesus after the resurrection of Lazarus. Raising Lazarus from the dead is the great sign in John’s Gospel for understanding the death and resurrection of Jesus. Lazarus is a symbol of humanity God reaches to save through the death and resurrection of his Son. (John 12,1-11) This is a meal Jesus eats with “his own.” His last meal will be a Passover supper.
Martha serves the meal. Lazarus newly alive, is at the table. But the one drawing most attention is their sister Mary. Sensing what’s coming, she kneels before Jesus and anoints his feet with precious oil and dries them with her hair. “And the house was filled with the fragrance of the oil.”
The precious oil, signifying her love and gratitude, also anoints Jesus for his burial. Our gospel makes only a passing reference to evil: Judas, “the one who would betray him,” complains that the anointing is a waste, but his voice is silenced. Believers honor the one they love.
Lazarus is the brother of us all who “sit in the shadow of death.” Mary represents us all.
An artist friend of mine painted this picture of Mary anointing Jesus. How fitting that Holy Week begins with this gospel when we’re called to follow Mary and kneel and pour out the oil of our love on him whose life was poured out for us.
The Anointing. Duk Soon Fwang
“May the holy cross of our good Jesus be ever planted in our hearts so that our souls may be grafted onto this tree of life and by the infinite merits of the death of the Author of life we may produce worthwhile fruits of penance.” (St. Paul of the Cross,Letter 11)
Let my prayer rise up before you like incense, The raising of my hands like an evening offering. Ps 141 We thank you with Mary of Bethany for your love and your promise of life. May we love you in return and believe in your promise.
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