1.
-- Lanie LeBlanc OP
2. --
Carol & Dennis Keller
3. --
Brian Gleeson CP
4. --
5. --(Your
reflection can be here!)
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1.
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3rd Sunday of Easter
I always feel so hopeful reading the selections from the
Acts of the Apostles. The passages are our heritage. They
are also our set of directions for how to spread the Good
News.
In the first reading, Peter uses direct and strong words,
not to berate unbelievers, but to offer them forgiveness of
their sins. In the first letter of St. John, we read/hear
that Jesus has atoned for our sins. We are encouraged to
keep the commandments as a way to learn about Jesus and have
love perfected in us by the Father.
In the Gospel story according to Luke, we see a very
practical Jesus asking for something to eat after he shows
the two disciples he is flesh and bones and assures them
that he is not a ghost. After that, Jesus "opened their
minds" to understand the Scriptures. Finally, Jesus tells
them "You are witnesses of these things."
We, too, are witnesses of the many things done by Jesus
and in the Name of Jesus. We read/hear about them from
Scripture. We are able to witness them in our everyday lives
each day if only we look carefully about us.
It is our turn now, to witness to these truths and spread
the Good News. How have our lives changed because of the
Risen Lord? What can we do in very down-to-earth and
practical ways, in the spirit of friendship and
encouragement, to bring the Good News into the lives of
others by sharing our story?
Blessings,
Dr. Lanie
LeBlanc OP
Southern
Dominican Laity
lanie@leblanc.one
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Third Sunday of Easter April 18, 2021
Acts 3:13-15 & 17-19; Responsorial Psalm 4; 1st
John 2:1-5; Gospel Acclamation Luke 24:32; Luke 24:35-48
The readings for this Third Sunday of Easter are really
amazing. Unfortunately, like so much of living that is
amazing, we often fail to put ourselves in the scene. "Yeah,
that’s really something." And then we just go on again in
our customary way, worried about the pandemic, conflicted in
a near violent way with family, neighbors, fellow citizens
about politics, and concerned about survival. Survival means
more than staying alive physically. Recent events tell us
physical survival is high among our concerns if we are part
of a minority. We note that the law and our constitution
fail repeatedly to preserve, protect, and to guarantee due
process to those without standing in society. Most of us get
accustomed to things as they are and go along to get along.
It’s most convenient to go along with culture,
relationships, economic paradigms, and social injustices
because that’s just the way it is. We are morally poverty
stricken by allowing status quo to continue even though
culture and practice are an affront to our Gospel.
This Sunday’s readings continue the accounts of the
Resurrection of Jesus. The gospel of Luke provides another
look into the reaction of the friends and followers of
Jesus. Until we put ourselves in their shoes and walk with
them for the time of Holy Week and Easter, we’ll stay stuck
in our everyday beliefs and culture. The disciples gathered
in the upper room in a deep depression. All their hopes for
a new beginning for their nation died on the cruel cross.
They buried themselves in the borrowed tomb with the body of
Jesus. By the time of this scene in Luke’s gospel they had
heard from near-hysteric women that Jesus was alive. They
heard from Simon – renamed Peter – that he and another
disciple had seen Jesus. The two disciples who claim to have
walked to Emmaus with a stranger who turned out to be Jesus
rushed back to Jerusalem with their strange and unbelievable
tale. To those who had yet to encounter the living Jesus,
this seemed like an illusion, a fabrication of grieving
minds. Perhaps the stress of the events of the past three
days had brought them into hallucination?
In these stories we see ourselves and how we understand
the events of our time. We take into our minds and hearts
through filters created by past experience, by culture, and
by relationships. For example, persons whose life is
dominated by victimhood – real or chosen – have a difficult
time loving themselves, others, and creation. Their
experiences filter through a mesh of insecurity, of
self-disdain, and of jealousy and/or envy. Anyone filtering
experiences through self-pity knows how very miserable it
makes them. Clinical depression robs many of vitality, peace
of mind, and happiness.
In these resurrection appearances Jesus goes to great
lengths to apply Hebrew Scriptures to what happened to him.
He applies the Law of Moses, the writings of the prophets,
and the verses of the psalms to his sufferings and death. In
his instruction, Jesus reveals God as God is. That God is
often in opposition to our personal understandings of what
and who God is. The Hebrews in their time and we in ours
filter our understanding of who God is for us through our
secular experiences. We apply what we experience each day to
what God is. Our experiences of civil law, economics, social
interactions, and political movements define for us who and
what God is. Using those criteria we attempt to make God
into our image and likeness. That’s really idolatry.
That’s so much of what this Easter season is about in the
time of the apostles and today. The Passion, Death, and
Resurrection bring a new filter to human experience. The
terrors are still with us. There is still war, famine,
social unrest, violence, and hatred. There is so much of sin
in our daily living that it becomes difficult to understand
our living in the light of the Christ. Yet, at Christmas we
insist Jesus is the light of the world. His presence helps
us see. And what is it that we see? That God loves us no
matter what.
Against this and denying the experience of God’s love is
the experience of sin and sinfulness. Accustomed as we are
to understanding sin in the light of retributive justice, we
look to the Ministry, the Cross, and the Resurrection as
some sort of ransom, a get out of jail card. The passage
from the first letter of John this week-end corrects this
notion. He speaks about Jesus being an advocate. Immediately
we take this to mean Jesus stands up for us in the court of
God who is just and who seeks retribution for sins and
transgressions. What would happen to our sense of victimhood
if instead of looking at Jesus as a lawyer for the defense
we’d look at Jesus as the advocate for God? What a turn
around that would be. Then sin would not be the all
important, all consuming focus and filter of our
self-awareness. If Jesus is the advocate for God, then his
role in our living is that he continually calls us to accept
God’s absolutely unconditional loving. The cross is the
absolutely clear and compelling call to humanity to accept
God’s love. Jesus is expiation for sin. That is, he reaches
into our hearts and minds and lifts us up out of sinfulness
into the freedom of the children of God. His action is a
constant call for us to turn away from victimhood into son/daughtership.
That call expiates our blindness. This is no ransom! This is
no substitution of retributive suffering for us. This
incarnation, ministry, suffering, death, and resurrection
are proof of God’s love.
This is not mirage. This is no illusion. "Come, touch me
and see that I am not a ghost for ghosts do not have flesh
and bones. Give me something to eat so to prove I’m real."
The God of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob is not interested in
retribution. God is not out to punish prodigal sons and
daughters. He is the Dad who in every waking moment looks up
the road which took away his son. He watches, hoping,
preparing for the moment when the prodigal returns home. No
matter the sorrow that son or daughter would confess.
"Welcome, welcome home, my child. I love you, I want you
with me, I will never deny you." That is the advocate of
which John writes. That is the advocate that Jesus promised
to send.
Peter’s speech to the crowd of Jews helps us to
understand. He doesn’t mince his words. "You denied the Holy
and Righteous One and asked that a murderer be released to
you. The author of life you put to death, but God raised him
from the dead; of this we are witnesses. I know, brothers,
that you acted out of ignorance, just as your leaders did…
Repent, therefore, and be converted, that your sins may be
wiped away."
That theme of repentance is a constant in our faith. When
we turn to find our meaning, purpose, dignity, and worth in
things of the world, then we fail to understand God as the
only effective energy for life. The world thrives on
domination, on competition, on power, on wealth, and on
fame. All of these pass away. Only the love of God endures
and provides us what our spirits seek. Only the love of God
continually calls us. Only the Love of God for us adopts us
as his daughters and sons.
Sin is certainly with us and the evil one constantly
seeks to mislead us, to trap us into thinking God doesn’t
love us. Fr. Terence Klein in a posting in the America
magazine newsletter of April 7, 2021 says it well. This is
taken from his article.
"Whatever else sin is, it is always a forgetting that we
are loved by God. And the more we sin, the more we forget.
Maybe instead of creating a new word "sin" we should have
called wrongdoing ‘our forgetfulness.’ Sin begins when we
forget that we are loved by God. Then we become afraid and
choose something less than being happy in God’s love. (Fr.
Terence Klein in America magazine newsletter April 7, 2021)
Carol &
Dennis Keller
dkeller002@nc.rr.com
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DISHING OUT HELL OR HEAVEN: 3rd SUNDAY EASTER B
The famous French philosopher, Jean-Paul Sartre, once
said: ‘Hell is other people.’ Judging on hellish things done
to others, sometimes this is all too true. A while back, a
young Indian woman about to start her career as a medical
doctor in Delhi goes out with her boyfriend to see a movie.
On their way home in the bus, they are set upon by a group
of three men, who then brutally rape her, murder her, and
try to hide her body. The many people who esteem and love
her are left broken-hearted. But the perpetrators and even
their lawyers dare to claim they are innocent because any
decent girl would not be out after dark. In the USA a young
unarmed man flees from a policeman who chases and shoots him
dead with a spray of bullets. In Kenya, one hundred and
forty-two students, mainly Christians, are gunned down on a
university campus north of Nairobi by Islamic militants. In
Australia, a young teacher lets herself into her high school
on Easter Sunday to prepare her next class but is stalked by
someone known to her. Her assailant shoots her dead,
transports and burns her body in bushland miles away. She
was soon to marry the love of her life.
But if hell is often other people, so too is heaven. The
good news is that many people constantly and repeatedly
bring comfort, joy, reassurance, peace, and contentment to
others. On television, Nana Mouskouri wows her listeners
with her beautiful signature song ‘The White Rose of
Athens’. An autistic boy wanders away from home into forest
land near a weir and goes missing for five days. But many
people give up their Easter holidays to join the police in
the search. Finally, cold and hungry and sitting on the side
of a precipice, he is spotted from the air and rescued. When
a mother takes a dizzy turn and accidentally drives a car
full of children into a lake, dozens of people wade into the
lake to try to free them.
Just days ago, you and I were remembering the sufferings
and death of Jesus our Saviour. As we looked on his
crucified body with sorrow, love, and gratitude, we came
face to face with the dark side of human nature that led his
enemies to give him hell, by torturing and humiliating him,
and then killing him on the rough wood of a cross. On that
black day in Jerusalem, the capacity of human beings to
hate, hurt and harm one another went right out of control.
Good Friday found us wondering over and over again: Why
was this good man, this innocent man, this man with so much
honesty and integrity, so much humanity and compassion, so
much warmth and generosity, so much affection and kindness,
violated, humiliated, tortured and murdered?
The motives which led his enemies to persecute and
destroy him are those which have always influenced human
beings to hurt and harm one another - arrogance and pride,
power-seeking and ambition, envy and jealousy, anger and
fear, hatred and revenge. Good Friday reminded us of the
dark and hellish side of human nature and its associated
evils.
Fortunately, however, this is not the whole truth. For if
we experience so much evil, we also experience an abundance
of goodness - glimpses of heaven on earth. The crops keep
producing food for our tables. The summer heat gives way to
cooling autumn breezes. Most diseases are now curable.
Tyrants are sometimes overthrown. Social reforms like
pensions for the needy are here to stay. Conflicts end in
reconciliation. Shaky marriages get patched up. Love
survives misunderstandings, thoughtlessness, and
indifference. Wars come to an end. Enemies become friends.
We forgive others and are forgiven. Just as our Risen Lord
has promised in today’s gospel: ‘... repentance for the
forgiveness of sins would be preached to all the
nations...!’ In a word, there is goodness everywhere, more
so than evil. In all such traces of heaven, the light of
Easter, the influence of the Risen Christ, keeps shining
upon us.
Yet one mighty struggle goes on between good and evil,
between hellish and heavenly influences. It goes on in the
material universe, in human societies, and within our
personalities. Evil even seems stronger than good. But it
has not yet finally triumphed. Though too often it seems to
be in danger of being crushed, it manages to survive, and
even to win many victories. The words of Mahatma Gandhi,
Father of Independent India, are so true: ‘When I despair, I
remember that all through history the way of truth and love
has always won. There have been tyrants and murderers, and
for a time they can seem invincible, but, in the end, they
always fall.’
Our continuing celebration of the resurrection of Jesus
reminds us that evil will not have the last say ether in us
or our world. It leaves us in no doubt about the ultimate
triumph of goodness, not only in ourselves but everywhere
around us. Jesus was buried at sunset, to all appearances a
victim and a failure. But on the third day after, the sun
came up on him alive and powerful, influential and
victorious. It will be the same for us who continue to
celebrate Easter by renouncing and rejecting everything dark
and evil in our lives, and by renewing our determination to
always walk with Jesus in his light.
So, dear People of God, what’s it to be? What will we
dish out to others? Will we give them hell on earth, or with
the grace of God will we give and keep giving them, little
slices of heaven?
"Brian
Gleeson CP" <bgleesoncp@gmail.com>
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5.
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Volume 2 is for you. Your thoughts, reflections,
and insights on the next Sundays readings can influence the
preaching you hear. Send them to preacherexchange@att.net.
Deadline is Wednesday Noon. Include your Name, and Email
Address.
-- Fr. John Boll, OP
