You might remember that we heard a fuller version of this same gospel story on the Second Sunday of Easter. In that longer version Jesus invited Thomas to reach out and touch his wounds and to believe. This is John’s gospel, where the giving of the Holy Spirit, the feast of Pentecost, doesn’t happen 50 days after the resurrection but in the evening of the same day Jesus rose from the dead. On that first Easter morning, the women at ...
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When I think of my own discernment, that is, when I was trying to figure out God’s will for my life, like you, I got no clear sign from heaven. Maybe that’s the way it’s supposed to be so that we have to keep coming back to God, even daily, for nourishment, strength, and guidance.
What preoccupied my mind for months, and even years, was whether I should become a teacher or a physiotherapist. One day I was sold on the ...
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The gospel passage I just proclaimed is a continuation of last Sunday’s gospel. It’s the farewell discourse. After Jesus breaks bread with his disciples and washes their feet, he spends the next five chapters saying good-bye to them. One remarkable thing is that although Jesus is within a day of his own cruel and unjustified death, his focus is not on himself. Jesus does not waste one minute looking for pity, or a shoulder to cry on, or on how ...
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Whenever we gather for Eucharist, our first reading we listen to always comes from the Hebrew Scriptures, what we traditionally called the Old Testament. The exception to this is during the 50 days of Easter, where the first reading comes from the Acts of the Apostles. Acts tells us of how the Church came to birth when it no longer had Jesus physically present to them. The early Christians truly relied on the ongoing presence of Jesus in his Spirit ...
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There is a pattern in this gospel story, a movement you might say. And the pattern seems to go like this. First you follow Jesus, then you find abundant life. The point of following the shepherd, if you see yourself as one of the sheep, is that you might be led to pastures of abundant food. “I came that you may have life and have it abundantly.” The movement is not that you first find some kind of abundant life ...
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Some 60 years ago, when the Second Vatican Council ended (1963-1965), the world’s bishops were looking for a metaphor to describe the Church. They settled on not calling the Church a divinely instituted hierarchy but instead a “pilgrim people of God.” What they were saying was: 1) the Church is made up of people, 2) the people are God’s people, and 3) these people were on a journey, a pilgrimage you might say. Until then we always thought life was ...
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In that Passion account we just heard, within just a few hours, Pontius Pilate asked Jesus 11 questions. Nobody in the entire Bible (Old Testament or New Testament) asks as many questions as he does. It becomes clear that Pilate really doesn’t want to know the answer to any of these questions. When Jesus, who is the Way, the Truth, and the Life, says that he came into this world to testify to the truth, Pilate asks him a question, ...
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That first reading from the Book of Exodus speaks about the central feast of our Jewish brothers and sisters down to this very day—the great feast of Passover. What I didn’t realize, until recently, is that the entire passage is a monologue spoke by God. It’s God speaking instructions about how to prepare the Passover meal and what to do with the lamb’s blood afterward. It ends with a command to do this ritual, that is, observe Passover as a ...
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I’m beginning to appreciate the importance of the gospel stories we’ve had over the last three Sundays. Like I mentioned last weekend, in the Early Church, a person could not be baptized unless they were familiar with the story of the Samaritan Woman at the Well (two Sundays ago), the story of the Man Born Blind (last Sunday), and today’s story of the Raising of Lazarus from the Dead. With each story we get a little bit closer to the ...
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For almost the first four hundred years of the Church’s existence only adults were baptized. Apparently, in the Early Church, a person could not be baptized unless they passed a certain litmus test. The litmus test was that they had to know their way into and their way out of three important stories: the story of the Samaritan woman at the well (last Sunday), the story of the man born blind (today), and the story of Jesus raising Lazarus from ...
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