Weekly Reflections

CCAS Administrative Assistant 4/14/26 CCAS Administrative Assistant 4/14/26

3rd Sunday of Easter

April 19, 2026

How do I recognize the presence of Jesus in my life?

Luke 24:13-35

That very day, the first day of the week, two of Jesus' disciples were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus, and they were conversing about all the things that had occurred. And it happened that while they were conversing and debating, Jesus himself drew near and walked with them, but their eyes were prevented from recognizing him. He asked them, "What are you discussing as you walk along?" They stopped, looking downcast. One of them, named Cleopas, said to him in reply, "Are you the only visitor to Jerusalem who does not know of the things that have taken place there in these days?" And he replied to them, "What sort of things?" They said to him, "The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over to a sentence of death and crucified him. But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel; and besides all this, it is now the third day since this took place. Some women from our group, however, have astounded us: they were at the tomb early in the morning and did not find his body; they came back and reported that they had indeed seen a vision of angels who announced that he was alive. Then some of those with us went to the tomb and found things just as the women had described, but him they did not see." And he said to them, "Oh, how foolish you are!
How slow of heart to believe all that the prophets spoke! Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things
and enter into his glory?" Then beginning with Moses and all the prophets, he interpreted to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures. As they approached the village to which they were going, he gave the impression that he was going on farther. But they urged him, "Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over." So he went in to stay with them. And it happened that, while he was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them.
With that their eyes were opened and they recognized him, but he vanished from their sight. Then they said to each other,
"Were not our hearts burning within us while he spoke to us on the way and opened the Scriptures to us?" So they set out at once and returned to Jerusalem where they found gathered together the eleven and those with them who were saying,
"The Lord has truly been raised and has appeared to Simon!" Then the two recounted what had taken place on the way
and how he was made known to them in the breaking of bread.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOSPEL

First Impressions by Jude Siciliano, OP

Acts 2:14,22-33; Psalm 16; 1 Peter 1:17-21; Luke 24:13-35

While we might love the New Testament stories, especially those where Jesus heals or offers forgiveness to needy “outsiders,” there are some that we could label “classics.” Today’s gospel might be called a classic tale. The resurrected Jesus appears to two disheartened disciples, confused and perplexed by the tragic, heartbreaking events of recent days. What happened to these disciples back in Jerusalem confused and disappointed them. It made no sense to them. Perhaps there are events in our families, communities, or the world that confuse us as well. How do we explain events that leave us uncertain? We pray, yet our prayers do not seem to be answered. Our hopes for family, health, unity in our church, or peace in the world do not unfold as we hoped. Still, we keep walking, carrying our disappointments and questions with us. In other words, we are confused disciples on our own road to Emmaus. Let us join the two in the gospel story; perhaps what they discover and learn will help us on our own journey. What is striking in our gospel account is that Jesus comes alongside the two disheartened disciples and, at first, they do not recognize him. He listens to their story, letting them express their disappointment and confusion. Where was their glorious God in the defeat of Jesus? They had hoped he would redeem Israel; instead, Jesus seemed to have let them down. Their dreams were shattered, so they left Jerusalem – the former place of hope – talking about their loss. Many of us can recognize that walk. We have all had moments when our faith felt uncertain; when prayers seemed futile and unanswered; when hopes for ourselves, our families, the church, or the world did not unfold as we had hoped. Like those two disciples, we keep walking, carrying questions and disappointment with us. Jesus often meets us where he met the two travelers to Emmaus – in the course of our own travels. He listens to our sadness; we are invited to tell our stories. We do not hold back as we speak out of our own sorrow. How does Jesus help us come to faith when things seem dire? He does for us what he did for the two: he opens the Scriptures to help us see that God is still at work and has not deserted us to suffering and apparent defeat. Do we expect flashes of light or a thundering voice of God to address our doubts and disenchantment? No – Christ meets us quietly and patiently at surprising moments: in our conversations, daily routines, exchanges with others, and even in our own doubts. At first it may be hard to recognize him in those moments, but later we come to say, “Were not our hearts burning within us?” When did things change for the two on the road? When they said to Jesus, “Stay with us,” and when they sat at table with him. He broke the bread, and their eyes were opened – not in a miraculous or grand display, but in the familiar gesture of broken and shared bread. For Luke’s community, and for us, the message is clear. We encounter the risen Christ in Word and Eucharist, in community and hospitality. They asked him, “Stay with us…,” and he did. Notice what happened next after he revealed himself to them. The two disciples did not stay on their path to Emmaus. They returned to Jerusalem, back to the community they had left. They had encountered the risen Lord, and that encounter sent them back – not only to the community, but to the troubled and confused world they had tried to leave. That might seem surprising. Why not simply go back to their homes, believe in Jesus, and say their prayers? Instead, faith moved them from discouragement to mission, from isolation to community. Faith does that for us too. Our Emmaus story offers us both reassurance and challenge. Christ walks with us even when we do not recognize him. He speaks to us through Scripture and shared prayer. He reveals himself in the breaking of the bread and then sends us back into the world with renewed hope because of the message we have heard and the bread we have shared. As we are told at the end of our Eucharist: “The Mass has ended; go in peace.” Or “Go and announce the Gospel of the Lord.” So, the question after Emmaus is not only, “Did they recognize Jesus?” but “How will they live now that they have?” The early Christians faced that very question once the excitement of the resurrection encounter settled into daily life. They had to learn how to live their faith in ordinary routines, in challenging circumstances, and sometimes in societies that did not understand them. That is where our second reading speaks to us today. Let us look briefly at our second reading from the First Letter of St. Peter. He is speaking to early Christians scattered throughout Asia Minor. They were living in a pagan culture, often feeling like outsiders because of their faith. They were trying to live Christian lives in societies that did not share their values. Sound familiar? Peter calls them “sojourners,” or “exiles,” not because they were literally foreigners everywhere, but because their deepest loyalty – their true citizenship – belonged to God. In many ways their situation mirrors ours, especially as we try to live faithfully in a world with priorities different from our own. Peter reminds them that they were living between resurrection and fulfillment. Like us in this Easter season, they believed and trusted that the risen Christ was enabling them to live their daily lives in hope. Peter is speaking to believers like us who are trying to be faithful in a complicated world. They had to decide what truly lasts and what fades away. So do we. The resurrection tells us that love, mercy, faith, and hope – unlike many things in the world – are not perishable. They endure, and their fruits sustain us. “Perishable things” are not only money or property. They include reputation, comfort, control, youth, success, and even our carefully constructed plans. All these might be good, but none can save us or give us lasting peace. In this Easter season, Peter’s message is both freeing and challenging. We have been saved by something imperishable. Therefore, we are invited to live with lighter hands, deeper trust, and greater compassion. We are called to invest in what lasts: faith, reconciliation, mercy, and service to others. These are treasures that do not fade.

Quotable

“Hope has two beautiful daughters: their names are anger and courage; anger at the way things are, and courage to see that they do not remain as they are.” – Augustine of Hippo

Justice Bulletin Board by Barbara Molinari Quinby, MPS, Director Office of Human Life, Dignity, and Justice Ministries Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral; Raleigh, NC

You were ransomed from your futile conduct. —1 Peter 1:18

There is a lot of duality in all three readings today. The First Reading presents Peter as a changed man. The Second Reading addresses Christian communities with their dual challenge to be uprooted from what they were familiar with and face alienation in a society that misunderstood their newfound religious beliefs. Then, in the Gospel, we have two disciples meeting the Risen Christ. This enduring presence of the risen Christ among his disciples then and his disciples now, radically re-creates their lives and our lives. We have been ransomed from our futile conduct. Do you see the duality? We were once one kind of a person but now we are another. Not only do we have all these ancient witnesses, but we also have the actions of God in our lives AND the promise that our souls will not be abandoned to the netherworld. Our life, like Peter, is a transformed one. This past Lenten season, we have been presented many opportunities to choose a life of merciful service to the poor, the disadvantaged, and to care for the suffering natural world. It is as counter-cultural to help the least of these today as it was in Jesus’ time. Our culture screams at us, “Me, me, me.” The “selfies” photo phenomenon grows stronger. Making it on your own is admired while community life is looked upon as weakness. Introspection is in short supply. In this transformational period of Easter time, we should continue to ask ourselves:

“Who am I?”
“Who is God?”
“Why am I here?”
“What am I to do with my life as a transformed follower of Jesus?”

As Pope Leo writes in Dilexi Te: Christians too, on a number of occasions, have succumbed to attitudes shaped by secular ideologies or political and economic approaches that lead to gross generalizations and mistaken conclusions. The fact that some dismiss or ridicule charitable works, as if they were an obsession on the part of a few and not the burning heart of the Church’s mission, convinces me of the need to go back and re-read the Gospel, lest we risk replacing it with the wisdom of this world. The poor cannot be neglected if we are to remain within the great current of the Church’s life that has its source in the Gospel and bears fruit in every time and place. Be transformed and, together, we can transform the world.

Faith Book

Mini-reflections on the Sunday scripture readings designed for persons on the run. “Faith Book” is also brief enough to be posted in the Sunday parish bulletins people take home.

From today’s Gospel: They said to him, “The things that happened to Jesus the Nazarene, who was a prophet mighty in deed and word before God and all the people, how our chief priests and rulers both handed him over to a sentence of death and crucified him. But we were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel.”

Reflection: Hope is the virtue that enables us to dream big dreams and work to put them into reality. But we often need our hopes nourished, because if what we hope for is important----peace, care for the elderly, an end to the death penalty, a rejuvenated and healed church, good liturgy and preaching in our parish, housing for the elderly, an end to domestic violence, equality of women and gays in our churches and communities, fair treatment for immigrants, and so much more—then we will need encouragement, perseverance, passion, clear thinking and the support of a believing and hoping community. We need the Word of God, the Eucharist and a faith community that shares our dreams and gives us hope.

And so we ask ourselves:

When I am discouraged, who gives me hope?
Who are the people in the world who kindle hope in me and challenge me to persevere in my good works?

Walking and Listening to Others

“And they recounted how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”

There are times in our lives when things happen either to us or to others we love; and we get frustrated and disappointed in God; maybe even we get mad at God. We certainly do not understand God’s ways. It happens to all of us who have lived long enough. In those moments of suffering, our frustrated response can be explicit or implicit. Explicit is when we just turn around and say “I don’t want anything to do with God.” When God’s name comes up, we just don’t want to talk about it; we actively avoid talking to God or God being talked about in our presence. There are also implicit ways that we do it. We don’t do anything necessarily bad; we just stop doing things. We get busy doing other things. We sort of ignore God by default more than explicitly wanting to have nothing to do with God. The seeds of either are the same: we ignore God. The question is what does God do in those moments with us? How does God minister to us; or how is he present to us? Today’s scripture tells us exactly what happens. Remember these are the disciples who walked with Jesus. They knew Jesus personally. They were his closest allies. They were not one of the twelve apostles but they would have been part of the group that was around him. When Jesus was crucified, they all absconded. They all abandoned him lest we think it was the other way around. They abandoned him and then they got mad at him. They got mad that he wasn’t the messiah. And you could see the frustration in today’s reading. There is powerful symbolism in Luke’s gospel that gives us to key to unlock the meaning of this gospel. Jerusalem is the City of God and Emmaus is considered like Sin City; think Las Vegas. They are walking away from the Holy City of God and walking toward Emmaus, which means that they are walking away from the Church. What does Jesus do? Remember this is the post-Resurrection Jesus. He has risen from the dead. He is glorified. He doesn’t stop them and say, “Hey. Stop. You’re going the wrong way. Whoa. Whoa. Whoa. No. Listen. Look. It’s me. Look. Look. It’s me.” No. He didn’t do any of that. He just walks with them as they walk away. He walks with them as they walk away and listens to their story the whole time. He doesn’t scold them. He doesn’t stop them. He doesn’t challenge them. And as soon as they were done telling their story, only then, did he break open what he had heard them say; and related himself to the scriptures and says: “Oh, how foolish you were; you didn’t see.” And he helps them to focus once again, to look again at what they have seen with a different eyes. And once they see with different eyes, they start to experience it first; their hearts were burning within them but they didn’t recognize him at first. It was only in the breaking of the bread. And then, what it says, “and he vanished from their sight.” So, where did he go? We see in the breaking of the bread, which we will do in just a few moments, we believe that in the receiving of the bread they became him. It isn’t that he vanished. They became the living Body of Christ for others. What did they do after that? They didn’t just go back to Jerusalem; they ran back to Jerusalem. Their conversion was immediate and urgent. This is what God does to us; Jesus accompanies us. He will walk with us as we walk away from Church or faith. We are all here. Right? But there are others who are not here. And Jesus is walking with those as they walk to the periphery of their lives. The question is how does that happen? What does that look like? It is usually in the form of one of us. It is usually in the form of somebody else. We need to be willing to walk with them to the periphery. Ministry just doesn’t only happen at the center of a life; it happens also at the periphery of our life. Barbara Taylor Brown is a great episcopal priest who writes beautiful poetry and books. She talks about the map of the journey of faith. There is a center and there are edges to that map. Ministry happens in both places. While Mother Church focuses most of its attention at the center; the greatest stories of conversion happen at the edges and then the center becomes the custodians of those stories. Our role as disciples is to go to the edges. Our role is to attend to those who are struggling with their faith; who have gone to the edges of their own lives. This is all great theology but how does that happen in our own lives? What does that look like? Let me give you just one example: There was a time I walked away explicitly from God in anger. My best friend was killed in a plane crash. I was 24 years old, and we were inseparable friends. I was so mad at God, once the funeral was over, I was done. I didn’t want to go back to Church. I would not talk to God. I would not listen. And I most certainly would not come to a Church. I was furiously mad at God. Then I immigrated to America, and I lived with my brother, Paul. Every single Sunday, my brother Paul would go to 7pm Mass down at Queen of Apostles. I used to live in Sunnyvale. And every single Sunday before he’d ask, “Do you want to come to Church?” And I’d go “grrrrrrrrrrr” All sorts of stuff would come out of my mouth and generally it would be a no in so many words! And he would go off to Mass. Then he would come back and never say anything. Every Sunday, he would ask, “Do you want to go to Mass?” He would brace himself for the answer. He kept on doing it. Kept on doing it. Until, one Sunday, I was so frustrated in my own life and lonely, realizing that I really needed God and I was starving myself pointlessly. He said, “Do you want to go to Church?” I said, “Yeah. Sure.” And I’ve been going to Church every Sunday ever since. God was present in my life through Paul. He kept on gently asking. He was present every single day of my life. All that time, he was loving me even though I was wounded and hurt, broken, angry and frustrated. But he kept on showing up and kept on inviting me. No guilt. Just love. Just a tender, caring love of showing up every single week. Every single day of my life. There are people in our lives who have lost faith with God. They have lost a relationship with God. They got angry and frustrated like the disciples on the way to Emmaus and like me in my younger years. There are two things that we need to do: Our role is to be on the periphery, on the edge of the map at the journey of life. It is to minister to them. We come back to the center on Sunday to be filled at the table of the Lord; to receive Christ in the breaking of the bread. Yes. That is our privilege. That is our grace. But we must go to feed those on the periphery, on the edge and we must go gently and kindly. We must be willing to just love them where they are at; and gently invite them week after week; knowing that we are the risen Christ to them, listening to their story. Don’t judge. Just listen to their story and love them. And when given the opportunity, invite. For those who are maybe online who are not here in person and maybe feel like they are on the edge, I ask you to be open to somebody in your life who is loving you; who is the presence of Christ now; who is loving you where you are on the periphery of your life. Allow them to be Christ to you and maybe accept the offer or the invitation to come to Church; or to pray a little bit more with the Lord; to be present to him; to listen and to accept that invitation. Whatever is our response, we are called to be both open to the Risen Lord in our own life when we get to the periphery and get angry at God; and also are called to be the Risen Christ to others. Gently. Kindly. Ever so lovingly being present to them. Loving them where they are at the edge of their life. So that they can know that God loves them. That God is there for them in the breaking of the bread.

PREPARATION FOR THE SESSION

Adapted from Sacred Space: The Prayer Book 2025

Presence of God: Jesus, As I come to you today, fill my heart, my whole being, with the wonder of your sacred presence. Help me to become more aware of your presence in my life, and more receptive to that presence. I desire to love you as you love me. May nothing ever separate me from you. ( 1-2 minutes of silence)

Freedom: Jesus, Grant me the grace to have freedom of spirit. Keep me from being bound by desires and actions that are not good for me or others. Cleanse my heart and soul that I may live joyously in your love. ( 1-2 minutes of silence)

Consciousness: Where am I with God? With others in my life? What am I grateful for? Is there something I am sorry for, words or actions that have hurt others, and which I now regret? I take a moment to ask forgiveness of God and of those whom I have hurt. God, I give you thanks for your constant love and care for me. Keep me always aware of your presence in my life. (2-3 minutes of silence)

OPENING PRAYER

Lord, I know I walk with you, but I do not always recognize you. Help me to find you through prayer and the scriptures, and especially through service to those who might need my help and comfort. Trust me to do for others what you do for me.

COMPANIONS FOR THE JOURNEY

From “First Impressions”, A service of the Southern Dominican Province.

Some people who go through a crisis, like a sudden illness, or the death of a loved one, will struggle in their faith and wonder: “Where is God?” “Has God abandoned me?” Or even, “Why is God doing this to me?” When people in crisis hear the Easter accounts, like today’s gospel, they get a case of the, “If only’s...” “If only I had been there with those frightened disciples when Jesus suddenly appeared in their midst, then I would have strong faith.” “If only I had seen his wounded hands and feet, I would have shared with him my own hurts.” “If only I had watched him eat that baked fish by the side of the lake, I would have told him of my own hunger.” Luke’s account of the disciples’ encounter with Jesus on the road is certainly one of the most beautiful in the New Testament. It is a story of two people who were so focused on the past they couldn’t see what was right before their eyes. With the death of Jesus their world collapsed. Walking away from Jerusalem they were also walking away from their dreams. They were going back into darkness, as they tell the stranger who has joined them, “It is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” They weren’t just speaking about the time of the day. They were returning to their old lives, it seemed nothing had changed and things appeared pretty dark for them. When Jesus joined them on their journey Luke tells us, “...their eyes were prevented from recognizing him.” What caused their blindness? Why didn’t they recognize the one they had been following, with whom they had shared their lives? Maybe it was because they had their own idea of what they wanted Jesus to be, some kind of king, or a warrior on a mighty stallion who would vanquish the Romans. “We were hoping that he would be the one to redeem Israel.” But Jesus was right there in front of them, in the flesh, to show he was alive. Wasn’t that enough? Apparently not, since they didn’t recognize him. Luke wrote his gospel between the years 80-90. The Emmaus account Is in the last chapter of his gospel. Neither he, nor his contemporaries, had experienced the risen Christ the way the first disciples had. Like us, they hadn’t seen him in the flesh. Like us they needed reassurance that Christ was truly risen from the dead and was among them. Like us, life sometimes overwhelmed them, leaving them with questions, confusion and doubts. Luke needed to show his contemporaries how their faith could be strengthened; how Jesus wasn’t a past-tense phenomenon, merely a great historical figure now long gone. We have walked the road to Emmaus. We know how long it is; how it twists and turns; how it doubles back on itself; how confusing it can be; how we can feel lost, even forgotten. The road to Emmaus is a road of fallen expectations. Haven’t there been times in our lives when we have said, “If only I had....” Or, “I wish I hadn’t....”? When we even uttered the words of the dejected travelers, “We were hoping....” When a marriage didn’t last… a personal goal never realized... a child went off the deep end... an illness severely limited our capabilities. Times like these, the words of the two disciples are ours as well, “We were hoping....” By the way he tells his story Luke is helping his contemporary Christians and us see the risen Christ with us. Notice the important elements: Jesus begins by explaining the Scriptures to them. In other words, the biblical Word of God is proclaimed and explained so that new insight is given to the disciples. Then, as we do in worship, after having the Word of God opened for them, the needy disciples gather around the table with Jesus where bread is blessed, broken and given to them. In both this gospel and the Acts of the Apostles (his second volume) Luke uses the term, “the breaking of the bread” -- which was, and still, is a term used for the Eucharist. Luke is describing the encounter with the resurrected Christ in terms of the community’s liturgical experience. With them our “eyes are opened” and we meet the risen Lord when we gather to hear the Word of God and “break the bread” together.

LIVING THE GOOD NEWS

What action can you take in the next week as a response to today’s reading and discussion? Keep a private journal of your prayer/actions responses this week. Feel free to use the personal reflection questions which follow.

Reflection Questions:
On my journey, what hopes have I had?
Have I ever wondered if it is all worth it?
What have been my disappointments?
Have I ever wondered if I matter?

Have I ever found myself walking away from a situation, a relationship or even my religion, because nothing had worked and I did not know how to go on?
Did my disappointment and regrets keep me from seeing the possibilities right in front of me?

How was hope and energy restored to me?
What was the role of another in helping me turn around?
Did focusing on the needs of someone around me help me pull out of a self-defeating funk?
What was the role of my religion or the scriptures in giving me comfort or a new direction?

Has there been a special companion on my journey of faith?

Has there been a time in my life when I was discouraged and then my eyes were opened to discover that Jesus was actually walking with me?

Has there ever been a time in my ordinary life that Christ was actually there, but I did not notice him?
Is Christ there now?

What is the difference between seeing and recognizing?
In the Eucharist we do not see Jesus, but we recognize him….is that true for me?
In the people I meet every day,I might not see Jesus, but do I recognize him in them?

The late renowned homilist Walter Burghardt, S.J., wrote that recognition for the disciples came in three stages: when they were walking together and sharing their disappointments; then when the stranger in their midst began interpreting the scriptures for them; and finally, after their invitation to dine, they recognized him fully in the breaking of the bread. So too, we can recognize Christ when we gather together, when we read, hear and try to understand scripture—either alone or in our small groups, and finally, at the Eucharistic table. Do I have a sense of coming to gradual recognition of Jesus in my life?
Do I realize that this is not a one-time process, but one that recurs all throughout my spiritual life?

Like the journey of the disciples to Emmaus, our life is a faith journey. Where am I in my journey, and what do I need to help me along the way?
On my journey, what have been some high points that caused “my heart to burn within me?”
What have been some signs of God present in my life?
How do I listen to and wrestle with scripture?
Is the Eucharist central to my relationship with Jesus?

Do I trust God enough to pour out my heart to Him?

C.S. Lewis, in a homily called “The Weight of Glory”, said: “Next to the Blessed Sacrament itself, your neighbor is the holiest object presented to your senses….for in your neighbor is Christ.” Do I actually see my neighbor as Christ in my own life?

Have there ever been Easter moments in my life?

PRAYER

Don’t forget to provide some prayer time at the beginning and at the end of the session (or both), allowing time to offer prayers for anyone you wish to pray for.

Stay with me Lord, for it is toward evening. The busy world is hushed, the fever of the day is over, and the work of my day is done. As you walked with me, beside me every minute today, be with me in my rest. Give me comfort and repose this day. I hope to do the same for others I need along the way.

WEEKLY MEMORIZATION

Taken from the gospel for today’s session: Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.

FOR THE WEEK AHEAD

Meditations

A Meditation in the IgnatianStyle/Imagination: Read the story of the journey to Emmaus (Luke 24: 13-32) Try to imagine what the apostles have been doing and how they have been feeling over the last two days. Then picture yourself in their place as they walk down that road to Emmaus. What do you see? hear? What are your feelings about all that has happened? Picture the scene as a strange man walks up to you and begins to ask about your feelings. How would you respond? Why do you not recognize Jesus? Imagine your feelings as you share the story of what the women told you, and then again as Jesus talks to you. Imagine the moment of surprise and joy as you recognize Jesus. How do you feel about seeing Jesus “alive?” Talk to Jesus as you would if you had actually been there that day, telling him of your sadness and then your happiness.

A Meditation in the Dominican Style/Asking Questions: T.S. Eliot, in “the Dry Salvages” poem of “Four Quartets”, wrote,
“We had the experience, but missed the meaning,
And approach to the meaning restores the experience
In a different form, beyond any meaning we can assign to happiness.”
Recognition of Jesus was not a magic act that was indisputable proof of his divinity, nor was it only open to those with brains or money, or religious position. Walter Burghardt, S.J. commented that recognition of Jesus was only open to believers. What, then, is needed, is grace freely offered and a response on the part of the believer. Note that even Jesus’ special friends could not recognize Jesus for much of their journey What is the difference between seeing and recognizing?
Have I ever had an experience, the importance of which was lost on me at the moment, but which I understood much later?
We each have different ways to come to recognition: the beauty of MemChu; a community of shared belief and prayer life; love of spouse, child, friends, parents, even pets; the selflessness of health workers and first responders, the kindness of another; the joy exhibited by a young child; memories of loved ones. Has this ever happened in my spiritual experience? Spend a little time thinking of the ways in which you might come to recognize God’s love and the presence of Jesus in your midst.

A Meditation in the Dominican style/Asking Questions: (Adapted from Sacred Space, a service of the Irish Jesuits) In looking at this Gospel, we see that all the ingredients of the Christian life are here. Where do you find yourself in this scenario?

Running away from where Christ is to be found. We do it all the time.
Meeting Jesus in the unexpected place or person or situation. How many times does this happen and we do not recognize him, or worse mistreat him?
Finding the real meaning and identity of Jesus and his mission in having the Scriptures fully explained. Without the Scriptures we cannot claim to know Jesus. Yet how many Catholics go through life hardly ever opening a bible?
Recognizing Jesus in the breaking of bread, in our celebration of the Eucharist. The breaking and sharing of the bread indicates the essentially community dimension of that celebration, making it a real “com-union” with all present.
The central experience of Scripture and Liturgy draws us to participate in the work of proclaiming the message of Christ and sharing our experience of it with others that they may also share it.
The importance of hospitality and kindness to the stranger. “I was hungry… and you did/did not feed…” Jesus is especially present and to be found and loved in the very least of my brothers and sisters.

A Meditation in the Franciscan Style/Action:
Can I see the face of Jesus wherever I look—
in the sick and the dying?
in the health care workers?
in the grocery store clerks?
in those defying safe-distance protocols?
in the person whose political views I despise?
in the homeless?
in the people who don’t look like me, speak like me, pray like me?
I spend this week making sure that I can find the face of Jesus in everyone I meet—without exception!

POETIC REFLECTION

Could you imagine yourself in this situation?

The Servant Girl at Emmaus — A Painting by Velasquez
She listens, listens, holding
her breath. Surely that voice
is his--the one
who had looked at her, once, across the crowd,
as no one had ever looked?
Had seen her? Had spoken as if to her?
Surely those hands were his,
taking the platter of bread from hers just now?
Hands he’d laid on the dying and made them well?
Surely that face--
The man they’d crucified for sedition and blasphemy.
The man whose body disappeared from its tomb.
The man it was rumored now some women had see this morning, alive?
Those who had brought this stranger home to their table
don’t recognize yet with whom they sit.
But she is in the kitchen, absently touching the winejug she’s to take in,
a young black servant intently listening,
swings round and sees
the light around him
and is sure.
—Denise Levertov from The Stream and the Sapphire

LITERARY REFLECTION

How does this poem by Thom Gunn reflect what the apostles needed after Jesus’ death? How does it reflect what we may need when we have lost someone?

The Reassurance
About ten days or so
After we saw you dead
You came back in a dream.
I’m all right now you said.
And it was you, although
You were fleshed out again:
You hugged us all round then,
And gave your welcoming beam.
How like you to be kind,
seeking to reassure.
And yes, how like my mind
To make itself secure.

CCAS Administrative Assistant 4/8/26 CCAS Administrative Assistant 4/8/26

2nd Sunday of Easter — Divine Mercy Sunday

April 12, 2026

Faith in Jesus might be hard-won, but it strengthens us for the journey of life.

On the evening of that first day of the week, when the doors were locked, where the disciples were, for fear of the Jews, Jesus came and stood in their midst and said to them, “Peace be with you.” When he had said this, he showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Jesus said to them again, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” And when he had said this, he breathed on them and said to them, “Receive the Holy Spirit. Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.” Thomas, called Didymus, one of the Twelve, was not with them when Jesus came. So the other disciples said to him, “We have seen the Lord.” But he said to them, “Unless I see the mark of the nails in his hands and put my finger into the nailmarks and put my hand into his side, I will not believe.” Now a week later his disciples were again inside and Thomas was with them. Jesus came, although the doors were locked, and stood in their midst and said, “Peace be with you.” Then he said to Thomas, “Put your finger here and see my hands, and bring your hand and put it into my side, and do not be unbelieving, but believe.” Thomas answered and said to him, “My Lord and my God!” Jesus said to him, “Have you come to believe because you have seen me? Blessed are those who have not seen and have believed.” Now, Jesus did many other signs in the presence of his disciples that are not written in this book. But these are written that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Christ, the Son of God, and that through this belief you may have life in his name.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOSPEL

First Impressions by Jude Siciliano, OP

Acts 2:42-47; Psalm 118; 1 Peter 1:3-9; John 20:19-31

In the Catholic community today, the Second Sunday of Easter is called “Sunday of Divine Mercy.” Actually, any Sunday could be called Divine Mercy Sunday—or any Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, etc. Today we are invited to see the Resurrection not only as a victory over death, but as the opening of God’s heart in mercy. The Gospel today (John 20:19–31) shows mercy in action through the risen Jesus Christ and his encounter with his fearful disciples and with “the doubter,” Thomas the Apostle. Note the encouraging details in today’s story. The disciples are hiding in fear, shame, and uncertainty. Yet Jesus does not wait for them to get their act together and become brave or faithful. Instead, he comes to them as they are and says, “Peace be with you.” On this Divine Mercy Sunday, the Word proclaims that God’s mercy reaches us where we are – in our locked rooms of grief, regrets, failures, and anxieties. He reassures them, and us, that we do not have to be perfect to receive God’s mercy. The risen Christ comes to fearful hearts, not just to faithful ones. Jesus breathes the Spirit on the disciples and gives them the ministry of sharing what he has given them – the ministry of forgiveness. “Receive the Holy Spirit; whose sins you forgive are forgiven them….” We are not only forgiven and comforted today for our failures as Christ’s disciples; we are also given a mission. We believers become a people called to extend patience, reconciliation, and compassion in families, workplaces, schools, and parish life. Mercy is the Church’s identity, not just one of our devotions. We knock on the door of one who has offended us. When they ask, “Who’s there?” we answer, “It is I, a forgiving person, and I have come to forgive.” However, mercy also makes room for doubt. The disciples, like Thomas, have doubts, questions, and struggles. Jesus did not reject Thomas, nor does he reject us. He invites us to touch his wounds. On this Divine Mercy Sunday, our faith community must be a safe place for honest questions – yes, even our own honest questions and fragile faith. Have you ever shared your doubts with another member of your faith community? Did you receive a compassionate hearing, without judgment or the imposition of guilt? Who does not have doubts, especially during personal struggles that push our faith to its limits? Doubt is not the opposite of faith; it can be the doorway to deeper faith. The bottom line: mercy listens before it judges. The wounds of Christ have not disappeared; they are the source of mercy. Jesus shows them to Thomas. His wounds are not erased by the Resurrection; they are transformed into signs of love. As Pope John Paul II taught, the mercy of God flows from the wounded heart of Christ. This has consequences for us, the faith community. Our own wounds can become places of grace. God’s mercy does not deny suffering. Jesus comes into a fearful, broken community and redeems it. His first word to them—and to us—is “Peace.” He speaks the same word three times: “Peace.” This is his first Easter gift—not certainty, not triumph, but peace in the midst of fear and anxiety. We are reminded today that resurrection faith grows in real life, not in ideal conditions. We are consoled by the story of Thomas the Apostle. He voices what we may feel: our disappointment and our need for assurance. Still, Jesus does not reject him. He returns a week later and meets Thomas exactly where he is. This tells us that the Lord is patient with our slow faith. He keeps coming back to us, Sunday after Sunday, each time we gather in worship. So our prayer today can be brief and to the point: “Thank God for Thomas.” We are invited by God’s Word today to bring our fears into the assembly. The risen Christ meets us behind locked doors. Here, once again, we receive our mission: “As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” We are sent by Easter faith to look outward toward reconciliation and mercy. We trust the quiet presence of the risen Christ among us. “Blessed are those who have not seen and yet believe.” We believers live by trust, not by dramatic signs. Today the Gospel assures us that the Easter season is not about sustaining emotional excitement, but about learning to recognize the steady presence of the risen Lord in Word, Sacrament, and community life. In short: one week after Easter, the message we receive is simple and hopeful – Christ still comes, still speaks words of peace, and still sends us out into our world, even when our faith feels unfinished.

Quotable

Pope Francis has said: “The name of God is mercy.” — From his book “The Name of God Is Mercy” (2016)
“Mercy is the very foundation of the Church’s life.” — Misericordiae Vultus (Bull of Indiction for the Jubilee of Mercy, 2015)“Where there is mercy, there is the Spirit of Jesus.” — General Audience, January 2016
“God never tires of forgiving us; we are the ones who tire of seeking his mercy.”

Justice Bulletin Board by Barbara Molinari Quinby, MPS, Director Office of Human Life, Dignity, and Justice Ministries Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral, Raleigh, NC

Blessed be the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ, who in His great mercy gave us a new birth to a living hope. — 1 Peter 1:3

Today is Divine Mercy Sunday and I am including a portion of the biography of Faustina Kowalska, the first declared saint of the 21st century, whose humble life echoed the message she received and sends to us on this day. Saint Maria Faustina Kowalska, an apostle of Divine Mercy, belongs today to the group of the most popular and well-known saints of the Church. Through her, the Lord Jesus communicates to the world the great message of God’s mercy and reveals the pattern of Christian perfection based on trust in God and on the attitude of mercy toward one’s neighbor. Sister Faustina was born on August 25, 1905, in Glogowiec, Poland of a poor and religious family of peasants. From a very tender age she stood out because of her love of prayer, work, obedience, and also her sensitivity to the poor. The Lord Jesus chose Sr. Maria Faustina as the Apostle and “Secretary” of His Mercy, so that she could tell the world about His great message, which Sr. Faustina recorded in a diary she titled Divine Mercy in My Soul. In the Old Covenant He said to her: “I sent prophets wielding thunderbolts to My people. Today I am sending you with My mercy to the people of the whole world. I do not want to punish aching mankind, but I desire to heal it, pressing it to My Merciful Heart”(Diary, 1588). As you can see from my emphasis in bold above, the following statement is worth repeating, “ The pattern of Christian perfection [is] based on trust in God and on the attitude of mercy toward one’s neighbors.” The statement reminds me of a quote from the Apostolic Exhortation, The Joy of the Gospel. Pope Francis writes, “Sometimes we are tempted to be that kind of Christian who keeps the Lord’s wounds at arm’s length. Yet Jesus wants us to touch human misery, to touch the suffering flesh of others. He hopes that we will stop looking those personal or communal niches which shelter us from the maelstrom of human misfortune and instead enter into the reality of other people’s lives and know the power of tenderness. Whenever we do so, our lives become wonderfully complicated and we experience intensely what it is to be a people, to be part of a people (270).” Be merciful.

Faith Book

Mini-reflections on the Sunday scripture readings designed for persons on the run. “Faith Book” is also brief enough to be posted in the Sunday parish bulletins people take home.

From today’s 1 Peter reading: “Although you have not seen him you love him; even though you do not see him now yet believe in him, you rejoice with an indescribable and glorious joy, as you attain the goal of your faith, the salvation of your souls.”

Reflection: This passage speaks beautifully to the heart of the Easter season. The first disciples saw the risen Christ, but most believers since then – including us – have not. Still, we gather week after week because we love and trust the Lord we cannot see. Faith becomes a way of seeing with the heart.

So, we ask ourselves:

When in my daily life do I show love and trust in Christ, even though I cannot see him?
What experiences have given me a sense of quiet joy or hope that comes from my faith?
How does my faith in the risen Lord influence the way I face difficulties, disappointments, or uncertainties?

Fr. Paul Crowley, S.J. Homily

Father Paul Crowley, S.J. taught theology in the Religious Studies Department, Graduate Program in Pastoral Ministries and at the Jesuit School of Theology. His teaching also brought him to Stanford University and the Weston School of Theology, now the Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, as a visiting professor. He was a prolific writer with numerous award-winning publications, with books on Karl Rahner, Robert McAfee Brown, pluralism in the Church, and faith and suffering. Paul was very active in his profession, having served as editor-in-chief of the prestigious journal of the Society of Jesus, Theological Studies, and as a member of its board. He also held appointments on the boards of the Catholic Theological Society of America, Boston College School of Theology and Ministry, and Jesuit School of Theology. He was good friend of the Catholic Community at Stanford, and devised two courses taught at Stanford through the Catholic Community at Stanford. This homily was posted on April 19, 2020, several months before his death from cancer on August 7, 2020.

When I was a boy, the first Sunday after Easter was known as “Low Sunday.” The previous Sunday had marked the greatest feast in the Christian year, in the Christian faith, and thus, anything following it had to be anticlimactic. Or so the thinking seemed to go. Yet, the Gospel was the same, John’s story about the doubting Thomas, and like today, Easter extended from Easter Sunday all the way to Pentecost. This year in particular, the moniker “Low” might seem appropriate enough. Easter itself felt “low” due to the shelter-in-place orders most everyone has all been faithfully observing. In fact, things are so low at this point in the Covid-19 catastrophe, that what we celebrate on Easter and in this season might get lost in the overall sense of panic that has beset many of us. For we were celebrating—remembering—the fact that in Jesus, God acted in and through suffering and death to conquer it and bring about a new creation. and that this new creation is the foundation of our hope: That even in the midst of the worst suffering, and in the face of death itself, God’s grace is constantly on offer. It is tempting to attribute this Easter faith to a Christianized version of a myth of eternal return, or a theological gloss on the obvious wonder of new life springing forth from winter’s hardened earth and appearance of death. But that is not what this is about, lovely as those images are, and even helpful in inspiring a sense of possibility, a future. For the death that was conquered in the Resurrection of Jesus was a real, bodily death. And that body was itself an outward expression of the fact that God had entered fully into the human condition in Jesus (that other feast we celebrate in December, the Incarnation). What the Incarnation tells us is that our human natures are made for this union with God, accomplished fully in Jesus, and analogously accomplished in us through a lifetime of grace ever abounding. Aquinas reminds us that the finality of a human life is in union with God, and that that human life includes the body. Of course, we are not speaking of a union of a physical body with God—an absurdity—but of the whole of our persons, symbolized by the body, in God. What makes Christian faith in the Resurrection a real thing—what anchors it—is not the sheer will to believe. It is, rather, that there is something to be discovered in this embodied existence, where Christ dwelt, with all its suffering, with the ineluctability of death: that God is found there; God resides there. And that the human, human nature, is entrée into the full reality of God. The conditions for union with God, completion in God, are set even before we are aware of that fact—or even if we are never made aware of it. But those with the gift of faith are aware of this fact, and that makes all the difference as we face death. When Jesus quite often counsels his disciples to “fear not,” he is pointing to a profoundly challenging dimension of this faith, of believing: that we can let go of our fears, even in the midst of the most terrifying suffering, because God is radically present in the realities we inhabit and is there to lead us through all of this harrowing directly into a more intense union with himself. But, accepting that is not an easy thing. In today’s Gospel, Thomas is reaching for that kind of faith. He wants to touch the wounds of Christ, not for empirical evidence of the Resurrection in a modern scientific sense, but in order to connect the Jesus he sees with the fact that Jesus is, as John reminds us at the start of his Gospel, the Word made flesh. It is this very Word-made-flesh that has now been raised from the dead. Thomas wants the complete experience of this fact—a somatic experience of the completeness of God’s work in Jesus as God’s promise for him. And his response is not one of a modern sceptic (I now have evidence, and so I’ll give it some credence); it is rather one of worship, of adoration, before the manifestation of the power of God’s love: “My Lord and my God!” For before this fact, this unity between Incarnation and Resurrection, there is a unity between our own embodied existence and God’s desire for us, his constant self-offer. We are made for this unity, this glory—for Resurrection understood as the finality of our embodied existence, the completion of our human natures in God. All that said, the suffering and death we are witnessing and will continue to witness in the Covid-19 pandemic are overpoweringly real. They admit of no sugar-coating. But no death admits of sugar-coating, especially when it is tinged with human sinfulness, as in warfare or violence. But even here we are challenged, as Thomas was, to find the reality of God—in the suffering and dying, in their bodies breaking down, in the overwhelming fatigue and frustration of generous health-care workers, in researchers looking for answers, and even in the dark recalcitrance of some “leaders” in the face of truth. If we are suffering ourselves in some real physical way, especially when it involves pain, this can make the challenge even greater. We are not disposed toward the search. We simply want to retreat, to escape. As well we might and sometimes should. But none of that empties the Resurrection of its meaning; in fact, what we are witnessing and many undergoing only reinforces it. We are now focused on our embodied lives, lives shared across artificial boundaries, and finding among ourselves a common set of hopes and ideals. Like Thomas, we want to touch others where they have been most grievously wounded. We are seeking to overcome fear, and to face the darkness in which we stand, especially through gestures of love. Some of us believe that in so doing we are walking the pathways of hope, of entry into a new creation—a new order for the human race. Or that we are at least rediscovering the patterns that are possible but too easily forgotten when we also lose sight of the full meaning of our shared embodied existence, of the transcendence of the human spirit reaching toward God, and of God’s reaching toward us in the very heart of the sufferings (and joys) that we undergo.

PREPARATION FOR THE SESSION

OPENING PRAYER

Jesus, I let you whisper to me: ”you will be blessed if you decide to believe”. And you alone know how hard it is sometimes to believe in your goodness, your mercy, and your power over sin and death. You alone know how afraid we are to trust in others, and even in your presence in our lives, sustaining us. Lord, I want to believe. Help my unbelief.

COMPANIONS FOR THE JOURNEY

A reflection from Sacred Space, a sesrvice of the Irish Jesuits

The Risen Jesus meets his closest friends for the first time after they had all abandoned him in his hour of need. It must have been a moment they were all dreading. Yet his first words, twice over, were, “Peace be with you.” No rebuke, no reproach, just ‘Peace!’ And then he showed them his wounds, the unmistakable signs.
“As the Father sent me, I also send you.” While they were feeling they had failed abysmally as his disciples, he entrusted them with the same mission he had received from the Father: now they knew it was not they who had chosen him, but he had chosen them. Their mission, a mission of bringing forgiveness of sins, was to be carried out by the power of the Holy Spirit. I stand in awe in the presence of the Risen Jesus, sharing his great joy and that of his best friends at this meeting.
Thomas is an ordinary person, knotted up in his own fears and doubts. Perhaps we all carry something of his DNA? Here we are shown the transforming impact which his personal encounter with Jesus has on him. Pope Francis says: ‘I invite all Christians to a renewed personal encounter with Jesus, or at least an openness to letting him encounter them. I ask all of you to do this unfailingly each day.’
Sacred Space can be proud, because it anticipated his call by almost twenty years! Let us as a praying community continue to meet the Lord personally and help others to pray in the way we ourselves have learnt.
“These are written so that you may come to believe that Jesus is the Messiah, the Son of God, and that through believing you may have life in his name.” The final sentence of this text underlines the purpose of the Gospel in general and of the Resurrection narrative in particular: that through faith in Jesus as the Messiah we may have life in His name.
How do you test that Faith in yourself? What strengthens that Faith? What tends to undermine that Faith? What remedy do you have to counter this?
Thomas places his hands in the wounds of Jesus, and the experience draws from him the first, ringing affirmation of Christ’s divinity: “My Lord and my God!” Fully human, and fully divine. Eternally human, eternally divine. His human nature is glorified, just as His divinity is humanised. Our human nature will be forever in Him; His divinity dwells within us, and will remain with us even to the consummation of the world.
Here we are shown twice how Jesus breaks into the lives of his friends. Can he break in on me? Where am I in these scenes? Am I hesitant like Thomas? Am I looking for some sign before committing myself to the fact that I am living in a new world, the world of the resurrection?
I let Jesus whisper to me, “You will be blessed if you decide to believe!” To believe in him is to give my heart to him, not just my head. It is not too demanding to do this, because he has already given his heart to me.
Thomas is remembered for his big words: he seemed clear about what he needed to do and what would satisfy him. Yet, faced with Jesus, we see the real Thomas who recognises his Lord and God. He seems to have forgotten his need to probe, his desire for proof. You look beyond my words, Lord, you see what is in my heart.
Help me, Lord, to be before you and to hear your word in this time of prayer. You know the needs of my mind. You have heard my words. Now, let me listen for your voice and know your presence. I lay aside my demands to receive what it is you offer to me.
Are the doors of my heart locked? Do I not expect Jesus to show up and visit me? Am I afraid – afraid that my well-ordered ways of thinking and doing things might be turned upside down if I let Jesus in? Jesus, batter my unyielding heart and break down my defences, and come in.
“Sending” is what God likes to do. Jesus is sent, the Holy Spirit is sent, and we are sent too. Jesus is sent to bring love, light and truth into the world. I too am sent. I am to bring love, light and truth into my little world. I am important to the plans of God. The world will be better if I carry out my mission.
Brave, honest Thomas had gone off to grieve on his own, so he missed that meeting with the Lord. I can taste some of his isolation and resentment in his Unless.... I will not believe. I have suffered in this way when I isolated myself from the community of faith. It is when I am stunned by sorrow that I most need the company of friends and the support of faith.
Thomas was a modern man, finding faith hard, like many people today. He was let down by the others who ran away, the leader denied Jesus, his trust in the group of apostles had been abused. He didn’t want much more to do with them. He had got tired of it all. He wanted to believe but needed a sort of proof. But faith grows within a community. That’s why we baptise children, because faith grows from the beginning of life. We find growth in our faith through the community—for example, in the Mass, shared rosary, sharing our faith in a group, a good spiritual book, sharing our doubts but never closing the door to Jesus, sharing our faith in thanks for what our faith gives us.
In community, the disciples found faith in the risen Christ. Thomas, for some reason, was not with them when the Lord came. Separated from the community, he found faith more difficult. Faith in the Lord, while personal, is not a private affair. In the faith of one, the faith of another may be strengthened. Formation in faith for the disciples had its communal experience—together they learned and found faith in the Lord.
The risen Jesus penetrates the disciples’ defences, overcomes their fears, and brings them joy. I ask him to pass through all my security systems and liberate me from whatever prevents me from “having life and having it in all its fullness.”
Jesus always brings peace and reconciliation. Saint Augustine called peace “the tranquillity of order,” meaning order in my relationships with God, with other people and within myself. Where is there lack of peace in my life? Who do I need to make peace with? Do I make space to experience God’s forgiveness and gift of peace? I ask for his peace so that I may bring others peace.
How did the others feel when Thomas challenged their testimony? Watch with them when Jesus comes to Thomas. Do they sympathise? Are they a little smug, even judgmental? Perhaps there is a lot of Thomas in me.

LIVING THE GOOD NEWS

Reflection Questions:
Those disciples were in a locked room because they were afraid. Are there doors to my heart that are locked?
What role does fear and self-preservation play in my tendency to lock myself away spiritually or emotionally?
What role does fear of change play in my unwillingness to let others in, even Jesus?

Did you ever make a promise that you ultimately were unable to fulfill?
How hard was it to face the one you disappointed?
Was your relationship ever the same?

If you were in Jesus place, what would you have said to those followers (like Peter, and like Thomas) who said they would follow him to his death? And didn’t?
Did Jesus response surprise you?

Scholars have said that the shalom means much more than the word “peace” What does the word shalom mean to you?

How do you define mercy?
Where, in this passage, is there evidence of God’s mercy?

Have you ever been called upon to receive mercy from someone else?
How hard was it to do so?

Have you ever been called on to extend mercy to someone else?
Was this mercy grudging, or condescending, or even insulting toward the recipient?

What is the role of understanding and compassion in extending mercy?
Where is the power dynamic in giving/receiving mercy?
Did Jesus reflect that?

Jesus greeted the disciples in the gospel twice with the words “peace be with you”. What is “peace” for me?
Has there ever been a lack of peace in my life?
Is there a lack of peace now?
How do I deal with his?

Thomas was called “the twin”. Could that refer to both his trusting and his skeptical self?
Can we be both believing and disbelieving at the same time?

When Thomas was separated from the community, he found faith more difficult. Has this been my experience?

Is it sometimes difficult to trust the assertion/testimony of another?
Can I sympathize with Thomas?

Do you think Jesus was judging Thomas?
What is the role of judgement in the practice of mercy?

Like Thomas, do I ever place conditions on my faith/belief?
Am I open to where God’s spirit may be recognized?
Is it enough to say “I believe”? or “My Lord and My God”?

What in my personal life tests my faith?
What strengthens it?
What weakens it?

Is there a climate of unbelief in our society?
What in our culture undermines trust/belief?
What supports it?

Who, in your experience, has not had proof to back up her belief, trust and optimism, but forged ahead anyway?
Are we asked to do this in our own daily lives in any way?

What does your relationship with Jesus do to sustain you in your fear and lack of trust/belief that, in the words of Julian Norwich: “All will be well”?

The emphasis on the wounds of Jesus in this gospel reinforces our recognition of the humanity of Jesus. Is it hard for me to identify with Jesus’ true humanity?
Do I really believe that Jesus is like us, with wounds of love, wounds of hate, and signs of suffering?

What do I see as “wounds” that the Church (the body of Christ) has received from the world, past and present?
What do I see as the ”wounds” that the Church has inflicted on itself?
What do I see as the “wounds” that the Church has inflicted on others?

“Blessed are those who have not seen, but believed.”
Does this imply somehow that we should have no doubts, or is this praise perhaps for John’s community who have never seen Jesus but believe in him, even despite their doubts and fears?
By extension, could it apply to us who have not seen, who may have doubts, yet choose to believe in the ultimate goodness that is Jesus?

Do you sympathize with Thomas or you find fault with his doubts ?

What do you think was the reason Jesus showed Thomas his wounds?
Do you think this shared experience brought Thomas closer to trusting and believing Jesus?

Have you ever been reluctant to show another your personal “wounds”?
Why?

Can sharing one ‘s woundedness ever be manipulative?
How do we avoid this tendency when imparting or receiving information about wounds that have been sustained?
Is it hard?

This story is a major example of how Jesus broke into the lives of his friends. Can I let him break into mine?

CLOSING PRAYER

Don’t forget to provide some prayer time at the beginning and at the end of the session (or both), allowing time to offer prayers for anyone you wish to pray for.

Lord of mercy, be with me in my daily life. Help me to extend mercy, forgiveness, acceptance and “shalom” to others as you have done so to me. Keep me open to the new truths about yourself that you are revealing to me each day, if I can but listen. Help me to share my wounds and help me to acknowledge the wounds of others, just as you did for Thomas.

FOR THE WEEK AHEAD

Weekly Memorization
Taken from the gospel for today’s session: Peace be with you.

Meditations
A Meditation in the Ignation Style/Imagination, freely adapted from “Sacred Space”, a service of the Irish Jesuits: I imagine that I am one of the disciples there in the room when Jesus first appears. How shocked am I? Am I fearful? Comforted? Does everyone in my community “see” that this is really the resurrected Jesus? Does it happen to each of us all at once, or is there a different pace of recognition for each of us? In my role as disciple in the upper room, am I at all hesitant to believe what I am seeing? How do I feel when Jesus says: ”Peace be with you”? What does it feel like when Jesus breathes on me and tells me to receive the Holy Spirit? Do I have any idea what he is talking about? When Thomas returns, do I rush to tell him what excitement he has missed? How do I feel when he rejects my testimony and demands some sort of proof? Do I feel this is this a rejection of Jesus or a rejection of my own personal experience of Jesus? When Thomas actually does encounter Jesus himself, he seems to forget his former need for proof. Did Jesus look into his heart and see the need that was there? Why do I think Jesus shows Thomas, and the rest of us his hands and his side? Do I feel connected, through those wounds, to our shared history? In my own life, do I ever feel that my experience of Jesus is special to me, and feel superior to those whose belief is harder won or even non-existent? In my own faith experience, do I hope that God looks beyond my first reaction, my hasty words, and sees the need in me for love, for reassurance, for comfort? I sit quietly in Jesus ‘ presence and listen for his voice, being open to whatever he offers me. I resolve to give Jesus not just my intellectual belief, but to give him my heart, because he has already given me his.

A Meditation in the Franciscan Style/Action: (From “Justice Bulletin Board,” by Barbara Molinari Quimby, Director of Social Justice Ministries, Holy Name of Jesus Cathedral, Raleigh, N.C.) When I came across these meditations that Pope Francis prepared for a spiritual retreat in 2016, I thought that each of us could find help for our own spiritual journey toward being recreated in the image of Jesus, an image of mercy.

1st Meditation: Nothing unites us to God more than an act of mercy. . . for it is by mercy that the Lord forgives our sins and gives us the grace to practice acts of mercy in his name. Mercy impels us to pass from personal to the communal. We see this in the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves, a miracle born of Jesus’ compassion for his people and for others. Something similar happens when we act mercifully: the bread of mercy multiplies as it is shared. Mercy joins a human need to the heart of God, and this leads to immediate action. We cannot meditate on mercy without it turning into action. . . Mercy engages our whole being -- our feelings and our spirit -- and all other beings as well. Mercy gets its hands dirty. It touches, it gets involved, it gets caught up with others, it gets personal.
2nd Meditation: Saint Bernard has two fine sermons on the Lord’s wounds. There, in those wounds, we find mercy. Bernard pointedly asks: “Do you feel lost? “Are you troubled? Enter into the wounds of the Lord and there you will find mercy.”
3rd Meditation: Being merciful is not only “a way of life”, but “the way of life.”

POETIC REFLECTION

This is a lovely meditation (from a site called “Eleison”) on a poem by Denise Levertov, late a professor of English at Stanford University, who converted to Catholicism while she was here in her sixties and who wrote a Mass for the Day of St. Thomas (also called Mass for the Sunday of St. Thomas). This poem is taken from a book called the Stream and the Sapphire, which chronicles her journey from unbelief to faith.

Especially on this Sunday I am reminded of the poem “St. Thomas Didymus” by Denise Levertov. In her poem she exquisitely expresses both Thomas’ doubt as well as the beautiful revelation of the risen Lord. She draws a parallel between Thomas’ doubt and the epileptic’s father who exclaimed, “I believe Lord, help my unbelief.” Often, like Thomas, I struggle with doubts of my own. I often doubt that God will tend to me and provide for me as I walk the narrow way. I fear loneliness, rejection, isolation, and unhappiness as the result of my life choices. However, I find much comfort in knowing that like Thomas I can express and speak aloud my doubts and like Thomas not be rejected for my doubt but met by the Risen Lord so I may cry, “You are my Lord and my God.”

St. Thomas Didymus by Denise Levertov
In the hot street at noon I saw him
a small man
gray but vivid, standing forth
beyond the crowd’s buzzing
holding in desperate grip his shaking
teethgnashing son,
and thought him my brother.
I heard him cry out, weeping, and speak
those words,
Lord, I believe, help thou
mine unbelief,
and knew him
my twin:
a man whose entire being
had knotted itself
into the one tight drawn question,
Why,
why has this child lost his childhood in suffering,
why is this child who will soon be a man
tormented, torn twisted?
Why is he cruelly punished
who has done nothing except be born?
The twin of my birth
was not so close
as that man I heard
say what my heart
sighed with each beat, my breath silently
cried in and out,
in and out.
After the healing,
he, with his wondering
newly peaceful boy, receded;
no one
dwells on the gratitude, the astonished joy,
the swift
acceptance and forgetting.
I did not follow
to see their changed lives.
What I retained
was the flash of kinship.
Despite
all that I witnessed,
his question remained
my question, throbbed like a stealthy cancer,
known
only to doctor and patient. To others
I seemed well enough.
So it was
that after Golgotha
my spirit in secret
lurched in the same convulsed writhings
that tore that child
before he was healed.
And after the empty tomb
when they told me He lived, had spoken to Magdalen,
told me
that though He had passed through the door like a ghost
He had breathed on them
the breath of a living man-
even then
when hope tried with a flutter of wings
to lift me-
still, alone with myself,
my heavy cry was the same: Lord,
I believe,
help thou mine unbelief.
I needed
blood to tell me the truth,
the touch
of blood. Even
my sight of the dark crust of it
round the nailholes
didn’t thrust its meaning all the way through
to that manifold knot in me
that willed to possess all knowledge,
refusing to loosen
unless that insistence won
the battle I fought with life.
But when my hand
led by His hand’s firm clasp
entered the unhealed wound,
my fingers encountering
rib-bone and pulsing heat,
what I felt was not
scalding pain, shame for my obstinate need,
but light, light streaming
into me, over me, filling the room
as if I had lived till then
in a cold cave, and now
coming forth for the first time,
the knot that bound me unravelling,
I witnessed
all things quicken to color, to form,
my question
not answered but given
its part
in a vast unfolding design lit
by a risen sun.

CCAS Administrative Assistant 4/2/26 CCAS Administrative Assistant 4/2/26

Good Friday

April 3, 2026

Jesus finishes his mission

SUGGESTION FOR GOOD FRIDAY, ESPECIALLY THE TRE ORE FROM 12-3PM

Spend some time with the Gospel of John, maybe comparing it to the same events recorded in Matthew’s Gospel from Palm/Passion Sunday on April 5.. You may want to intersperse some music between the sections (see below). Then take a look at two homilies from 2008 from community members, delivered at two different services. Finally, just spend some time with Jesus.

MUSIC MEDITATIONS FOR GOOD FRIDAY
All are on YouTube:
“Were You There When They Crucified My Lord” — (CTCatholicCorner, 4PM Media, Mahalia Jecson, Pegasis and others)
“What Wondrous Love is This”— (Fernando Ortega, Sabine Murza)
“Pie Jesu by Faure” by Kathleen Battle
“Going Home” by Dvorak, sung by Bryn Terfel

GOSPEL — JOHN 18:1-19:42

Jesus went out with his disciples across the Kidron valley to where there was a garden, into which he and his disciples entered. Judas his betrayer also knew the place, because Jesus had often met there with his disciples. So Judas got a band of soldiers and guards from the chief priests and the Pharisees and went there with lanterns, torches, and weapons. Jesus, knowing everything that was going to happen to him, went out and said to them, “Whom are you looking for?” They answered him, “Jesus the Nazorean.” He said to them, “I AM.” Judas his betrayer was also with them. When he said to them, “I AM,“ they turned away and fell to the ground. So he again asked them, “Whom are you looking for?” They said, “Jesus the Nazorean.” Jesus answered, “I told you that I AM. So if you are looking for me, let these men go.” This was to fulfill what he had said, “I have not lost any of those you gave me.” Then Simon Peter, who had a sword, drew it, struck the high priest’s slave, and cut off his right ear. The slave’s name was Malchus. Jesus said to Peter, “Put your sword into its scabbard. Shall I not drink the cup that the Father gave me?” So the band of soldiers, the tribune, and the Jewish guards seized Jesus, bound him, and brought him to Annas first. He was the father-in-law of Caiaphas, who was high priest that year. It was Caiaphas who had counseled the Jews that it was better that one man should die rather than the people. Simon Peter and another disciple followed Jesus. Now the other disciple was known to the high priest, and he entered the courtyard of the high priest with Jesus. But Peter stood at the gate outside. So the other disciple, the acquaintance of the high priest, went out and spoke to the gatekeeper and brought Peter in. Then the maid who was the gatekeeper said to Peter, “You are not one of this man’s disciples, are you?” He said, “I am not.” Now the slaves and the guards were standing around a charcoal fire that they had made, because it was cold, and were warming themselves. Peter was also standing there keeping warm. The high priest questioned Jesus about his disciples and about his doctrine. Jesus answered him, “I have spoken publicly to the world. I have always taught in a synagogue or in the temple area where all the Jews gather, and in secret I have said nothing. Why ask me? Ask those who heard me what I said to them. They know what I said.” When he had said this, one of the temple guards standing there struck Jesus and said, “Is this the way you answer the high priest?” Jesus answered him, “If I have spoken wrongly, testify to the wrong; but if I have spoken rightly, why do you strike me?” Then Annas sent him bound to Caiaphas the high priest. Now Simon Peter was standing there keeping warm. And they said to him, “You are not one of his disciples, are you?” He denied it and said, “I am not.” One of the slaves of the high priest, a relative of the one whose ear Peter had cut off, said, “Didn’t I see you in the garden with him?” Again Peter denied it. And immediately the cock crowed. Then they brought Jesus from Caiaphas to the praetorium. It was morning. And they themselves did not enter the praetorium in order not to be defiled so that they could eat the Passover. So Pilate came out to them and said, “What charge do you bring against this man?” They answered and said to him, “If he were not a criminal, we would not have handed him over to you.” At this, Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves, and judge him according to your law.” The Jews answered him, “We do not have the right to execute anyone,“ in order that the word of Jesus might be fulfilled that he said indicating the kind of death he would die. So Pilate went back into the praetorium and summoned Jesus and said to him, “Are you the King of the Jews?” Jesus answered, “Do you say this on your own or have others told you about me?” Pilate answered, “I am not a Jew, am I? Your own nation and the chief priests handed you over to me. What have you done?” Jesus answered, “My kingdom does not belong to this world. If my kingdom did belong to this world, my attendants would be fighting to keep me from being handed over to the Jews. But as it is, my kingdom is not here.” So Pilate said to him, “Then you are a king?” Jesus answered, “You say I am a king. For this I was born and for this I came into the world, to testify to the truth. Everyone who belongs to the truth listens to my voice.” Pilate said to him, “What is truth?” When he had said this, he again went out to the Jews and said to them, “I find no guilt in him. But you have a custom that I release one prisoner to you at Passover. Do you want me to release to you the King of the Jews?” They cried out again, “Not this one but Barabbas!” Now Barabbas was a revolutionary. Then Pilate took Jesus and had him scourged. And the soldiers wove a crown out of thorns and placed it on his head, and clothed him in a purple cloak, and they came to him and said, “Hail, King of the Jews!” And they struck him repeatedly. Once more Pilate went out and said to them, “Look, I am bringing him out to you, so that you may know that I find no guilt in him.” So Jesus came out, wearing the crown of thorns and the purple cloak. And he said to them, “Behold, the man!” When the chief priests and the guards saw him they cried out, “Crucify him, crucify him!” Pilate said to them, “Take him yourselves and crucify him. I find no guilt in him.” The Jews answered, “We have a law, and according to that law he ought to die, because he made himself the Son of God.” Now when Pilate heard this statement, he became even more afraid, and went back into the praetorium and said to Jesus, “Where are you from?” Jesus did not answer him. So Pilate said to him, “Do you not speak to me? Do you not know that I have power to release you and I have power to crucify you?” Jesus answered him, “You would have no power over me if it had not been given to you from above. For this reason the one who handed me over to you has the greater sin.” Consequently, Pilate tried to release him; but the Jews cried out, “If you release him, you are not a Friend of Caesar. Everyone who makes himself a king opposes Caesar.” When Pilate heard these words he brought Jesus out and seated him on the judge’s bench
in the place called Stone Pavement, in Hebrew, Gabbatha. It was preparation day for Passover, and it was about noon. And he said to the Jews, “Behold, your king!” They cried out, “Take him away, take him away! Crucify him!”Pilate said to them,
“Shall I crucify your king?” The chief priests answered, “We have no king but Caesar.” Then he handed him over to them to be crucified. So they took Jesus, and, carrying the cross himself, he went out to what is called the Place of the Skull, in Hebrew, Golgotha. There they crucified him, and with him two others, one on either side, with Jesus in the middle. Pilate also had an inscription written and put on the cross. It read, “Jesus the Nazorean, the King of the Jews.” Now many of the Jews read this inscription, because the place where Jesus was crucified was near the city; and it was written in Hebrew, Latin, and Greek. So the chief priests of the Jews said to Pilate, “Do not write ‘The King of the Jews,’ but that he said, ‘I am the King of the Jews’.” Pilate answered, “What I have written, I have written.” When the soldiers had crucified Jesus, they took his clothes and divided them into four shares, a share for each soldier. They also took his tunic, but the tunic was seamless, woven in one piece from the top down. So they said to one another, “Let’s not tear it, but cast lots for it to see whose it will be,“ in order that the passage of Scripture might be fulfilled that says: They divided my garments among them, and for my vesture they cast lots. This is what the soldiers did. Standing by the cross of Jesus were his mother and his mother’s sister, Mary the wife of Clopas, and Mary of Magdala. When Jesus saw his mother and the disciple there whom he loved he said to his mother, “Woman, behold, your son.” Then he said to the disciple, “Behold, your mother.” And from that hour the disciple took her into his home. After this, aware that everything was now finished, in order that the Scripture might be fulfilled, Jesus said, “I thirst.” There was a vessel filled with common wine. So they put a sponge soaked in wine on a sprig of hyssop and put it up to his mouth. When Jesus had taken the wine, he said, “It is finished.” And bowing his head, he handed over the spirit. Now since it was preparation day, in order that the bodies might not remain on the cross on the sabbath, for the sabbath day of that week was a solemn one, the Jews asked Pilate that their legs be broken and that they be taken down. So the soldiers came and broke the legs of the first and then of the other one who was crucified with Jesus. But when they came to Jesus and saw that he was already dead, they did not break his legs, but one soldier thrust his lance into his side, and immediately blood and water flowed out. An eyewitness has testified, and his testimony is true; he knows that he is speaking the truth, so that you also may come to believe. For this happened so that the Scripture passage might be fulfilled: Not a bone of it will be broken. And again another passage says: They will look upon him whom they have pierced. After this, Joseph of Arimathea, secretly a disciple of Jesus for fear of the Jews, asked Pilate if he could remove the body of Jesus. And Pilate permitted it. So he came and took his body. Nicodemus, the one who had first come to him at night, also came bringing a mixture of myrrh and aloes weighing about one hundred pounds. They took the body of Jesus and bound it with burial cloths along with the spices, according to the Jewish burial custom. Now in the place where he had been crucified there was a garden, and in the garden a new tomb, in which no one had yet been buried. So they laid Jesus there because of the Jewish preparation day; for the tomb was close by.

COMPANIONS FOR THE JOURNEY

Homily for Good Friday 2008
The last words of Jesus, according to the writer of the last canonical Gospel, were the cryptic: “It is finished.” What is finished? I think it depends on your perspective. Let us, in our mind’s eye, gather around the cross and observe the reactions of those intimately connected to the fateful events of that day. For the High priests, this is the end, or so they think, to all those incendiary speeches, dangerous gatherings of people who are beginning to question the authority of the temple, and who are beginning to see the high priests as collaborators in a system which kept the peace with Rome, but did so on the backs of the poor and marginalized. It is an end to a public relations nightmare in which Rome once again looks at this corner of the world as a hotbed of discontent and sedition. The traitor is dead. It is finished; FINALLY! Soldiers on a hill, obeying orders from above. Nasty job to pull. But somebody has to. Wretched day. Hot. Humid. Cloudy. Storm brewing. Anybody for a quick game? Thirsty! Listen to that one. He’s thirsty! If you are the king of the Jews, get out of this one — if you can. A bad job; but it’s over now. Another day, another shekel. (1.) It is finished. Two thieves, each with a different reaction on their last day on earth: One is desperate for life, disappointed when Jesus can’t pull off the final miracle. “I knew you were a fake!” The other, sensing something larger than life is happening here: “This man has done nothing wrong.” But for each of them, there is no coming down from that cross alive. It is finished. The crowd dwindles. The shouting subsides. Wagging their heads they snort and chuckle. Destroy the temple! Who did he think he was? Rebuild it in three days! He fancied himself at playing Solomon. Good riddance, I say. That was a good one. But it’s finished now. Somewhere in the shadows lurks a free man. Released from prison his first day out of jail. Barabbas delivered from bondage! His term of sentence? It is finished. Off in the distance on the palace balcony stand Pilate and his wife. A nightmare come true, but after all — I didn’t really know him. It wasn’t as though he were somebody important. What’s done is done. “What I have written I have written, “And that’s that. It is finished (2.) The disciples—men and women, many of whom have been expecting a radical change in the religious philosophies and the social structures at the hand of Jesus surely realize that it is finished, and not in a good way, on that fateful afternoon when Jesus dies. “I left my family, my good life as a fisherman to follow him. I thought we had every chance of success. I was going to be his right hand person in his new kingdom. He is the only one who understood everything I ever did. What now? I guess it’s back to the job of trying to make a living fishing. That’s it. We failed. It is finished.” (3) What is finished? When I was a child, I heard over and over again in one version or another: Jesus’ job, to die for our sins, is finished. Jesus had to die in order for humanity to be restored to God’s favor. Jesus’ death settled the debt we owed by sinning, and opened up the gates of heaven for us once more. When Jesus’ death is understood in light of salvation spirituality, his was a necessary sacrifice for all mankind. The reasoning, according to St Anselm in 1097, goes something like this: the human race has sinned, from Adam on down, and all crime must have punishment. Therefore, God must require a punishment, a price, before God can forgive our sins or crimes. God’s anger will only be appeased by human sacrifice. This human sacrifice must be unblemished and perfect, so no one other than Jesus, the God-Man will be adequate. Jesus died for my sins. The payment has been made, the debt has been satisfied. (4.) Jesus came to save us. And that job is finished. Sorry folks, I just don’t buy it. For many of us, both in and out of the Christian communion, this notion of substitutionary atonement is more of a stumbling block than a help. For many of us, this reasoning flies in the face of our understanding of God as Abba, a loving daddy. What parent would demand the death of a son or daughter as payment for disobedience? Not a normal one. Oh yes, Jesus came to save us, but not in the way we expected Jesus became human to show us how to save ourselves from ourselves. He came to give us a vision of how life could be if it were ordered according to the principles of God instead of principles of humans. Jesus came to show us how to love. How to heal, and how to forgive. And this is what he did from one dusty corner of Israel to other. This is what he preached when he spoke of the laborers in the vineyard, or the Prodigal Son. This is what he did when he refused to counter violence with violence in his last hours on this earth. The legacy Jesus left is there for all of us to recall, recounted every time we pick up a gospel reading. Too often we look on Jesus’ death as a one-time solution to all that ails the earth. Too often we pray to God for an end to war, or poverty or injustice, expecting God to make it happen without any change or effort on our part. God has chosen since the beginning of time, to work in and through humans, and if the kingdom of heaven is to be attained, it must be through our own efforts, using the words and works of Jesus as a lodestar. And when he died on that dark and dreadful day, his part in the drama we call the History of the Earth was over. It was finished. God or no God, by becoming fully human, one in solidarity with all of humanity, it was ordained that he would die--and the manner of his dying showed those who suffer: “I will suffer with you.” He had done all he could to leave behind a legacy of love and mission. Unfortunately, the world Jesus left behind is a broken, messy world, riddled with sin and selfishness, and the project of healing is an interactive one between God and us. It is our job to do our part to finish what Jesus started. And it that sense, it is not finished. Look around folks. We got trouble, right here in River City. Right here on our small planet, we are busy killing one another and have been doing so since the days of Cain and Abel. When we speak of war casualties—which in this war, numbers 4300 and counting—we rarely count the losses to our “enemy.” When we speak of deterrents, we don’t always stop to consider that our little planet has enough weapons of mass destruction stockpiled to annihilate every person on this earth. On our small planet, we are punching holes in the ozone layer, polluting the oceans with oil spills and ruining rivers and streams with industrial waste. Some animals, driven out of their habitat by encroaching civilization and industrialization, starve or are killed for profit. Currently, there are over 1000 species of birds and mammals that are facing extinction. And let us not forget that the collateral damage of war is the scorching of Mother earth itself. IT IS NOT FINISHED! Right here in this land of the free, last time I looked, bigotry and prejudice were alive and well. Stories of discrimination and hate crimes against Blacks, Asians, gays, women, Jews, Muslims; against “those people” who are not like us—these stories are in the newspaper and on the daily news every day. Every day! Right here in this prosperous country, the younger you are, the more vulnerable you are. Among industrialized countries, America is the first in military technology, in military exports, in defense expenditures, in millionaires and billionaires, in health technology, but 17th in efforts to lift children out of poverty, 18th in infant mortality, last in protecting our children against gun violence. As our country has grown richer, our children have grown poorer. (5.) Every 40 seconds a child is born into poverty. Every minute a child is born without health insurance. Every three minutes a child is arrested for drug abuse. Every six minutes a child is arrested for a violent crime. Every eighteen minutes a baby dies. Every two hours a firearm kills a child or youth. Every day in America 8189 children are reported abused or neglected. (6.) Every day. IT IS SO NOT FINISHED! Right here in our own small town, today and tomorrow people are surging or sending surrogates into the grocery stores to provision for the Easter feast as if it were the last banquet. As we exit the stores we don’t even see the people sitting outside on an upended box with crudely lettered cardboard signs saying: “Homeless. Out of Work. Please help.” As darkness closes in, small groups of desperate people arrange their meager bundles for another night in the open. The homeless shelters are full, the lines at St. Anthony’s get longer and longer. Right here in our small town, many of the elderly have to make a choice between food and medication, between food and heat. Right here. IT IS NOT FINISHED! And we pray to God to fix it. “Please God, give us peace. Stop people from fighting with us. Please God, stop people from polluting the earth. Please God, end discrimination and poverty and safeguard the most vulnerable.” I ask you, is this the best we can do to love one another as Jesus has loved us? I think we can do better. Jesus is no longer with us, and in the words of St Theresa of Avila: “God has no body now but yours. Yours are the eyes with which he looks compassion on the world. Yours are the feet with which he walks to do good. Yours are the hands with which he blesses all the earth.” Instead, Let us pray to God to fix us: Jesus, Man of Peace, Give us the wisdom to look beyond military power and brute force to see that the collateral damage of war is often the life of an innocent child, or somebody’s mother or hundreds and thousands of homeless and dislocated souls living in refugee camps. Lord of Consolation, I want to see with loving eyes all those lonely and hopeless ones who have no one to talk to, who are locked in their own misery, who are too old to matter to anyone any more. Give me eyes of compassion to look at the faces behind the faces that I meet every day. Help me to see as fellow travelers those tucked into homes lighted for the evening, and in the homeless who arrange their bundles at the end of the day. Give me ears to hear the voices of the needy and the non-voices of silent desperation. Help me to have the courage and the energy to spend something of myself on their behalf Give me a heart that cares and words to heal. Jesus, brother and friend, you left us an awesome and difficult task--It is not finished. I am not finished. I have barely begun.

1. adapted from God Has A Story Too by James A. Sanders, Elizabeth Hay Bechtel Professor of Intertestamental and Biblical Studies at the School of Theology, Claremont, California, and Professor of Religion at Claremont Graduate School. He is also the author of Torah and Canon.. This material was prepared for Religion Online by Paul Mobley. God Has A Story Too was published in 1979 by Fortress Press, Philadelphia
2. Ibid
3. Ibid
4. Crossan, John Dominic and Borg, Marcus: The Last Week, p139
5. Walter Burghardt: To Be Just is to Love, 190
6. Ibid

Exaltation of the Cross by Catherine Wolff

Sept. 14, 2008

My early school days were spent at St. Agnes Grammar School up in San Francisco. I’m old enough that seeing a movie was a major treat in those days, and the nuns who ran St. Agnes must have invested all their savings in the one movie we had in our library—a Spanish film that came out in the mid-1950’s called The Miracle of Marcellino. My memory of the exact plot is a bit sketchy—Marcellino was a poor little orphan who had been taken in by the monks in a very austere monastery, and there was an episode having to do with a scorpion bite, and a miracle involving bread and wine. But I do have vivid, enduring memories of the conversations that Marcellino would have with Jesus. He was a lonely little boy who visited the chapel regularly to pray out loud in front of a crucifix that seemed to be at least 15 feet tall. After awhile Jesus, from way up on the cross, started talking back in a deep, rich, sorrowful voice. It was a great comfort to Marcellino but it was absolutely terrifying to me as a 6 or 7-year-old. I was worried that any number of crucifixes that hung all over Catholic 1950’s San Francisco would start speaking to me, but really what was most disturbing was that Jesus was somehow still hanging on the cross, now, today. Now this was in the days just before Vatican II, when there was still considerable emphasis on the cross as ransom for sin, and on our personal and collective culpability in Jesus’ suffering and death. The story of the cross was told in terms of the sacrifice necessary for the redemption of our sins, one that we find in the Synoptic Gospels. This was a story that implied that God was deeply offended, that he required appeasement, recompense, and that since no mere human could make up for the estrangement that we humans had chosen, God had to send His own son to make amends, and to require of Him the ultimate sacrifice of death. But there is another way to understand the cross. If we consider God’s love to be the real basis for hope, instead of the terrible ransom of Jesus’ life, we can tell another version of the story. It starts with creation itself, where God begins to reveal Himself, freely and forgivingly, as we see in today’s first reading about his care for his hungry and confused people wandering in the desert. And in this story creation is not an event that is contained in the past but is actually ongoing in history, ongoing in our hearts. The next phase in this unfolding revelation of God’s love is the Incarnation. This is not a desperate salvage job, where God has to intervene in human history to help set it right. We already see him intervening continuously throughout the Old Testament, through the covenant which He kept so lovingly and faithfully and His People kept so badly. The Incarnation is God breaking directly, physically, into history in human form in the person of Jesus. In fact, the great Franciscan Duns Scotus made a powerful argument that the Incarnation is God’s primary redemptive act. He said that the Incarnation was first and foremost in God’s mind from the beginning. It could not have been dependent on, or occasioned by, any action of humans, especially sin. The language of John’s Gospel, which we hear today, does not stress Jesus’ death as ransom, sacrifice, atonement, as the Synoptic Gospels do. In John and Ephesians, in Duns Scotus and Karl Rahner, the crucifixion is part of Jesus’ glorification, not only a sacrifice but a manifestation of the lengths to which God is willing to go to bring us closer to him. All of Jesus’ work was redemptive, all of it ennobled our human nature he took on for us -- his healing, his teaching, and as we heard from Paul today, his obedience unto death, even death on a cross. Jesus was a prophet in a long tradition that believed in the power of suffering to atone for wrongdoing, and because he was so faithful to God’s will, he come to understand that he was to die, and that his death was a sacrifice for others. Jesus resolutely accepted his fate, and his faithfulness persisted throughout his terrible suffering and into his death. But so did the Father’s outpouring of love. We know that because Jesus was raised from the dead, and we are given new life in the Kingdom that came about as a result. And yet that Kingdom is often so difficult to realize. We still suffer. You do, I do. I think of my long walk with my brother down the road to his death from brain cancer. I think of my friend Mary who has carried her schizophrenic brother for twenty years now. I wonder where so many Katrina victims are—they never came home again. And when I see pictures of children in Darfur it seems as though much of humankind is still nailed to a cross. How can we find hope in our suffering, in the suffering of Jesus on the cross? How can we come to comprehend the reality that the cross contains not only the suffering but also the incarnation and the exaltation of Jesus? That it contains not only failure and scandal and pain but also victory and the promise of eternal life? Jesus already triumphed, and yet you and I here today are not yet capable of living fully in the Kingdom he established. We are more like the Hebrews wandering around in the desert, complaining about wretched food and ravaged by serpents. In the rather mysterious passage we heard earlier, Moses had to appeal to God who told him to make an image of the serpent, mount it on a pole, and to have everybody who had been bitten look at it, and as a result, actually live. God had his people confront that which terrified them, and in doing so they were healed. In fact, Jesus recalls that very event in the gospel we heard today—He tells us that as Moses raised up the serpent for his people, the Son of Man is also lifted up so that everyone who believes in him may have eternal life. The Son of Man lifted up on the cross is a dreadful sight to see. It requires us to confront not only Jesus’ suffering but our own demons, and our own suffering borne in His body. This is a powerful lesson of the cross—that we cannot turn away from suffering. We must assume our crosses as faithfully as Jesus did; we must suffer in order to be healed. In being healed we will be able to accept Jesus’ reassurance that the cross is the occasion for the great manifestation of God’s love for us, not a condemnation of the world but a promise that the world is saved.

A Good Friday Meditation Adapted from Sr. Marina Wiederkehr, O.S.B. from Behold Your Life: A Pilgrimage Through Your Memories

Into your hands I commit my spirit.

Read Psalm 31. Stand beneath the cross of Jesus today and embrace the mystery of suffering—that mystery that none of us can fully understand. Touch anew the ways suffering has been your teacher. I once heard someone say: “I am in pain but I am not suffering.” At the time I wondered what she meant. Now I think I know. Perhaps it has something to do with acceptance. Ponder the difference between suffering and pain. Just be there with Jesus today and accept the healing that is within your reach. Hold gently the pain of the entire world this day. Today I am contemplating the mystery of suffering. Now that I am here at he foot of the cross what can I say that matters? I am putting my life on the cross with Jesus, but what does that mean? I can’t put any of those memories on the cross without putting myself on the cross with them. I cannot disconnect myself from my pain and suffering. And so I feel it all again: the resentments, the angers, the pain of rejection, the fears, the guilt, the sin and immaturity, my jealousies and envy, my addictions and my loneliness! They are all here with me on this Good Friday. And now that I’m here with all this baggage, I do not even pray to be rid of it. Standing before the cross I proclaim a gospel that God undestands, “Here is my life. This is who I am. This is what I have to offer you. Here is my gospel—my bittersweet good news. I am wounded, broken, and scarred. Yet with all these burdens I am still able to be your song.” Even here at the foot of the cross my blessings seem to stand in the background. I invite them to come closer, and they do. They step forward. It feels like a great homecoming. Everyone is present. Deep gratitude is here. She stands close by me, reminding me of all the ways she’s blessed me. Immense love and healing grace are present. Fierce yearning is here. Constant conversion and childlike trust have arived. Always forgiving is here. Abundant joy is present. Lasting beauty stands by my side. Ever faithful smiles through the crowd. Even quiet peace has arrived at the scene. The two sides stand and look at each other as if to say, “We’re not really divided. We’ve always been one.” The blessings embrface the bruises. The bite is gone in that embrace. I look upon the cross and I am healed, I look upon what has bitten me and blessed me and I am mended. Yes! There is a great mending on this Friday that is good. Jesus, never allow me to turn away from my life again. I put the gospel of my life into your hands. In your good time I know that you will wrap a cloak of transformation around me. Now it is time to wait and keep vigil with your love that has been poured out. In some small way I know that my love has mingled with yours. Together we will wait for resurrection.

First Impressions—The Easter Vigil by Jude Siciliano, OP

Genesis 1:1–2:2 (Psalm 104), Genesis 22:1-18 (Psalm 16), Exodus 14:15–15:1 (Ex 15), Isaiah 54:5-14 (Psalm 30), Isaiah 55:1-11 (Is 12), Baruch 3:9-15, 32-4:4 (Psalm 19), Ezekiel 36:16-17a, 18-28 (Psalm 42), Romans 6:3-11, Psalm 118:1-2, 16-17, 22-23, 1 Corinthians 11:23-26, Matthew 28:1-10

We have a rich diet of scriptures this evening! Let’s pause for a momentary overview and notice their flow. Start with the creation account and the pair of humans who are given stewardship for what God has created. This is a perfect reading to address how well or poorly we have done in our care of what God has placed in our hands—the created world around us. With the daily extinction of plant and animal species throughout the world and the pollution of rivers, fields and air in our immediate environment, we must seriously ask if the original blessing God said over the humans in the garden has really taken! If it has, then why don’t we share the Creator’s love for everything God saw as “good?” It is because sin entered the world and defaced the image and likeness of God that was created in each of us. We are in need of help. God comes to help us, and it begins with a call. Abraham and Sarah are God’s called and chosen ones and from them shall come descendants who will “find blessing.” The third reading shows God’s deliverance of the enslaved chosen people and reflects how God will deliver us from sin—through the parting-waters. Tonight’s readings carry a strong baptismal theme. Hear the prophets Isaiah, Baruch and Ezekiel proclaim God’s forgiveness and invitation to a wayward people to return to “the One who has become your husband…” If nothing else, the prophets make quite clear that God is crazy in love with us! Where shall we go for rebirth and renewal? Isaiah directs us, “All who are thirsty, come to the water!” God’s graciousness is the strongest message from these readings. This graciousness does not come because the people have been faithful. Based on their own merits, Ezekiel says, they would deserve nothing, for they have “profaned among the nations” God’s holy name. “Not for your sakes do I act, house of Israel, but for the sake of my holy name...” God just continues to be loving and forgiving despite how we act, because God just can’t help it. It’s God’s nature! And God is always doing what comes naturally! This night the biblical waters will flow again as new Christians are initiated into our community. While we humans have taken some meandering paths since our creation that have turned us away from God’s original blessing and plan for us, tonight’s readings remind us of God’s faithfulness to us. We may not have deserved such a “crazy-lover”, but God tells us through Ezekiel that, “for the sake of my holy name,” God will not let us go. We hear in the readings God’s ultimate act of love for us, the sending of the Son. Jesus shows by his life and message that God loves us despite ourselves. Even under threat of death, Jesus will not renege or back away from this message. Isaiah described it well, God would not give up on us, “So shall my word be that goes forth from my mouth; my word shall not return to me void, but shall do my will, achieving the end for which I send it.” (fourth reading.) The congregation will be somewhat fatigued by the evening hour and the length of the readings. But that is no excuse to omit the homily; just keep it focused and short. We will have ample opportunity to preach from several resurrection and post-resurrection accounts over the next weeks. I thought my preaching this evening would focus on the Romans text. It grabs my attention as it speaks about being “baptized into his death.” What does it mean and what are its consequences for our life? No one talks about that at baptisms—“baptized into his death.” Why not? Is it because it would turn off potential candidates? Is it because we want to stress the bright side, the resurrection and new life? Of course we do. But these Triduum days remind us that to get to the resurrection, Jesus had to pass first through his death. We need to have a dying of who we are and what we have been—we too need to pass through death to get to a new life, a new way of living. In a manner of speaking, we were baptized first into the human experience—the waters of the womb was our first baptism. We were immersed into the human condition. It is our life and the only life we would have known. Besides its joys, there are the limitations, and the contagion we caught just by walking along with others in our condition. We catch the illness of the tubercular ward just by walking through it and breathing the air. Sin is in the air, and we breathe it in from the first breaths we take—it is racism, sexism, aggressions, selfishness—you know the list. We have been breathing this stale and contaminating air all our lives. We have to stop breathing in this way and begin breathing in a new way. We have, according to Paul, to die and have a whole new life. How can this happen? Paul has a special moment in mind when he speaks to Christians about having died. He is speaking about being “baptized into Christ.” Paul sees Christ as a representative figure; he is the new human being (Adam). In 2 Cor. 5:15-15) Paul’s teaching reflects this representation model when he says that Christ’s death was on behalf of us all—he died and so “all have died.” He died and we die by being linked to him in our baptism. At a particular moment, our baptism, we died to sin. (Read back a few verses for this, 6:1-3) Baptism in the early church looked like a dying and a rising. Remember that immersion was the more typical form of baptism. To be immersed in water was to be “buried”—when you came up from the water you were “raised.” (Acts 8: 36-39) You stopped breathing when you went under the water. When you came up you took your first breath as an entirely new person, the way an infant takes a first breath at birth. This baptismal dying involved the ending of our past way of living. So, whereas we once lived in sin, now we live in a whole new life. Notice the continual use of the expression used to describe who the baptized are we are “with him”—with him through baptism, “with him through a death like his,” “crucified with him,” “died with him,” and “shall also live with him.” The words Paul uses to describe being “grown into union with him” literally translated means, “grown together with him.” It is like a grafting. We are now, through our baptism, grafted to Christ; growing together with him. We were buried in death with him and so we will be raised with him. The final resurrection is still in the future. We are very aware this new state of union, grafting into Jesus, is far from a perfected state. We are in the in-between time, awaiting what Paul assures us will come, “we shall live with him.” And so, the human struggle against the “bad air” of sin continues. It is an atmospheric pollution in our lives; hard to take a breath without breathing it in. But we are not on our own. We first of all have a new life in us and Paul reminds us that, “Christ died to sin, once for all.” That means that, though sin killed him, it did not defeat him. He triumphed over sin in his lifetime and he won the final battle over sin at his death. Now his new life contains that victory and our being grafted to him passes that victory to us. The union brings his resurrected life with its power over sin to us. Now we live directed and energized by a new life force. We look to the completion when, because of our union with him, we will be “united with him in the resurrection.”

Quotable

Christianity is not merely a religion that was marketed well with just the right political spin by gifted writers. It is a living, breathing, ongoing conversation between God, humanity and all creation empowered by the resurrection of Jesus Christ. Without the resurrection, there would have been no Christianity, no Christendom, no hymns, no seminaries, no churches and no nativity scenes. Jesus lives, not in the sense that King Lear or Hamlet or Handel’s Messiah live on in the hearts and minds of the people, but in the sense that something totally new has happened and keeps happening. The resurrection is the ultimate breakthrough of God into our world that transcends all nature and history. Without it, we wouldn’t care one whit about Bethlehem and the manger, which is why every year my wife and I try to send Easter letters instead of Christmas cards and I congratulate all the once-a-year visitors for choosing Easter above all others. At least they picked the right Sunday to come!

–William J. Carl III, in “The Living Pulpit” (January-March 1998)

Faith Book

Mini-reflections on the Sunday scripture readings designed for persons on the run. “Faith Book” is also brief enough to be posted in the Sunday parish bulletins people take home.

From today’s Gospel: After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning, Mary Magdalene and the other Mary came to see the tomb… The angel said to the women..., “Do not be afraid! I know that you are seeking Jesus the crucified. He is not here, for he has been raised just as he said.”

Reflection: It is, “After the sabbath, as the first day of the week was dawning.” The event happens on an ordinary day in the week when people are finished with the sabbath and have returned to their daily work and routines—mostly struggling at very hard work to feed and support their families. Don’t expect resurrection appearances just on high holy days, in dedicated places and under certain, ideal conditions. Look for the Risen One where “the rubber hits the road,” in daily life, while doing ordinary chores. If the Risen Christ isn’t with us where we work out our Christian lives, he is still in the grave with the stone still sealing the entrance and the guards keeping close watch.

So, we ask ourselves:

Have I discovered new life after a deep loss or disappointment?
Who helped me find it?
How can I bring the Risen Christ to another person suffering loss, or death?

CCAS Administrative Assistant 3/30/26 CCAS Administrative Assistant 3/30/26

Holy Thursday

April 2, 2026

Service to others is a hallmark of a disciple of Jesus.

Companions for the Journey as we enter the Triduum:

1. We must be careful these days not to caricature the Jewish faith. The Gospels portray its piety and leaders in a very unsympathetic light. Don’t become an unconscious anti-Semite. Such bashing of the Jews can reveal an insecure faith, seeking assurance in caricaturing the faith of others. Jewish people suffered their worst pogroms during Holy Week at the hands of Christians. So, we need to be careful of subtle forms of anti-Semitism.

2. We must be careful to respect the integrity of each Gospel. Don’t harmonize or fill in to make a composite picture. Stay within the text and treat it distinctively, learn how each writer saw and witnessed the Christ event. For example, notice that no one gospel has all seven phrases of the “Last Words.” “Seven Last Words of Jesus” in the four gospel accounts of The Passion:

Mark: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Matthew: My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?
Luke: Father forgive them; they don’t know what they are doing.
Today you shall be with me in Paradise.
Father, into your hands I commend my spirit.
John: Woman, here is your son. Here is your mother.
I thirst.
It is finished.

3. Remember that the principle actor is God. There are some key figures in the stories for meditation (Peter, Pilate, etc.), but in the Gospels this week Jesus absorbs our attention. Put aside all else, even the “moral lessons.” We see nothing but Jesus, and him crucified. What is God doing and saying to us this week?

4. The Triduum is a unity: this contradicts the conventional wisdom that sees each day as a separate unit. Note that in each day of the Triduum there is explicit reference to the whole paschal liturgy. Each particular day commemorates the whole of the mystery, while at the same time emphasizing one aspect of the events. So we experience Good Friday in its defeat and pain in the light of the hope of the resurrection; we experience Easter in its glory, reminded of the seeming hopelessness of Good Friday. The renewed emphasis isn’t on “holy week” but on the consciousness of the passion and resurrection as intimately bound to our own lives as church.

5. I want to be careful how I think about suffering and death during these days. I wonder how we can think of them as positive? In the Scriptures of the Jewish people, suffering and death are to be avoided and, where possible, alleviated. The hope we have as Christians is that God will do away with both at the end. It seems to be always the poor who suffer the most, who always are the victims. So, during these days we might resolve to become more fully involved with God’s plan to alleviate suffering by alleviating the suffering of the poor through deeper involvement in social programs. Good Friday, for example, should not be a day that keeps a silence of inattention to the suffering of others. If we keep a silence this day, it may be to ponder the suffering of those around us and to resolve to do something about it. If we fast, or partially fast this day, it might be to do so in solidarity with those who have too little to eat, using whatever we did not spend a give it away to someone in need, or to an organization that helps feed the poor.

GOSPEL FOR HOLY THURSDAY: JOHN 13:1-15

Before the feast of Passover, Jesus knew that his hour had come to pass from this world to the Father. He loved his own in the world and he loved them to the end. The devil had already induced Judas, son of Simon the Iscariot, to hand him over. So, during supper, fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power and that he had come from God and was returning to God, he rose from supper and took off his outer garments. He took a towel and tied it around his waist. Then he poured water into a basin and began to wash the disciples’ feet and dry them with the towel around his waist. He came to Simon Peter, who said to him, “Master, are you going to wash my feet?” Jesus answered and said to him, “What I am doing, you do not understand now, but you will understand later.” Peter said to him, “You will never wash my feet.” Jesus answered him, “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.” Simon Peter said to him, “Master, then not only my feet, but my hands and head as well.” Jesus said to him, “Whoever has bathed has no need except to have his feet washed, for he is clean all over; so you are clean, but not all.” For he knew who would betray him; for this reason, he said, “Not all of you are clean.” So when he had washed their feet and put his garments back on and reclined at table again, he said to them, “Do you realize what I have done for you? You call me ‘teacher’ and ‘master,’ and rightly so, for indeed I am. If I, therefore, the master and teacher, have washed your feet, you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.”

Reflection Questions:
Normally, in Jesus’ time, a slave would be ordered to wash the feet of guests. What does it tell me that Jesus choose to perform this humiliating act?

Jesus’ claim to power confused the disciples, because he used his power to perform an act of service.
How do I view power?
Is it always a bad thing?
What have I done for others with whatever powers I possess?

How does it feel to be the recipient of another’s efforts, kindness, largesse?
Does it seem demeaning?
What mindset can I adopt in order to summon up genuine, gracious acceptance

Peter was reluctant to submit to having Jesus see how dirty his feet were. It was demeaning.
What dirty little secrets have I withheld from others?
What dirty little secrets do I think I have hidden from Jesus?

A Meditation in the Ignatian Style/Imagination:
Imagine that you are one of the twelve settling in for a Passover meal with Jesus. Does this night seem special to you? Where is it being held? Who prepares and serves the meal? What are you eating/drinking? Are there any women present? What of the old stories of the first Passover stand out for you? How do you and your companions view Jesus this evening? Does he seem any different? What do you make of the exchange with Judas, and then with Peter? Do either of them make you uncomfortable? Is there anything in the conversation that puzzles you? What is the message that you take away from the evenings activities, or are you puzzled by the curious events? Do modern readers, who know the outcome of that fateful evening, view the events differently? What message in contained in this story for modern readers? What message is there in that story for me?

Music Meditations:
“Servant Song” by Servantofthelion
“Whatsoever You Do” by Robert Kolchis
“The Call” by John Bell

A HOLY THURSDAY MEDITATION ADAPTED FROM BEHOLD YOUR LIFE: A PILGRIMAGE THROUGH YOUR MEMORIES BY SR. MARINA WIEDERKEHR. O.S.B.

As I have done, so you must do!

On this memorial of Holy Thursday contemplate how your life has been a eucharist: a song of thanksgiving. Two important rituals took pllace during the meal that Jesus shared with ihs disciples the night before he died. The first ritual was that of sharing a meal together during which bread was blessed, broken and passed on to one another to be eaten. The cup of wine beame the cup of blessing because it, too, was shared. The second ritual was the loving action of Jesus washing the feet of his disciples. Beccause this meal was the last meal Jesus shared with his friends before he died, it is often referred to as the Last Supper. He knew that Christians throughout the ages would celebrate it again and again. He knew that the eucharist would be all-embracing—that his presence would be real and vibrant, far beyond the wafer we receive on Sunday mornings. Jesus knew that his pressence would extend to the gathered assebly, his visible body on earth: the body of Christ. It has even been said that we should think seriously about receving communion if we cannot receive every person gathered with us—and beyond. Jesus knew that every time we gather round the table in love, he would be the silent, unseen guest, and eucharist would take place. He know that the eucharist is all-embracing, It cannot exclude. Perhps ths is why Jesus didn’t exclude Judas at the Last Supper. Jesus also knew that we would exclude some people from the eucharist, calling them unbelievers, because not everyone believes in the same way. Consider these things today:

What does it mean to be a believer?
How has your believing transformed your life?
How well have you fed others?
How well have you been eucharist?

Ponder these questions in the silence of your hearts. I refresh my memory today, I call back into my mind and heart eucharistic moments throughout my life. Eucharist means thanksgiving. It often happens at a table, but not always. There is another table called daily life, there are many eucharistic moments right in the midst of everyday life.I envision myself gathered around that table with Jesus and his friends the night before he dies. We are celebrating that great moment of thanksgiving for having been delivered out of slavery. We break the bread. We share the cup. We chant hymns. Jesus say that this is his body and we should do this often in memory of him. I recognize this moment as eucharist and I am full of joy that I can be present. But something else happened at the table that night. I sometimes forget the other eucharistic moment, Jesus got up from the table and washed my feet. He washed everyone’s feet, even Judas’. It has taken me a long time, but I’m finally beginning to read between the lines of that foot-washing moment. Jesus wasns’t just trying to teach me by example that I should wash the feet of others. Oh, it was more than that. I’ll never forget the look on his face as he washed my feet, His heart was overflowing with sorrow, love,and gratitude as he ministered to us. He had to wash our feet because he loved us. He was giving us eucharist again. It was as powerful as the moment he broke the bread and said; “This is y body!”. As he tenderly held my feet he seemed to be saying again; “This is my body!” Now that I’ve grown older, I look back at this moment and understand that he was calling us all to be servants—not doormats, but servants! The difference between being a doormat and a servant is the difference between living in slavery or freedom. To be a servant means to let Jesus sing his song to us, in us, and through us. Only free people can be servants. Only free people can be eucharist for one another. I am beginning to see how I sometimes allow my distracted and addictive life to smother the song of thanksgiving in me, I pause now and call to mind moments whenI have forgotten to be eucharist—times when I have silenced the song within. Yes. There are days when my song has been unsung and the people around me have starved for lack of eucharist. I forgive myself as with great compassion I touch those memories. On this holy day, I also call up all the times when I have not forgotten. I can remember days when I have allowed Jesus to make music with my life—to sing songs through me. I remember times when I have handed out bread and washed feet with abandon. There have been seasons when I have celebated the eucharist at the table of daily life as well as at the altar. I heart the echo of Jesus’ words, “This is my body!”, and did not turn away. Jesus, your words are clear. Your two rituals from the Last Supper live on in my life. Deep inside of me the call to be eucharist throbs unceasingly. I hear your voice, echoing through the ages, “This is my body!”. “Yes”, I say, as I reach for the bread at the altar. “Yes”, I say as I reach for the hand of my brother and sister. Your second ritual, too, aches to be fulfilled in me.”As I have done, do must you do”. Help me never to block your song of love in me. Lead me to those who long for their feet to be washed. And so today, my dearest Lord who washes feet, I sit down at the table with new confidence, It is never too late to be eucharist. Almost anything can happen when you share a meal. Anything can happen at the table of daily life. Amen.

REFLECTIONS ON THE GOSPEL

First Impressions by Jude Siciliano, OP

Exodus 12: 1-8, 11-14; Psalm 116; 1Cor. 11: 23-26; John 13: 1-15

When I was a boy I used to watch professional wrestling matches on a black and white television with my grandfather. The other night I came across a wrestling match as I was flipping through the channels, and I paused and recalled those boyhood memories. I was struck by how much professional wrestling has changed since I was a boy. Now it’s in full color and with great spectacle. When the wrestlers for a match are announced they come down a long ramp, illuminated by spotlights, flashing strobe lights and fireworks. There’s dramatic music too, lots of trumpets and drums. Quite a change from what I remembered. But in other ways the past and present bouts are similar. You can still tell from the wrestlers’ appearances and mannerisms who the heroes and villains are. The crowds know immediately who the “good guys” and “bad guys” are – and these days the wrestlers are just as likely to be women. They cheer and boo for their favorites. When the match starts, at first the hero is beaten up, or so it seems – it still looks phony. Then, as if by divine intervention, he or she gets up from the mat, gathers strength and proceeds to wallop the villain. From out of nowhere, it seems, the weakened hero has been given a gift of new life and power to overwhelm the villain. Of course, it is all drama and pretense. (I was told once there is a drama school in Manhattan for wrestlers to perfect their acting technique.) When the victim hero got up to stride forward to finish off the rival, my grandfather and I would say, “Oh, oh, here it comes!” The wrestling match comes to mind because of today’s gospel. Throughout John’s gospel Jesus has been doing battle against evil and death. It has been a wrestling match; not the fake television kind, but a life and death struggle against very real and powerful opponents. He has confronted sin and death in the surrounding world and also in the resistance of the religious leaders to his message. Death’s powers have come close to him. For example, two weeks ago many of us heard the Lazarus story. We watched Jesus weep at his friend’s tomb as he confronted death’s power to inflict pain and loss among those he loved – and to himself as well. In today’s gospel John says that Jesus, “was fully aware that the Father had put everything into his power....” Then we are told that Jesus “rose from supper.” I remember those television matches and I wonder, is this going to be one of those, “Oh, oh, here it comes” moments? Will Jesus use the power he has been given to overcome his enemies? Will he name and condemn his betrayer? Will he smite the Roman army? Dash over to the Temple and cast out his religious opponents and banish the unfaithful? Will he break his previous pattern of patiently instructing his disciples, dismiss them and go get a better and brighter crop of followers? What will Jesus do when he rises from table with all that power available to him. Well, he certainly surprised his disciples. And he continues to surprise us this day. Jesus rises and washes his disciples’ feet. That’s not how they, or we, would use all the power, were it available to us. How do we know? Because it isn’t the way power is usually used in our world: nations dominate nations; one ethnic group purges its rival; one religion proclaims its dominance over others; some parents, by word and example, teach their children to succeed at any cost; some church officials cut off dialogue over disputed issues; news commentators shout down one another on talk shows; businesses take over weaker rivals, etc. It does seem that when some nations, organizations, religions and individuals come to power, other groups must shudder and say, “Oh, oh, here it comes!” – and suffer the consequences. Having power is not necessarily a bad thing and Jesus’ life and today’s gospel are examples of ways to use power to the benefit and for the good of others. His use of power is also an example to us. I have friends who belong to a mediation group. They use the term “practice” to refer to their daily meditative exercise. So, they schedule into their day a half hour meditation each morning and evening. It’s their “practice” and they have been doing it regularly for some years. They try to support this “practice” by other disciplines. They play meditative music in their home; occasionally join group meditative sittings; read books about meditation, etc. In other words, they feed their basic practice with an appropriate life style. But while they may change routines and what they do for the rest of the day, they stay faithful to their meditation schedule. It is their basic “practice.” Notice the word they use – “practice.” It takes the perfectionist pressure off what they do, they don’t have to do it perfectly. They can be patient and tolerant when they let things slip or they don’t feel a meditation went as they had hoped. They can say, “I am no expert, I am just a beginner. I just practice, maybe I’ll get it right someday. Someday it will be easier and better---right now I practice.” There are a lot of levels of application in today’s foot washing story. We are at Jesus’ last supper with his disciples and so we think of the Eucharist. The other three gospels already have the account of the institution of the Eucharist, so John doesn’t have to repeat that. Instead, he narrates the washing of the feet and in doing that, links it to the Eucharist. From now on, disciples cannot think of the Eucharist without Jesus’ example and instruction to us, his disciples, about the washing of feet. After he washes their feet Jesus tells his disciples, “...you ought to wash one another’s feet. I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do.” Before we get too work-oriented and think about what we must do, let’s reflect on what the washing means for us. First of all, it reminds us that we are recipients. In washing his disciples’ feet, Jesus has acted as the lowly servant, given his life in service for others. As a church, we are who we are because of Jesus’ offering of himself. The washing reminds us that our baptism unites us to Jesus and his death. He has gained life for us, something we couldn’t do on our own. Our washing, our baptism, is what puts us in touch with that life, “Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.” Now, with that new life, we hear Jesus’ instruction, “As I have done for you, you should also do.” So, we too are called to lay down our lives in service to others – and we set about practicing the life we have received. We learn our “practice” from him. And of course, as with any other “practice,” we probably won’t get it perfect, but we will keep at it. Eucharist is our most basic “practice” for Jesus’ disciples; it is the center of our spirituality and is what we regularly return to. It is not only that we attend Eucharist, but, because of the foot washing, we try to put it into practice by serving the needs of others. We try to act towards the world as Jesus acted towards us, by being his faithful witness and serving others, even to the point of giving our lives. Have we gotten it perfect yet? No. That’s why we return to Eucharist and that’s why we keep practicing in our daily lives what we have learned at Eucharist.

Quotable

Prayer for All Migrants to Saint Joseph, persecuted and courageous migrant

Saint Joseph
You who have experienced the suffering
of those who must flee
You who were forced to flee
to save the lives of those dearest to you
Protect all those who flee because of
war, hatred, hunger
Support them in their difficulties
strengthen them in hope
and let them find welcome and solidarity
Guide their steps and open the hearts
of those who can help them. Amen
(Pope Francis, Catechesis on Saint Joseph, December 29, 2021, quoted in the Houston Catholic Worker Newsletter Jan-March 2022)

Music Meditations for Holy Thursday
(All are on YouTube)

“Ubi Caritas” by Taize
“I Have Loved You” Michael Joncas

COMPANIONS FOR THE JOURNEY

(Pinched from somewhere; source unknown)
Jesus is saying this: “you want to know what we’re doing at this last supper? By my taking bread and wine, this cup, and sharing it among you, by my washing of the feet, I want you to understand what the eucharist would mean. The eucharist would be forever a living symbol that I am in your midst urging you to do that service, When I take this bread and say, ’Look, this is my body, and it’s broken for you. This is the cup of my blood shed for you.’ And so the Christian community should do that as well.” So this is the holiest night of the year, as it were, the time when Christians harken back to almost 2000 years ago; into a room which was less than half the size of most churches, with apostles gathered like ourselves, and the twelve represented by these participants tonight. And we have met in order to remember what eucharist means. Jesus, in our midst, urges us “Take your body and give it for others, and break it for others, in love. Take the cup of your blood and pour it and empty it, and hold it out and help restore others so that fractured humankind may be whole again. Whenever you eat this bread and drink this cup, you do it, truly, in memory of me.” My friends, let us try to put ourselves back into that room. Let’s pretend that we’re there and Jesus has just washed our feet, and we’re ashamed, but now we have the message. And during the rest of this service we promise anew to Jesus to be his living community and his presence, and resolve that all shall know we are Christians by our love, one for the other.

WEEKLY MEMORIZATION

Taken from the gospel for today’s session….
At the moment you do not know what I am doing, but later you will understand.

LIVING THE GOOD NEWS

Reflection Questions:
Love is not a feeling; it is a decision. Jesus chose to love those who had not always been as he would have liked, and who would fail him in the last days of his life. Whom do I choose to love in spite of how I feel?

What does “to the end” mean to you? Is there anyone that you love “to the end”?

How do I “show my love” to those I really love?

How hard is it to do demeaning, servant-like things for another person? What makes it hardr? What makes it easier?

“You are to do exactly as I have done for you”. What has Jesus done for me that I must replicate?

What in my life needs to be cleansed?

Why did Peter react the way he did? Has another person’s ultra-kind, ultra self-sacrificing, or ultra humble behavior ever bothered you? How did you react?

Meditations:

A Meditation in the Dominican Style/Asking questions:
Two reflections on humility:

Spiritual writer Paula Huston said” Truly humble people are grounded inreality. They neither preen undel illusions of greatness nor suffer agonies of self-hatred.” Where do I fit on this spectrum?
Rick Warren wrote: “Humility is not thinking less of yourself; it is thinking of yourself less. What, for you, is true humility? What is false humility?

Poetic Reflection in the Ignatian Style/Imagination: Imagine that you are there in that upper room, that you are Judas. What are you thinking and feeling as you see Jesus kneeling before you, knowing what you area about to do? Then imagine that you are Jesus, knowing what you know about Judas. How do you feel?

Jesus Washes Judas’ Feet by Andreas Kevington
That moment, when you knelt before him,
took off his sandals, readied the water,
did you look up? Search his eyes?
Find in them some love, some trace
of all that had passed between you?
As you washed his feet, holding them in your hand,
watching the cool water soak away the dirt,
feeling bones through hard skin,
you knew he would leave the lit room,
and slip out into the dark night.
And yet, with these small daily things –
with washing, with breaking and sharing bread,
you reached out your hand, touched, fed.
Look, the kingdom is like this:
as small as a mustard seed, as yeast,
a box of treasure hidden away beneath the dirt.
See how such things become charged,
mighty, when so full of love. This is the way.
In that moment, when silence ebbed between you,
and you wrapped a towel around your waist;
when you knew, and he knew, what would be,
you knelt before him, even so, and took off
his sandals, and gently washed his feet.

POETIC REFLECTION

Read this poem, then write your own note to Jesus about being made whole and clean by him.

The Touch of the Towel
Jesus, you kneel before me
You remove my shoes and I am exposed
My feet are grimy
full of calluses and cracks
pungent with sweat and toe jam
I’m embarrassed by them
I pull back but you reassure
You’re not offended
I feel welcome in your hands
vulnerable, yet safe
The cleansing begins
I see your reflection in the ripples
I see me, too
Your water brings truth and life
Who I am and who I can be
I am whole and home in the touch the towel
You look at my neighbor and hand it to me
poem
© 2011 Lisa Ann Moss Degrenia