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Archive for the month “June, 2023”

24 Jun 2023

12th Sunday in Ordinary Time

The readings for the 12th Sunday in Ordinary Time are a call to trust in God. In the first reading Jeremiah refuses to be intimidated by terror from every side. That doesn’t mean that the terror doesn’t get to him it means that he has no intention of allowing the terror to dictate who he is or what he does. Jeremiah has been abandoned by all his friends who now try to discredit him. He is thrown into prison for his preaching, and the army council threatens him with death if he doesn’t change his tune. But Jeremiah refuses to be bullied into agreement because he believes that “the Lord is at his side, a mighty hero”. What keeps Jeremiah sane amidst all this persecution is the profound belief that God cares for him. And, less spiritually, the frank hope that God will clobber all his enemies in good time! The message of the Gospel is quite simple Jesus tells us not to be afraid. Jesus encourages His disciples to fearlessly proclaim His teachings, assuring them that whatever is hidden will be revealed and their actions will be brought to light.

 He does not disguise the truth that his disciples will be confronted by those who threaten, bully and intimidate others into submissive agreement. He emphasizes that the apostles should not fear those who can harm the body, but rather fear God who holds ultimate authority over both body and soul, and promises that those who acknowledge Him before others will be acknowledged by Him in return Not only does Jesus want his disciples to refuse to submit to the merchants of death, he tells them not to be afraid of them: “Do not be afraid of those who kill the body but cannot kill the soul.” What our Lord said to His Apostles applies to all Christians including you and me in the practice of our faith where we are today. By the very fact of fully living our faith day and daily we are apostles. So today we think of all of those who have given us an example by living their lives in faith. These may be parents family members or people we have known we all have people who have shown us the way of faith. So as faith filled people Jesus teaches us that our only source of freedom and strength is the goodness of our heavenly Father a goodness that is comes to us through Jesus himself as well as through people we know.

Our world is full of hype and glitter, but Jesus tells us here and now the same thing he told His apostles: “Do not be afraid. “Whoever acknowledges me before men, I will acknowledge before my Father in heaven. Whoever disowns me before men, I will disown before my Father in heaven.” Jesus wants to us understand that with God there is no such thing as a nameless, faceless individual as we are all part of gods family and our names are carved in the palm of gods hand. Like Jesus, Jeremiah and the disciples, knew all about persecution and rejection. If we allow fear to silence us how will the Good News of Jesus Christ ever be heard in the world? If we don’t speak, who will? If we don’t act, who will? As St Francis of Assisi said, ‘Preach the Gospel at all times. When necessary use words’. This means that by the way we lead our lives and the things we say and do for others the people around us will see we are the Christians we are called by Christ to be.

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17 Jun 2023

11th Sunday of Ordinary Time

The Scripture readings for this Sunday are all about the great compassion Jesus has for the crowd who were his followers. In the first reading the Israelites are reminded that God led them out of Egypt. The psalm tells us that God cares for us. In the second reading, Paul tells us that God proves His love for us because Christ died for us. In the gospel, we hear how Jesus cared for the people and sent his disciples to do the same. Jesus wanted to bring the Kingdom of his Father to them, so he set out to heal them, and sent the apostles out to do the same. His aim was to bring them the peace of God, to help them by healing their worries, their sickness, their embarrassment at being lost sheep without a shepherd as God was always the shepherd in Israel. When he called the twelve apostles he was making a New Israel, a new set of twelve tribes, as a permanent healing body, to make sure that the Kingdom of the Father and its peace and generosity would always be available to everyone everywhere.  

He was not setting up a group  of leaders, instead he was appointing his own helpers in spreading God’s Kingdom.  Do we make it our business to spread the Kingdom of God? Are we labourers in the vineyard, trying to bring God’s peace and healing to all the people of God? All of us are  made in the image of God, and he gave us the task of following on his creative work. And then we are all called to follow Jesus, we are all called to make his message known to all people, those around us as well as the people at large. Like the chosen people of Israel we are counted a kingdom of priests, a consecrated nation. We are called to  minister to the people in our own time, taking responsibility for our own mission. This is a matter for all of us. As Blessed John Henry Newman wrote: He called us first in baptism; but afterwards also; whether we obey his voice or not, he graciously calls us still… Abraham was called from his home, Peter from his nets, Matthew from his office, Elisha from his farm, Nathanael from his retreat. The call that Christ makes to us  takes us onwards, It is a call to be the church of the future just as the Apostles were called to be the Church of the future at its beginning.

Jesus  mission is to the lost sheep. It is his desire and endeavour to bring together, those he pities, those he looks on with love. So today Through the words of the Gospel may we hear again our own call to be emissaries of God’s love and bearers of Good News. May we allow the kindness and compassion of God to touch our own lives and the lives of  those around us wherever we are.

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09 Jun 2023

Corpus Christi

This Sunday we celebrate the feast of the Body and Blood of Christ also known as Corpus Christi. In many places throughout the world the Feast of Corpus Christi would have been celebrated last Thursday but we in Ireland and many other places in the world  celebrate this feast on the weekend after Trinity Sunday.  The first reading tells us that the Israelites were told to remember how God led them through the wilderness and provided for them, emphasizing that they should not live by bread alone, but by every word that comes from God’s mouth. It warns against forgetting God and becoming proud in their own abilities and possessions, as it was God who brought them out of slavery in Egypt and gave them abundance in the Promised Land. 

In the Gospel  Jesus teaches about the necessity of consuming His flesh and blood to gain eternal life. Jesus explains that His flesh and blood are real food and real drink, and those who eat and drink them will abide in Him and have eternal life. When we see the Eucharistic Bread, we believe that it is Jesus who is there before us.  We are in the presence of the one who rose from the dead at Easter, The Church teaches that the Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life.” (CCC 1324) This means that, because Christ is really, truly and substantially present in the Eucharist, we recognize that all the graces we enjoy as Catholics come from this great Sacrament, and all we aspire to, the fullness of the life of God, is contained in this Sacrament. Gathered at the Eucharist we bring ourselves to God.

We bring prayers for our needs and the needs of others to church because they raise our hope in the power and love of God to help us in our needs.  We have this hope because God is with us and continues to be with us in good and bad times through the sacramental life of the Church and through the Eucharist in particular.  Because of God’s faithfulness, we present our needs, give thanks, and offer sacrifice.  The celebration of Corpus Christi is there to remind us that the great gift of the Eucharist is a both a gift and a mystery. Jesus is present with us in a way that is really beyond our understanding. We take Him into ourselves when we receive communion. We are united to his sacrifice on the Cross for all of us when we pray the Mass in its fullness. We come into His Presence whenever we are in Church where the Eucharist is reposed in a tabernacle or exposed on the Altar.

Over the centuries By following in our Lord’s footsteps, many Christians have made great sacrifices, for their faith. Then as now, it begins with each of us  humbly asking God to show us the way to go and to provide the strength needed to follow in his footsteps. This strength we need to follow Jesus comes from the Eucharist the Bread of Life. We feed on the “living bread” that is Jesus and then, we are called to go out to be the living bread for others  as we show  what it means to be a follower of Christ  to the people where we are.

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02 Jun 2023

Trinity Sunday

From Ash Wednesday to Easter Sunday we journeyed through the 40 days of Lent. From Easter Sunday until Pentecost we enjoyed the 50 days of the Easter Season and we  now come to the part of the Churches Year that is called Ordinary Time. This weekend we celebrate Trinity Sunday which is all about the triune god Father, son and Holy Spirit. We remember that the Father is equal to the Son and the Son is equal to the Spirit three in one and one in three we hear this in the breastplate of St. Patrick. The 4th century St Patrick, with a brilliance that we Irish are justly celebrate found in the three leaf shamrock rising from the one stem an image of the Trinity. The feast of the Trinity goes back to 12th century England and St Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury. Historians say the great Thomas celebrated a Liturgy in honor of the Trinity in his cathedral. So the observance was born. In the 14th century, the feast came to be observed by the universal Church. 

We open each Liturgy especially the Mass by invoking the Trinity. We also close Mass and other liturgies by calling upon those same 3 people Father Son and Spirit  to bless us  as we go out into the world.  Throughout the Christian world many people young and not so young will be received into their faith communities  through Baptism in the name of the Trinity. The Christian belief that God is a trinity helps underscore how rich the mystery of God is and how our experience of God is always richer than our concepts and language about God. In intellectual terms, God remains a mystery. For people of faith, God is known not by the mind, but by the heart. That is what spirituality and mysticism are about – exploring our experience of God.  In the first reading God is proclaimed as a God of tenderness and compassion, slow to anger and rich in mercy; a God who walks with his people.  St. Paul’s words in the second reading are born out of his belief that, having been made in the image and likeness of God, Christians must always act in the image and likeness of God.  

When the Church celebrates the Feast of the Most Holy Trinity, it is an attempt to summarize the whole mystery of our God into one day.  This is not just a “theological feast” but a feast which should speak to us of this simple fact of faith: the Father loves us, has revealed that love in his Son, and has called us into a relationship sustained by the Spirit. It is our joy that, as baptized members of the Church, we can share in that divine life and love as children of God.  God has chosen us, and we are his own people, just as he chose the people of Israel long ago. Each Trinity Sunday, we only scratch the surface of this great mystery of our faith.  In gratitude and faith, let us begin and end every prayer with greater faith and reverence as we invoke the Blessed Trinity when  we say “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen.”

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