Thomas Gumbleton's blog

I think to begin to get the full impact of what Jesus is teaching us today, it's helpful to go back a little way in this Gospel. During this same Last Supper conversation a few minutes earlier, Jesus had told his disciples, "I am the way, the truth and the life. No one comes to God but through me, and if you know me, you know God also. Indeed, you know him and have seen him." Then Phillip, at this point in the conversation, says, "Lord, show us God and that will be enough."

As we listen to today's scripture lessons, one of the most important parts for us to reflect upon is the part where Peter is standing before the Sanhedrin, the religious leaders of God's people, and declares to them, "You and all the people of Israel must know that this cripple stands before you, cured through the name of Jesus Christ the Nazarene. You had him crucified yet God raised him from the dead. So Jesus is the stone rejected by you, the builders. This stone has become the cornerstone."

I'm sure sometimes people wonder, why do I do that? Because, after all, they have prepared over a period of time and they're dressed up in their confirmation robes and everybody's here to celebrate with them, and so why would I ask the question, "Do you want to be confirmed?" Well, the reason I do -- and this is important for the candidates especially, but for all of us because we can remember our own confirmation and what it means.

It's really amazing how appropriate these readings are for what we're celebrating today. The account in the Gospel, as you know, is the first Easter Sunday, the day Jesus rose from the dead. If you remember last Sunday's Gospel, the day of Easter, John is the same Gospel writer who told us how early in the morning, Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and was worried about the stone being moved away. It was gone, and she discovered that the tomb was empty. She was terrified.

With our solemn procession, carrying our palm branches, we have begun the most important, most sacred, most holy week of our church year, and we have listened to the full account of the sufferings and death of Jesus. During this week, we are invited now to enter into the experiences of Jesus, to hear more deeply perhaps than ever before the words of Jesus, because this is the week when we can once more undergo the profound transformation that God calls us to as disciples of Jesus Christ.

Last Sunday, you may remember we heard that short Gospel lesson from St. John that is so widely known, the 16th verse of the third chapter, John 3:16. The verse was, "God so loved the world that God sent God's only Son, and the Son so loved us that he gave himself for our salvation." When we heard those words last Sunday, perhaps they did not bring about within us an understanding of the price that Jesus paid. It sounds so simple in a way, "God so loved the world that God sent Jesus, and Jesus so loved us that he gave himself for us."

As we listen to the lessons today, it seems to me that what might be a very important question for us to reflect on and to draw more deeply from the lessons is the question, "What happens when we don't listen to God's prophets?" God, as you probably know, continues to speak to every one of us so that in some way we can surface God's will in our lives, and the normal way that God does that is through the prophets. This is so clear in the Hebrew Scriptures and in that first lesson of today.

Editor's note: Because Bishop Thomas Gumbleton was traveling last week, his homily for March 11 was late coming to NCR.

Sometimes when we celebrate the special Peace Mass, if you will, on occasion when we've been reflecting on the way that Jesus teaches us to bring peace into our hearts, lives and worlds, we want to choose certain lessons that we think might express that. Well, these are the lessons that were already assigned for this Sunday, and it's been my experience very often that if you go to the lesson of the day, you find lessons that God wants you to hear rather than you choosing certain lessons that you think God wants you to hear.

The lessons today fit in very well with what we've been doing all day, trying to listen to God as God leads us into the ways of peace. As we heard the first lesson, it might not seem at first like one that would be easy to accept as a way toward peace. In fact, it's a very puzzling and difficult incident. What kind of a God would tell a father to sacrifice his son? What kind of a God would almost torture Abraham by putting him to this test which is beyond understanding?

Why we'd ask that question at this point -- because after all, you have really prepared over a long period of time for the Sacrament of Confirmation, so undoubtedly you're ready. Yet, it's important that I ask you: Do you want to be confirmed? Why? If you think about it, it's not just a ceremony that we're going through this morning. You could say, "Well, I want to be confirmed because everybody is prepared for it. We're going to have the ceremony, so I'll join in."

I think it is most appropriate today to begin our reflection on the Scriptures by focusing especially on the first lesson, where Isaiah is trying to reassure people that God is about to do something new, if only they have the courage to respond to what God is doing. We should remember that these are people who have been driven out of their own city and land. Jerusalem was destroyed and the temple was left in flames. They had to go off into exile, and were in exile for 80-some years. By now, they had become accustomed to the way things are.

As Sr. Marie mentioned before our Liturgy, we celebrate today throughout the whole world a special day of celebration of the Sacrament of Marriage. It's World Marriage Day. Of course, we want to try to reflect on the Scriptures in the light of this special day, but as I read them over, I thought this would be a real challenge. First of all, from the Book of Leviticus, we hear all the rules and regulations about how to worship according to the Jewish tradition.

Now as we try to listen carefully to today's Scripture lessons, there are a couple of things that we need to put into context. First of all, as I mentioned in introducing the Gospel, this event comes right after Jesus has for the first time proclaimed, "The Reign of God is at hand. Change your lives." Enter into this Reign of God by undergoing an extraordinary, profound kind of upheaval in your life. You've got to overcome what was wrong and now follow the way of Jesus. Change your lives, because then you will enter into the Reign of God.

As we listen to these lessons today, especially the first lesson and the Gospel lesson, it's obvious that we're being asked to reflect on the whole idea of vocation, a calling coming from God. We hear about Samuel -- he is called and misunderstands, but then finally hears and understands that God is calling him. Then Jesus, calling the first of His disciples, Andrew, Peter, Phillip and Nathaniel; these four are the very first ones that Jesus calls.

As you probably know, this feast of the Epiphany concludes our celebration of the whole Christmas season. In many parts of the church, this feast is celebrated with even greater joy and celebration than the feast of Christmas itself. It's the culmination of the birth of Jesus, the Son of God, into our world. It is celebrated as the most important feast of the Christmas season. As we listen to the second lesson today, we get a sense of why in the early church, and for many hundreds of years in fact, this feast was so important.

In this liturgy, we celebrate three separate things, really. First, we celebrate together with the whole human family the turning of a new year. We have the same calendar throughout the world. It's perhaps the one thing that does unite the whole human family. We all have this celebration of the beginning of a new year of human history, but then we also celebrate Mary, the mother of God. That's in fact what we call the feast today, the Feast of Mary, the Mother of God.

Probably all of us realize that there are three separate liturgies for Christmas with three separate sets of readings: the one that we use during the night, the one that is taken from Luke's Gospel and recounts those events that happened in Bethlehem of Judea, and then there's the one that we call the Celebration of the Shepherd's Mass. It is usually celebrated at dawn, and that is where we hear about Mary reflecting on all these things in her heart, trying to get some sense of what was happening. Finally, we have these readings from the Mass of Christmas Day.

Today is the beginning of the fourth week that our new missal has been in use, and some of us perhaps are still wondering why these changes were brought about, why we are asked to pray in a way different from what we've been doing for the last 40 years. If we listen carefully to our lessons today, I think we'll get a deeper understanding as to the reasons why we're being asked to make this change. There is always a tension in our relationship with God.

For two weeks now, we have been celebrating the season of Advent, that time of waiting, of expectation, for the coming of someone. As this expectation builds up, our anticipation grows and we hope that maybe during the next two weeks, it will even intensify our prayer life more so that we have a deeper awareness that something extraordinary is coming. We know that the coming that we're talking about is the coming of God into our midst.

In order to listen deeply to the lessons today, it's important to remind ourselves once more that we have begun the season of Advent. The word Advent, as you know, means, "coming." So we're celebrating a season in which we're expecting someone or something to come into our lives. Of course, the someone is God who comes into our lives. In this season of Advent, we expect God to come in different ways.

When we listen to this Gospel message today and the other Scripture lessons, it will be helpful if we remember the context within which these lessons are proclaimed to us. We're beginning a new year. We're used to new years. With our calendar year, we celebrate the beginning of every new year, or we know how we have a fiscal year, and we know how we have an academic year, but we also have a church year, a liturgical year.

Some years ago, a Dominican priest named Albert Nolan wrote and published a book that was entitled Jesus before Christianity. That might seem like a puzzling title to you because we would say that Jesus and Christianity are the same, but what Fr. Nolan was writing about very convincingly was that Jesus, when He lived among His disciples here on earth and then when He first began to live within the community disciples, proclaimed a very radical, even revolutionary message, a message that is very hard to hear and to really take in and understand, and then to follow.

As we listen to the lessons today, one of the first things we might notice is how the different books of the Scriptures, the letters of Paul, Matthew, John, Luke and so on were all written at a different time. They bring forth lessons for the people then, but for us, too, that change over the period of time. What I'm thinking of is the second lesson today from St. Paul. That was the earliest of all the Christian Scriptures. It was written around the year 50, and at that point the Christian community was still expecting the return of Jesus at any moment.

Over these past seven weeks, we have been celebrating what is contained in a hymn preserved for us in the Letter of Saint Paul to the Church at Philippi. It’s a hymn that probably was sung at the time of a person’s reception into the church.

As we listen to the readings today about the final event in the life of Jesus on earth -- His leaving the earth and going to heaven -- we get an impression, I think, that everything is now well organized and Jesus had given to the disciples instructions on how to go and proclaim the Good News everywhere and make the Church happen.

If we think that, we are sadly confused because Jesus did not give a blueprint to the disciples.

A recent report done by a research group called the Pew Foundation indicates an extraordinary number of people have left our Catholic church -- people who were baptized, raised Catholic, have gone. In fact, this report says that one out of 10 people in the United States have what we would call "fallen away" or are former Catholics. One out of ten -- that's 30 million people. Many people are troubled and mainly we see it especially among young people, which is always very discouraging.

In his homily from Sunday Aug. 16, Bishop Thomas Gumbleton relates the teaching on the Eucharist from John's Gospel to the debate on health care reform. He says, "If we're going to say, 'Yes, I will accept [this teaching on the Eucharist],' I hope we will accept it with a full understanding of what Jesus is teaching about the Eucharist, not just that he's present, but that he's present to give himself. … [to] pour out his blood, give his flesh for the life of the world."

To reflect on today’s lessons, it’s very important, I think, to remind ourselves of the context in which these lessons come to us this morning. You may remember this year, we have been following the gospel of Mark, but then suddenly a couple of Sundays ago, we turned to John’s gospel for the account of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes in the desert place. That is also in Mark, but we skipped over to John’s gospel, and then for four Sundays (this is the second Sunday after that), we are reflecting, as Jesus did, on what happened when Jesus fed them in the desert.

This third part of our instruction from sacred scripture continues our reading of the holy gospel according to John. You remember last week, the people were gathered together in a deserted place and after a long day of teaching, they were tired and hungry. The disciples were going to send them away, but then Jesus kept them and found a way that all of them were nourished and fed. After that, they wanted to make him king, so he went away and hid. The disciples crossed the lake in a boat and then John picks up the incident from there.

In our second lesson today, St. Paul exhorted us, “I, Paul, the prisoner of the Lord, urge you to live the vocation you have received,” and that really is what we must try to reflect on this morning as we listen to the scripture lessons -- how these lessons can guide us to live the vocation we have received. First of all in our reflection, I think it’s very important to remind ourselves that in this instance, when we hear the word “vocation,” it’s not something specific, like a call to the priesthood, which we often think of as a vocation, or to the religious life, that’s a vocation in the church.