Thomas Gumbleton's blog

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.

If we listen to the three scripture lessons carefully today, we discover that in each of them, God takes an initiative in a time of crisis. God enters in to the activities of God's people. In the first lesson today, it's very clear that it's God's initiative that has brought it about that Amos has gone to the king's palace and has gone there to challenge the king and the elite of the people, the rich.

A couple of weeks ago, when we celebrated our Sunday liturgy, we celebrated the sacrament of baptism for one of the newest members of our parish family, and we do that periodically. So most of you (or all of you, I’m sure, at one point or another) have witnessed a baptism, and you may remember that during the baptism ceremony, after the water has been poured, the baby has been baptized, there are a couple of other small ceremonies that happen:

If we listen very carefully to the readings today, even more than just learn in our minds, we will experience more deeply who God is as God is revealed in Jesus. We will come to know Jesus much more deeply in his humanness, something that we can relate to and try to become like him as we get to know him. In the second lesson, St. Paul reminds us of the generosity of Jesus who, though he was a god, did not think his equality with God something to be clung to, but emptied himself.

If I tell you that we live in a time of great turmoil and stress, both within the Church and within our world, I’m sure no one will be surprised. It’s certainly very evident within the Church that we are living in very troublesome times. Large numbers of people, in fact, are leaving the Church -- one out of ten people in the United States is a former Catholic; that’s 30 million people. We’ve experienced, just recently it happened again, a terrible scandal of sex abuse.

You may remember last Sunday on the Feast of the Holy Trinity, our gospel lesson ended with the very last words of St. Matthew’s gospel, where Jesus promised his disciples and promised all of us, “I will be with you always, even until the end of time.” Now many of us, I believe, when we hear that promise and reflect on it, think of Jesus being present with us; as he said, “I will be with you, present to you,” and we think of what we call the real presence in the Blessed Sacrament, the presence of Jesus living, risen, truly his body and blood, the whole Jesus.

We’re so very familiar with the sign of the cross, which we say at the beginning of this liturgy, for example, and most of the time before any of our prayers or devotion, “In the name of the Father and of the son and of the holy spirit,” we are very familiar. But we probably do not reflect often enough on the fact that that formula, which we take in a sense, I think, very much for granted, was not how the first disciples in the beginning experienced God and reflected on God. It’s a formula that, in fact, only was developed within the Church about 200 years after the last biblical writings were proclaimed.

There is one line in the gospel today that is very important, and yet it's very easy for us to overlook it. Jesus tells his disciples and is telling us that Jesus has many things that we need to know. He was speaking to the disciples at the Last Supper Many things that they had to know, but they couldn't hear them all now, so that is why Jesus tells them, "I will send you the holy spirit and the spirit will make known to you all that has been revealed to me."

Now when we think of the Feast of Pentecost, we think of it as an event that was extraordinary, of course, but we think of it as an event that is over. It happened that one time; 50 days after Easter, the whole community was gathered together in the upper room. They were living in fear and doubt, not knowing what to do. Then there was the extraordinary experience that St. Luke describes in the Acts of the Apostles, and he makes it very clear that this is something special.

Probably all of us are able to picture the ascension of Jesus as it's described by Luke in our first lesson today. It's something that we've heard from the time we were very young and we, I'm sure, have seen many pictures showing the disciples standing around in a circle looking up and Jesus kind of floating up in the air out of their sight. But that's not the way it happened, I have to tell you this. It's very important that we take some time to understand what the gospel writers are doing, what Luke is doing in the Acts of the Apostles, which is the history of the early church, but also in the gospel, and the other gospel writers -- they are not giving us historical facts.

As we try to listen deeply to God's word now during this liturgy, I think it's important to remind ourselves of what is happening during these weeks of Easter. We don't say it's the fourth Sunday after Easter; it's the fourth Sunday of Easter -- we're beginning the fourth week of the Easter time, the time of the risen Jesus. During this time, what the liturgy guides us in doing is trying to hear how the disciples came to understand Jesus. Think back to Easter Sunday, and if you remember, we listened to the gospel of Mark, and that gospel is rather unusual in the way it ends, because it's a very abrupt ending.

We begin this week the Fifth week of Lent, the beginning of the last two weeks of the season of prayer and penance. We refer to this time as the time of the Lord’s Passion. This is the first Sunday of the Lord’s Passion. Next Sunday is the second Sunday of the Lord’s Passion, which we call Palm Sunday. During these two weeks, the readings draw our eyes to look on the crucified Jesus and to focus on what God is doing through Jesus, his death and his resurrection. And what God asks of us if we are to follow Jesus.

In a few moments when I return to the altar, I will proclaim the words of the Eucharist prayer, and I ask you to listen to the beginning words of that prayer right now, because they really express what God is trying to teach us through the lessons of today.

The words are: "Yes, God, you are holy. You are kind to us and to all. For this we thank you. We thank you above all for your son Jesus. You sent him into this world because people had turned away from you and no longer loved one another. Jesus opened our hearts and our eyes to understand that we are brothers and sisters and that you are the one God of us. Jesus brought us the good news of life to be lived with you forever in heaven, and he showed us the way of that life, the way of love."

If we listen very deeply to these readings today, we will have a deeper understanding and perhaps a greater commitment about what it means to enter into the season of Lent. As we approach the second half of Lent, we will be more sincere in our efforts to bring about deep and profound renewal in our hearts and our souls.

I know that we are celebrating a beautiful feast today, the Feast of St. Patrick, and all of us rejoice in our heritage as Irish descendents of that great disciple to the land of Ireland. I should join you. I have discovered that my own ancestors came from both the north in Derry and the south around the city of Cork.