by Joan Mitchell, CSJ
“In the cosmology of Jesus’ time, God and the heavens were up and human beings and Earth were below. Our 2,000-year-old gospel tells the story of the risen Jesus’ return to God in the cosmology everyone assumed in the first century. To return to God is to go to the heavens. As the Church celebrates Jesus’ ascension into heaven in 2013, we wonder where he goes, where God’s home is. We hunger for lasting communion with our loved ones.”
How do you imagine communion with God?
Jesus said, “My sheep hear my voice. I know them, and they follow me.”
Sunday’s short gospel passage comes near the end of John’s gospel, chapter 10. Jesus knows us. This passage promises his followers will never perish. No one can snatch us from Jesus’ hand or his Father’s hand. These consoling promises make a comforting funeral gospel; our relationship with Jesus and his Father is infinite and eternal.
What insights into our relationship with God as believers do you find in the imagery of the good shepherd?
My dad was a different man when he was fishing. If we dinged the car or hit a ball through a window, he would growl and shake his head as if to say, “How did I get such dumb kids?”
But on the Mississippi River things were different. We anchored in some backwater and casted for hours, waiting for the big catfish to find our night crawlers and swallow our hooks. Backwaters are quiet places with low-hanging trees. Many of my casts got caught in their leafy branches.
I expected Dad to be impatient with my lack of casting skill. But he wasn’t. Every time I snagged a tree, he motioned for me to haul up the anchor. Then he rowed over, patiently untangled the line, and retrieved my tackle and bait. He would be whistling, not growling. I loved those times together and was always amazed that he wanted us kids to go along.
Maybe the Mississippi was a sacrament of reconciliation for my dad. Maybe the quiet and the slow, gentle rituals of fishing let his heart ring with his love for us and gave him small but important ways to show that love.
I never drive the winding road down to where Dad kept his boat without grinning to myself because I can see him grinning at me, the girl who caught more trees than fish. I can see us fishing with all the time in the world to untangle our lines and our lives.
In Sunday’s gospel Peter goes fishing and the risen Jesus waits for him at the lakeshore. Why should I be surprised that this place is where they reconcile?
Sunday’s Easter scene preserves a snapshot of the original Christian community, small and intimate. It includes the eleven, Jesus’ mother, Mary Magdalene, and other people who have followed Jesus. They have accompanied Jesus to Jerusalem and witnessed him heal and teach.
This Easter community has no pastor, committees, governance, or finance reports – yet. The group encounters Jesus face to face, risen and present. Jesus knows their feelings and needs; he brings them peace and process for handling their conflicts.
A third time Jesus asks, “Simon, son of John, do you love me?”
Peter was hurt because Jesus had asked him a third time, “Do you love me?” So Peter said to him: “Lord, you know everything. You know well that I love you.”
Jesus answered, “Feed my sheep.”
John 21.17
The three repetitions remind us of the three times Peter denied Jesus in the courtyard of the high priest. In that scene Peter, afraid for his life, refused to own up to any connection with Jesus. Here by the lake, Jesus asks him to affirm that they still stand together in love and mission. Jesus gives Peter a responsibility but not a superior role. Peter is to feed, tend, and love the community, not lord it over the flock.
How have Church pastors tended and nourished you?
Jesus said, “You became a believer because you saw me. Blessed are they who have not seen and have believed.”
John 20:29
Thomas occupies center stage in the second half of Sunday’s gospel. Thomas’s doubt and subsequent faith parallel the mystery of how later generations of Christians grow into faith in Jesus’ death and resurrection. Thomas touches Jesus’ hands, feet, and side for all of us who are not among the first witnesses.
In every believer’s life, the community’s faith sometimes must carry the doubts of an individual. By including the story of Thomas’s doubt and faith, John’s community challenges itself to faith in Jesus’ presence and absence.
Our celebration of Holy Week originates in our instinct to visit the graves of the dead in order to remember them. Pilgrims flock to Jerusalem during Holy Week each year to walk its narrow streets and visit the sites where Jesus died and was buried.
The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, built by Helena, mother of the Emperor Constantine, stands on the site where crucifixions took place. Greek Orthodox monks keep lamps lit above the rocks where executioners stood upright beams. No one knows exactly where Jesus’ tomb was but the gospel says nearby. Tombs abound under the foundations of the church and give the church its name.
The liturgy visits the holy places in its worship during Holy Week – the upper room on Holy Thursday, Golgotha on Good Friday, the empty tomb on Easter morning. Every Eucharist recalls the events that happened in these places. We gather for a meal as Jesus did with his disciples in the upper room. In the signs of bread broken and wine poured out, each Eucharist celebrates Jesus’ gift of himself on the cross and the promise of eternal life that his resurrection opens for all of us who believe in him.
Mary Magdalene went to the tomb and Jesus appeared to her.
Mary Magdalene went and announced to the disciples, “I have seen the Lord!”
John 20:18
Mary Magdalene hears a man she supposed to be the gardener speak her name. Like the sheep who know the shepherd’s voice in John 10, she recognizes Jesus’ voice. In John 20, the evangelist’s resurrection chapter, people come to faith in Jesus in multiple ways. The beloved disciple sees and believes. Mary Magdalene hears and believes.
Jesus commissions Mary Magdalene to tell his disciples he is risen. She is the first witness of the resurrection and the one sent to tell the others—the apostle to the apostles.
What do you hear in Mary Magdalene’s encounter with Jesus that affirms your faith?
Joan Mitchell, CSJ celebrated her Golden Jubilee as a Sister of St. Joseph this week. She gave this reflection to her fellow Jubilarians on St. Joseph’s Day.
Fifty years ago when our reception walked down the aisle at St. Kate’s Chapel in wedding dresses and left in black with new names, we committed to serving a Church that cloistered its women and kept us apart, but it was also a Church awakening with John XXIII to the modern world. In 1959 he had written his human rights manifesto Pacem in Terris to the people of the whole world, and less than a month after we entered, the Second Vatican Council began in October 1962.
Joan Mitchell, CSJ
The work of the liturgical movement came to fruition when the Council in its first action turned our altars around for dialogue between priest and people and gave us worship in English so we could participate fully, actively, and consciously.
The Council recognized the whole people of God as the Church and called every person to holiness, “God does not save us as individuals without any bond or link between us,” it said, “but as a people to serve God in holiness.”
In 1965, Council ended and in its final document called us into solidarity with the human family: “the joys and sorrows, griefs and anxieties of the people of this world, especially the poor and afflicted, are the joys and sorrows, griefs and anxieties of the people of God.” The theologies of Vatican II formed us irreparably as they rolled off the press.
That same miraculous year, 1965, the Civil Rights Voting Act passed. The someday the Civil Rights Movement sang about, “We shall overcome…someday,” came at last, freedom came at last. We were in the laundry when we heard President Kennedy had been shot. When we heard Dr. King had been killed in April 1968, cloister was gone and we went out and joined the African American community to mourn this gifted leader.
We were still protesting the Vietnam War, but the 60s were a decade of dreams—of a modern Church and an America without racism. It has left us perennially hopeful and ultimately at odds with the Church in retreat from the world our leaders often label secular but which we claim as our own. Whoever thought Rome would investigate us for doing too much social justice, for speaking out and stepping up to help people who are poor have health care? As Sisters of St. Joseph and Consociates, we are people of dreams. Like the universal Church we have as our patron Joseph the dreamer.
Joseph is uneasy with the obvious when he finds his fiancé pregnant with a child he knows is not his own. Joseph doesn’t want to expose Mary to the law or the stoning it could require. He is a just man, used to doing the right thing. So Joseph plans to send Mary away quietly—until he sleeps on his decision.
I sleep on my side, so when I hear this gospel passage and picture it in my mind, I see Joseph lying down and turning over on his side, leaving the day of his disappointment in Mary behind and turning toward a new day.
His going to sleep is a contemplative act, entrusting himself to rest in the midst of personal turmoil. In his sleep Joseph’s relationship with Mary draws him into relationship with the child. He dreams he will name and claim the child as his own. His turning toward sleep results in changing his society; he disregards its laws, alters conventional expectations for marriage, and finds the living God acting not in the temple but in the young woman he cherishes—the power of relationships to transform the world.
Who would think sleep could change the future of the world? Who would think 50 years could bring so much change? In 1964 when we were still novices and Paul VI spoke at the United Nations before the third session of the Council, the Hubble telescope confirmed that all these galaxies and stars that light up our nights are moving away from each other—the cosmos is expanding, the big bang.
All that is bursts forth out of nothingness from a single seed of energy, A flaring forth so powerful the cosmos is still becoming more.
We live in a story that we cannot flip to the end and find the conclusion.
We live in this story among its characters.
We live in a vast pregnancy 13.7 billion years long and counting.
It turns out that Abraham and Sarah and Hagar and the magi were right to see promise in the stars and hold this promise in faith.
Right now the Large Hadron Collider is smashing protons together at nearly the speed of light, looking for traces of the god particle, what gives matter mass and joins everything together, the secret to how our unfolding story began.
In the world of the tiny, the quantum world, cause and effect go out the window.
Waves become particles when we measure to determine where they are going, and yet over time they dance into patterns, self-organizing into new wholes.
As Sisters of St. Joseph and as Consociates we find this dance deep within, this persisting desire for more, for communion, harmony, justice, this openness to God.
We live not only in an infinity of vastness and an infinity of smallness but in an infinity of relationships, the web of life.
Everything that is wants to become more.
Within our bodies we hold this story of our evolving, this drive toward greater, more complex wholes.
Our blood runs red with the iron forged in the super novas of stars.
The bacteria that first awakened to life 4 billion years ago are our ancestors.
The microbes that learned to eat oxygen 2 billions years ago live on in our mitochondrial DNA and fuel us within every cell.
We inherit our eyes from bacteria that first moved toward light, our backbones from the fish, our erect two-footed posture from the apes that left the trees for the plains.
We humans are the universe become conscious of itself, become its singers and healers.
Then in Jesus Christ Holy Wisdom finds a prophet, God becomes one of us.
We live in a fourth infinity—the horizon Jesus’ resurrection sets in our sights, a future in our hands and hearts—a dream of all that love can give life and make new. We participate in the creative power that Jesus reveals at the heart of God: love.
All of us come here tonight suspended in mystery, challenged to do justice on earth.
How did the years pile up so fast? What is my future and our future? Will Pope Francis like his patron rebuild our Church to benefit the poor and heal the abused?
In this mystery that is vastly big, infinitely small, and complexly diverse, we stand together buoyed by faith and challenged to use our power to love and give life, inspired by the Spirit who breathes in our breaths and dances in our heartbeats to cocreate the future, inspired by Joseph’s small act to keep turning toward every new day.
As Sisters of St. Joseph we celebrate the feast of our patron on March 19 and take a break from Lent for festivities. Joseph is also the patron of the universal Church, so March 19 is a feast we can all claim. Joseph also gives us an example of an ordinary husband and father who faces extraordinary challenges. Here is a prayer to him.
Joseph, most ordinary, on this your feast,
help us listen to our dreams with compassion and openness as you did.
Help us stretch, hold, and deepen our relationships.
Open our embrace of the future
as you opened your arms to a child not your own.
In these hard times may we like you
dream compassionately, provide wisely,
and build community that can hold us together.
We ask this through Jesus, whom you claimed and named. Amen.
