Gospel Reflection for October 29, 2023 – 30th Sunday Ordinary Time

Sunday Readings: Exodus 22.20-26; 1 Thessalonians 1.5-10; Matthew 22.34-40
 
When the Pharisees heard Jesus had silenced the Sadducees, who put a question to him about resurrection from the dead, the Pharisees assembled together. One of them, a lawyer, in an attempt to trip Jesus up, asked, “Teacher, which commandment of the law is the greatest?” Jesus said, “You shall love the Lord your God with your whole heart, with your whole soul, and with all your mind.   This is the greatest and first commandment. The second is like it. You shall love your neighbor as yourself.” On these two commandments rest the whole law and the prophets (Matthew 22.34-40).
 
Gospel love is not an idea or an emotion but an imperative—a call to act. The great commandments recognize that acts of love weave us into community, just as selfish and violent acts fray the social fabric.

The commandments are more than rules to keep and thereby gain heaven. The actions to which they call us are the hammer and nails of Christian community. Christian life is social, Pope Francis reminds us in Joy of the Gospel (177-179).

The evangelization to which the pope calls us starts with recognizing God’s love for us, love we cannot help but share. At the heart of the gospel is life in community and engagement with others. No one is alien.
 
What other verbs say “love” to you? What sustains your heart and its commitment to God?

Gospel Reflection for July 9, 2023 – 14th Sunday Ordinary Time

Sunday Readings: Zechariah 9.9-10; Romans 8.9,11-13; Matthew 11.25-30

“Come to me, all you who are weary and are carrying heavy burdens, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you, and learn from me; for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy, and my burden is light” (Matthew 11.28-30).

In Sunday’s gospel Jesus speaks as Wisdom’s prophet. Proverbs personifies Wisdom as a woman who is with God from the beginning—helping put the heavens in place and marking out the limits of the sea. Lady Wisdom is God’s delight. She represents our human capacity to know, learn, and understand—to find God in all that is. 

Like Wisdom, Torah makes life sweet and harmonious. For Jews, Torah holds the way to find and worship God and do what is right. Torah is the name for the first five books of the Bible, which contains the commandments. Torah is the yoke that puts human relationships in right order.

Like Wisdom and Torah, Jesus lightens, refreshes, and restores our spirits. The rest that Wisdom, Torah, and Jesus offer has its origins in Sabbath, the seventh day on which God rests and enjoys all that has come to be in the six days of creation. Sabbath rest is a pause to appreciate God’s gracious goodness in all that is.

Rest acknowledges our need for restorative sleep and rejuvenating experiences. Rest is willingness to relax in the mystery of God as a swimmer floats in the buoyancy of water. Rest is stopping to let indescribable beauty soak in.

Rest frees imagination to sight heaven’s edge on the horizon. Rest is existing in right relationship with all that is, acknowledging ourselves and all that is as gift, welcoming and blessing even the least among us.

Where do you find rest? How do you keep sabbath as a right relationship to God? As a right relationship to all God’s creatures?

Plan Early for Advent andExplore the Gospel of Mark

In Advent the Church begins to read from Mark’s gospel at Sunday Eucharist, the Cycle B readings. Plan early. Form bible study groups in your parish or congregation. These two books are all you need to reflect on Mark’s gospel together.

Mark’s Gospel: the Whole Story is a short (88 pages) and very readable introduction to Mark. Each of the 11 chapters covers a portion of his Gospel. The questions after each chapter stimulate sharing about the portrait of Jesus Mark draws for his community and for us today. Ideal for faith-sharing groups and homilists.

Mark devotes 60 of the 660 verses in his Gospel to stories about women. Holy Women, Full of Grace tells their stories and creates a litany of prayers to them. For both individuals and small groups. Book groups have found Holy Women a prayerful break from their usual choices.
 
Go to goodgroundpress.com to view the art and sample pages of both books. Then order online or call 800-232-5533. Thank you.

Gospel Reflection for June 18, 2023 – 11th Sunday Ordinary Time

Sunday Readings: Exodus 19.2-6; Romans 5.6-11; Matthew 9.36-10.8 

Jesus sent the twelve disciples out with the following instructions: “Go nowhere among the Gentiles, and enter no town of the Samaritans, but go rather to the lost sheep of the house of Israel. As you go, proclaim the good news, ‘The kingdom of heaven has come near.’ Cure the sick, raise the dead, cleanse the lepers, cast out demons. The gift you have received, give as a gift” (Matthew 10.5-8).

In giving the gift they have received, Christians of every generation have stories to tell both of God’s compassion and of the surprising and life-giving understanding of others who follow Jesus’ way. The word compassion takes its root meaning from the Hebrew word for womb (rhm). Compassion grows out of the inseparable belonging that parents feel for their children. To act with compassion is to regard others as one’s own.

Jesus’ sending disciples forth to touch more people provides a good model for the Church today. Without new laborers to gather in the plentiful harvest, it can be lost. Disciples with compassionate hearts bring God near in every age.

Jesus calls us to use our leadership and authority with compassion. The table at which we gather is a table of communion where Christ himself is the shepherd who feeds, who leads, and who feels compassion for people tired and bewildered.

Who stirs compassion in you? What is the mission you go forth to live each day?

Visit goodgroundpress.com for daily prayers, free online retreats, and more spiritual resources.

Gospel Reflection for June 11, 2023 – Blood and Body of Christ

“This is the bread that came down from heaven, not like that which your ancestors ate, and they died. Those who eat this bread will live forever” (John 6.58).

John’s gospel equates faith in Jesus with faith in Jesus’ signs. Eucharist is a performative sign, a commitment we live out, that we perform. Jesus is bread broken for the life of the world. To share the Body of Christ in this sacrament is to commit to give one’s self for the life of the world as Jesus did. In making a cup of wine the pledge of pouring out his lifeblood for us, Jesus makes the wine our means of pledging commitment and faith.

Every Eucharist is a gathering to put our offering of our lives on the same altar as Jesus. It is to say, “This is my body given for you.” It is to join the line of people receiving nourishment from the hands of each other. It takes the whole Christian community to remember Jesus’ gift of himself and to make him present today. Each of us is the feast of Corpus Christi, a source of blessing and nourishment and revelation of Jesus’ good news to those we meet today and this week.

What is the most life-changing Eucharist you have experienced?

Sunday Readings: Deuteronomy 8.2-3, 14-16; 1 Corinthians 10.16-17; John 6.51-58

Gospel Reflection for Sunday, May 28, 2023 – Pentecost

Sunday Readings: Acts 2.1-11 1 Corinthians 12.3-7, 12-13 John 20.19-23

When it was evening on the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where the disciples had met were locked for fear of the Jews, Jesus came, stood among them, and said, “Peace be with you” . . . He showed them his hands and his side. The disciples rejoiced when they saw the Lord. Then Jesus said, “Peace be with you. As the Father has sent me, so I send you.” He breathed on them, saying, “Receive the Holy Spirit. If you forgive the sins of any, they are forgiven; if you retain the sins of any, they are retained them (John 20.19-23).

Jesus lets his friends see the wounds in his hands, feet, and side. This intimate act demonstrates for every hearer of the story that the risen Jesus is the crucified Jesus.

In this Easter appearance Jesus sends his friends out as the Father sent him. He commissions them and us to continue his mission. For this purpose, Jesus breathes his animating Spirit upon them just as the Creator breathed life into the first humans in Genesis 2.24.

The invisible, enlivening breath points to the mystery of divine energy in us. The Spirit is the giver of our lives. The Spirit lives in, with, and among us in sorrows and joys, in threats and wonders, tragedies and reunions, breakups and breakthroughs, in mourning and in yearning, in rage and delight. People too often attribute their successes to God and their failures to themselves.

The Spirit does not work apart from our human effort. The Spirit permeates our lives, our anguish as well as our joy, all that we struggle with as well as all that comes easy.

When have you been aware of the Spirit’s presence in anguish? In joy? What nudgings of the Spirit recur in you? How do you respond?

Gospel Reflection for May 14, 2023 – 6th Sunday Ordinary Time

Sunday Readings: Acts 8.5-8,14-17; 1 Peter 3.15-18; John 14.15-21

Jesus spoke to his disciples. “I will not leave you orphaned; I am coming to you. In a little while the world will no longer see me, but you see me. Because I live, you also will live. On that day you will know that I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.”

In Sunday’s gospel Jesus speaks to his disciples’ most primal fear. Call it separation, call it abandonment, call it aloneness. Jesus wants his disciples to know that while death will end his earthly life, it cannot and will not end their relationship.

Thanks to the pervasive power of God’s love, there is nowhere his friends can go where God is not, and nowhere they can go where the Spirit it not, or where Christ is not. The hour of Jesus’ death approaches, but his friends will not be orphans.

In fact, through their relationship with him, they will participate in Jesus’ relationship with God—“I am in my Father, and you in me, and I in you.” His Spirit will abide with them and prompt them to live as Jesus lived, to embody his words and continue his deeds.

When have you experienced that Jesus has not left you orphaned?

Gospel Reflection for April 30, 2023 – 4th Sunday of Easter

Sunday Readings: Acts 2.14,36-41; 1 Peter 2.20-25; John 10.1-10

I tell you truly, I am the sheepgate. All who came before me are thieves and marauders whom the sheep did not heed. I am the gate. Those who enter through me will be safe. They will go in and out, and find pasture. The thief comes only to steal, slaughter, and destroy. I came that my sheep might have life and have it more abundantly (John 10.1-10).

John’s gospel reflects tensions in the last decades of the first century between Jews who follow Jesus and those who continue to follow the law of Moses. In these struggles the Christian community identifies Jesus with Wisdom, who was with God from the beginning and was God, who became human and dwelt among us (John 1.14). To other Jews this is blasphemous, reason to put believers out of the synagogue.

More than ten times John’s gospel puts statements in Jesus’ mouth that use the divine name to identify him with God. I am the good shepherd. I am the sheepgate. I am the resurrection and life. I am the bread come down from heaven. I am the way, the truth, and the life.

Today we contend with our own tensions. Will the Catholic Church ordain women deacons? What about intercommunion with other Christians? The prohibition “only Catholics in good standing can receive communion” tends to alienate rather than welcome family and friends at weddings and funerals. Can divorced and remarried Catholics receive communion?

For our contentious times, Pope Francis articulated four principles in his first encyclical Joy in the Gospel, which put his faith in the Holy Spirit into action.

Principle 1: Time is greater than space. To build and develop character or communities requires time and process. Growth takes time. Peace building takes time.

Principle 2: Unity is greater than conflict. “The Spirit can harmonize every diversity,” Pope Francis writes in his encyclical Laudato Si’ about repair our common home, the Earth. We are one Earth family. We can negotiate differences rather than insist on our way or no way.

Principle 3: Realities are greater than ideas. The pope’s report on the family synod Amoris Laetitia envisions Christian life and marriage unfolding as a process and divorced people needing ongoing support rather than being cut off from the Church community. People need time to open their hearts to grace.

Principle 4: The whole is greater than the part. This guideline challenges us to see the world is global and local. Pope Francs calls us to broaden our horizons and see the greater good that will benefit us all, yet to work also on a small scale in our own neighborhoods.

What do you value about these principles that see life as a growth process? What kind of time has grace needed in your life?

Gospel Reflection for March 19, 2023 – 4th Sunday of Lent

Sunday Readings: 1 Samuel 16.1,6-7,10-13; Ephesians 5.8-14; John 9.1-41 

Jesus heard that the teachers had expelled the man born blind from the synagogue, Jesus found him and said, “Do you believe in the Son of Man?”  The man answered, “Tell me who he is, sir, so I can believe in him.” Jesus said to him, “You have already seen him.  The one speaking to you is he.” “I believe,” the man said and worshipped Jesus” (John 9.35-38). 

Where do we find God? One common answer is deep within. How do we find God deep within? Common answers include time for solitude and silence, time to listen to one’s own aspirations and desperations apart from those of others in our lives. A retreat can help us sort what and who we really value or maybe we need a little time with a fishing hook in the water.  The man born blind in Sunday’s gospel finds God in a different place, in encounters with others who question him.

Jesus leaves the scene after he puts mud on the eyes of the man born blind and sends the man to wash in the pool of Siloam. In Jesus’ absence—the middle of Sunday’s gospel—the man with new eyes faces neighbors, teachers, and parents in turn. Explaining his new eyes helps the man find words to explain what has happened. He progressively gains insight into who Jesus must be, recognizing Jesus must be a prophet, a man from God.

The seeing man’s witness models the value of articulating and sharing our own experience of God and of persisting in dialogue with those who challenge us. He finds faith in dialogue, in the space between us, where grace and amazement attend our efforts to bridge our separate selves and glimpse the mystery of God among us.

When have the questions and opinions of others called you to explain who Jesus is to you, who God is, or how Spirit stirs in you?