"Let us love God, but with the strength of our arms, in the sweat of our brow."
- St. Vincent de Paul ___
"Without work it is impossible to have fun."
- St. Thomas Aquinas
It is good to work, even to work hard. Spend yourself for God this day, and have some fun while you're at
it.
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2 Corinthians
3:15 - 4:1, 3-6
Psalm 85:9ab and 10, 11-12, 13-14 Matthew 5:20-26 Jesus said to his disciples: ‘If your virtue goes no deeper than that of the scribes and Pharisees, you will never get into the kingdom of heaven.
‘You have learnt how it was said to our
ancestors: You must not kill; and if anyone does kill he must answer for it before the court. But I say this to you: anyone who is angry with his brother will answer for it before the court; if a man calls his brother “Fool” he will answer for it before the Sanhedrin; and if a man calls him “Renegade” he will answer for it in hell fire. So then, if you are bringing your offering to the altar and there remember that your brother has something against you, leave your offering there before the
altar, go and be reconciled with your brother first, and then come back and present your offering. Come to terms with your opponent in good time while you are still on the way to the court with him, or he may hand you over to the judge and the judge to the officer, and you will be thrown into prison. I tell you solemnly, you will not get out till you have paid the last penny.’
Reflection on the Scriptures
Reflecting on the events of my day, relates to the gospel of the day nicely. I had a wonderful conversation
with a colleague who was sharing her thoughts about another colleague. She was so complimentary of the way this person interacts with everybody. You see, the colleague we were chatting about is a social worker. She has a very hard job. She often helps people clean up messes that may the result of bad choices. Sometimes she encounters people who are not truthful with her despite the fact that she has put forth great effort to assist them. Every day, she works
with those who may be considered hard to love by many. Most of the people she serves are marginalized in one way or another. My colleague shared that she is so impressed with the way our social worker friend treats everybody. She approaches each person with the utmost respect and without judgement. She is a fierce advocate for her patients no matter what. She forgives. She is an excellent example of the message of today’s gospel. Do not hold anger toward
another. Love others as we would love ourselves. I wish everybody had somebody like my colleague and friend Rose in their life. If we could all live our lives in the manner that Rose does every day, the world would be a better place. A more peaceful, Christ-centered place. - by Angela Maynard, Student Health Services
The Bodily Resurrection of Jesus, by James Arraj
https://innerexplorations.com/catchtheomor/resurrecion.htm Inner Growth Publications, 2007.
Chapter 4: The Resurrection of Jesus Space and the Resurrection Body In his earlier The Problem of Jesus he (Guitton) had
advanced similar reflections. What we have looked at under the heading of being of union Guitton called sublimation, and quoted Leibniz, “The lower exists in the higher in a manner nobler than in itself.”60 And Guitton treats us to an allegory of the fourth dimension to give us some idea of what a resurrection body would be like. Imagine, he tells us, flat people living in a two-dimensional world. What would happen if a third-dimensional being appeared to them? This being would seem to appear
and disappear from their midst in a way that they could not comprehend, and yet, to follow the direction of Guitton’s logic, this third-dimensional being, far from being a ghost or nebulous apparition, would be more solid and more real than his two-dimensional audience. When Jesus appeared in the midst of his disciples gathered in the upper room, the doors of which were closed, his disciples understandably feared that they were seeing a ghost. Not only did they know that Jesus had died, but they knew that his appearance defied the normal laws of matter. And so Jesus had to address their fears and show them that he, indeed, did have a real body. If we wanted to argue that the early
church community had invented these stories, we would have to explain why their inventions were flawed by the fact that they insisted that Jesus had a real body at the same time that they insisted that he had a transformed one. It would have been much easier to hold to one or the other of these characteristics, and thus make their stories more readily believable. They could have said that Jesus had come back from the dead with a body that had the same qualities as the body he had during his
lifetime, or they could have insisted that Jesus had come back in a spiritual way without a real physical body at all. The most obvious explanation for bringing these two apparently paradoxical traits together was how they had experienced his appearances. But doesn’t insisting on both of these traits really demonstrate that the resurrection
appearances cannot be real? Doesn’t putting them together violate some fundamental immutable physical law? A material body, as we saw, has a potency to substantial existence, but now we need to carry our analysis a step farther. This potency is at the root of its low intensity of being which gives rise to its extension in space. Material beings have dimensions because they need to interact with each other by means of substantial change, but the higher intensity a being has, the less it is
embedded in space, and if it has no potency to substantial existence, that is, it is a spiritual being, then it is not in space at all. What if Jesus’ resurrection body appeared and disappeared not because it was somehow not a real body, but because it was a hyper-real body, as it were? Jesus’ body is not less real than a normal body, but more real, and as such it is not confined to a three-dimensional world, but dwells in another dimension from which it enters our world at will. It does not
pass through the locked doors of the upper room as if it had to compete for space with normal bodies, but enters and exits third dimensional space from any point because this higher dimensional space, or better, supradimensional space, is present to any place in ordinary space.
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