We implore the mercy of God, not that He may leave us at peace in our vices, but that He may deliver us from them.
… Blaise
Pascal
(From which vices do you seek deliverance?)
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DN 7:9-10, 13-14; PS 138:1-2AB, 2CDE-3, 4-5
JN 1:47-51
Jesus saw Nathanael coming toward him and said of him,
“Here is a true child of Israel.
There is no duplicity in him.”
Nathanael said to him, “How do you know me?”
Jesus answered and said to him,
“Before Philip called you, I saw you under the fig tree.”
Nathanael
answered him,
“Rabbi, you are the Son of God; you are the King of Israel.”
Jesus answered and said to him,
“Do you believe
because I told you that I saw you under the fig tree?
You will see greater things than this.”
And he said to him, “Amen, amen, I say to you,
you will see heaven opened
and the angels of God ascending and descending on the Son of Man.”
Reflection on the
Scriptures |
Once one becomes familiar with the whole of the Gospel of John, one realizes
that John 1:51 (“You will see the sky opened and the angels of God ascending and descending upon the Son of Man”) alludes to the dream of Jacob and applies it to Jesus as the Son of Man, i.e. the one who fulfills Daniel 7’s vision of the “one like a son of man” inheriting the kingdom of God. For in the Fourth Gospel we learn to understand Jesus, as the Word made flesh, now risen Lord, as the temple of God, the ultimate point of connection between heaven and earth. So the dream of Jacob’s ladder
points to the incarnation, God made man in Jesus crucified and risen from the dead.
Let’s allow this very Jewish feast point us to a new appreciation of Jesus Christ our Lord as the “place” of full connection between the divine and the human, the new
embodiment of everything that the desert tabernacle and the Jerusalem temple stood for. This feast helps us join the angels praising God for our redemption in the joining of heaven and earth in Jesus Christ.
- by Dennis Hamm, S.J.
Revelations of Divine
Love - by Julian of Norwich
Thirteenth Revelation, Chapter 27
“Often I wondered why by the great foreseeing wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not hindered: for
then, methought, all should have been well.” “Sin is behovable—[playeth a needful part]—; but all shall be well”
AFTER this the Lord brought to my mind the longing that I had to Him afore. And I saw that nothing letted me but sin. And so I looked, generally, upon us all, and methought: If sin had not been, we should all have been clean and like to our Lord, as He made us.
And thus, in my folly, afore this time often I wondered why by the great foreseeing
wisdom of God the beginning of sin was not letted: for then, methought, all should have been well. This stirring [of mind] was much to be forsaken, but nevertheless mourning and sorrow I made therefor, without reason and discretion.
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