What people turn to is more important than what they turn from, even if that to which they turn is only a higher moral truth; but to turn to Christ is far more important than to turn to higher moral truth: it is to turn the face towards Him in whom is all moral truth; it is to turn to Him in whom is not only the virtue which corresponds to the known vice from which the penitent desires to flee, but all virtue;
it is to turn the face to all holiness, all purity, all grace. It was this repentance which the apostles preached after Pentecost.
- Roland Allen (1869-1947), Pentecost and the World
("For in Christ the fullness of the Godhead dwells in bodily form." Col. 2:9)
|
Ez 47:1-9, 12; Psalm 46:2-3, 5-6, 8-9
Jn 5:1-16
There was a feast of the Jews, and Jesus went up to Jerusalem.
Now there is in Jerusalem at the Sheep Gate
a pool called in Hebrew Bethesda, with five porticoes.
In these lay a large number of ill, blind, lame, and crippled.
One man was there who had been ill for thirty-eight years.
When Jesus saw him lying there
and knew that he had been ill for a long time, he said to him,
“Do you want to be well?”
The sick man answered him,
“Sir, I have no one to put me into the pool
when the water is stirred up;
while I am on my way, someone else gets down there before me.”
Jesus said to him, “Rise, take up your mat, and walk.”
Immediately the man became well, took up his mat, and walked.
Now that day was a sabbath.
So the Jews said to the man who was cured,
“It is the sabbath, and it is not lawful for you to carry your mat.”
He answered them, “The man who made me well told me,
‘Take up your mat and walk.’“
They asked him,
“Who is the man who told you, ‘Take it up and walk’?”
The man who was healed did not know who it was,
for Jesus had slipped away, since there was a crowd there.
After this Jesus found him in the temple area and said to him,
“Look, you are well; do not sin any more,
so that nothing worse may happen to you.”
The man went and told the Jews
that Jesus was the one who had made him well.
Therefore, the Jews began to persecute Jesus
because he did this on a sabbath.
Shalom Place Covid-19 resource page
- Practical, inspirational and spiritually formative writings and podcasts
see http://shalomplace.com/covid-19.html and check back often as we're frequently adding more.
Reflection on the Scriptures
It’s easier to be a letter of the law person because you can go strictly by the book. You don’t risk suffering any consequences as Jesus did for violating regulations in order to obey the Great Commandments to love God and other people. Saints throughout the ages including our own era have suffered for breaking rules in the name of obeying those greater commandments.
Heroes like Dorothy Day and the late Rep. John Lewis were beaten and jailed for refusing to practice a bland form of Christianity that followed legal rules but never challenged injustice. They spent their lives making “good trouble” at great personal cost, as Jesus did.
Happily, we don’t have to face down armed attack at the Edmund Pettus bridge to live the message of today’s gospel. I think, for example, of people I know, especially nuns, who help migrants regardless of their legal status. I’m sure that Jesus blesses their work.
We can all find opportunities to respond to the spirit of the law even if it occasionally means fudging on some technical rules if we’re willing to risk paying even a small price to claim the label of “Christian.”
- by Eileen Wirth
The Son of God Became Human
From The Catechism of the Catholic Church
Part One, Section Two, Chapter Two
Article 3: He Was Conceived by the Power of the Holy Spirit, and Born of the Virgin Mary
Paragraph 1: The Son of God Became Man
V. CHRIST'S SOUL AND HIS HUMAN KNOWLEDGE
471 Apollinarius of Laodicaea asserted that in Christ the divine Word had replaced the soul or spirit. Against this error the Church confessed that the eternal Son also assumed a rational, human soul.100
472 This human soul that the Son of God assumed is endowed with a true human knowledge. As such, this knowledge could not in itself be unlimited: it was exercised in the historical conditions of his existence in space and time. This is why the Son of God could, when he became man, "increase in wisdom and in stature, and in favour with God and man",101 and would even have to inquire for himself about what one in the
human condition can learn only from experience.102 This corresponded to the reality of his voluntary emptying of himself, taking "the form of a slave".103
(Footnote references in the Catechism.)
|
|
