Daily Scripture

Palm Sunday of the Lord’s Passion

Scripture:

Mark 11:1-10 or
John 12:12-16
Philippians 2:6-11
Mark 14:1-15:47

Reflection:

In her book entitled, “Dead Man Walking” Congregation of St. Joseph Sr. Helen Prejean narrates the story of her relationship with a young man on death row in the Angola State Penitentiary in Louisiana; he is accused of murdering a teenage couple. At first, he is arrogant, racist, thundering his innocence. Eventually, he admits his guilt to Sr. Helen. As he is preparing for execution, he appeals to the boy’s father for forgiveness, and tells the girl’s parents he hopes his death brings them peace. While he is lead to a chamber where he will die by lethal injection, Sister Helen tells him to look beyond the glass panels where she will be… “to look at someone who loves you.”
Today’s readings speak to us of our vulnerable God, as a suffering servant, and Jesus who empties himself. And in the courtyard, the night before he dies, when Jesus’ gaze of love falls upon Peter, we are told the disciple runs away and weeps bitterly. This is the same Jesus who looks with love upon the rich young man in Mark’s (10:17-31) Gospel, encouraging him to sell everything, and follow him.

This Holy Week might be an appropriate time to again allow the loving gaze of Jesus to fall upon us. Our tears are very different from the ones we weep when we feel judged or humiliated. Admitting we are sinner, we recognize we are loved. And Jesus’ loving gaze transforms us.

Fr. Jack Conley, C.P. is a member of the Passionist formation community at Catholic Theological Union in Chicago.

Scripture:

Ezekiel 37:21-28
John 11:45-56

Reflection:

Christ Crucified Alive

 “You know nothing at all, nor do you take into account that it is expedient for you that one man die for the people.”       John 11:49

Caiaphas as high priest tells us in today’s gospel that we do not take an inventory nor compute the value of the death of Jesus.   Devotion to the Passion of Christ means a lot more than ending the distress of our brothers and sisters around us.    All the actions and sufferings of Christ should be seen in real time and not just something that has happened 2000 years ago.  The actions of the Divine Jesus in His earthly life are not merely contained or limited by past time.   The sufferings of Christ are caught up in the eternal presence of His divinity.

I find St Gregory of Nazianzus words fascinating:  “Christ is alive.  Christ is present.  Alive and real, not in the shadows of doubt and uncertainty.  Christ is present. Time does not limit nor does it consume Him.”   God the Father lives in an eternal now and has no past and still hears the agony of His Son’s wordless cry on the cross.   There is no time but real time in God!

Christ does not suffer again. “For Christ also died for sins once for all, the just for the unjust, so that He might bring us to God. 1Pet 3:18   But this most beautiful act of love in the whole cosmos never ceases nor dies.  It is kept alive in the timeless divinity of Christ and is made present to us in every encounter we have with the Eucharist.

The sufferings of Christ are present not just in the sufferings of His Church, but in the timeless sacrifice of His Son. We contemplate the suffering Christ now and not in dead past time!  In our beautiful St Agnes Church in Louisville we have a beautiful figure of St Paul of the Cross embracing the living and suffering Crucified Christ.   For Paul the suffering Christ is in real time because it is in eternal time!  We need to contemplate this timeless suffering Christ.  The words of St Paul of the Cross quite clearly show that he thought about his suffering as forever present in the “Eternal Now”.

“The world lives unmindful of the sufferings of Jesus which are the miracle of miracles of the love of God.  We must arouse the world from its slumber.  His Holy Spirit will teach us how.” 11 726

“His most holy Passion is the greatest and most stupendous work of his love.”  11 249

Fr. Bob Weiss, C.P. preaches Parish Missions and is a member of the Passionist Community in Louisville, Kentucky.

Scripture:

Genesis 17:3-9
John 8:51-59

Reflection:

I am still able to hear my mother say over and over again to my father and my siblings, “Self praise is no recommendation.”  This was my mother’s way of saying we should always do our best in whatever we are doing and let others score your achievements.

Our Lenten scriptures for today offer us an invitation to understand with new enthusiasm how it is that God speaks the divine Word, how God commits to that Word and how God fulfills the promise of that Word.  It is God who makes the promises and it is God who fulfills those promises.  The Lord is not in need of self boasting.  The fulfillment of promises speak for themselves.

Abram receives a mighty promise.  I will make you exceedingly fertile.  I will make you father of a host of nations.  That is a host of nations, not just the Jewish nation to come.  Perhaps this is God’s way of saying Abram, now Abraham, will be the father of all peoples.  The universal sweep of this divine promise is glaring and amazing.  We might be tempted, as was Abraham perhaps, to begin thinking of a mighty family resembling the great family tree of the King of Siam in “The King and I”.  We might imagine children everywhere from infants to young adults – all with one father.  However, this was not what God had in mind.  Abraham heard the divine word and promise but then had to trust that God would fulfill the divine Word spoken to him.  He would have to wait until his old age to have a single child named Isaac who would have twins, Jacob and Esau.  Jacob in turn would have his famous twelve sons who would become the fathers of the twelve tribes of Israel.  The key ingredient to all the waiting Abraham had to endure is trust.  He had to trust God would fulfill the divine promise.  He was blessed with an image if himself as the father of all.  He would be the father of every race and ethnic grouping; the father of all in every land, far and wide; the father who eliminates all that separates and divides; the father who puts to rest any form of discrimination, resentment, envy or animosity.   All would live peacefully the covenant life God formed with them.  Trust in the fulfillment of God’s promise will be the hallmark of Abraham’s waiting.

That very same trust cascaded down every succeeding generation to the moment of today’s gospel.  Would the Jews trust that Jesus was the final fulfillment of the promise God had made?  Would they hear God speaking unity and peace through Jesus?  Would they be able to see in Jesus the promise of reconciling salvation made manifest?  Or would their trust be boxed in by personal agenda and self-interest?  Would their trust be slave to their own version of how God must speak and act if the promise was to be fulfilled?  Unfortunately, we are witness to demands that God accomplish faithfulness to divine promises according to the minds and hearts of human beings.  Trust in God is encrusted with so many conditions that it sinks below the surface.  In the end, God will be God and Jesus will hear and respond faithfully to the Father’s will.

Our Lenten scriptures for today call on us to trust in God in every way.  We are reminded by Abraham’s course of life that God works in God’s own way and in God’s own time.  Like him, we wait and we trust.  Jesus reminds us in the Gospel that He is indeed the divine Word spoken to us in fulfillment of the divine promise of salvation.  We wait in Him and we trust in Him as we journey through our own lives, awaiting the final fulfillment in His coming in glory, the glory in which the Father clothed Him.

Fr. Richard Burke, CP, is a member of St. Paul of the Cross Province.  He lives at St. Ann’s Monastery in Scranton, Pennsylvania.

Scripture:

Daniel 3:14-20, 91-92, 95
John 8:31-42

Reflection:

There is an annual event in the U.S. called March Madness, and it refers to competitive college basketball teams from across the nation, representing those with the best win-loss records, playing one another, in an effort to establish the team recognized as the best team, because it has emerged as the winner of the final game between the two teams that are recognized as the best two teams in the nation.  It legitimately claims to be the best basketball team in the nation.

Today we listen to our bible readings that more or less follow the same course of action, in a completely different venue: it is a religious contest, either between Israel and a foreign nation such as Babylon, or else factions within Israel itself.

The struggle between Babylonia and Israel centered on the religions of these two nations.  For the military struggle had already taken place, and Babylonia (Chaldea) won that part of the struggle.  But then the king, Nebuchadnezzar, moved the struggle beyond the military part of it, and centered it on the religious element, for he, pagan that he was, had a huge golden statue set up representing the god the king worshipped, and he issued an order that everyone in his kingdom worship it. This included the Jews, held captive in his country, and of course the Jews had an abhorrence for idolatry, listed among the ten commandments as the first of the sins to avoid.  When three young Jewish men among the captives refused to worship this false god, it was reported to the king, who, in a rage, had them thrown into a fiery furnace, but they miraculously survived this ordeal, thanks to the protection offered them by God, and this won the admiration of the king for their God.  So, while the Chaldeans won the military phase of their struggle with the Jews, the Jews won the religious phase of it.

And a similar struggle is described in today’s gospel, between Jesus, and the opponents among His fellow Jews, concerning the quality of their allegiance to their father Abraham.  Jesus challenges the legitimacy of their claim to be Abraham’s children, over against His own claim about God as His Father.

We have in these two instances a contest underway to establish the validity of these claims and counterclaims about who is one’s father.  And it ultimately comes down to the quality of the claims about fatherhood, with the Jews claiming both Abraham as their father, (as well as God), and Jesus speaking solely of God as His Father.  Any intimate relationship, such as to one’s father, centers on the love to be found at its heart and core.  The three young men demonstrated this in the fiery furnace, showing their love for God by trusting in His protection, and Jesus relied on His loving relationship to God as His Father in establishing His credentials, which enabled Him to challenge the claims of His opponents who focus on having Abraham as their father, because He sees no love in the opposition He is encountering from them.  Today’s readings, while giving God (or god) a central place in this relationship, suggest that we check the kind of love at play this Lent, amid the competing claims made about what genuine love truly is.

Fr. Sebastian MacDonald, C.P. is a member of the Passionist Community in Louisville, Kentucky.

Scripture:

Ezekiel 37:12-14
Romans 8:8-11
John 11:1-45

Reflection:

…the time has come for the son of man to be glorified…

The end is drawing near…we are approaching Jesus’ entry into Jerusalem…a journey to the end. We remember, Jesus came for the Jews, and now there are Greeks among them, the kingdom is bigger and broader – the kingdom is for all.

Unless a grain of wheat falls to the ground, it remains just a grain of wheat…but once in the darkness of the earth, in the stillness of the ground, transformation can happen, new life bursts forth, possibilities for life-giving, life-sustaining food – food for all.

Can we go to the quiet place within our heart, enter into the stillness and darkness, dare to go into the fear and anxiety that surrounds us and consumes us.  Can we trust, as Jesus trusted, that even in the midst of the illness, disease, chaos, confusion, anger, hurt – can we trust that God is waiting to bring new hope, new possibility, new life!  God promises to stand in the tension with us.  He will be glorified – his Glory is for all.

We look to the cross, a place to lay our struggle, our pain, our emptiness and fear – out of all the emotion that we leave at the cross, God brings about hope, love, promise – for all.

With St. Paul of the Cross we can say When affliction lays heavy on you, you can go to your room, take the crucifix in your hands and give yourself a sermon from it.  What a sermon you will hear!  How quickly your heart will be calmed”  A message for all.

Faith Offman is the Associate Director of Ministry at St. Paul of the Cross Passionist Retreat and Conference Center in Detroit, Michigan.

Scripture:

Jeremiah 11:18-20
John 7:40-53

Reflection

Our readings today focus on two men, Jeremiah and Jesus, surrounded by people who would love to see them fail.

Jeremiah is violently opposed by people who fear goodness and resent the truth. Instead of heeding the word of God he has spoken, they want to kill him for proclaiming it: “Let us destroy the tree in its vigor; let us cut him off from the land of the living, so that his name will be spoken no more.” Sometimes, like Jeremiah, we may find ourselves surrounded by people who would love nothing more than to see us fail. How are we to respond when they, like those who opposed Jeremiah, hatch plots against us? First, we must remember that we do not gain power over evildoers by becoming like them; rather, we triumph over evil by remaining faithful to the love and goodness of God. Second, we gain power against evildoers, as Jeremiah did, by entrusting ourselves to the Lord, knowing that in God there is a love and goodness no evil can destroy.

If our first reading urges us to find refuge in God, today’s gospel suggests there are times when God must take refuge in us. The gospel story recounts a scene in which people are sharply divided about Jesus. The chief priests and some of the Pharisees want to silence Jesus by arresting him while others boldly proclaim, “This is the Christ.” The passage reminds us that in a world where there are people opposed to everything Jesus is about, we must safeguard the ways of God by being straightforward about whom Jesus is for us. Is it abundantly clear by our words and our deeds that Jesus is life for us and that we have given our hearts to him? If it is, the cause of Jesus continues to live through us.

Today’s readings confront us with an important truth: If we often must take shelter in God, it is also true that the God who comes to us in Jesus sometimes must take shelter in us. It’s a beautiful image of two loves watching out for one another, keeping each other safe from harm.

Paul J. Wadell is Professor of Theology & Religious Studies at St. Norbert College in De Pere, Wisconsin, and a member of the extended Passionist family.

Scripture:

Wisdom 2:1a, 12-22
John 7:1-2, 10, 25-30

Reflection:

In our first reading from the book of Wisdom, there are those who are “not thinking aright.” They plot to “beset the just one.” They say to each other, “Let us condemn him to a shameful death.” And finally, the author states, “These were their thoughts, but they erred; … and they knew not the hidden counsels of God; neither did they count on a recompense of holiness nor discern the innocent souls’ reward.” Whoever these people were, they had no understanding of how God works, and they were not humble enough to know that they didn’t know.

We have a similar situation in our Gospel reading from John. Jesus decides to go to Jerusalem, even though He knows there are people plotting against Him. And when the people see Him, they ask, “Is he not the one they are trying to kill? … Could the authorities have realized that he is the Messiah? But we know where he is from. When the Messiah comes, no one will know where he is from.” The people think they know how God works. They think they know who Jesus is. They may know where He is from, but they don’t know, or rather they don’t believe, Who He is from.

The challenge for us is to be humble enough to know that God does not operate the same way we do. We can’t presume that we know everything there is to know about God. We do know that God has shown His love for us in Jesus Christ, and that we are given a guide in the Holy Spirit. But we also know that God often goes beyond what the world might consider to be fair or acceptable. Thank God! So we can’t presume to judge or condemn others. We can’t say that some person or group of people (including ourselves) has been rejected or forsaken by God.

If we can accept that we are not God, but that God loves us, and the world, beyond anything we know, we can choose to follow Jesus in humility and thanksgiving. There is a certain peace that comes from letting go of trying to be God, and simply seeking to do God’s will. May God’s peace reign in our hearts!

Fr. Phil Paxton, C.P., is the local superior at St. Paul of the Cross Passionist Community in Detroit, Michigan.