Reflections on the Sunday Readings

                                                                                                                                     At this time of year, all around us are the hints of spring and yet there are still enough days of chilly weather to make us, like a doubting-Thomas, wondering if and when Spring will happen.  People have told us that they see definite signs of it but still we may have questions?                                                                      ...

                                                               As we open the readings for Palm Sunday, we realize that unlike any other Mass during the year, there are two gospels, in our liturgy this Sunday.                                                 The first gospel recalls the triumphal entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem.   This initial scene is of those who have been following Jesus     singing the hosannas and the hallelujahs and waving palm branches and laying their cloaks before him as he rode on the   donkey into the city.   But an interesting thing that the scripture scholars often remind us about, is the fact that Jesus is entering Jerusalem at the same time as when the lam...

    Our gospel reading this weekend seems to parallel in many ways the gospel   of last week. Last week, we had the youngest son in a crisis of extreme poverty but with enough wisdom to return to his father.   He expects nothing in return except to be taken back as a hired worker on his father’s farm.   Also, we had the brother who held feelings of condemnation for both toward his younger brother for his dissolution of the younger brother’s   inheritance and towards the father for the extent of mercy and forgiveness that was extended to the younger son.   This week as the gospel opens, we have Jesus teaching the crowds in the temple area and suddenly the pharisees and the scribes appear and produce this woman who had been caught in the act of adultery. Of course. as some of my female friends point out there’s no reference to the man who was also part of this adulterous relationship, but that is a discussion for another time.     ...

                                                       In the State Hermitage Museum, in Moscow, Russia, is a famous painting by the artist Rembrandt called The Return of the Prodigal Son .   In 1986 the famous author, priest, and theologian, Henry Nouwen visited that museum and was granted permission to sit and study this painting each day before the museum opened daily for the regular public. Shortly after this, in 1992 he wrote his famous book,  The Return of The Prodigal Son/ A Story of a Home Coming, In his book he reflects on his study of the picture and what it  meant to him in terms of his own personal life and the issues of forgiveness, and reconciliation  with which he was trying to understand in his own life.   Nouwen comments in his book how Rembrandt depicts each character in this gospel parable. Fo...

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    “Wait for the  Lord  with courage; be stouthearted, and wait for the  Lord” (Psalm 27:14)   The disciples after their climb up the mountain were weary and fell asleep. Upon awakening they experienced what must have seemed to them almost like a dream, the vision of Jesus, Moses, and Elijah speaking together.   While the account of the Transfiguration of Jesus appears in the gospels of Matthew, Mark, and Luke, only in Luke’s account do we get the detail about what was being discussed, namely Jesus’..   “exodus that he was going to accomplish in Jerusalem.”                                                     We know the second book of the bible as   Exodus.   But that is what Greek translation of the bible called this second book.   In the Hebrew ...