The gospel lesson shows us something about Jesus’s personality. As a teacher, he tries his best to help his students get his point. So, we hear two parables in the lesson. Let’s not forget that it is not his original intention to tell two parables. It’s supposed to be just one parable but his disciples don’t seem to get it the first time. So, he redacts his first parable to help them get it. If I may roughly summarize his original parable, Jesus is the shepherd and his followers are the sheep. The point of the parable is this: Do not follow the voice of a thief or a bandit but only the voice of the shepherd who calls you by name. Logically, it makes more sense to read John 10:1-5 and then skip to verse 11 where Jesus says, “I am the good shepherd, the good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep.” Verses 7-10 make Jesus’s parable of the good shepherd less coherent, if not confusing.
For some unknown reason, the disciples don’t get Jesus’s figure of speech. (Actually their lack of understanding of Jesus’s teaching is quite consistent throughout St John’s gospel. They just don’t seem to get it, which is a big relief for me personally. I don’t get lots of Jesus’s teaching either!) So like the patient teacher that he is (like our own Beth, Jackie, Sue, and Dana), Jesus changes his original parable. No longer does he identify himself as the shepherd, he is now the gate itself through which one joins the sheepfold. If I may paraphrase the point of Jesus’s revised parable, it goes like this: “Forget about following the voice of the shepherd. All you gotta do is to enter the sheepfold through this gate. Join the group through me. Just be in the sheepfold. Then we’ll go further from there.” As a good shepherd, Jesus does not want to lose a single sheep from the sheepfold. If there’s a lost sheep, he’ll go search for the lost. (Luke 15:3-7; Matthew 18:12-14) It seems that Jesus finds it more crucial to tell the disciples to be in the sheepfold than to explain to them why they need to follow the shepherd. That explanation can always come after they join the sheepfold. It’s like you don’t and can’t teach anything to a hungry person. You gotta feed that person first. You can see what kind of pedagogical tactic Jesus is using in the gospel lesson. It’s always down to earth, which is the core of the incarnation. Find where people are and be on the same page with them. This downward movement, always beginning from the bottom, is pedagogically incarnation. In a spiritual sense, he displays the divine movement of God that refuses to be high above but among God’s own creatures on earth. In doing so, Jesus shows what kind of God he believes in: Emmanuel, “God among us.” He reveals our eternal unity with God here on earth. No matter where we are, how we are, who we are, beyond life and death, the risen Christ reveals and promises God’s eternal oneness with the entire humanity. Don’t look up to the sky to find God. Don’t make an idol to worship God. The reign of God, which is traditionally called ‘the kingdom of God,’ is among us according to Jesus. He doesn’t promote the image of God above, but of a loving parent, calling God as Father who is compassionate and ready to run to his prodigal child, and who is always ever present in us. This image of God is drastically different from a punitive figure who is all about moral codes. As Jesus becomes the gate from initially identifying himself as the shepherd, he creates the ground of God’s compassion in which everyone can enter. Thus, join the sheepfold through the gate of baptism, be on the sacred ground of God’s compassion in which you find your fellow sheep. Where is then this ground in our lives? It’s found in our parish life. I’m sure you would agree that the church is that ground where we gather as the sheepfold. (During this pandemic, we gather virtually.) Now, let’s not just settle in this sheepfold and become too comfortable. If we do so, we turn our Christian faith to a privatized, individualistic social club of like-minded people. We ought to return to Jesus’s original parable in which he is the shepherd who feeds us with his body and blood. Once we join the sheepfold, we are to follow the voice of our good shepherd. This means we’re recapitulating Christ’s own journey to the Father through the guidance of the Holy Spirit, to the cross and resurrection. This is the main reason why we observe our church calendar: Advent, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent, Easter, and all the way to the feast of Christ the king. But again, this is to remind ourselves of that journey. What should be enacted is to actually live Christ’s journey to the resurrection in our lives. As a church community, our food pantry ministry is how we follow Jesus. I dare say that Saint Agnes Church exists because of her food pantry ministry. It’s not the church that creates her mission, but rather God’s mission that creates the church. The church only exists for God’s mission. Imagine our food pantry being the bread that is to be taken, blessed, broken, and given to those in need. During this time, I would like to thank all of you who are joining God’s mission of feeding the hungry and following the voice of our good shepherd in prayers and actions. In a way, those who are joining our food pantry mission are all priests who serve the people of God with Holy Communion. May God the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit with the intercession of Blessed Mother continue to protect the sheep of his own and continue to bless and use us all. Amen. On the road to Emmaus, two disciples of Jesus encountered the risen Christ. For some reason, they were not able to recognize him at all until the bread was taken, blessed, broken, and given to them. In receiving this bread, their eyes were finally open to see the risen Christ. St Luke doesn’t specify and name this sacred action of taking the bread, blessing, breaking, and giving it though we know what it is. It is the Eucharist.
We have not been able to receive for the past seven weeks since the Second Sunday in Lent due to the pandemic. This unprecedented situation challenges us to rethink about the Eucharist. Some of you might have heard about whether virtual Eucharist is possible, meaning whether bread and wine, placed before a computer screen or a smartphone, would be consecrated by a priest presiding at a service on line. I wouldn’t drag all of us into this debate when we have a greater concern in our community. While people are fighting for their lives, I find this debate a bit off putting. Yet, it is crucial to ask ourselves what it means for us to fast from the Eucharist during this time and what the Eucharist is to us. The Eucharist (i.e. sacraments=outward signs of God’s grace in general) does two things: 1) to point to the reality of Christ’s presence and 2) embody that reality to which the Eucharist refers. The Eucharist points to the new reality of the resurrection, which is the new creation, and embodies this new reality as the body and blood of Christ in the bread and wine. In receiving this sacrament of the Eucharist, we are pointed to the new reality and embodied in the body and blood of Christ as one body of Christ. Now, before theologizing the Eucharist any further, I would like us to reflect on what Jesus actually said in his sacred act of taking the bread, blessing, breaking, and giving. That is, the Word of Institution that Saint Agnes Church says together during the Eucharistic prayer in our Sunday Eucharist. “Take, eat: This is my Body, which is given for you. Do this for the remembrance of me...Drink this, all of you: This is my Blood of the new Covenant, which is shed for you and for many for the forgiveness of sins. Whenever you drink it, do this for the remembrance of me." In the Word of Institution, Jesus points to the bread and the wine and identifies himself with the bread and wine as his body and blood. What he does in this simple action is that this bread and his body are not two, that this wine and his blood are not two. They are not separate but one. There is no duality of this and that or subject and object but wholly (and thus holy) oneness. Let’s mimic Jesus. Grab a loaf of bread and say, “This is my bread.” What you are actually doing in that simple action as Jesus does is that “this bread” and you are one, that creation and you are one in God. Therefore, God and us as well as all creation are one. This eternal oneness of God with us in Christ is what is celebrated in the Eucharist. When a priest consecrates the bread and wine, s/he does not do any magic but confirms the unity of God and creation in Christ and affirms what’s already holy. And in our sacred action of partaking in the Eucharist, eating the Body of Christ and drinking his blood, our spiritual eyes are open to confirm our communal oneness in Christ that you and I are one, which enables us to love others as ourselves. St Paul thus says, “...so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually we are members one of another.” (Romans 12:5) Every time we receive the Eucharist, this eternal oneness is what we affirm and confirm. When the eyes of Jesus’s two disciples were open, they saw the unity of God and creation in Christ. Seeing Christ is seeing God’s unity with us as well as our unity with others. While we are not able to receive the Eucharist, we can still live out the Eucharistic life in which we exercise this oneness with others, sharing ourselves with (or being broken and shed for) those in need more so than ever. Perhaps, what we have been missing is not the Eucharist itself but the Eucharistic life after all. In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. The scene of the very first Easter day is not so glorious. It is filled with fear and doubt. We see Jesus’s disciples hiding themselves from the local religious and civil authorities out of fear that they may be accused of stealing the body of Jesus from his tomb. Considering our current situation, we can very well resonate with the disciples as we too are keeping our version of the stay-at-home order. If I may rephrase (or contextualize into ours) the beginning of the gospel lesson, it goes something like this: “When it was evening on that day, the first day of the week, and the doors of the house where people had met, wearing their masks on and keeping their physical distance of 6 feet were locked for fear of the virus…” We might, however, warn them, “No meeting even with your masks on!”
You get my point that the common experience that the disciples and we share together is fear. Their fear of being charged of stealing Jesus’s body and being punished by the power that be or being crucified like Jesus is deeply rooted in fear of death. Our general fear of the virus is also rooted in fear of death. While it is completely human to have this fear, there’s one thing we should be careful with: don’t let fear control us. When fear dominates us, we lose a sense of control, that all our behaviors are driven by fear, that our decisions are made solely on fear, that our whole being shrinks. Then what do we do about this fear? A psychologist would say, “Name your fear. Recognize and accept it with self-compassion without your self-talk of ‘buck up’ and self-judgment.” While this is a helpful and recommended way of managing fear, we Christians hold onto one more, which is the most essential core of our lives. It’s the crucified and risen Christ. In the midst of the disciples’ fear, Christ comes and stands among them and says, “Peace be with you.” This peace is merely a word we say to calm ourselves but that which goes beyond the phenomenal realm of life and death. This peace is of the resurrection, not of resuscitation. It is eternal, always enduring and hopeful. This is the peace we share during our Sunday mass. Christ is in our midst and brings this peace born of the resurrection. All of us already are ensouled and embodied with this seed of Christ’s perpetual peace at our baptism. This new reality of the resurrection is what the Church celebrates and lives out. We hope both with realizable desires and with faith in our eternal oneness with God in Christ. It is my prayer that all of you are able to experience this eternal peace of the resurrection within yourselves. It doesn’t go anywhere. It has never left you. It is always right here in the depth of your being. Keep paying attention to that peace within you as all thoughts and feelings cease. This discovery and experience of the peace of Christ, which passes all understanding, will create in us a new narrative while we keep the stay-at-home order. So if we let this peace of Christ speak to us, it might be like this: “We are not passively stuck at home but are actively flattening the curve of infections. We are not just doing anything useful at home but are helping healthcare workers conserve their energy and take a break. Our freedom is not forcefully taken but conscientiously exercised to keep ourselves and others safe.” The Peace of Christ be with you always, especially during this crisis in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. |
Paul"...life up your love to that cloud [of unknowing]...let God draw your love up to that cloud...through the help of his grace, to forget every other thing." Archives
January 2025
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