May 24, 2007 Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter

  2007년 5월 24일 부활 제7주간 목요일

 

 제1독서

 사도행전 22,30; 23,6-11
그 무렵 30 천인대장은 유다인들이 왜 바오로를 고발하는지 확실히 알아보려고, 바오로를 풀어 주고 나서 명령을 내려 수석 사제들과 온 최고 의회를 소집하였다. 그리고 바오로를 데리고 내려가 그들 앞에 세웠다.
23,6 의원들 가운데 일부는 사두가이들이고 일부는 바리사이들이라는 것을 알고, 바오로는 최고 의회에서 이렇게 외쳤다. “형제 여러분, 나는 바리사이이며 바리사이의 아들입니다. 나는 죽은 이들이 부활하리라는 희망 때문에 재판을 받고 있는 것입니다.”
7 바오로가 이런 말을 하자 바리사이들과 사두가이들 사이에 논쟁이 벌어지면서 회중이 둘로 갈라졌다. 8 사실 사두가이들은 부활도 천사도 영도 없다고 주장하고, 바리사이들은 그것을 다 인정하였다.
9 그래서 큰 소란이 벌어졌는데, 바리사이파에서 율법 학자 몇 사람이 일어나 강력히 항의하였다. “우리는 이 사람에게서 아무 잘못도 찾을 수 없습니다. 그리고 영이나 천사가 그에게 말하였다면 어떻게 할 셈입니까?”
10 논쟁이 격렬해지자 천인대장은 바오로가 그들에게 찢겨 죽지 않을까 염려하여, 내려가 그들 가운데에서 바오로를 빼내어 진지 안으로 데려가라고 부대에 명령하였다.
11 그날 밤에 주님께서 바오로 앞에 서시어 그에게 이르셨다. “용기를 내어라. 너는 예루살렘에서 나를 위하여 증언한 것처럼 로마에서도 증언해야 한다.”

  

 복음

 요한 17,20-26
그때에 [예수님께서 하늘을 향하여 눈을 들어 기도하셨다.]
20 “저는 이들만이 아니라 이들의 말을 듣고 저를 믿는 이들을 위해서도 빕니다. 21 그들이 모두 하나가 되게 해 주십시오. 아버지, 아버지께서 제 안에 계시고 제가 아버지 안에 있듯이, 그들도 우리 안에 있게 해 주십시오. 그리하여 아버지께서 저를 보내셨다는 것을 세상이 믿게 하십시오.
22 아버지께서 저에게 주신 영광을 저도 그들에게 주었습니다. 우리가 하나인 것처럼 그들도 하나가 되게 하려는 것입니다. 23 저는 그들 안에 있고 아버지께서는 제 안에 계십니다. 이는 그들이 완전히 하나가 되게 하려는 것입니다. 그리고 아버지께서 저를 보내시고, 또 저를 사랑하셨듯이 그들도 사랑하셨다는 것을 세상이 알게 하려는 것입니다.
24 아버지, 아버지께서 저에게 주신 이들도 제가 있는 곳에 저와 함께 있게 되기를 바랍니다. 세상 창조 이전부터 아버지께서 저를 사랑하시어 저에게 주신 영광을 그들도 보게 되기를 바랍니다.
25 의로우신 아버지, 세상은 아버지를 알지 못하였지만 저는 아버지를 알고 있었습니다. 그들도 아버지께서 저를 보내셨다는 것을 알게 되었습니다. 26 저는 그들에게 아버지의 이름을 알려 주었고 앞으로도 알려 주겠습니다. 아버지께서 저를 사랑하신 그 사랑이 그들 안에 있고 저도 그들 안에 있게 하려는 것입니다.”

 

 

 

 May 24, 2007

 Thursday of the Seventh Week of Easter

 Reading 1
Acts 22:30; 23:6-11

Wishing to determine the truth
about why Paul was being accused by the Jews,
the commander freed him
and ordered the chief priests and the whole Sanhedrin to convene.
Then he brought Paul down and made him stand before them.

Paul was aware that some were Sadducees and some Pharisees,
so he called out before the Sanhedrin,
“My brothers, I am a Pharisee, the son of Pharisees;
I am on trial for hope in the resurrection of the dead.”
When he said this,
a dispute broke out between the Pharisees and Sadducees,
and the group became divided.
For the Sadducees say that there is no resurrection
or angels or spirits,
while the Pharisees acknowledge all three.
A great uproar occurred,
and some scribes belonging to the Pharisee party
stood up and sharply argued,
“We find nothing wrong with this man.
Suppose a spirit or an angel has spoken to him?”
The dispute was so serious that the commander,
afraid that Paul would be torn to pieces by them,
ordered his troops to go down and rescue Paul from their midst
and take him into the compound.
The following night the Lord stood by him and said, “Take courage.
For just as you have borne witness to my cause in Jerusalem,
so you must also bear witness in Rome.”

Responsorial Psalm
Ps 16:1-2a and 5, 7-8, 9-10, 11

R. (1) Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Keep me, O God, for in you I take refuge;
I say to the LORD, “My Lord are you.”
O LORD, my allotted portion and my cup,
you it is who hold fast my lot.
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
or:
R. Alleluia.
I bless the LORD who counsels me;
even in the night my heart exhorts me.
I set the LORD ever before me;
with him at my right hand I shall not be disturbed.
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
or:
R. Alleluia.
Therefore my heart is glad and my soul rejoices,
my body, too, abides in confidence;
Because you will not abandon my soul to the nether world,
nor will you suffer your faithful one to undergo corruption.
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
or:
R. Alleluia.
You will show me the path to life,
fullness of joys in your presence,
the delights at your right hand forever.
R. Keep me safe, O God; you are my hope.
or:
R. Alleluia.

Gospel
Jn 17:20-26

Lifting up his eyes to heaven, Jesus prayed saying:
“I pray not only for these,
but also for those who will believe in me through their word,
so that they may all be one,
as you, Father, are in me and I in you,
that they also may be in us,
that the world may believe that you sent me.
And I have given them the glory you gave me,
so that they may be one, as we are one,
I in them and you in me,
that they may be brought to perfection as one,
that the world may know that you sent me,
and that you loved them even as you loved me.
Father, they are your gift to me.
I wish that where I am they also may be with me,
that they may see my glory that you gave me,
because you loved me before the foundation of the world.
Righteous Father, the world also does not know you,
but I know you, and they know that you sent me.
I made known to them your name and I will make it known,
that the love with which you loved me
may be in them and I in them.”

 

 

 Commentary

 

 Paul is released from prison and he is brought before the Sanhedrin to be tried. Paul is shrewd and says that he is a Pharisee and that he stands before them because he believes in the resurrection (setting the factions against each other). A riot breaks out and he is rescued by the troops and is taken back to headquarters. Paul dreams that the Lord is at his side and he is told to have courage. He has testified to Jesus in Jerusalem, now he will testify to the risen Lord in Rome. Paul does have a way of enraging people-perhaps we need to learn more from Jesus' ways and words, than from Paul's style and weaknesses on how to preach the good news of the crucified and risen Lord.

Jesus prays for all who believe, for all who teach/preach, and he prays that we all might be one as the Father is one in him and he is in the Father, and that all of us might be one in God, as they are in communion. We are given to know the Father, to know the Word made flesh, and Jesus will continue to reveal God to us in the Spirit. Does this love and life of God dwell in us? How do we as Church reveal this to the world today?

 

 

 “. . . that they all may be one, as you, Father, and I are one . . . so that the world may believe. . .”

These seem to me to be among the saddest words in the Bible. Sad, because we have failed this prayer so miserably, so consistently, right from day one. Today we live with a fractured, fragmented Christianity – East and West, Protestant and Catholic, with hundreds of splinter groups within the major divisions. How can the world believe – what is the world to believe – if the witness we give of Jesus is divided and divisive?

Even if we personally didn’t cause the splits, we have to be concerned about them. We have to take responsibility for doing something about them. We fail Jesus’ post-resurrection command to preach the good news to every creature if our divisions give the lie to what we preach (if, that is, we even preach it . . .). Somehow we find enough fervor to be concerned about global warming, the ecology, rain forests, and threatened species. Why can’t we seem to muster an at least equivalent concern for this challenge, surely no less important than the others? The world desperately needs to hear the good news, but so long as we pigheadedly stick to our divisions, we make it impossible for the world to hear Jesus’ message. Religion is seen as divisive and therefore irrelevant.

It is not a matter of who is right and who is wrong. So long as we disobey Jesus’ fervent plea at the Last Supper, we are all of us wrong. We have to realize that it is possible to have unity without uniformity. We have to make room for differences and for different perspectives; but above all, we have to be together.

There is an interesting, possibly instructive parallel in a story we read a few weeks ago from Acts (Acts 6:1–12). It is the dispute about whether the widows of the Greek-speaking Jews were getting their share of the common resources, particularly food. The dispute was not really about food, but about viewpoints, about culture, about who was a good Jew and who wasn’t. You can just hear the two sides as they approach Peter “Tell them that . . .” “Make them do . . .” Luke doesn’t tell us that Peter sided with one faction or the other, didn’t say one or the other was wrong. What Acts does tell us is that Peter set up a system so that both sides could continue to coexist. That surely is a powerful illustration of what the Petrine office ought to be and to do.

It is we Christians who have to manifest to the world the unity of Jesus and His Father. And we must beseech heaven to help us do that. God wants to help, that’s clear. We have to want to as well. There’s the problem . . .

 

 by
Robert P. Heaney
John A. Creighton University Professor

 

 

The anthropologist Colin Turnbull lived for two years with a Ugandan tribe, the Ik, and described his experiences in a book called The Mountain People.  They are seen as utterly brutish, selfish and loveless.  They never sing, and they laugh only at one another’s misfortunes.  They turn their children out to forage as soon as they can walk, and they abandon the old to starvation.  Presumably they were once a normal easy-going people, but the government took over their lands to create a national park, and these hunter-gatherers were reduced to farming the poor hillside soil, at which they failed miserably.  Along with their way of life they lost their culture and even their humanity.  It is a depressing picture. 

The biologist Lewis Thomas, in The Lives of a Cell, sketched a theory about them  -  and about human beings in any society.  “The solitary Ik, isolated in the ruins of an exploded culture, has built a new defence for himself.  If you live in an unworkable society you can make up one of your own…. Each Ik has become a group, a one-man tribe of its own…. This is precisely the way groups…from committees to nations, behave…. In his absolute selfishness, his incapacity to give anything away, no matter what, he is a successful committee.  When he stands at the door of his hut, shouting insults at his neighbours in a loud harangue, he is a city addressing another city…. Nations are the most Ik-like of all…. For total greed, rapacity, heartlessness, and irresponsibility there is nothing to match a nation.  Nations, by law, are solitary, self-centred, withdrawn into themselves.’  He concludes, ‘We haven’t yet learned how to stay human when assembled in masses.  The Ik, in his despair, is acting out this failure, and perhaps we should pay closer attention.”

            There are lessons here for Christian community too.  Despite hearing the Gospel, times without number, we are capable of living instead by the gospel of greed.  Society breaks down around us, and we fail to create Christian community, receding into ourselves and living out our lives as solitary egos.   The ego is my false identity; it is the identity I forge for myself in early childhood and build upon for the rest of my life, unless radically called into community.  It is the fundamental lie about who I am.  It is not really an identity, it is a strategy for survival, security and comfort.  For this reason the ego cannot love, though it can produce an imitation of love, for strategic purposes.  Whenever it pretends to form community with others there is a built-in flaw.   As W.H. Auden once said, we have to learn to love one another or die. 

            What is meaning?  It is to know the fragment in relation to the whole.  A madman is so-called because his talk and actions are unrelated to a wider structure.  Cut a piece out of a picture and it’s meaningless.  Put it back and there’s a thrill of recognition.  This is the thrill of jigsaw puzzles.  Today many people are like isolated fragments of a jigsaw puzzle, with no desire to be part of anything.   

 

 

 “May they become perfectly one”

Do you pray as Jesus did for the unity of all Christians? The distinctive mark of Jesus’ disciples is their love and unity.  “How good and delightful it is when brethren dwell together in unity” (Psalm 133:1). Jesus' high priestly prayer at the last supper concludes with the petition for Christian unity among all who profess Jesus Christ as Lord.  Jesus prays for all men and women who will come after him and follow him as his disciples. In a special way Jesus prays here for us that as members of his body the church we would be one as he and his Father is one.  The unity of Jesus and his Father is a unity of love and obedience and a unity of personal relationship.  Because Jesus loved us first and united us in baptism we are called to live in a unity of love.  Jesus’ prayer on the eve of his sacrifice shows the great love and trust he has in his beloved disciples.  He knows they would abandon him in his hour of trial, yet he entrusted to them the great task of spreading his name throughout the world and to the end of the ages. The Lord entrust us with the same mission...to make him known and loved by all.  Jesus died and rose again that all might be one as he and the Father are one.  Do you love and accept all baptized Christians as your brothers and sisters in Christ?

 "Lord God, have mercy on your people and heal the divisions in the body of Christ.   May all  Christian people throughout the world attain the unity for which Jesus prayed on the eve of his sacrifice.  Renew in us the power of the Spirit that we may be a sign of that unity and a means of its growth. Increase in us a fervent love for all our brothers and sisters in Christ."

Psalm 97:1-2,6-7,9

1 The LORD reigns; let the earth rejoice; let the many coastlands be glad!
2 Clouds and thick darkness are round about him; righteousness and justice are the foundation of his throne.
6 The heavens proclaim his righteousness; and all the peoples behold his glory.
7 All worshipers of images are put to shame, who make their boast in worthless idols;  all gods bow down before him.
9 For thou, O LORD, art most high over all the earth; thou art exalted far above all gods.

 

 

 'onE' SPIRIT

'I pray that they may be [one] in Us, that the world may believe that You sent Me.' John 17:21

God created man and woman to be one flesh, crafting a supernatural unity (Gn 2:24). Adam and Eve sinned against God, and with their fallen nature, humanity has inherited a tendency to fracture into disunity. Before long, mankind was so wicked (Gn 6:5) that God wiped them out in the flood (Gn 7:23).

So God started over again with Noah's family, and again the human race began with unity (Gn 8:16). Before long, man's pride again resulted in a false unity, as men joined to glorify themselves rather than God (Gn 11:4ff). So God had to bring division (cf Lk 12:51), through different languages and physical dispersion.

After many years, God sent His Son 'to gather into one all the dispersed children of God' (Jn 11:52). Jesus did this by ascending into heaven and, with the Father, sending forth the Holy Spirit. At Pentecost, the Spirit started over again and reversed man's disunity. The apostles and disciples 'were filled with the Holy Spirit. They began to express themselves in foreign tongues' (Acts 2:4). Dispersed people heard and understood the gospel in their own language (Acts 2:11).

Our human nature tends toward disunity. But God makes us 'sharers of the divine nature' (2 Pt 1:4) by giving us the Holy Spirit. only the Spirit can unite us. 'Receive the Holy Spirit' (Jn 20:22). Come, Holy Spirit of unity! (Eph 4:3)

Praise: Putting her prayer group into the hands of Jesus, Laura saw a new unity and deeper bond of love.
Prayer: Holy Spirit, pour out the love of God in my heart (Rm 5:5). Give me Your heart for Christian unity.
Promise: 'You will show me the path to life, fullness of joys in Your presence, the delights at Your right hand forever.' Ps 16:11

 

 

«I pray not only for these but also for those who through their word will believe in me»

Today, we find a solid basis for trust in the Gospel: «Holy Father, I pray not only for these but also for those who through their word will believe in me...» (Jn 17:20). It is Jesus' heart, which, in the intimacy of Jesus with his disciples, opens up the inexhaustible treasures of His Love. He wants to strengthen their hearts overwhelmed by the sense of farewell that, during the Last Supper, the Master's words and gestures have left them with. It is Jesus' unfailing prayer that goes up to the Father, pleading for them. What a confidence and strength will they find in this prayer throughout their apostolic mission! Amidst all the difficulties and dangers they have to face, this prayer will go all the way with them to become the source where they will find the strength and courage to give the final testimony of their faith with the offering of their own life.

We should let the reality of Jesus' prayer for his disciples to reach our lives, too: «I pray not only for these but also for those who will believe in me...». These words travel through time and centuries to attain, with the same intensity they were once said, the hearts of every true believer.

In the living memory of His Holiness John Paul II's last visit to Spain, we find in his words the echo of Jesus' prayer for his disciples: «With my open arms, in my heart I carry you all —said the Pontiff before more than a million persons—. The memory of these days will become a prayer, we shall beg the peace for you in fraternal coexistence, encouraged by the Christian hope that never loses heart». An another Pontiff, not so close in time, also made an exhortation that, after many centuries, have reached our heart, too: «There is no ailing one whom the victory of the cross be denied to, nor there is anyone whom Christ's prayer does not help to. For, if it was so profitable for those who treated him so cruelly, how much more will it not be for those who are converted unto him» (St. Leo the Great).
 

 

 In today’s first reading, Paul delivered his one and only philosophical discourse.   He uses all the right techniques of rhetoric, eloquence, and allusions to Greek authors and Greek culture.   He was speaking to the cultured intelligentsia of Athens, the men of the Areopagus.   And the sermon fell flat!   It was devastating.   When Paul mentioned the resurrection of the dead, the closed-minded Greeks tuned him out and turned him off.   (Greek philosophy and culture considered all material things as evil, and only spirit as good.   Humans were a sort of contradiction: the spiritual soul was imprisoned in a material body.   Greeks thought that death was liberation of this spiritual soul to contemplate the good and the true.    To them, resurrection – putting the spiritual soul back into the material body – was nonsense.)
This disastrous experience was enough for Paul.   From that time on, he resolved never to use mere human “wisdom” or philosophy or eloquence.   He would preach only Jesus Christ and him crucified.   In our modern world we may make use of various techniques.   But we must always remember that faith is a gift.   We do not gain converts by argument or eloquence, but by radiating the good new in our lives: the good news that Jesus died for our sins, rose for our justification, and gives us a share in his glory.

 

 

 The word of Jesus has come to us through the Apostles, and now envelopes us into the life of the Trinity—we who live in Christ because of the Apostles’ witness.  Christ prays that we share in the divine intimacy that is the life of God the Trinity.  Our prayer is the actualization of that prayer of Jesus.  Jesus lives now in us ever expressing this prayer of John 17.  This portion, vv. 20 -26 concerns us who are the believers of this time in history.  Even now at this moment he prays that we can pray.  We can pray only because Jesus has asked that we be capable of his prayer.  Praying in the power of Jesus is to be in God, to behold his glory, to share in his joy.  The gift of contemplative prayer is to be so united in Christ that we do not look upon God as another object outside of ourselves.  But we experience that our inner workings of consciousness are the knowing and loving, and feeling of the Trinity.  Love does all this.  God's love poured forth by the Holy Spirit creates prayer within us.  We pray only because we are already alive in God.  Jesus prayed for this gift.  In him we have received the gift of our sharing in the Trinitarian life.