Jesus and the Father unite in care for us – John 10:27-30, Rev 7:9-17, Acts 13:43-51

4th Sunday of Easter, Year C; Holy Infant parish

“The Father and I are one,” Jesus tells the crowd. And that statement has led to all kinds of theologizing to try and make sense of what it can mean for Jesus, who certainly looked pretty human, to be able to say that. And the crystallization of a few hundred years of puzzling over that is what we say in our creed, what we mean when we confess Jesus is fully divine and fully human. It’s an amazing confession, when you think about it, that there’s nothing that authentic to being human that’s incompatible with divinity. That’s an amazingly daring statement about our created dignity, to which God longs to restore us, and to which God has acted in Christ to begin to restore us. It’s also an amazingly daring statement about God, the limitless God, who can hold creation in his fingertips, but consented to know limit, to know impairment, to know hunger and thirst and death all for love of us. That God, in His totally radically free will, wills to love us so much even when we turn away that He consents to know a thirst for us that He doesn’t have to.

God always gives us a second chance – John 21:1-14, Rev 5:11-14

Third Sunday of Easter, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Our God is a God of second chances. And not just second: third, fourth… there isn’t an ordinal so high that it could limit God’s love, stop God from continue to reach out to us, from bidding us cast our nets, and inviting us to breakfast; just as Jesus does with Peter, even after Peter denied him. The image of the net, full to bursting with fish, but not bursting, is an image of how plentiful and limitless God’s ongoing will to reach out to us is. A lot of commentators over the centuries have spilled a lot of ink (or, I guess, now, worn out a lot of keys on a lot of keyboards) trying to figure out quite why there were 153 fish. Some of these explanations are kind of fun. St. Jerome claimed that there were 153 species of fish, so 153 fish was a symbol for the church containing the full diversity of humanity. Unfortunately, there aren’t just 153 species of fish, and no one at that time seemed to think that either, except people that wanted to get this meaning out of John.  Other people have tried gematria, which is an ancient technique whereby you assign a number to each letter of the Hebrew alphabet and add up all the letters in a word or phrase. If you do that to the phrase “church of love,” you get 153, which is really cute. The problem is that neither John no anywhere else in the New Testament is the phrase “church of love” used, and there are all kinds of different phrases that would give you that number. My personal favorite explanation is that 153 is the sum of all the whole numbers from 1 to 17, and 17 is the sum of 10 and 7, two important numbers that represented fullness (think 10 commandments, 7 days of the week).

Jesus takes away our grave clothes, too – Luke 24:1-12

Easter Sunday, Year C [Mass during the day, but I used the Vigil Gospel]; Holy Infant parish.

Our gospel ends with Peter amazed. Actually, in Greek, it says that he went away “marveling to himself.” I love that. Just imagining him walking and marveling. Like, his legs are keeping moving, but in his mind, and in his heart, all that he can think, all that he can feel, is “Wow.” Our gospel ends with Peter amazed, but I’d like to encourage us to read the whole thing amazed.

Jesus labors to bring the Church to birth – John 18:1-19:42

Good Friday; Holy Infant.

When the fire broke out at Notre Dame earlier this week, I was actually rather surprised by how many people seemed to be touched, moved, grieved by it. My facebook feed was full of people who felt a need to share something about it; Catholics, but also non-Catholic Christians, people of other faiths, and people with no religious commitments at all. I think there’s just something basically human about grieving the loss or potential loss of beauty like that. I’m reminded of the rallying cry of the early 20^th Century American Labor movement: “give us bread, but give us roses too.” Stomachs can hunger, but so can hearts. Beautiful places of worship can often be among the few places of beauty where people in poverty are actually welcomed.

Jesus brings us back to the Father – Luke 22:14-23:56, Phil 2:6-11

Palm Sunday, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

Luke shows what Paul tells.

Paul, when he writes to the Philippians, tells them how much God in Christ desired to be close to humanity, tells that there was nothing Jesus wouldn’t do, that he would even empty his very self, so that could be with us, be human with us.

God sends us to the goal of glory – John 8:1-11, Isa 43:16-21, Phil 3:8-14

5th Sunday of Lent, Year C; Holy Infant parish.

The saddest thing about this gospel is that they walked away, these people with stones in their hands.  And there’s pretty stiff competition for the saddest thing about this gospel.  There’s the fact that there were going to stone a woman to death.  There’s their desire to test Jesus.  There’s the possibility that an act of adultery had been occurring, and the (worse) possibility that their accusations were false.  There is a lot to lament in this Gospel, about this happening retold to us, and about people and events in our lives whose memories it evokes.  But, I still contend that the saddest thing about this gospel is that they walked away, these people with stones in their hands.

God feeds us for joy – Luke 15:1-3. 11-32

Fourth Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C; Holy Infant Parish.

Did you know that baby flamingoes are born with grey feathers?  They only become pink because their diet is rich in a natural pink dye called canthaxanthin, which is found both in brine shrimp and, somewhat paradoxically in blue-green algae.  Zoo flamingoes used to lose their acquired pinkness until zookeepers realized that they had to provide them with artificial sources of canthaxanthin.  As with flamingoes, so with us: we are what we eat.