Year B Fifteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Amos 7:12-15; Psalm 85:9-14; Ephesians 1:3-10; Mark 6:7-13

To be a Christian is to be called. The Lord sends those he calls. In today’s Gospel, Jesus, having already called the Twelve, sends them. While he “gave them authority over unclean spirits” and they cured many sick people, they were primarily sent to preach repentance.¹

Along with our Gospel, our first reading from the book of the prophet Amos provides some insight into who God calls as well as what he sends them to do. Amos was a shepherd “and a dresser of sycamores.”² LLike Jesus, was also not of the tribe of Levi, the priestly tribe, Amos was not a priest. Nonetheless, God called him to be a prophet.

Amos lived in the Northern Kingdom of Israel, in Galilee. This is the area where, centuries later, Jesus came from. Judah is where Jerusalem is and, being the holy city, where the Temple was. The main Israelite shrine in the Northern Kingdom, as well as its capital, was Bethel. It was to Bethel that God sent Amos to prophesy. His prophesy was to call those prophets and leaders to repentance, back to fidelity to God’s covenant.

As you might imagine, Amos’ prophesying went over like a lead balloon. He was told to leave Bethel and go prophesy in Judah. In essence, the chief priest, Amaziah, told Amos, “Get out of here. Who do you think you are to speak to me, to speak to the king, like that?” This should take us back to our Gospel for last Sunday.

If you remember, after healing, casting out demons, and preaching repentance throughout the rest of Galilee, Jesus went home to Nazareth. On the sabbath, he taught in the synagogue. As a result of his preaching, the devout people in Nazareth, Mark tells us, “took offense at him.”³ Their offense caused the Lord to observe: “A prophet is not without honor except in his native place and among his own kin and in his own house.”⁴ You see, being Messiah means that Jesus is a prophet.

Immediately after being baptized, a child is anointed with sacred chrism with the words: “As Christ was anointed Priest, Prophet, and King, so may you live always as a member of his body, sharing everlasting life.”⁵ “By Baptism,” the Catechism teaches, we “share in the priesthood of Christ, in his prophetic and royal mission.” Together, the Catechism continues, the baptized “are ‘a chosen race, a royal priesthood, a holy nation, God's own people, that [they] may declare the wonderful deeds of him who called [them] out of darkness into his marvelous light.’ Baptism gives a share in the common priesthood of all believers.”⁶

Your being called and sent is no accident, at least if our second reading from Ephesians is to be believed: “In love he destined us for adoption to himself through Jesus Christ.”⁷ This is a clear reference to baptism, through which you are reborn, through Christ, by the Holy Spirit’s power, as a child of God. Through the blood of Christ, “we have redemption…, the forgiveness of transgressions…”⁸

Amos, the prophet, by Naomi, used under the rules of Creative Common License

It is only by experiencing the sweet fruits of repentance that you are able to share them with others. It is then, like Amos, like the Twelve, you are sent on mission, so that you can evangelize, share the Good News. Because it is only then than you can tell others what difference knowing Jesus makes in your life.

Living as we do at the intersection of time and eternity, truly knowing Jesus makes a lot of difference. It is easy to be mistaken about this difference and all too common to exaggerate it, often to an absurd degree. Michael Knott, who was a pillar of Christian alternative music and who passed away earlier this year, when asked the usual question during a lengthy interview, something like “Who are you?,” he replied:

Basically, I'm a human being and I believe in Christ, period. It doesn't make my life rosy, it doesn't make my life terrible, it doesn't do anything with that. I know Christ⁹

What Knott nailed was that knowing Christ isn’t transactional. In other words, it doesn’t work by believing in Christ and neatly following all the rules in exchange for nothing bad ever happening to you, let alone a promise to live your best life now. As our Gospel from three Sundays ago showed us, Jesus is with us in and through the storm, even when, maybe especially when, it doesn’t seem like it, when it seems like he’s asleep. Rather, as the psalmist puts in Psalm 23: “Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me.”¹⁰

To know Christ, to really know him, means that being a Christian constitutes your identity, becomes who you are. As Saint Paul insisted, “whoever is in Christ is a new creation: the old things have passed away; behold, new things have come.”¹¹ Knowing Christ isn’t just a way to add a little morality, a little religion, to your life. That is old and dead, not new and alive.

Like Jesus in the garden, you must learn, to borrow the title of a great spiritual classic, to abandon yourself to divine providence. In other words, to trust him even when the chips are down and when the deck seems stacked against you.

The only way to really know Christ is to experience what I am trying to describe for yourself. Only then, can you fulfill your prophetic call. Only then can you be sent to proclaim the Gospel, that is, to tell others what it means, through experience, to say, “I know Christ.”

Only once you truly repent, can you preach repentance. For a Christian, repentance is just another word for redemption, another word for true freedom, another word for realizing what the Lord means when he says, “Blessed are you…”

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1 Mark 6:7.13.12.^↩
2 Amos 7:14.^↩
3 Mark 6:3.^↩
4 Mark 6:4.^↩
5 Rite of Baptism for Children, “Rite of Baptism for Several Children,” sec. 62.^↩
6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 1268; 1 Peter 2:9.^↩
7 Ephesians 3:4-5.^↩
8 Ephesians 3:7.^↩
9 Doug Van Pelt & Daniel Johnston. “Michael Knott- A Candid Interview.” HM, 2003.^↩
10 Psalm 23:4.^↩
11 2 Corinthians 5:17.^↩

Monday of the Fourteenth Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: Hosea 2:16.17c.18.21-22; Ps 145:2-9; Matthew 9:18-26

Our Gospel today is Saint Matthew’s version of events first written about in Mark’s Gospel. This should sound familiar because Mark’s version of these things was our Gospel reading for the Sunday before last.

Our understanding of today’s Gospel should be shaped by our first reading with which the Church pairs it. Our first reading today is from the Book of the Prophet Hosea. Before getting to our passage for today, a little background is useful.

As is the case with the prophets, both major and minor (Hosea is a minor prophet), Hosea was commissioned to call Israel back to fidelity to her covenant with God. One way God commanded Hosea to do this was through his marriage to a woman named Gomer.

Gomer was a practitioner of “the world’s oldest profession.” In other words, she was a prostitute. Nonetheless, God called his prophet to marry this unreformed harlot. Not only did they marry but they had children together. Despite this, Gomer still plied her trade.

What we have, then, is a pretty ham-fisted allegory: Hosea is God and Gomer is Israel. While God remains faithful to Israel, his beloved, Israel plays the harlot, chasing after other gods. One of the many things John Calvin was right about is that “the human mind is, so to speak, a perpetual forge of idols.”¹

The truth of Calvin’s assertion is not only verified in the exploits of ancient Israel but also through the history of the Church. One of the four “marks” of the Church is that she is holy. Just before saying the Prayer Over the Gifts, the priest says to the assembly- “Pray, brethren, that my sacrifice and yours may be acceptable to God, the almighty Father.” To which we respond: “May the Lord accept this sacrifice at your hands for the praise and glory of his name, for our good and the good of all his holy Church.”² The Church is his, meaning Christ’s.

In answer to the first question of an interview he gave at the beginning of his pontificate, “Who is Jorge Mario Bergoglio?,” Pope Francis said, “I do not know what might be the most fitting description.... I am a sinner. This is the most accurate definition. It is not a figure of speech, a literary genre. I am a sinner.”³ The Church is holy because she is the Bride of a Husband who is indefatigably faithful, loving, and forgiving: Jesus Christ. The Church is holy because it is Christ’s, not because you or I, or even the Pope, belong to it.

Hosea and Gomer, by Barry Moser, used under the rules of Creative Common License

Like Gomer, like ancient Israel, Christ’s Bride is not always faithful. This is why the Church earned the patristic moniker casta meretrix- chaste whore.⁴This points to an inseparable union of the human and the divine that constitutes the Church. At least for now, the Church is a union between sinful, unfaithful, idol-chasing people, and her holy and wholly faithful Lord.

What makes our reading from Hosea so beautiful is that it tells us of God’s tender fidelity not just despite our individual and collective infidelity but, like Hosea, because of it. This suggests that great line from the Exsultet, sung at the Easter Vigil:

O happy fault
    that earned so great, so glorious a Redeemer!⁵

Or this from Preface III of the Sundays in Ordinary Time:

For we know it belongs to your boundless glory, that you came to the aid of mortal beings with your divinity and even fashioned for us a remedy out of mortality itself, that the cause of our downfall might become the means of our salvation, through Christ our Lord⁶

In light of this perhaps we should also understand today’s Gospel as something of an allegory. The Church is the woman with the hemorrhages who Jesus heals and makes whole. The Church is also the community of those who, through the mystery of Baptism, have died, been buried, and risen with Christ to new life.

Indeed, as we sang in the Responsory, the Lord is “gracious and merciful.”⁷ As Christians, as members of Christ’s Body (through the Eucharist, He becomes one flesh with his Church), let us recommit, with God’s help, to never again say, “My baal.”⁸ Let us be ever mindful that, in the end, only those who, forsaking all other gods, say to Christ “My husband” may enter the Wedding Feast of the Lamb.

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1 John Calvin. Institutes of the Christian Religion. I.11.8.^↩
2 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, The Liturgy of the Eucharist, sec. 29.^↩
3 Fr. Anthony Spadero. “Interview with Pope Francis.”^↩
4 See Hans Urs von Balthasar, “Casta Meretrix,” in Explorations in Theology, vol. 2, Spouse of the Word, trans. John Saward (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1991), 193–288..^↩
5 Roman Missal, Sunday of the Resurrection, The Easter Vigil, The Easter Proclamation, sec. 19.^↩
6 Roman Missal, The Order of the Mass, Preface III of the Sundays in Ordinary Time, sec. 54.^↩
7 Psalm 145:8.^↩
8 Hosea 2:18.^↩

Year B Thirteenth Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Wis 1:13-15.2:23-24; Ps 30:2.4-6.11-13; 2 Cor 8:7.9.13-15; Mark 4:21-43

“Death is a part of life,” or so we’re told. This is true insofar as all of us will die. As Jesus, drawing attention back to the beginning in Genesis, pointed out to those who asked him about divorce and who noted that Moses permitted it, from the beginning it was not so.¹ As our reading from Wisdom tells us: “God formed man to be imperishable.”²

As the inspired author of the Book of Wisdom notes: God created human beings “of his own nature.”³ This amounts to the same thing we learn about in the first creation account in Genesis: man and woman were made in God’s image and likeness.⁴ While God’s image, the imago Dei, cannot be lost, our likeness to God is lost through sin.

While we are not born merely to die, because death entered the world, it is not enough to be born in order not to die. You must be reborn by water and the Spirit. The primary effect of the sacrament of baptism is to restore the baptized to a state of original grace. Through Jesus Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit, our likeness to God can be restored by grace.

This same grace is operative in the sacrament of penance, which is an extension of baptism. While it may seem old-fashioned to say so, you should strive to live in a state of grace. What does it mean to endeavor to live in a state of grace? It doesn’t mean being perfect, even though we should strive for and deeply desire perfection, which, in a Christian context, can also be called holiness.

The fruit of the fourth Luminous Mystery of the Blessed Virgin’s Most Holy Rosary, which mystery is Jesus’ Transfiguration, is a desire for holiness, a desire for transfiguration, transformation, conversion, the desire for sanctity. What it means to be holy is to be like Jesus Christ. What it means to be like Christ is to love perfectly, to love God with your entire being, and to love your neighbor as yourself. All of the various ways we have to access grace, even the sacraments, are means to this end.

Today’s Gospel powerfully shows us how Jesus rescues and restores us. While there is no reason to doubt the historicity of these encounters with Jesus, these were not remembered and written down to be handed merely as biography.

What I am getting at is illustrated by last Sunday’s Gospel. If you remember, it began with Jesus climbing into the boat with his disciples and saying, “Let us cross to the other side.”⁵ Perhaps the best way to grasp this episode is as an allegory.

Uou and I, all of us hearing God’s word together, are the disciples to whom Jesus speaks. The boat is the Church. The sea, which in the ancient world, including for the Jewish people, was a place of chaos, a place where dangers lurked, where storms often proved deadly, is what we experience as we make our way through life to what the old hymn calls “God’s celestial shore.”⁶ Jesus is the master of wind, the sea, the sky, of all there is. Therefore, because we are in the boat with him, we need not fear even while the storm rages.

In today’s Gospel, Jesus’ bringing Jairus’ daughter back to life is interrupted by the woman who sought healing from something that afflicted her for twelve years. Let’s translate this into something more relatable for most of us. In terms of sin, how long have you struggled with the same damned thing? How often does it seem like your confession is just the same thing over and over? It’s easy to get discouraged.

You need to remember three things. First, Jesus has already won the victory. Second, you’re never beaten until you quit. Third, you will get tired of asking for God’s mercy before God tires being merciful to you, which requires nothing other than your acknowledgment of and sorrow for your sins. Divine Mercy is infinite.

What God limits is evil, even though this is sometimes far from evident. Pope Saint John Paul II insisted that the cross of Christ “marks the divine limit placed upon evil.” Through the cross, he continued, “evil is radically overcome by good, hate by love, death by resurrection.”⁷

The fruit of the third Luminous Mystery is repentance and trust in God. Maybe this is going off on a tangent but pray the Rosary. If possible, pray the Rosary every day. In a letter he wrote to an archbishop, Pope Pius XII noted that the Rosary is “the compendium of the entire Gospel.”⁸

To trust God is to trust Jesus, who, as Son of the Father, is also God. Each Christian amid life’s storms must not ask, “Jesus, why don’t you care that I am perishing?” Instead. We must learn to say, even if only in a quivering voice, “Jesus, I trust in You.” Thomas à Kempis in his timeless spiritual classic The Imitation of Christ, writes about Jesus saying,

Come to Me when it is not well with thee.
This is that which most of all hinders heavenly comfort, that thou art slow in turning thyself to prayer⁹

These are lovely words. But like those featured in today’s Gospel as well as last week’s, we must get beyond the sentimentality of these words and verify this truth through experience. Is Jesus trustworthy, or isn’t he? Everything hinges on the answer to this question! Proof in favor of the Lord’s trustworthiness is not whether he does your bidding according to your timing and in just the way you ask him to. Rather, it lies in abandoning yourself, like he did, to the loving care of the Father, who is committed only to your good.

Don Francisco, a contemporary Christian music artist from years past, has an amazing ability to bring Gospel stories alive through his songs. He wrote an amazing song called “A Little Closer to Jesus,” the first verse of which, along with the chorus, strikes me as very illuminating today:

Well, a woman with a burden of sickness twelve years
Heard that Jesus was coming her way;
She didn't stop to worry 'bout her doubts and her fears
She had to fight for every step of the way
Through the crowds that were pressing around Him
Through the heat and the dust of the road,
And when she touched his cloak, God healed her body
He lifted her heavy load

If I can get a little closer to Jesus
Just a little bit closer to Jesus…
Everything's gonna be all right¹⁰

For those who like to be given something to do in a homily: this week, get a little closer to Jesus by praying the Rosary each day. To Jesus through Mary is the fruit of the Rosary’s second Luminous Mystery- the miracle at the wedding feast of Cana. Given that this happens during a feast, one can taste a Eucharistic undertone, pointing us to the Wedding Feast of the Lamb. As Catholics, we must always be aware that it is impossible to get closer to Jesus than through the Eucharist.

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1 See Mark 10:3-7.^↩
2 Wisdom 2:23.^↩
3 Wisdom 2:23.^↩
4 Genesis 1:26.^↩
5 Mark 4:25.^↩
6 "I'll Fly Away."^↩
7 Pope John Paul II. Memory and Identity: Conversations at the Dawn of a Millennium.^↩
8 Cited by Pope Paul VI in Apostolic Exhortation Marialis Cultus, sec. 42.^↩
9 Thomas à Kempis. The Imitation of Christ, Book III, Chap 30, verse 1.^↩
10 Don Francisco, “Closer to Jesus.”^↩

Monday of the Eleventh Week in Ordinary Time

Readings: 1 Kings 21:1-6; Ps 5:2-7; Matthew 5:38-42

Jesus, Ahab, or Jezebel? This is the question posed to us by our readings. What do you do when life doesn’t go your way because of someone else? Do you mope about, lamenting loudly about that person? Do you, in the words of the Foo Fighters song “Monkey Wrench,” waste another night planning [your] revenge?” Or, do you recognize that things aren’t going well and practice benevolent detachment, giving that and everything else that worries you to the Lord?

Our Gospel reading for this evening is one of those very challenging passages from Saint Matthew’s Gospel. One temptation that must resisted when dealing with a passage like this is to water it down, attempting to make it less convicting. Let’s be clear, in this passage, the Lord doesn’t only tell us not to seek revenge. As his follower, he teaches you to turn the other cheek, to go out of your way for the one whom you perceive has wronged you.

In his letter to the Romans, Saint Paul summarizes the response of a Christian disciple well: “Do not be conquered by evil but conquer evil with good.”¹​ This isn’t just a slogan. The passage begins with “Vengeance is mine, I will repay says the Lord.”² By conquering evil with good, the apostle tells us that by doing what Jesus instructs in today’s Gospel, “you will heap burning coals” on the head of one does you evil.³

God is a God of justice. Like there is no love without truth, there is no mercy without justice. In his encyclical letter on hope, Pope Benedict XVI insisted: “Only God can create justice.”⁴ “The image of the Last Judgement is not primarily an image of terror,” Pope Benedict continued, “but an image of hope; for us it may even be the decisive image of hope.”⁵ Mercy does not cancel out justice.

Jesus at Bethany, by James Tissot 186-1894

Among fallen and sinful human beings, justice easily becomes revenge. Revenge is to justice what indifference is to mercy. Mercy is only genuine when extended with the recognition that a true wrong has been committed. An eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth is known as the lex talionis. The lex talionis is the law of retribution.

Early Christians explicitly rejected retributive justice, choosing restorative justice instead. Concerning judicial punishment, the Catechism teaches that “in addition to preserving public order and the safety of persons, has a medicinal scope: as far as possible it should contribute to the correction of the offender.”⁶ In this regard, the Church views capital punishment as retributive, a punishment that leaves no possibility for the offender to correct.

In the musical Fiddler on the Roof, in a meeting of the men of the village, fearing another pogrom, one man says that rather than leaving, “We should defend ourselves!” Another man yells, “An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth.” To which Tevye, the main character replies: “Very good. That way the whole world will be blind and toothless.” Finally, the village leader says, “Rabbi, we’ve been waiting for the messiah all our lives. Wouldn’t this be a good time for him to come?” The old rabbi responds: “We’ll have to wait for him someplace else.”

My friends, Jesus came to make the blind see, the deaf hear, the lame walk, the toothless chew. We are his disciples only insofar as we join his messianic mission. As we sang in our Responsory: “Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.”

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1 Romans 12:21.^↩
2 Romans 12:19.^↩
3 Romans 12:20.^↩
4 Pope Benedict XVI. Encyclical Letter Spe Salvi [On Christian Hope], sec. 44.^↩
5 Ibid.^↩
6 Catechism of the Catholic Church, sec. 2266.^↩

Year B Eleventh Sunday in Ordinary Time

Readings: Ezk 17:22-24; Ps 92:2-3.13-16; 2 Cor 5:6-10; Mark 4:26-34

As indicated in our reading today from 2 Corinthians, as Christians, “we walk by faith, not by sight.”¹ What this means in practical terms is that we don’t always, or even usually, see the fruit of our spiritual endeavors. We’re used to living by the law of exchange, which, in our society, threatens to make all relationships quid pro quo, characterized by “You do something for me, and I will do something of less or equal value for you.” As Bob Hope once quipped about his comedy partner Bing Crosby: “There's nothing I wouldn't do for Bing, and there's nothing he wouldn't do for me. And that's the way we go through life—doing nothing for each other!”

As Jesus shows, divine life is not ordered that way. Rather than the law of exchange, the divine economy adheres to the law of gift. This means rather than this-for-that it is simply this, given the impossibility of giving something equal in return.

Think about how Christian life would be if for everything God gives you, God explicitly expected something in return to the point that if you did not return what was expected, God would take away what he gave you. But it isn’t that we don’t owe God anything. We owe God everything. It’s just that, having given us his only Son, God isn’t interested in collecting debts. God is gracious. Rather than take back what he gives, God leaves it to us whether to accept his gift, which is nothing other than himself. A gift not received is a gift forefeited.

What do you owe God? You owe God praise and thanksgiving! Among the reasons it is important to attend Mass each Sunday is to thank God, to praise him for the gift of his only begotten Son. Another reason is to offer yourself, again, as a living sacrifice to the Father, through Christ, by the power of the Holy Spirit.² As you have no doubt heard- in the Eucharist, Christ gives himself to us body, blood, soul, and divinity.

“Eucharist,” as you are likely aware, means thanksgiving. Coming as it does from the Greek verb eucharisteō, more specifically it means simply to “give thanks.” As the suffix -urgy indicates, liturgy refers first and foremost to something we do. It’s easy to lose sight of the reality that the Eucharist is an exchange of gifts but not a quid pro quo.

Each Eucharistic Prayer starts with the priest saying, “The Lord be with you,” to which we instinctively reply: “And with your spirit.” He then exhorts us “Lift up your hearts.” We reply by saying what we should also be doing: “We lift them up to the Lord.” The priest then invites us to “give thanks to the Lord our God,” to which we respond, “It is right and just.”³

That this praise and thanksgiving is what we owe and should freely desire to give God is further indicated by the beginning of the Preface to the Eucharistic Prayer:

It is truly right and just, our duty and our salvation,
always and everywhere to give you thanks,
Lord, holy Father, almighty and eternal God⁴

In what does the Eucharistic exchange consist? In the bread and wine transformed into his body and blood by the power of the Holy Spirit, Christ gives us himself whole and entire and in doing so, refills us with divine life, which is infinite, eternal, and inexhaustible.

What do we offer God? In our humble gifts of bread and wine, along with the collection, which is not some new-fangled invention but part of the liturgy from the beginning, which are presented to the priest at the foot of the altar, we offer ourselves, whole and complete. This ritual act is deeply symbolic. Hence, those who bring forth the gifts should be members of the faithful through baptism who represent the rest of the gathered baptized.

What we see is a ritual act, one that always runs the risk of becoming ho-hum, just one of those things we do at Mass for some reason. What we believe is the reality to which the ritual symbolically points: through our humble gifts of bread, wine, and collection, the offering of ourselves to God, through Christ, by the Spirit’s power. By means of these gifts, we offer ourselves body, blood, soul, and humanity. While this is visible to all, one needs to understand the symbol that underlies the ritual to make the offering. In other words, it is not intuitively obvious to the casual observer, too often even to the Catholic observer, what is happening.

In Eucharistic Prayer III, with now consecrated bread and wine on the altar, the priest prays: “May he [Christ] make of us an eternal offering to you [the Father].”⁵ Like the tender shoot taken from the top of the mighty cedar tree in our reading from Ezekiel and the mustard seed from our Gospel, nourished by the Eucharist, we grow ever more into the image of Christ, becoming not just the ekklesia, the assembly, the Church, but the veritable Body of Christ.⁶ God takes our gifts, makes them himself, and then gives us back something infinitely greater than what we offered, gathering us to himself and uniting us to one another.

Spiritual growth is usually imperceptible to the ones experiencing it. But whether you see it, feel it, or in some other way sense it, walking by faith and not by sight, continue trusting “that the one who began a good work in you will continue to complete it until the day of Christ Jesus.”⁷ And “as we await the blessed hope and the coming of our Savior, Jesus Christ,” do not take God for granted and do not be presumptuous, using God’s patience to exempt yourself from the demands of discipleship.⁸ Above all, do not neglect the Eucharist, which is an indispensable means through which God accomplishes his good work: the redemption of the world.

As we sang in our Responsory: “Lord, it is good to give thanks to you.”

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1 2 Corinthians 5:7.^↩
2 Romans 12:1-2.^↩
3 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, Eucharistic Prayer III, sec. 107.^↩
4 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, Preface VI of the Sundays in Ordinary Time, sec. 57.^↩
5 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, Eucharistic Prayer III, sec. 113.^↩
6 Ezekiel 17:24; Mark 4:30-32.^↩
7 Philippians 1:6.^↩
8 Roman Missal, The Order of Mass, sec. 125.^↩

Triduum- Good Friday

The Crucifixion, by Giotto (b. 1267 or 1277 - d. 1337 CE). Part of a cycle of frescoes showing the life of the Virgin Mary and Jesus Christ. Scrovegni Chapel (aka Arena Chapel) in Padua, northern Italy. From c. 1304 to c. 1315

"He mounted the Cross to free us from the fascination with nothingness, to free us from the fascination with appearances, with the ephemeral."

Servant of God Msgr. Luigi Giussani

Triduum- Holy Thursday

Christ Washing the Disciples' Feet, by Jacopo Tintoretto (1519-1594)

“Unless I wash you, you will have no inheritance with me.” (John 13:8)

"In his person, the deacon makes it clear that the liturgy must have concrete consequences in the world with all its needs, and that work in the world that is done in the spirit of charity has a spiritual dimension" Herbert Vorgrimler, Sacramental Theology, 270.