Announcements for 4th Sunday of Easter, May 3, 2020
Link to our community Mass on Zoom:
https://us02web.zoom.us/j/7428208829?pwd=VERncTBxaWdkaFpkTUZKL3RROW81UT09
Readings:
Acts of the Apostles, 2, 14, 36-41, Then Peter stood up and proclaimed.
Psalm 23, The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want (a goood one)
1 Peter , 2, 2-25, To this you have been called.
John 10, 1-10, Whoever does not enter a sheepfold through the gate….
How goes Ye Ole Catholic Church
To open or not to open the churches, https://www.ncronline.org/news/parish/us-bishops-wrestle-whether-or-how-open-churches?clickSource=email
Dolan delivers Church to Trump & GOP, https://www.ncronline.org/news/opinion/editorial-dolan-delivers-church-trump-and-gop?clickSource=email
Birthdays this week, Cole McClurg, 11; Patricia, 74; Ron Senter
Anniversaries:
Bill & Patty Hammond, 52nd
Joe & Marsha Farmer, 36th
Stack & Rosemary, 15th
Please Remember these special people:
For all the medical personnel struggling to treat the tsunami of sick people, in particular locally, Cindy's staff at Presby; For John & Connnie's good froends, Bob with cancer & his wife, Judy; For Joe Hogan with cancer, For Loretta's aunt Alicia; For Ryan, Rosemary's nephew, who had surgery; For Bill Hammond, For Sydney & her dear Husband, Hugh, who just moved to the Other Side, & For Sir Charlie recuperating from surgery; Shonda's mom; For Gilberto recuperating from his gall bladder operation: for Michelle; For a friend, a neighbor, & a doctor, Karen, with brain cancer; For Rick Turner searching for a kidney donor, Type O neg; For Meredith, cancer free.; For Hue; For John O'Donnell; For Dee, and for her daughter, Lisa; For John Schanot's continued health; For Anthony & Sabrina; For a young man who is suffering from depression; John Cade's mother in law, Kalliopi Piskiouli and Lambrini;
Tom and Teresa Quinn's niece, Chawna, with cancer, their granddaughter, Mikayla; plus Neva Flynn, Angel, and Diane Kreeitzer; Connie Doherty's mom and her sister, plus Kevin's cousin, Peter; For a number of David McKeon's family who are having a rough time with health issues, especially Mark Terain; for our friends, sons, and daughters in the military, including Ryan McClurg and Chebino; cure for autism from Laura Chollick; for our President.
Remembering.….
John Cade's excellent homily on Matthew from Bishop Spong The Gospel of Matthew and the Jewish Synagogue—Talk Five
Today’s talk is the longest one and may give you a small taste of the lengthy readings in the Synagogue every week. When we look at Jesus’ Passion Narrative, powerful and dramatic as it is, many questions arise. Matthew tells us, e.g., the content of Jesus’ private prayers in the Garden of Gethsemane. Where did this private information come from? We read the exact charges and responses between Jesus and the chief priests and elders of the council. Who reported those conversations? No one was with Jesus except the Jewish council itself. The account couldn’t come from Jesus, since he is shown having no time with any of his followers after that confrontation in which to relay its content to them. Jesus was then taken directly to Pilate, the Roman Governor.
The narrative provides the actual dialogue between Jesus and Pilate. How did that conversation become public? Who carried these private details to the one who first wrote the story of Jesus’ crucifixion? We are told what the soldiers said and did to Jesus just prior to his crucifixion: the purple robe, the crown of thorns, the reed, the taunts. Who was the source of these details? We are told the exact words Jesus spoke from the cross when he died. How were these words recorded or remembered? In the synoptic gospels, none of his disciples is said to be present. Matthew records that some women were present, but he clearly states that they looked on from afar. They were not within hearing distance.
There are two known and likely sources for details of the Passion Narrative: they are Psalm 22 and 2nd Isaiah (Ch. 40-55). The first verse of Ps 22 reads: “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” In vs. 7—“Let God deliver him, let God rescue him if he delights in him”. In vs. 16-18—“They have pierced my hands and my feet; ….they divide my garments among them and for my clothes they cast lots.”
Then, the 2nd Isaiah portrait of the “Suffering Servant” certainly is reflected in the Passion Narrative. In 2nd Isaiah, Ch. 53, we read, “Surely, he has borne our grief and covered our sorrow; we esteemed him stricken, smitten and afflicted. He was wounded for our trans-gressions, he was bruised for our iniquities.… the Lord has laid upon him the iniquity of us all.” Jesus was being portrayed in the passion narrative as the fulfillment of the prophet Isaiah’s “Suffering Servant”.
It is now obvious that the memory of Jesus was written with the books of the prophets laid open, so that Jesus could be made to fulfill those prophetic messianic expectations. Those who read the gospels with Jewish eyes and Jewish understanding, would quickly reach that conclusion. Those early readers would have been intimately familiar with the biblical portrait of the Servant, who, though innocent, allowed the hostility and rejection of the world to be absorbed and transformed into love. The story of the Passion of Jesus is an interpretive painting of the role of messiah.
Question: Does the passion cease to be true, even if its story did not literally happen as written? Were the gospel writers not describing what they experienced as the meaning of the Christ? Or are we the ones who failed for centuries to understand, and proceeded to impose a life-strangling literalism on this magnificent portrait of Jesus.
Matthew moved the story of the crucifixion into the Jewish liturgy for Passover. In the story of the first Passover in the book of Exodus (Ch. 12), we understand that it was the blood of the lamb sprinkled on the door posts of Jewish homes that banished death from those homes. Under the power of Christian preaching, the cross came to be understood as “the door post of the world.” The blood of the new paschal lamb was placed on that new door post, and the result was that death would be banished for those who came to God through the blood of Jesus, the new paschal lamb.
The division of a day into eight three-hour “watches” was a familiar concept in the world of first-century Judaism. The watches of the day and the night were standard then, with day starting at 6 AM and night at 6 PM. We talk here of ‘watches’, because the followers of Jesus took the three-hour Jewish observance of Passover and stretched it into a 24-hour vigil with eight distinct segments or 3-hour watches. Matthew’s passion narrative was purposely written for that liturgical vigil. In the passion narrative we have a scripture lesson, designed to be read at each of the eight segments of a 24-hour vigil liturgy. This allowed the followers of Jesus to “watch” with their Lord during the final 24 hours of his life. This means that the original story of the cross, by the time Matthew was written, was written as liturgy, and followed the practice of dividing the day into eight 3-hour segments.
Matthew begins the vigil with the words: “When it was evening, he sat at table with the twelve disciples” (Matt. 26:20). “When it was evening” means that it was now 6:00 PM, the first watch. Sundown was when evening came in that non-electrified world. In this first 3-hour segment of the vigil, the Passover meal was observed and interpreted. The Passover meal of the Jews lasted about three hours, concluding with the singing of a hymn, usually a psalm. Matthew mentions that hymn right on cue (Matt. 26:30). The people attending then exited the house into darkness. It was now 9:00 PM. The first three-hour watch of the vigil was complete.
Jesus and his disciples went to a garden named Gethsemane, and Jesus took three of them deeper into the garden. Jesus went farther by himself, leaving this core group “to watch with me while I pray.” He checked on them three times at one-hour intervals, and they were asleep each time. After the third hour, Jesus accepts his fate: “Rise, let us be going; see, my betrayer is at hand.” The second three-hour watch of the vigil was over. It was now 12:00 midnight.
Matthew’s midnight portrayal of Judas acting as the traitor advances the conclusion that Judas himself is a symbol rather than a person of history. The betrayal began as an individual deed by one whose name was of the country of Judah, but the betrayal was soon joined by the leaders and rulers of Judah. Between midnight and 3:00 AM, Jesus was taken to Caiaphas, the high priest, and the Council of the Jews, known as the Sanhedrin. So both the individual Judas and the ruling Council of Jews betrayed him. He was pronounced to be “worthy of death.” It was now 3:00 AM. The third watch was over and the vigil was right on schedule.
The fourth watch, between 3:00 AM and 6:00 AM, was called “cockcrow.” In this segment of the vigil, Peter is the principal actor, denying Jesus three times, once for each hour of the watch, all before the cockcrow announced the dawn. Then, broken and weeping bitterly, Peter disappears from Matthew’s text. It was now 6:00 AM and Matthew announces right on cue: “When morning came…” (Matt. 23:1). The fifth watch was sunrise or morning, 6:00 AM, and was when the trial before Pilate occurred. At its end, Pilate delivered his prisoner to the soldiers for crucifixion. Matthew doesn’t give us the time for this, but Mark does. It was “the third hour of the day,” Mark says, “when they crucified him.” “Day” starts at sunrise, 6:00 AM. So “the third hour of the day” would be 9:00 AM, the beginning of the sixth watch, 9:00–12:00 Noon. This segment in the 24-hour vigil included the crucifixion, ending with Jesus’ death, “he gave up his spirit.” Many of us can remember attending “the Way of the Cross” and the “Veneration of the Cross” (kissing it after so many did always grossed me out) at this point in the Good Friday services.
Then Matthew announces that “from the sixth hour” (12:00 Noon) “until the ninth hour” (3:00 PM), in other words, the seventh watch, there was darkness over all the land” (Matt. 27:40). The light of the world was being extinguished in the death of Jesus. The last three hours, the eighth watch of the vigil, 3:00 to 6:00 PM, gave Matthew the opportunity to describe how Jesus was taken from the cross and buried by Joseph of Arimathea. This was done before sunset (6:00 PM) so as not to violate the Sabbath which began at sunset.
It is increasingly clear that the story of the passion of Jesus was written to serve as liturgy, not to describe what actually happened. The death of Jesus by crucifixion at the hands of the Romans was history, an event that did happen. The narrative of the crucifixion, however, was not. It was developed as liturgy. The problem all along has been that the primary readers and interpreters of the passion story, through most of the years of Christian history were Gentiles, not Jews. As Gentiles they did not have the background to see the Jewish symbols being employed in the story of the cross. When we discover these symbols, literalism dies, but the interpretive power of the story remains.
We will see next week that the story of Easter is ultimately the interpretation of the crucifixion.
And saving a special gift to make your week:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbObZIvBgGk
