Archive for category: Go and Glorify

Father Stephen Bankemper

Guest

We come this Sunday to our diocese’s celebration of the solemnity of The Ascension of the Lord. It is a fascinating event that can be forgotten in our everyday language.

How often, for example, have you heard someone speak of the “Passion, Death and Resurrection” of the Lord, as opposed to the “Passion, Death, Resurrection and Ascension” of the Lord? The first is a far more common phrase. Yet the Ascension of our Lord is truly a pivotal event: with the Lord’s return to the Father his earthly ministry in his body ends and the ministry of the apostles (and, by extension, the ministry of the Church) begins.

This article will focus on the twofold meaning of the Ascension for us in the Church: the hope and mandate that come from it.

The hope that the Ascension awakens in us is the hope that we, too, can “ascend” one day with Jesus to the Father. It is heard in all the prayers of the Mass and in one of the readings.

In the Collect we pray: “. . . for the Ascension of Christ your Son is our exaltation, and, where the Head has gone before in glory, the Body is called to follow in hope.”

The Prayer Over the Offerings does not use the actual word ‘hope,’ but the idea is there: “. . . grant, we pray, that through this most holy exchange we, too, may rise up to the heavenly realms.”

Finally, in the Prayer After Communion we pray, “. . . grant . . . that Christian hope may draw us onward to where our nature is united with you.”

The Church also gives us a short section of St. Paul’s letter to the Ephesians that not only mentions our hope of being with Christ in heaven, but also entices us, draws us, one might say, by its very description: “May the eyes of your hearts be enlightened, that you may know what is the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory in his inheritance among the holy ones . . .”

It is vital that we understand how the Church uses the word “hope.” The way we use the word in ordinary speech, we might just as easily and accurately exchange for it the word “wish”: “I hope it does not rain tomorrow,” “I hope she shows up on time,” “I hope there are tickets left for the movie.”

This is not what the Church means by hope. The Church’s meaning is expressed in paragraph 1817 of the Catechism of the Catholic Church: “Hope is the theological virtue by which we desire the kingdom of heaven and eternal life as our happiness, placing our trust in Christ’s promises and relying not on our own strength, but on the help of the grace of the Holy Spirit.”

Notice the parts of this definition: hope is a theological virtue — in other words, it does not even come from us but is a gift from God — and we rely, not on ourselves for its fulfillment, but on Christ’s promises and the grace of the Holy Spirit. And, we can add on this feast, on Christ’s first taking our human nature into the heavenly realms.

As Martin Luther wrote in his hymn, A Mighty Fortress Is Our God (Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott), “Did we in our own strength confide, our striving would be losing,/ Were not the right Man on our side, the Man of God’s own choosing.”

Pope Francis expressed this beautifully in one of his general audiences: “The Ascension of Jesus into heaven acquaints us with this deeply consoling reality on our journey: in Christ, true God and true man, our humanity was taken to God. Christ opened the path to us. If we entrust our life to him, if we let ourselves be guided by him, we are certain to be in safe hands, in the hands of our Savior.” (General Audience, 17 April 2013)

The Ascension of our Lord also brings a mandate, as we hear in the Gospel. Jesus has redeemed the world, reconciling it to the Father, and created the Church. He now entrusts to his Church a mission: “All power in heaven and on earth has been given to me. Go, therefore, and make disciples of all nations, baptizing them in the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Spirit, teaching them to observe all that I have commanded you.” (Matt 28:18-20)

If the hope of eternal life with the Father cannot be realized without entrusting our life to Jesus, as Francis said, then those who know Him must proclaim Him to others.

Jesus’ command to make disciples “of all nations” may sound so broad as to seem to apply only to “the Church” as we often mean it, the great institution into which it has grown, but if it is to mean something to each of us — we individually are part of the Church’s constitution — we must see something more specific in Jesus’ words.

Instead of “all nations,” we might substitute “all people” or, even better, “every person.” In other words, the Church’s mission — and we are part of the mission — is to make disciples of our sister and brother, if necessary, our next-door neighbor, our boss, our co-workers and cousins. Not necessarily first by proselytizing, but by the “strangeness” of our Christian life.

Last Sunday we heard from Peter’s first letter: “Always be ready to give an explanation to anyone who asks you for a reason for your hope.” (Pt 3:15) Why would someone ask about our lives if they were not different from theirs?

So, Jesus’ command to his apostles before he ascends to his Father becomes an exhortation and command to us as well: live a life that draws the world to me, that all may know “the hope that belongs to his call, what are the riches of glory” that await all who give their lives to our Lord.

The Ascension of the Lord — our hope and our mandate.

Father Stephen Bankemper is pastor, St. Catherine of Siena Parish, Ft. Thomas, Ky.

Father Daniel Schomaker

Guest

“Ego sum via, veritas, et vita.” These words we hear in the Gospel for the Fifth Sunday in Easter: “I am the way, the truth and the life” should bring great comfort to all of us. When I’m traveling, I have two great fears: One, breaking down in the middle of nowhere, and two, getting lost. I find those of you out there who like the “adventure of getting lost in a new place” odd — and a bit nuts!

Sadly, it is too easy to break down and get lost in this life — and I’m not talking about traveling. I’m speaking of the spiritual life. The burdens of life can sometimes feel overwhelming. The stresses we experience and the anxiety they bring can unfortunately lead to depression and even despair. That is, unless we maintain that spiritual engine. And we do this with Jesus! Jesus has to be everything in our lives. It is the truth that no matter how difficult a day has been, or the stresses we have endured are, or even the sins we have committed, God still loves us. Our lives are valuable and precious. The great deceiver is the one who places doubts of this truth in our minds. We have been intentionally made in love, by love, to be loved and to love! Saint Augustine reminds us that: “God loves each of us as if there were only one of us.”

It is this love of God, which we encounter in the very person of Jesus Christ who brings about authentic life. Jesus is life — in him and through him — we have all been made. And to live in him, to live in love, brings eternal life — that for which we have been made!!!

But, sin is a reality of being human. It is true, none of us has to sin, but in my experience we all do. We turn inward. We allow the ego to take over, we place all our confidence and effort and trust in ourselves. When this happens (even if its just through “tiny” sins) we get lost, because we have stumbled and veered off the path which is Jesus who leads us on the way to Heaven.

My friends, we don’t walk in darkness, because Jesus is also the light. In himself he dispels the darkness of error and of death; and illuminates the path of the righteous.

Jesus is the WAY and the TRUTH and the LIFE. We don’t have to find him, we have to allow ourselves to be found. He is always there to guide and to teach and to experience abundance of life!

Father Daniel Schomaker is pastor, Blessed Sacrament Parish, Ft. Mitchell and director, Office of Worship and Liturgy for the Diocese of Covington, Ky.

Father Stephen Bankemper

Guest

Most Catholics know that there are two creeds we use at Mass, the Apostles’ Creed (the shorter of the two, the one most people pray at the beginning of the Rosary) and the Niceno-Constantinopolitan Creed, which title we, thankfully, usually shorten to Nicene Creed. In the Nicene Creed, which we use most of the time, we pray these words: “For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate,/ he suffered death and was buried,/ and rose again on the third day/ in accordance with the Scriptures.” Many Catholics seem to understand the phrase — “in accordance with the Scriptures” — to refer to the Passion narratives in the Gospels. While that thought is not completely incorrect, the more fully correct understanding of it is that it refers to the types and prophecies in what we call the Old Testament. For instance, in Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians he wrote, “For I delivered to you as of first importance what I also received, that Christ died for our sins in accordance with the scriptures, that he was buried, that he was raised on the third day in accordance with the scriptures, . . .” (1 Cor 15:3-4) Since Paul wrote this around the year 55, and the first Gospel was written somewhere around 65-70, Paul could not have been referring to the Gospel accounts, but was clearly referring to the Hebrew scriptures (what we call the Old Testament) he knew so well.

The fact that Paul uses the phrase and the Church incorporated it into her creed shows the importance of it, but one scholar, John Bergsma, goes even further: “The inclusion of this line, the most widely-used and recognized statement of the Christian faith, should cause us to realize this fact: that Jesus’s Passion and Resurrection fulfilled the oracles of the prophets is central to the Gospel message. (Emphasis in original.) Moreover, in the early Church, it was of considerable apologetic and evangelistic power because no other religious or political leader could claim to have fulfilled ancient prophecies in the way that Jesus had.” (THE WORD OF THE LORD: Reflections on the SUNDAY MASS READINGS for YEAR A, p.131)

We have two examples this weekend of the early Christians coming to understand Jesus’ Passion, Death and Resurrection in terms of the Old Testament narratives, types (events and people in the Old Testament that prefigure New Testament events and people, particularly Jesus), and prophecies. In the first reading, Peter helps the Jews to understand Jesus’ life, death, and resurrection through Psalm 16, and Jesus himself, in the Gospel account of the disciples on the road to Emmaus, apparently goes through all the Old Testament references to him to help the two understand the events of the previous week.

In the first reading this weekend, from the Acts of the Apostles, the Church presents Peter’s sermon after the outpouring of the Holy Spirit at Pentecost. It is important to understand that the general belief of the Jews of Peter’s time was that the psalms were written by David. Psalm 16 must have been a puzzle to them, especially the line, “nor will you suffer your faithful one to undergo corruption.” But to Peter, reading the psalm through the perspective of Jesus’ death, burial and resurrection, the psalm makes complete sense, and he uses his new understanding to begin to evangelize his listeners. The psalm, Peter contends, could not be about David, because David’s tomb is yet in their midst. Rather, it is a prophecy about the Messiah and has been fulfilled in Jesus the Nazorean. You killed him, Peter says, but God raised him up. Now, “. . . because you will not abandon my soul to the netherworld,/ nor will you suffer your faithful one to undergo corruption,” makes perfect sense.

Jesus makes a similar move with the two disciples on the way to Emmaus, for even they, who knew and followed Jesus and heard him teach, had no understanding of the events they themselves witnessed. Jesus, “beginning with Moses and all the prophets, . . . interpreted to them what referred to him in all the Scriptures,” explaining why it was “necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into his glory.” What a monologue that must have been!

All this stands as a reminder to us of the importance of the Old Testament. So many Catholics, if they read scripture at all, tend to stay with the Gospels. While it is good to read and re-read the Gospels, we can come to know Jesus through the Old Testament as well. Some passages from the Catechism of the Catholic Church may serve to encourage us:

128. The Church, as early as apostolic times, and then constantly in her Tradition, has illuminated the unity of the divine plan in the two Testaments through typology, which discerns in God’s works of the Old Covenant prefigurations of what he accomplished in the fullness of time in the person of his incarnate Son.
129. Christians therefore read the Old Testament in the light of Christ crucified and risen. [And] the New Testament has to be read in the light of the Old. Early Christian catechesis made constant use of the Old Testament. As an old saying put it, the New Testament lies hidden in the Old and the Old Testament is unveiled in the New. [St. Augustine]
130. The Church “forcefully and specifically exhorts all the Christian faithful . . . to learn ‘the surpassing knowledge of Jesus Christ,’ by frequent reading of the divine Scriptures. ‘Ignorance of the Scriptures is ignorance of Christ.’” [Phil 3:8 and St. Jerome]

If you are new to the Old Testament, try this: read a passage that the Church uses in the liturgy (the first reading or the psalm) and ask the Holy Spirit to show Jesus to you in that passage. Then ask yourself, how does this apply to Jesus, or how does Jesus fulfill this passage. You might be surprised at how easily you can come to know Him in this manner of reading.

Father Stephen Bankemper is pastor, St. Catherine of Siena Parish, Ft. Thomas, Ky.

Bishop Emeritus Roger Foys

Guest

Holy Week. The holiest week of the year for all Christians. A week filled with emotion. We move from joy to wonder, to betrayal, to denial, to grief and back to joy.  We relive that week during which Jesus would suffer and die. We walk with him, as it were, the path to his passion and death. But we begin with joy.

On Palm Sunday, Jesus was welcomed with great fanfare into Jerusalem. Throngs of people lined the streets and shouted his name. Hosanna, they called to the Son of David! What exhilaration must’ve filled the air! The Lord had arrived! The Savior was to save his people! But, unfortunately, that joy would not last. By the end of the week, it would turn to grief and sorrow.

On Holy Thursday, Jesus dined with his apostles to celebrate the Passover meal. During this meal, he would wash the feet of his apostles, a ritual ordinarily conducted by a servant. Jesus, the Son of God, stooped down to wash the feet of his apostles — and when he was finished, he would tell them that what he had just done, they were to do for each other.

This was a sign of His love, His humility. He wanted his disciples to do likewise. This is the kind of community he desired his followers to live — one of service, one of love. The apostles must have wondered what all this meant.

Further on Holy Thursday, Jesus would bless and break the bread, would bless the wine and proclaim that this was his body and his blood and that his apostles were to do this in memory of him. Notice, he didn’t say this was a symbol or a sign of his Body and Blood. He said this IS my body, this Is my blood. And so, he gave us the Eucharist to sustain us on our journey, to strengthen us amid the vicissitudes of life. Thus, was given to us the gift of the Eucharist and of the Priesthood. It was a marvelous wonder!

But then came the betrayal. Judas, one of the disciples of Jesus, sold him to those who wanted to kill him. And he betrayed Jesus with a kiss. With a kiss, a sign of love, a sign of friendship.

And once Jesus was taken away, his most trusted disciple, Peter, would deny him — not once, not twice, but three times. He proclaimed that he didn’t know Jesus and was certainly not one of his followers.

The next day, Good Friday, we recall the passion and death of Jesus on the cross. What grief must his followers have experienced. What sorrow must have filled his mother, Mary, as she beheld her beloved son beaten and bruised as he carried his cross to Golgotha, the place of his death. What emptiness filled the earth on that dreadful day.

On Holy Saturday, the disciples of Jesus must have experienced that loss. They had thrown their lot in with Jesus. They had given up everything to follow him. And now, it had all come crashing down. Would they ever experience joy again?

What can we learn from this Holy Week as we walk with Jesus?

We have all at some point in our lives experienced the joy that the apostles must have felt on that Palm Sunday when Jesus was welcomed to Jerusalem — that exhilarating feeling that we would like to bask in for the rest of our lives. But we know that the joys of this world are fleeting, that our true joy — the joy that will last — can only be found in the Lord and in our obedience to His word. When life gets difficult, it is good to remember the joys we’ve experienced and to thank God for them. We also know that life is made up of joys and sorrows, of good times and bad, of success and failure. So, we do not lose hope, we do not give up or give in.

There are also times in our life that we experience wonder just as the apostles did when Jesus washed their feet and when he gave us the Eucharist and the Priesthood. They might not have understood at that moment all that these gifts of Jesus implied, but they accepted them, knowing that they were acts of love, acts of friendship. When we experience this kind of wonder in life, we give thanks to God for providing it for us. We have experiences that we don’t always understand, but it is enough to understand that God provides these moments for us because He loves us.

Betrayal, unfortunately, is sometimes a part of our lives. Perhaps we’ve been betrayed by a spouse, a friend, a co-worker, a neighbor. A relationship that we imagined would last forever suddenly ends. We are left stunned, we don’t understand. How could this happen? What or who caused it? Is it irrevocable? Was it me? Did I do something wrong? It seems to be a pain too difficult to bear. How will we ever survive? When these moments happen, we remember Jesus and His betrayal by Judas, by one he trusted, one he chose, one he loved. We will survive, we will conquer the grief, the hurt, even the anger. We pray to the Lord Jesus, who experienced the betrayal of one he loved, and ask Him to ease the pain, to ease the hurt, to heal the emptiness we feel at that moment.

And finally, grief. Sometimes people discount grief, as though grief is something to be embarrassed about, as though grief is a sign of weakness. Grief, believe it or not, is a byproduct of love. If we never loved, we’d never grieve. But if we never love, we never live. When someone we love dies, no matter how strong our faith is, we feel a loss, there is a void, an emptiness in our lives. The passing of a loved one leaves a hole in our hearts. You can imagine how the apostles grieved when the one in whom they had placed all their trust, all their hope, for whom they had given up everything and everyone, died. Their hopes and dreams hung on that cross with Jesus, and they saw those hopes and dreams dashed. How would they go on, how would they survive? But they did. We are blessed to know that the death of Jesus on the cross was not the end. We know the rest of the story. We know that the grief the apostles were experiencing would turn to joy when the Lord Jesus would be raised from the dead. This was not the end — it was the beginning. So too with us. When we experience grief from some significant loss, our grief can be turned into joy when we remember that Jesus died for us but that he also rose. He is with us always. This is our hope. This is our faith. This is our joy.

And so, we end as we began — with joy. The joy of Palm Sunday, the wonder and betrayal of Holy Thursday, the grief of Good Friday, the emptiness of Holy Saturday will give way to a new joy with the resurrection of Jesus Who conquers sin and the grave.

A blessed Holy Week and a joyous Easter to all!

Most Rev. Roger J. Foys, D.D. is Bishop Emeritus of the Diocese of Covington, Ky.

Father Stephen Bankemper

Guest

How blessed we are in Lent to have such rich fare in the Scriptures provided for us! We heard the story of Jesus’ temptations on the first Sunday, then the Transfiguration, the Samaritan woman at Jacob’s well last week, and this week the story of the man born blind.

If part of your Lent is to read more Scripture, you could do no better than to read these stories two or three times again, slowly, savoring the details. The details on which this article will focus will be the question Jesus’ disciples ask him about the man born blind and his answer, what Jesus does to bring sight to the man, and what he tells the man to do as his part in gaining his sight.

In the background of Lent and Holy Week is Adam and Eve’s disobedience in the Garden of Eden; after all, that is the reason we needed a Savior. Although some people think that “Original Sin” refers to Adam and Eve’s disobedience, this is a misunderstanding. “Original Sin” refers to the wounded state that all of humanity inherited after their sin.

As the Catechism of the Catholic Church explains, Adam and Eve did commit a personal sin, but what we inherit from them is not their sin, but the “fallen state” of human nature. The Catechism continues: “That is why original sin is called ‘sin’ only in an analogical sense: it is a sin ‘contracted’ and not ‘committed.’” (CCC 404) To the question, “Rabbi, who sinned, this man or his parents…?” Jesus answers, “neither he nor his parents sinned . . .” We can hear in his answer a reference to Original Sin. We did not commit Adam and Eve’s sin, rather we inherit a human nature that is “fallen” or wounded. We needed someone to save us; we received more, which we will see a little later.

Many people have wondered at the strange way that Jesus brings sight to the man. Modern Christians are likely to think immediately that Jesus is being unhygienic, but some biblical scholars explain Jesus’ actions in terms of a Rabbinic tradition about creation. Genesis relates that God formed the first man out of clay, but one needs water to make clay from dirt, so the tradition says that God used spittle to mix with the dirt. This means that Jesus is not “healing” the man, as one sometimes hears. In fact, the text of the Gospel never uses the word “heal,” rather, the text reads “gained his sight” and “able to see” and four times some version of “opened his eyes.” The implication is that this is an act of re-creation restoring what God originally intended, undoing the damage brought about by Adam and Eve.

After smearing the clay on the man’s eyes, Jesus tells him to go wash in the Pool of Siloam. How does a person appropriate for herself or himself this restoration? By washing, or more properly, by being washed in the waters of Baptism. This restoration will not be complete until “the resurrection on the last day,” but Baptism begins the process of that restoration.

The theme of light versus darkness/blindness versus sight is woven throughout this Gospel, highlighted by the Church’s choice of the second reading: “Brothers, you were once darkness, but now you are light in the Lord.” (Eph 5:8) Notice the present tense: now you are light in the Lord. We are born into darkness — as St. Thomas Aquinas puts it, a double darkness: “. . . removing from me the double darkness into which I was born, namely, sin and ignorance.” (Prayer Before Study)

We are born under the condition of Original Sin but need not remain in sin. We are born in the darkness of not knowing God, not living for God, but need not remain in that ignorance. In baptism we have been freed, our eyes have been opened, let us now live in that freedom and sight, as Paul exhorts us. Let us live as children of the light, and children of the Light.

Father Stephen Bankemper is pastor, St. Catherine of Siena Parish, Ft. Thomas, Ky.