Catholic in Yanchep

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Monthly Archives: March 2015


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Holy Week: Palm Sunday, Year B | Yeshua, name above all names

Jesus' Entry into Jerusalem

The Entry of The Lord into Jerusalem

“One day I will do something that will change the system and everyone will then know my name and remember me.”  These are reported to be the words of Andreas Lubitz to his former girlfriend, prior to committing mass murder by deliberately crashing an Airbus A320 into the French Alps this week.  His action is currently being described in the news media as a case of depression.  But depressed people don’t generally commit murder on a grand scale.  On the other hand, people under the influence of Satan do.  Let’s remember who the real enemy is.  And remember that the best way to counter evil is prayer.

Lubitz wanted to elevate his own name.  In contrast, we read in today’s reading from Paul’s letter to the Philippians , how Jesus:

 … humbled himself,
becoming obedient to the point of death,
even death on a cross.
Because of this, God greatly exalted him
and bestowed on him the name
which is above every name,
that at the name of Jesus
every knee should bend,
of those in heaven and on earth and under the earth,
and every tongue confess that
Jesus Christ is Lord,
to the glory of God the Father.

John Bergsma has a beautiful commentary on this reading over at The Sacred Page.

This famous passage—often thought to be a early Christian hymn or creed that St. Paul is quoting—gives an outline of the whole Gospel.  Jesus did not see “equality with God as something to be seized,” using the Greek word harpagmon, from a root harpazo, “to snatch or seize, often quickly or violently.”  Jesus is thus a contrast with the Greco-Roman mythical hero Prometheus, who ascended to the realm of the gods and “snatched” fire, bringing it back to man in an effort to attain equality with the divine.  So Prometheus has always stood as an icon of rebellion against God or the gods, and a worldview that imagines the divine as opposed to or limiting the human.  In this worldview, humanity is liberated and fulfilled at the expense of the divine; the realm of God must be rolled back to make way for the kingdom of man.  This spirit continues to animate the New Atheist movement in our own day (with their flagship publisher, Prometheus Books), which is more a miso-theistic (God-hating) cultural force than an a-theistic (no-God) one.

In contrast to Prometheus, Jesus does not conceive of the relationship between God and man as one of antagonism, in which the divine nature must be violently “snatched” from the Divinity.  Jesus empties himself of the glory of his divinity in order to descend to the status of creature, of “slave.”  Crucifixion was the form of execution mandated for slaves; citizens could not be crucified.  Having taken on human nature, he submits to the death of slaves: “even death on a cross.”  But paradoxically, this great act of self-giving love shows the glory of Jesus and the glory of God.  Truly, a God who would so empty himself out of love is greater, more lovable, more worthy of worship, than a God who will not give of himself. The cross is the glory of our God.  So God the Father bestows on Jesus “the Name which is above every name”, so that at the Name of Jesus, “every knee should bend.”  St. Paul probably has in mind here the ancient ritual of the Day of Atonement (Yom Kippur), on which, according to the Mishnah, the High Priest would exit the Holy of Holies after making atonement for Israel and pronounce the priestly blessing of Numbers 6 upon the gathered worshipers.  This was the one day a year (apparently) when the Divine Name YHWH was pronounced audibly, and each time the assembly heard the name pronounced, they dropped to the ground in prostration.  The name of “Jesus” is now heir to the glory of the divine name YHWH.  In the Name of Jesus we now find salvation.  Thus, in the Catholic tradition we bow the head at the Name of Jesus and celebrate the Feast Day of the Most Holy Name of Jesus (Jan 3), for which our present text is an optional Second Reading.

Unlike the New Atheists, the Jesus and his disciples do not regard the divine-human relationship as one of antagonism where goods are “snatched” from each other, but a relationship of communion, love, and self-gift.  The human is not exalted at the expense of the divine; rather, human and divine are exalted together.  God and man are mutually glorified by loving each other.  Humanity becomes more human by becoming more divine.  Divinization also humanizes.

Today is the beginning of Holy Week, where we follow Jesus from his final entry into Jerusalem to his Resurrection.  This year we have the narration from the Gospel of Mark.  You can download a 12 page Mass booklet for the Palm Sunday Procession and Mass here:

Word format: Year B Palm Passion Sunday

Pdf format: Year B Palm Passion Sunday


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Fifth Sunday of Lent, Year B | Attuning Ourselves to the Divine Will

Adoration of the Trinity (Landauer Altarpiece), Albrecht Dürer, 1511, oil on poplar panel, Kunst-historisches Museum, Vienna.

Adoration of the Trinity (Landauer Altarpiece), Albrecht Dürer, 1511, oil on poplar panel, Kunst-historisches Museum, Vienna.

In one of my posts on Facebook last week, a comment was made that our religion was ‘repressive’ (referring to my support for traditional marriage).  By that, the speaker meant ‘how dare you tell other people how to behave’!  (The people who say these sorts of things are usually, by the way, advocates of free speech.)  Actually, the Church doesn’t tell ‘other people’ how to behave.  It tells its members how to behave, and it is the job of these members (the faithful) to advocate for best practice in the public square, for the good of society.  It is also the job of the faithful to bring up their children to follow the good, the true and the beautiful and to repress (yes, repress – or suppress, if you want to be less Freudian) its baser desires: selfishness, unfaithfulness, dishonesty, disobedience, pride, lust, envy, and so on.

In today’s Readings from Hebrews and the Gospel of John, we see Jesus wrestling with the natural desire not to die (i.e. repressing this desire), versus obedience to the Divine plan:

During his life on earth, Christ offered up prayer and entreaty, aloud and in silent tears, to the one who had the power to save him out of death, and he submitted so humbly that his prayer was heard. Although he was Son, he learnt to obey through suffering; but having been made perfect, he became for all who obey him the source of eternal salvation. (Heb 5:7-9)

and again in today’s Gospel:

‘Now my soul is troubled.
What shall I say:
Father, save me from this hour?
But it was for this very reason
that I have come to this hour.
Father, glorify your name!’ (Jn 12:27-28)

In Jesus of Nazareth, Vol. 2, Pope Benedict discusses the troubled soul of Jesus:

The great Byzantine theologian Maximus the Confessor (d. 662) formulated an answer to this question [on the relationship between Jesus’ humanity and divinity] by struggling to understand Jesus’ prayer on the Mount of Olives. Maximus is first and foremost a determined opponent of monotheletism: Jesus’ human nature is not amputated through union with the Logos; it remains complete. And the will is part of human nature. This irreducible duality of human and divine willing in Jesus must not, however, be understood to imply the schizophrenia of a dual personality. Nature and person must be seen in the mode of existence proper to each. In other words: in Jesus the “natural will” of the human nature is present, but there is only one “personal will”, which draws the “natural will” into itself. And this is possible without annihilating the specifically human element, because the human will, as created by God, is ordered to the divine will. In becoming attuned to the divine will, it experiences its fulfillment, not its annihilation. Maximus says in this regard that the human will, by virtue of creation, tends toward synergy (working together) with the divine will, but that through sin, opposition takes the place of synergy: man, whose will attains fulfillment through becoming attuned to God’s will, now has the sense that his freedom is compromised by God’s will. He regards consenting to God’s will, not as his opportunity to become fully himself, but as a threat to his freedom against which he rebels.

The drama of the Mount of Olives lies in the fact that Jesus draws man’s natural will away from opposition and back toward synergy, and in so doing he restores man’s true greatness. In Jesus’ natural human will, the sum total of human nature’s resistance to God is, as it were, present within Jesus himself. The obstinacy of us all, the whole of our opposition to God is present, and in his struggle, Jesus elevates our recalcitrant nature to become its real self.

The question for each of us is: do we experience God as a threat to our freedom, or do we desire God so much that we happily allow him to use our freedom for his purposes, and in so doing, achieve true self-fulfilment?

Mass readings for today …
Word format: Year B Lent 5th Sunday 2015

Pdf format: Year B Lent 5th Sunday 2015

Other resources:

  1. Listen to Fr Barron’s homily for today.
  2. Scripture study for this weekend.


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4th Sunday of Lent | Why do so many prefer darkness to light?

The Crucifixion, Isenheim Altarpiece, centre panel, Matthias Grünewald, 1512-1516, chapel of the Hospital of Saint Anthony, Isenheim, Germany, c. 1510-15, oil on wood, 9' 9 1/2" x 10' 9" Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France.

The Crucifixion, Isenheim Altarpiece, centre panel, Matthias Grünewald, 1512-1516, chapel of the Hospital of Saint Anthony, Isenheim, Germany, c. 1510-15, oil on wood, 9′ 9 1/2″ x 10′ 9″ Unterlinden Museum, Colmar, France.

This week we saw the tragic death of 18 year old Australian suicide bomber, Jake Bilardi.  In a blog post from January 13, Bilardi says, “And that is where I sit today, waiting for my turn to stand before Allah (azza wa’jal) and dreaming of sitting amongst the best of His creation in His Jannah, the width of which is greater than the width of the heavens and the Earth.’’

How sad that in his search for God, he found the wrong one.  Carolyn Moynahan, in her article, Why do kids desert the West to fight with Isis, written well before Jake’s death, hits the nail on the head in her analysis.  And as Greg Sheridan says in his article in The Australian, “how long can the West live off the moral capital of religious conviction that it is now abandoning? The West is the only part of humanity abandoning religious belief. Can societies in which there is no overarching idea beyond the individual compete successfully in the long run?”

In our readings today, John invites us to turn to the right God while there is still time:

For God sent his Son into the world not to condemn the world,
but so that through him the world might be saved.
No one who believes in him will be condemned;
but whoever refuses to believe is condemned already

Of course, Westerners are likely to balk at the word ‘condemned’.  But of course it’s not God who condemns you, it’s your refusal to seek him that does.

Download today’s readings here:

Word format: Year B Lent 4th Sunday 2015

Pdf format: Year B Lent 4th Sunday 2015

To understand  how God can be both merciful and yet allow people to be condemned, read the homily from Sacerdos.  And listen to Fr Barron explain God’s tender mercy here.

Click-here-to-listen


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3rd Sunday of Lent, Year B | Jesus, the Embodiment of the Law

Pope Francis, Penance and Reconciliation during 24 Hours for the Lord

Pope Francis, Penance / Reconciliation during 24 Hours for the Lord

Are The Ten Commandments still relevant for us?  I have friends who claim the Bible is nothing special – just a man-made unenlightened compilation of Bronze Age writings, and certainly not inspired by the Holy Spirit.  If that were the case, Jesus would not fulfil so many prophecies from the Old Testament.  In today’s Gospel, for example, we see Jesus fulfilling prophecies from Isaiah 56:6-7, Jeremiah 7:1-11 and Malachi 3:1-3, to name only a few.

Mass Readings Word format: Year B Lent 3rd Sunday 2015

Mass Readings Pdf format: Year B Lent 3rd Sunday 2015

John Bergsma gives a great analysis of the readings here.

I have to conclude that my friends who denigrate the Bible are too used to thinking of themselves as ‘good people’ and find it too confronting to consider themselves as sinners, so they are compelled to ‘shoot the messenger’.  Getting down to practicalities, Pope Francis has called all Christians to make 13th and 14th March “24 Hours for the Lord”.  He wants us to go to Adoration, examine our consciences (take some time about this – perhaps spend an hour in Adoration asking the Lord to reveal your sins to you) and receive the sacrament of penance / reconciliation / confession during this time.  To prepare for this, why not listen to Fr Barron’s homily on the Ten Commandments here:

Click-here-to-listen

 

and do a thorough examination of conscience.  You can download these as a guide:

Word format: Confession and Examination of Conscience

Pdf format: Confession and Examination of Conscience

By the way, these lists of sins are not exhaustive – they are just meant as a guide.  If you take time to examine yourself and listen to the Holy Spirit, you’ll find many imperfections that aren’t even on the list.

For those of you in the Perth Northern Suburbs, you can attend 24 hours for the Lord events here:

  • Joondalup Holy Spirit Chapel: Adoration and Confession from 00h00 (midnight) Friday until midnight Saturday.  Mass: 12:10 Friday.   Please put your name on the adoration roster in the front porch.
  • Our Lady of the Mission, Whitfords: Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament: Friday 09.30 a.m. to 7.00 p.m., Mass Friday 9 a.m, Saturday 08.30.  Confession: Saturday 12.00 to 13:00and 17:30 – 18:00.
  • St Simon Peter, Ocean Reef: Blessed Sacrament Adoration Friday 9:00 to 18:50.  Mass: Friday 19:00, Saturday 8:30, Reconciliation: Friday 18:30-18:50, Saturday 17:00-17:45.
  • St Andrew’s, Clarkson: Mass: Friday and Saturday 08:00, Reconciliation: Saturday 17:00 to 17:30, Exposition of the Blessed Sacrament and Benediction: Friday 15:00 to 17:00.

Wishing you joy and grace this Lent!