After Vespers on the
Solemnity of Pentecost Sunday the Church crosses the threshold into the
liturgical season – known in Latin as Tempus Per Annum: the time during the
year or: Ordinarius Tempore.
There are two
liturgical seasons known as Ordinary Time – the first between the end of the
Advent and Christmas seasons, which begins after the Epiphany, and this far
north it is winter, a time with barely 8 hours of daylight [given the frequency
of snowstorms hardly right to say ‘of sunshine’] and is a period of prelude to
Holy Lent and then the great Holy Week and the greatest feast of all: Easter –
His Holy Resurrection.
This second Ordinary
Time is a period of active attentiveness, through living the Gospel awaiting
Christ’s return – and should it not happen in our lifetime, no worries, for
after these summer days of on average 16 ½ hours of sunlight – yep sunlight –
already having re-entered winter the Sunday following the Sunday of Christ,
King of the Universe, is the first Sunday of Advent and we renew the pilgrimage
deep in the mysteries of Christ.
Perhaps Ordinary Time
should be re-named as Extraordinary Time – for it is an extraordinary grace to
have time to live and move and have our being each moment of our lives in
Christ, through Christ, with the Holy Spirit in communion of love with Them for
the Father – in a word to live in communion of love with the Most Holy Trinity.
The template for such
living is Jesus Himself as revealed to us in the Holy Gospels:
Vs.31/32= “If I bear witness of Myself, My
witness is not true. There is another who bears witness of Me, and I know that
the witness which He witnesses of Me is true.
The Father has borne
witness to Jesus [Mt.3:17], St. John the Baptist likewise [Jn.1:29-34], Jesus’
own works such as at Cana [Jn.2:1-11] and indeed St. John himself ends his
Gospel account with a witness statement: 21:24ff.
This is important
because those Jewish leaders who opposed and challenged Jesus were harking back
to the Mosaic Law which determined for testimony to be valid two witnesses were
required, a number surpassed by those given by Jesus, even more so by His
Resurrection.
Vs.33-35=You have sent to John, and he has
borne witness to the truth. Yet I do not receive testimony from man, but I say
these things that you may be saved. He was the burning and shining lamp, and
you were willing for a time to rejoice in his light.
Jesus does not focus
on the Baptist witnessing to Himself, rather to the Baptist’s witnessing to the
truth, which ultimately, if we listen to the truth brings us to the one who IS
the Truth, Jesus Himself.
Neither does Jesus
argue that He is referencing any witness to focus on Himself as the important
issue, He teaches for our salvation, that is always His primary focus when He
speaks.
Finally, how human the
stark reality His listeners were rather fickle, basking for a time in the
phenomena of the Baptist, but moving on to the next flash, the next ‘star’ –
and for many that was Jesus and many of them would also reveal their fickleness
when Jesus proved too brilliant a light, too sharply the truth and, as we see
in Holy Week, many who cried out Hosanna on Palm Sunday would be a frothing mob
screaming “Crucify Him!” by Friday.
We live in a time when
it is all so very common for people to be elevated to some dizzying height
because they appear to have all the answers or some importance in which we can
bask and just as suddenly they are turned upon and brought down with no little
satisfaction by the very people who elevated them.
Our modern media and
the so-called social media are very adept at this elevating and destroying.
As Christians we
should ask the Holy Spirit, when it comes to such things, to renew within us
His gift of prudence that we, as St. Paul urges: Beware lest anyone cheat you through philosophy and empty deceit,
according to the tradition of men, according to the basic principles of the
world, and not according to Christ. [Col.2:8], and in the Letter to the
Hebrews: Do not be carried about with
various and strange doctrines. For it is good that the heart be established by
grace….[13:9], and St. Peter urges: Be
sober, be vigilant; because your adversary the devil walks about like a roaring
lion, seeking whom he may devour. [1Pt.5:8].
Before continuing with
the meditation on this critical teaching of Jesus it should be noted again that
St. John, of all the Evangelists, gives us the greatest, in length to be sure,
perhaps we might argue also in scope, treasury of the spoken teachings of
Jesus.
How might it be that
of the four Evangelists, St. John is the one who chose – more accurately was
chosen by the Holy Spirit – to do this?
What then do we know
about each of them?
Unlike other
historical figures and the lives of many saints, outside of what may be gleaned
from the Gospels themselves, little is known about St. Matthew.
The Gospels texts
speak of a Matthew/Levi who as a publican in Capernaum, a Galilean tax
collector, likely able to speak, and write, Aramaic and Greek, and in his
encounter with Jesus he left everything and became a disciple. [Mt.9:9; 10:3;
Mk. 2:14; 3:18; Lk. 5:27]. He was chosen as an Apostle, was present,
importantly at the Last Supper, encounters with the Risen Jesus and at
Pentecost. Tradition holds after preaching in various countries he suffered a
martyr’s death.
An Evangelist, not an
Apostle, St. Mark, according to tradition likely travelled with St. Peter
through Asia Minor, preaching to and encouraging the communities of Christians
along the way and that St. Mark wrote down St. Peter’s teachings – nowadays we
would call them homilies – and from those composed what we now know as the
Gospel according to St. Mark.
In Acts reference is
made to “John called Mark”, hence St. Mark, cousin of St. Barnabas. It is also
tradition, drawn from the same passage in Acts [15:36-41] that we see St. Mark
eventually arrives in Alexandria, founds the Church there, today the Coptic
Church within whose liturgy are elements which can be traced back to St. Mark.
It is likely he died there of natural causes.
There is an old
expression in French which roughly translated into English means ‘to dream in
technicolour’!
The Holy Evangelist
St. Luke certainly presents the Holy Gospel to us filled with all the colours
and light of marriage, family life, childhood, adulthood, the lives of people,
the miracles and words of Jesus, and in the Acts of the Apostles the brilliance
of Christian life in all is beauty and yes in all its challenges and suffering.
St. Luke, as best can
be discerned was born in Syria and died in Greece an elderly man.
It certainly would
appear from the content of the Gospel according to St. Luke that either he was
in direct contact with the parents of St. John the Baptist, with the Blessed
Virgin Mary, or at least with persons who were, as he details – with imagery
and words – are brilliant, in both senses of the word.
St. John, known as the
Beloved Disciple – though we must keep in mind Jesus loves everyone and
certainly each of us as disciples are beloved – was both Apostle and Evangelist
and certainly, as his Gospel account, his letters and his book of Revelation
reveal, was also a mystic.
Likely the youngest of
the Twelve, described as a son of Zebedee, brother of James, tradition holds he
was the only one of the Apostles to die of old age, the others all suffering
martyrdom.
Banished, rather than
executed, by the Roman authorities to the island of Patmos he trained St.
Polycarp who became bishop of Smyrna. St. Ignatius was also trained by St.
John, the same St. Ignatius whom St. Peter would appoint as bishop of Antioch.
A Melkite bishop once
told me of a tradition he heard growing up about how St. John in his old age,
living a somewhat hermitical life on the island of Patmos, would be visited by crowds of Christian youth
from the places where the Gospel had already penetrated, in hopes both of
seeing St. John and receiving a word from him – guess these were the original
World Youth Days!
The bishop said:
“Deacons would help the elderly saint from his cave to stand in front of the
assembled youth and all St. John would say, simply yet powerfully was: “My
little children, love one another.”
Scholars continue to
debate the historical accuracy of the biographies of the Four Evangelists, some
even debate who wrote which Gospel and when, etc., - more powerful than such
arguments are the texts themselves: …. in
order to keep the Gospel forever whole and alive within the Church, the
Apostles left bishops as their successors, "handing over" to them
"the authority to teach in their own place." This sacred tradition,
therefore, and Sacred Scripture of both the Old and New Testaments are like a
mirror in which the pilgrim Church on earth looks at God, from whom she has
received everything, until she is brought finally to see Him as He is, face to
face (see 1 John 3:2). [see the Documents of Vatican II, Dei Verbum, Ch.
II, paras. 7,8ff.]
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