Seventh Sunday of Easter

Posted on by Patrick Leyden

Jesus concludes the Last Supper in prayer.  Now that His mission is about over and He is going to return to His Father, He reflects on His mission.  He has glorified His Father by carrying out His mission, which was to reveal His Father to men and women and thus give them eternal life.

Jesus’ work has borne fruit.  Through His words, His disciples have finally come to understand Jesus as the one sent by God—this is the key component of Christian faith in John’s gospel.  This does not mean their faith is perfect, or that they will never waver.  Therefore Jesus prays for them. He asks the Father to protect and care for them just as He has cared for them while He was with them.

The purpose of Jesus’ mission is to give us eternal life.  This life is not just the fact that we live forever; more importantly it is a new quality of life for the believer.  Eternal life is God’s own life.  He wants us to share this life because He loves us.  Jesus describes this life as “knowing” the Father and the Son.  This knowing is a personal, experimental union with God, an experience that is entered through the gift of faith when we surrender to God’s incomparable love.

 

God Bless.

Msgr. Powell

Sixth Sunday of Easter

Posted on by Patrick Leyden

 

Happy Mother’s Day!

Though Jesus taught His followers many things throughout His public ministry, they were unable to understand much of what He said because the heart of His truth was revealed in His death and resurrection.  Jesus told His disciples that the role of the Holy Spirit is to “teach you everything and remind you of all that I have said to you”.  The Spirit of truth will continue the teachings of Jesus in light of the transforming reality of Jesus dying and rising.  The Spirit will enable believers to experience Jesus days, years or centuries after His earthly life.  The effect of the Spirit’s work within the believer is a profound sense of peace, well-being, and confidence, the kind of peace that the world cannot give and that does not go away in the midst of life’s most difficult struggles.  It is the greatest gift imaginable.

Just as Jesus promises to send His Holy Spirit, so He promises to send us His peace.  These two gifts are really one.  The Hebrew idea of peace was not merely lack of strife but completeness, wholeness.  Through the Holy Spirit, we are being make whole in the image of Christ.

God Bless!

-Msgr. Powell

 

 

Fifth Sunday of Easter

Posted on by Patrick Leyden

Jesus’ full command is, “do not let your hearts be troubled. You have faith in God; have faith also in me.”  It is only through faith that we can continue as disciples of Christ, following Him even though we do not see Him with bodily eyes, striving to love as he loved, even though we know that we, like His first disciples, fall woefully short.  It is only through faith that we can be peaceful instead of troubled and anxious.

Our faith is this: Jesus of Nazareth is the word—made—flesh, the one who came into the world in order to give us everlasting life.  Our faith is that Jesus is God’s revelation of  Himself to us, so that whoever sees Jesus sees the Father.  Our faith is that  Jesus has  blazed a path through death for us.  He has  gone  ahead of us to prepare our eternal reward so that where Jesus now is, we also may eternally be.  Our faith tells us that Jesus is drawing us, despite our frailties and failures, to Himself and His Father.

God Bless.

Msgr. Powell