Deacon Jerry Franzen April 19, 2015 Cathedral
Acts 3:13-15, 17-19 1 John 2:1-5a Luke 24:35-48
Praised be Jesus Christ!
R: “Now and Forever
*Today’s readings are
intriguing:
each contains a sentence or two on knowing.
From the Acts of the
Apostles, Peter said,
“Now I know,
brothers, that you acted out of ignorance,
just as your leaders did.”
The implication is that if
the leaders of the Jewish people
and the ordinary people in the crowds
had known that Jesus was the Messiah,
they would not have put him to death.
In the first Letter of St.
John, he wrote,”
The way that we may be sure that we know him (Jesus
)
is to keep his commandments.”
The way to know Jesus is to
follow him.
And in the Gospel reading
according to Luke,
there are two sentences:
“The two disciples recounted
what had taken place on the way
and how Jesus was made known to them
in the breaking of
the bread.”
AND:
“Jesus opened their minds to
understand the Scriptures.”
We must know who Jesus is,
and we learn that from our presence here
at the Eucharist where we receive Him,
and from our proper understanding of Sacred Scripture.
But John’s letter says that
we can be sure that we know him
by keeping his commandments.
We can know the theology of
the Eucharist, the Mass,
and all of the other
sacraments.
We can know what is written
about Jesus in Scripture.
But we truly know Jesus when
we act like Him.
I
Once upon a time there was a
world of people
who had lost their God and had no way of finding HIM.
So God went looking for them by sending his
Son
in flesh and blood
to find them.
The Son lived with them,
infant to mature adult
and died with them by being treated as
a common criminal.
Through His dying and
rising, the people came to life again,
and God was theirs
once more.
By and large the people were
grateful to God,
and they felt fairly safe from the fires of hell.
But they didn’t think about
God much,
mostly just on Sundays, or as a last resort,
when they had problems
that could not be solved by
their priests.
They had too much else to do
and too many things and other people
they had to get to know:
corporate bosses, college professors,
next door neighbors, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt.
God’s Son was not a friend
on Facebook.
When we realize who Jesus really
is,
it should strike us
as how frightful a loss it is not to know
Him,
I do not mean knowing his
biography
like that of Shakespeare, or FDR or Pope Francis;
I mean knowing him like a
brother, like a parent, like oneself.
II
What does it mean to know
Jesus?
In our Western ways, knowing
means to grasp reality
with the intellect and to affirm it with a judgment –
to take in information and store it in the
intellect,
so that it is ready to be used.
“God is good!” I can depend on God! He won’t fail me.
“Light travels at 186,282
miles per second.” Pretty fast!
I can confidently use that number.
"Cigarette smoking is
dangerous to your health!”
I will risk an earlier death by smoking cigarettes.
Much of our knowledge is
based on
proof, reasoning and
scientific data.
Not so for the Hebrew of the time of Jesus.
In his first Letter, St.
John wrote,
”The way that we may be sure that we know Jesus
is to keep his commandments.”
The Israelite knew with the
heart.
The Prophet Jeremiah (Jer
24:7), speaking for God,
said, “I will give them a heart to know me,
that I am
the Lord.”
For the Hebrew, to know God
was to experience God,
to recognize Him in his words AND his deeds –
from the parting of the Red Sea
to simply “Samuel, Samuel,”
from the covenant on Sinai
to the “still quiet
voice” to Elijah (1 Kgs 19:12).
To really know God is to
experience God and to respond:
“Your servant is listening,”
AND, it’s not
just listening but also responding
in
justice and charity.
It’s following God in faith,
opening our hearts to further submissiveness,
yearning for what is beyond.
To know God, then, is not a
question
of clearer and
clearer vision;
it means sinking deeper into
God’s unknown.
III
So how do we go about really
knowing God,
this sinking deeper
into God’s unknown?
Jesus, in today’s Gospel
reading, gives us two paths:
“He opened their minds to understand the Scriptures”
and “was
made known to them
in the breaking of the bread.”
We get to really know God
better at the table of His Word
and at the table of His Body and Blood.
The “Constitution on the
Sacred Liturgy,”
a document of the Second Vatican Council,
has a startling sentence, it reads:
Christ “is present in His
word, since it is He Himself
who speaks
when the Holy Scriptures are read in church.”
We are so accustomed to the
real presence of Jesus
under the forms of bread and wine at Mass,
that we hesitate to speak of the real presence
in the proclaimed Word.
When the lector proclaims
God’s Word or
Father or I proclaim the Gospel, Christ is speaking.
The words are of John or Isaiah
or Luke but they are inspired.
They transmit God’s message.
We heard today a selection
from the third Chapter of the Acts of the Apostles,
not to learn that some ignorant people
had crucified Jesus, but maybe, just maybe,
to be
challenged to consider our own ignorance.
We listened to a part of John’s
letter maybe, just maybe,
as a challenge to our love for God
and our readiness to obey him.
I say, “maybe” because I
should not be telling you
what you heard.
I don’t know what God is
saying to you;
I only know that he is speaking to you.
To hear the Lord, you cannot
be passive
and listen like one might listen
to the Reds baseball game on the radio.
You must listen with your
heart
as people listened to Dr. Martin Luther King,
as young people once listened to the peace songs of Joan
Baez,
as people now listen to the homilies of Pope Francis,
listening with heart speaking to heart.
We are also united with God
at the Lord’s table.
We touch the host to our
hands and tongue;
The precious blood of Jesus
touches our lips and inner mouth.
Fr. Walter Burghardt,
whom I have quoted on previous occasions.
has said that when his
fingers enfold the flesh of Christ
and when Christ’s blood moistens his lips,
he touches in a unique way
the risen humanity of Christ,
and through this contact
with Christ’s
life-giving Body and Blood,
he
shares in Christ’s awesome divinity.
Would that we all
would have that same feeling?
I will close with a short
story:
Last weekend, my wife and I
went to a memorial celebration commemorating
the life and recent death
of the wife of a dear friend.
She had strongly stipulated that after
her death
there were to be no religious services of any kind for her.
Her reason was that she did
not believe in God.
I presume that was because
she did not know God,
because it would seem to me that if you knew of God,
you knew of His love for us and his infinite mercy,
certainly you would be one
who would believe in Him.
She was a wonderful wife,
mother, grandmother,
good teacher and a dear friend.
I would have to say that she
expressed many of the qualities
of a good Christian;
in fact, she was the product
of Catholic education
from grade school through College.
Certainly this woman had
learned about God
throughout all of her education,
and yet, she did not know God.
My guess is that she
probably stopped coming to Mass,
ceased hearing the message in God’s Word and
lost all contact with the Lord’s Body and Blood.
That experience coupled with
today’s readings
brought home to me what it really means to know God
and to be nourished by the Word
and at the Table of the Lord.
*Based on a homily by Walter
J. Burghardt, S.J.
in “Still Proclaiming Your Wonders” Paulist Press
New York
1984 pp 84-89
