There is a story from the early church that the author of this gospel of John lived to be an old, old man, so old that he had to be carried around from place to place, and he said very little, and when he did speak, what he did was just repeat to the Christians around him today’s gospel passage, my little children, love one another. And he repeated it so much that it frustrated people, they wanted more than that, they asked him why he just kept repeating it, and he said that if we do this one thing, it is sufficient. It sounds simple, one commandment, but then…
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When you think about it, it’s surprising how little there is in the gospel about the whole question about whether people believe in God, or don’t believe. It’s surprising since so many of the debates we hear around us when it comes to religion are about that question, whether we believe there is a God, whether it’s rational, or why other people don’t believe, asking ourselves, is that why young people aren’t part of religion, because they don’t believe. But in the gospel, really, there’s a different focus to what Jesus says that following him is all about. It turns out God is expecting something from us very different from…
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Finding words and images to describe God isn’t easy, since God isn’t like anything else that we know. For example, despite the way we talk about God sometimes, God isn’t a human being, for which we can only say, thank God, the last thing we need would be a God with as many faults as most of us human beings have. Even Jesus had to use different images to find the right words to tell people who God is, and what the relationship between God and us is actually like. He tried different things. Sometimes he said God was like a shepherd, taking care of us, which at times is…
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In these last weeks of the Easter season, we always hear some very famous and sometimes very difficult to understand passages from the Gospel of John, like the one we just heard about the vine and the vine grower. This is from what is often called the final discourse, that takes up four whole chapters in the gospel of John, a long monologue from Jesus to his disciples late in the night before his passion and death. And what he seems to be most concerned to give them in their last moments together is image after image of what their relationship with Jesus will be in the future. Partly, this…
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If you are a deacon, then today’s first reading is clearly the one that you have to address: It’s the reading from the Acts of the Apostles, part 2 of Luke’s gospel, and in it the 12 apostles decide that their many duties are leading them to neglect the service of some of the widows and the other needy in the early church. So they asked the community to choose 7 others who would take over some of the apostles’ duties in these works of charity and administration. By long tradition, these 7 – Stephen, Philip and the others – we regard as the first deacons. So there is your…