Mediation for the Second Sunday of Easter and Meditations for the Weekdays

Second Sunday of Easter, Cycle B, April 27, 2003

Read the selections from Sacred Scripture for this Sunday:

Readings: Acts of the Apostles 4. 32-35; 1^st Letter of John 5.1-6; John 20.19-31

This risen, glorified Christ Jesus is still the same Jesus of Nazareth. The sacred union of the humanity of Jesus subsisting in the Second Person of the Holy Trinity remains the same, yesterday, today, tomorrow. Jesus, the man from Nazareth, crucified with nails, who breathed his last in death, with a human history and particularity, is the same Christ who is the Risen Lord, at the center of the cosmos and the One Who Is To Come in Glory.

The great danger to Christian contemplatives at this present time, especially in the West, is that they think as Gnostics who espoused an early heresy in the Church. The Gnostics did not see creation as the work of God, but rather as a mistake of lesser beings in the chain of spiritual "gods" or angels. The Gnostics were in quest for this global spirituality that would deliver then from the ordinariness of daily life. They taught that the Christ did not really die on the cross. According to their teachings Christ in the Spirit left his body before the crucifixion and ascended into heaven. It was only lesser, non-spiritual beings, attached to creation, who would think that the Son of God would undergo such ignominy—spittle, beatings, nails driven into flesh, blood, wounds, rough-handling, death among criminals as a criminal, resurrection of the body etc.

Thus it is that in today’s Gospel, Thomas confesses the true risen Lord after he touched the wounds and open side of Jesus. Jesus is glorified, can pass through the doors, yet still is a true human being—he eats, prepares breakfast, walks the road to Emmaus—experiences a mild exasperation: "O foolish men, and slow of heart to believer all that the prophets have spoken!" (Luke 24.25).

My brother and sister contemplatives, cling to the Risen Jesus in all His particularity and specificity. We grasp him not by holding on to him with physical hands, as Mary tried in the garden. We cling to him by faith. But it is the same Jesus we move toward that is Jesus of the Calvary and of the tomb in the garden.

We can emphasize the unknowing aspect of our prayer so much that we are in danger of neglecting, even looking down upon, the sensibilities that surround our confession of faith in Jesus as the way to the Father in the Holy Spirit. Holy Week makes us experience in the Holy Spirit, the need to enter into the fullness of all the sufferings and death that Jesus experienced. That is why the great mystic, John of the Cross, is called "of the Cross." That is why the great mystic, St. Francis of Assisi, and the Franciscan contemplative theologian, St. Bonaventure, taught that the contemplative life, "the journey of the soul into God" is always through the sacred humanity of the Son of Man, Jesus, our Savior.

The doors were shut, but Jesus came and stood among them, and said, "Peace be with you." Then he said to Thomas, "Put your finger here, and see my hands, and put your hand, and place it in my side, do not be faithless, but believing." Thomas answered him, "My Lord and my God" Gospel Reading).

Filled with this insight of faith, we extend the particularity of the risen Savior, Jesus, to the particularity of the Church, specifically, our embrace of the Catholic Church, in which, as Vatican II teaches, the true Church of Christ subsists.

Jesus comes amid the disciples gathered together with the leadership of the Apostles with their leader, St. Peter. This is the Church. This is the "spiritual" Church; this is the "institutional" Church. You read so much in some contemporary spiritual writers about the separation of the Church from the institutional Church, as if the Church were not one, incarnate, specific. Again, the Gnostic approach tends to separate the humanity of those who have leadership of the Church from this spiritual center. These experts in contemplative prayer have an occupational hazard toward spiritual pride thinking themselves more spiritual than the Church hierarchy.

The First Reading describes the Church in its completeness. It is the organized Body of Christ. It is a specific group with its leadership. It is spiritual; it is evangelical and heroic in its love and faith. The love is so great that people sold what they had to be able to sustain those with needs. But they lay it at the feet of the Apostles. The spiritual is one with the institutional.

Finally, the Second Reading describes the most mysterious aspect of the Church that is also its most tangible and visible. It is in the Sacraments of the Church that we are moved by the Spirit into our union with Christ.

Faith is our entrance into the Body of Christ. Who is it that overcomes the world but he who believes that Jesus is the Son of God? It is Jesus that leads us into the Trinitarian life of Father, Son and Holy Spirit, being himself the Son.

Our entrance into the Body of Christ is through the Sacraments of the Church, Baptism, ‘the water" and Holy Eucharist, "the blood." But it is the Holy Spirit who works through all the signs to effect the real transformation of the soul. This is he who came by water and blood, Jesus Christ, not with water only but with the water and the blood. And the Spirit is the witness, because the Spirit is truth.

Life within the Body of Christ is love, principally love. But it is love that informs the commandments. Again, there is no separation: love and commandments. By this we know that we love the children of God, when we love God and obey his commandments. For this is the love of God, that we keep his commandments. And his commandments are not burdensome (Second Reading).

This Easter time is the time of great joy, in the fullness of the Holy Spirit. It is joyful because our souls share in the eternal beatitude, the eternal glory of God, that is Jesus Christ, the Son of God, the Son of Man.

The Holy Father, John Paul II, in the Jubilee Year of the 2000^th anniversary of these great events of our new life in Christ, has given us the invitation: "Open the doors of your heart to Christ." As the holy doors of St. Peter’s Basilica were flung open, so the doors of the Church have been opened wide, so that we can pass through the sacramentality of the Church into the interior life of Jesus, one with the Father and the Holy Spirit, One Triune God. The wounds of Christ are the doors into God. The wounds of Christ are real in the Sacraments of the Church. No eye has seen, nor ear has heard, nor can the human heart imagine, what God has promised us in our entrance into God, the Trinity. This is the gift of the Kingdom. Let us enter into Christ. Receive the Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation; celebrate the Sacrifice of the Eucharist with Holy Communion. Immaculate Heart of Mary, share with us the attitude of faith, hope, love and humility. Amen.

--William Fredrickson, Obl.OSB, D.Min.

Questions, comments: please direct to f499@erols.com

Meditations on the Gospel Readings for the Weekdays for the Second Week of Easter

Monday

John 3.1-8

In my prayer I come like Nicodemus to the risen Christ. I come with limitations of my self-dependence. I come with hesitations about the reality of Christ Risen. I still hold on to the ruminations of intellectual understanding of Christ in glory. I surround my heart with the boilerplate of religious prattle and of a relativistic modernity of syncretism. Jesus cuts through it all. Be born again. And there is in it a warning: "Unless." Unless there is an unequivocal, absolute surrender to my primal baptismal state I remain outside the fullness of the Kingdom. I am afraid I will be labeled a fundamentalist because I surrender to the fundamental state of a child reborn into the Kingdom, at each moment of the Spirit's visitation, on each occasion of true prayer in spirit and in truth. Flesh is human nature taken as self-sufficient. Spirit is that zone within me of surrender into God's Word and Spirit. My prayer must be simple and in the spirit. Resurrected Christ in glory holds me in the simplicity of the divine Presence and of the divine work of transformation. I surrender. I consent. I constantly enter the womb of the Church to be reborn in her sacramental waters and nourishment.

Tuesday

John 3.7b-15

I do not know whence the Spirit comes and wither the Spirit goes. So much of my deep, simple prayer is not knowing. As I progress in my prayer, it becomes more of an unknowing than a knowing. The truths of doctrine are still held and confessed. They are as an arch that holds up the bridge into God. But prayer is a matter of my clinging in love to the risen Christ in his fullness. A potential fullness of light is present but not completely grasped in my mind at any given moment. It is love that gives understanding. Ultimately we are illumined with truth but it is truth born of love. It is truth that is one with doctrine. Doctrine and truth born of love are identical because they both proceed from Christ and are the doors into the divine presence. Jesus is lifted up and gazing upon him as savior and totality I am saved from the plague of my disparateness, of my scattered self. Jesus knows; Jesus has seen. He bears witness. Our prayer is the reception of that witness and it is the gazing upon the One Lifted Up.

Wednesday

John 3.16-21

I have been growing in prayer. That growth is measured by prayer's simplicity and clarity of vision. There is a torment associated with this progress. I see so clearly my interactions with people, my actions and lack of action in a true light. The simplicity of prayer surrenders my sins to Christ's judgement in his light. There is no condemnation. There is judgement but it is healing and redemptive. It is penetration to the roots of my sins so that the causes can be burned away, excised as a cancer from the living tissue of my spirit. No more do I fear the light. I bring all to the light out of the darkness. Yet it is not I; I am too deceptive by nature. It is the Spirit, the re-birthing Spirit, who brings me into the healing light of Christ. This presence and love are a reality for me because God so loved the world of which I am a part that he gives his Son so that I do not perish, but that I may live the eternal life of the Trinity.

Thursday

John 3.31-36

O my God, you are completely beyond me, above me, outside of my experience of existence. I am of the here and now, of the real appearances of the earth and of human and animal life. I am a river of fluids and currents, forces and movements. I am of time and place, subject to change and decay. You are beyond all in your Person and in your holy being. Jesus is the One in whom I can touch you, O God. Jesus is from the reality of your existence. Jesus is the Person who is the Son in you, the Father. Jesus lives in my flesh and blood. Jesus bears testimony to my heart in the Spirit. You, O Father, love the Son and I am included in that love. There are no limits to the Triune love which I share. This is eternal life begun now. My prayer is the concentration of all my inner workings and the stillness of my outer self so that what becomes real is this eternal life already begun, here and now.

Friday

John 6.1-15

Jesus, I want to follow you. I follow you not because I see signs although I have experienced the signs of your healing. I desire you because I am hungry. I have come a long way. Life often is a desert place and there is no where to get bread to eat. Like your apostles I am beside myself to figure out a way to do this, to feed the multitude of which I am numbered. I sit in prayer on top of the grass that grows from your beautiful earth. I await your word and my hands are outstretched waiting for the bread and fish to be placed there. I am nourished by you in your Spirit and in your Word. Gather me up with the fragments that nothing be lost. You are at the center and all is being gathered up into you, Lord, that is the Bread and Wine of our Eucharist, the reality of our Sacrament. I will be quiet and still on the green grass of my consenting prayer, and of hunger and fulfillment, all at once. I will be with you in your solitude, finding there the beginnings of a renewed universe.

Saturday

John 6.16-21

Often I feel that I am alone in the night at sea that is rising from a strong wind. Fear and anxiety grip me. I must peer out and beyond this frightening experience. Faith focuses me upon Jesus walking upon the waters. It is not so much the presence of fear that is harmful to my prayer, but it is that fear will block the light of Jesus' presence. I will not be able to see Jesus if my vision is clouded with a blinding fear. In our present condition, fear is always ready to greet the circumstances of our life. Indeed, many people suffer from various forms of anxiety because of levels of chemical imbalance, not to speak of inherited mental patterns of general anxiety. Jesus, the risen Lord, is able to shine forth in the midst of all fear no matter what the cause. Fear overcomes us through not holding onto to a basic faith that keeps present the vision of the risen Christ. Actual grace is always present to hold onto faith. Dissipation of my faith focus deprives me of hearing deep within me the voice of the "I AM." The injunction, "Do not be afraid" means do not lose the vision nor be deaf to the voice of the One Who Is because He is Life. We can not know when the seas will be calmed. In faith, the Presence is eternal and the ground of resting is always there. Prayer leads me there.

--William Fredrickson, Obl.OSB, D.Min.

Questions, comments: please direct to f499@erols.com