Third Sunday after Easter, April 29, 2012
(Jn. 16: 16-22)
St.
Joseph the Worker, May 1, 2012
After the Last Supper, where He established the Mass we
celebrate today, Christ gave a long discourse to His Apostles, which is in
John’s Gospel. Today’s reading is a part of that discourse. Jesus says, “A
little while, and now you shall not see me; and again a little while, and you
shall see me, because I go to the Father.” St. Augustine writes that Jesus was
telling His Apostles that in a little while they would not see Him because he
goes to His Father, and again a little while they will see Him. He went to His
Father after He died, then they saw him again for 40 days, then He went back to
His Father, and we are now in that “little while,” which has lasted 2,000 years
and will end when Jesus comes again in glory to judge the living and the dead.
The Apostles didn’t understand what He was saying, so He
explained to them further that they will “lament and weep, but the world shall
rejoice; and you shall be made sorrowful, but your sorrow shall be turned into
joy . . . I will see you again, and your heart shall rejoice; and your joy no
man shall take from you.” This great promise was preserved in writing by Holy
Mother Church in the Gospel and preserved and retold to the faithful through
the centuries in the Bible and in other publications and in sermons at Mass.
We are wanderers from our true home. We are sorrowful
because we cannot see God Whom we love, and it is through much hard work and
sorrow that we reach our crown in heaven. Psalm 125:
5 says it well:
“They that sow in tears, shall reap in joy.”
Our Lord also told His Disciples in this discourse that the
world will rejoice. Now, whatever joy the worldly find in their lives is the
only joy they will know because they have no hope for the joys of heaven. Jesus
compares what the Apostles will experience to a woman in labor, that when she
brings forth the child her joy is so great that she no longer remembers the
pain. St. Paul reiterated this in his letter to the Romans, “For the sufferings
of this time are not worthy to be compared with the glory to come.”
Today’s reading ends with our Lord telling the Apostles:
“So also you now indeed have sorrow; but I will see you again, and your heart
shall rejoice; and your joy no man shall take from you.” The Disciples had to
mourn Christ who was murdered and then buried, but after His Resurrection they
“were glad when they saw the Lord,” and no one ever took this joy from them. In
the days that followed our Lord’s Ascension into Heaven, the Disciples suffered
persecution and torment for Christ’s Name, but they suffered it gladly. They
saw the people Christ had raised from the dead, they saw the resurrected Christ
and saw Him ascend into Heaven. Because they saw these things they were
inflamed with the hope of resurrection and the hope of seeing Him again, just
as He promised. Later on, when the priests of the Temple scourged them, they
continued preaching, “rejoicing that they were accounted worthy to suffer
reproach for the name of Christ.” (Acts 5: 41)
If we were reduced to sleeping in alleys and begging for
food and suddenly a rich man found us and adopted us, we would soon forget our
former desperate situation. This is what Baptism is like. The Rich Man who
found us is the King of Angels, and the joyful life He offers us is beyond our
ability to imagine. On earth, a rich man can only raise us from beggar to
prince, but, through Baptism, the King of Angels raises us from earth to
heaven.
We are living now in that time when we cannot see Him, just
as He told His Disciples. But if we practice living a virtuous life, that is,
if we constantly try to strengthen within ourselves the virtues of Faith, Hope
and Charity, and of Prudence, Justice, Temperance and Fortitude, we can be sure
that the world will harass us and persecute us. If we persevere, we will
receive the promised reward. Christ’s Disciples saw with their own eyes the
Resurrected Christ and saw Him ascend into Heaven to His Father. We know what
they saw is true because they continued to tell about it and write about it
even in the face of persecution and death.
We can also persevere, we can stick to it, and all our
lives we can take heart in the words of Christ at John 16: 33: “In this world you shall have distress: but have
confidence, I have overcome the world.”
This Sunday used to be the Feast of the Solemnity of St.
Joseph. Devotion to St. Joseph was not part of the early Church. It began first
in the East and in the 15th Century the Latin Church adopted it
making this devotion worldwide. Nowadays we celebrate the Feast of St. Joseph
on March 19th, and again, in two days, on May 1st, we
will celebrate the Feast of St. Joseph the Worker.
Pharaoh gave his ring to Joseph, the son of Jacob, and
placed him in charge of everything in his house and his kingdom. In heaven,
Joseph, the foster father of Jesus, has more influence with God than Jacob’s
son had with Pharaoh. Pharaoh told his people during the famine to “Go to
Joseph!” (Genesis 41: 55) We should
go to Joseph, spouse of Mary, with our petitions. We can be confident that
Jesus will listen to his prayers on our behalf because He, Who is God, listened
to Joseph when He was a child living among us.
The Book of Tobias (Tobit) [KJV: Missing]
This Book
contains excellent examples of great piety, extraordinary patience, and of a
perfect resignation to the Will of God. God heard Tobias’s humble prayer and
sent Archangel Raphael, appearing before them as a man, to relieve him. St.
Raphael found a wife for Tobias’s son, a woman who had been plagued by a
murderous devil, and he cured Tobias’s blindness. Tobias and his son wanted to
reward their new friend. St. Raphael’s response was:
“’Bless ye
the God of heaven, give glory to him in the sight of all that live, because he
hath shewn his mercy to you. . . . Prayer is good with fasting and alms more
than to lay up treasures of gold; For alms delivereth from death, and the same
is that which purgeth away sins, and maketh to find mercy and life everlasting.
. . . When thou didst pray with tears, and dids’t bury the dead, and didst
leave thy dinner and hide the dead by day in thy house, and bury them by night,
I offered thy prayer to the Lord. And because thou wast acceptable to God, it
was necessary that temptation should prove thee. And now the Lord hath sent me
to heal thee, and to deliver Sara thy son’s wife from the devil. For I am the
angel Raphael, one of the seven, who
stand before the Lord. . . Peace be to you, fear not. . . It is time therefore
that I return to him that sent me: but bless ye God, and publish all his
wonderful works.’ And when he had said these things, he was taken from their
sight, and they could see him no more.” (Tobias
12: 6-21) +++
We Celebrate the Traditional Tridentine Latin Mass
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