The Ascension of the Lord [A]
Acts 1:1-11  +  Ephesians 1:17-23  +  Matthew 28:16-20
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
May 17, 2026

Christians eager to grow spiritually sometimes request spiritual direction.  The spiritual director sometimes gives encouragement.  But sometimes the spiritual director has to challenge.  To use an analogy:  having a spiritual director is like having a personal trainer at the gym.  If your personal trainer did nothing but tell you how good you look, you would not make much progress.  The personal trainer has to push you outside of your comfort zone, to help you make efforts that you would rather not make.

It’s similar with spiritual direction.  One of its more challenging demands is related to the mystery of Jesus’ Ascension to Heaven.  Summed up in a single word, what the Ascension and authentic spiritual direction both demand is “detachment”.

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At His Ascension, Jesus demanded detachment from His disciples.  In fact, Jesus had spoken to this demand just hours after He rose from the dead.  Jesus on Easter Sunday morning said to Mary Magdalen, “Stop holding on to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.  But go to my brothers and tell them, ‘I am going to my Father and your Father, to my God and your God.’”[1]  In some translations of this verse, Jesus says, “Do not cling to me, for I have not yet ascended to the Father.”  Jesus demanded that Mary Magdalen exercise spiritual detachment.  Even though Jesus has risen from the dead, there is something greater on the horizon.  Mary Magdalen must have wondered what this might be.

In a similar way, on the day of Jesus’ Ascension, the apostles must have felt bewildered.  Think about all the ups and downs they’d faced over the past several weeks.  On Palm Sunday, Jesus had been acclaimed as the Messiah.  Then He was crucified as a common criminal.  Days later Jesus had risen from the dead and started appearing to His disciples.  But what was going to come next?  Was the Risen Jesus going to rule as the Messiah on earth forever?

On the day of Jesus’ Ascension, when it became clear to the disciples that Jesus was about to leave them, some of them likely felt as if Jesus was abandoning them.  But He was not.  He was leaving them so that something greater could occur on the day of Pentecost.  Jesus demanded from His disciples that they let Him go.

The detachment—that letting go of Jesus—was a means to a greater goal.  Jesus was preparing His disciples for the day of Pentecost.  Jesus in His risen and glorified body ascended to Heaven.  In His place, the Holy Spirit descended from Heaven to join the disciples into one Mystical Body.  This Mystical Body of Christ is the Church.

In your life as a Christian, God is calling you to live as one member of the Church:  as one member of Christ’s Mystical Body.  However, to live that calling faithfully, you must practice the virtue of detachment.

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So what is the first step?  The first step is to practice detachment from material things.  It’s important to note that being detached from material things does not necessarily mean that we remove them from our lives.  It might be true that we need to remove certain things from our lives altogether.  This would be especially true if those things prey upon faults or vices that we bear. 

However, being detached from most created things does not demand that we remove them from our lives.  Certain created things can be part of our lives, and we can still be detached from them. 

What being detached from created things demands is that we admit that eventually, we will leave those things behind.  Saint Paul wrote to St. Timothy:  “we brought nothing into the world—it is certain that we can take nothing out of it.”[2] Monsignor McGread, the long-time pastor of St. Francis Parish in Wichita, put it differently.  He would often note:  “I’ve never seen a U-Haul attached to a hearse.”

We can detach ourselves from created things in several ways.  The most practical way is through simple acts of penance, or what the Church calls self-mortification.

Some Christians only practice self-mortification on Fridays of Lent, and only by not eating meat.  However, the more intentionally we want to follow Jesus, the more we will broaden our practice of self-mortification.  You need to ask yourself, “What are my favorite creature comforts?”  Whatever they are, they need to be the object of your practice of self-mortification, especially each Friday, the day of the week on which Our Lord died for your sins.

Detaching ourselves from material things is demanding.  However, much more demanding is the need to detach ourselves from other human beings.  As with material things, being detached from someone does not mean removing someone from our life.  It does not mean not loving them.  Nor does it mean being inattentive to them.

Detachment from others, rather, is a disposition of the soul.  It means recognizing that each person in our life is a gift:  a gift from God, and a gift who has a calling—a destiny—beyond this world.  Whenever we practice the virtue of detachment, we are giving God the room to work in our lives, and in the lives of others as He wills. 

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Keep in mind that the practice of detachment is a means to an end.  Detachment helps us to love as God loves.  This divine love is necessary to celebrate the Church’s birth at Pentecost, and to live out the mission of the Church.  To live this mission means to love both our God and our neighbor, as God loves.

Having a detached heart means being able to love more freely, more readily, and as God Himself loves.

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[1] John 20:17.

[2] 1 Timothy 6:7.  St. Paul here echoes Job 1:21.

The Sixth Sunday of Easter [A]
Acts 8:5-8,14-17  +  1 Peter 3:15-18  +  John 14:15-21
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
May 10, 2026

“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate.”

Today’s Gospel passage is set at the Last Supper.  Although the disciples of Jesus do not fully know at this point what’s ahead, Jesus knows completely.  Jesus was fully God all the days that He lived on this earth.  He had divine knowledge, which includes divine fore-knowledge.  So what He said at the Last Supper was part of a plan.

“I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate.”  In speaking these words, Jesus is looking beyond His death, beyond His resurrection, and beyond His ascension to Heaven.  Jesus is looking to the day of Pentecost, which will occur ten days after His ascension.  The Holy Spirit who will come at Pentecost wants to strengthen us in a specific way, for a specific reason.

However, by contrast, it’s also important to remember what Jesus said about the Holy Spirit on another occasion.  On the evening of Jesus’ resurrection, He spoke about the Holy Spirit coming for another reason, and in another way.  Jesus said to the Apostles, “Receive the Holy Spirit.  Whose sins you forgive are forgiven them, and whose sins you retain are retained.”[1]  In those words, Jesus pointed out one of the specific roles—one of the “jobs”, if you will—that the Holy Spirit carries out.  The Holy Spirit works in the Sacrament of Confession to forgive, heal, and strengthen.  But that’s not the Holy Spirit’s only role in our lives. 

To use an analogy from ordinary life:  when you go to your physician to be healed of sickness or disease, your aim is full health, so you can live your life again.  Something similar is at work in the spiritual life.  When we go to Confession to be healed of spiritual sickness, our aim is full health, so we can live a healthy spiritual life again.

But that begs the question.  What role does the Holy Spirit play in an active, healthy spiritual life?  That’s what Jesus is speaking about when He says, “I will ask the Father, and He will give you another Advocate.”  The Holy Spirit will appear front and center in two weeks on Pentecost Sunday.  But even today, two Sundays beforehand, Jesus is preparing us for Pentecost.  He wants us to understand how the Gift of the Holy Spirit animates the active, daily, healthy Christian life.

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Consider what the Creed tells us about the Holy Spirit.  We will profess the Creed in just a few minutes.  The Creed is usually printed in our missals and missalettes in 32 lines.  Yet only four of these lines concern the Holy Spirit directly.

During the Creed, you as a Christian disciple profess:  “I believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life.”  In that sentence there are two titles by which we honor the Holy Spirit.  First we profess that the Holy Spirit is our “Lord”.  Then we profess that the Holy Spirit is “the giver of life”.  Both of these titles for the Holy Spirit run against the grain of the modern world.

In our day and age, when individualism is prized so highly, we minimize the notion of God as our Lord.  Certainly, we might consider God the Father as a “lordly” figure.  We are less likely to consider God the Son as our Lord.  This is because we want Jesus to have a softer image, and we want to consider Him our friend (which is right to do).

Yet least of all do Christians consider God the Holy Spirit to be their Lord.  We often reduce the Holy Spirit to a gentle breeze who encourages us to follow our hunches.  However, it is essential to recognize the Holy Spirit as our Lord.

We are meant to be subject to the Holy Spirit.  He means to rule our lives, to give them order and purpose.  He means to do this for the same reason that Jesus came into this world.  Jesus proclaimed:  “I came so that they might have life and have it more abundantly.”[2]

This life is what we’re speaking about when we profess the Holy Spirit to be “the giver of life”.  This abundant life is what gives our earthly days authentic meaning.  When we choose to recognize the Holy Spirit as our Lord, there is peace.  But in all honesty you have to ask:  do you want this peace?  Or do you want instead what the world offers?

As Christians, we need to allow the Holy Spirit to be our Lord.  We need to allow the Holy Spirit to rule our lives and give them order, even when this demands that we admit our sins. 

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So given this, how can we invite the Holy Spirit into our lives?  How can we allow the Holy Spirit lordship over our earthly lives?  One simple way is frequent, worthy reception of the sacraments. 

Another way to foster devotion, dedication, and service to the Holy Spirit is to make a Novena to Him.  We can make this novena any time during the year, of course.  But it’s very powerful to make this novena on the nine days before Pentecost.  This year the ninth day before Pentecost will be this coming Friday, May 15.

One thing to keep in mind about a novena is that it’s usually prayed for a specific intention.  For example, since this weekend is Mother’s Day, you might want, as a gift to your mother, to offer the novena for her and her intentions.  Or since the novena starts on May 15, and May 15 is the feast of St. Isidore the Farmer, you might want to pray the novena for good weather for our crops.  Or you might want to pray the novena for someone suffering from serious illness and disease.  Or you might want to pray the novena for Deacon Peter Bergkamp and his fellow deacons in our diocese.

God the Holy Spirit is the Love that God the Father and God the Son bear for each other.  God the Holy Spirit is the Gift that God the Father and God the Son gift to fallen man.  The Gift of the Holy Spirit allows a sinner like yourself or myself to become an adopted child of God the Father.  That divine love of the Father and the Son for each other allows us to love as God loves, if we allow the Holy Spirit to be our Lord, and to rule our lives.

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[1] John 20:23.

[2] John 10:10.

CLICK HERE FOR THE NOVENA TO THE HOLY SPIRIT

The Fifth Sunday of Easter [A]
Acts 6:1-7  +  1 Peter 2:4-9  +  John 14:1-12
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
May 3, 2026

“… like living stones, / let yourselves be built into a spiritual house / to be a holy priesthood to offer spiritual sacrifices / acceptable to God through Jesus Christ.”

On the Saturday of Memorial Day weekend, Deacon Peter Bergkamp will be ordained to the Priesthood of Jesus Christ.  Each of us needs to keep Deacon Peter and his fellow deacons in our prayers between now and May 23rd.  The blessing of having a fellow parishioner ordained to the priesthood reminds us to pray always for more vocations.  Our Scriptures this Sunday help us see why the priesthood of Jesus Christ is so important.

However, sometimes it’s difficult to appreciate the depth of Jesus’ Priesthood.  We might think of His Priesthood in just one way:  that is, the ordained priesthood that we see at the altar at Sunday Mass.  But actually, there are three distinct forms in which Jesus lives out His Priesthood within His Church.

The first is in history:  that is, what Jesus accomplished when He walked this earth some 2000 years ago.  This is most especially true of what Jesus sacrificed for us sinners on Good Friday.  Jesus acted as a priest in offering His Self for us sinners on the Cross out of love for us.  Jesus acted as a priest in giving us the Eucharist the night before He died.

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So while the first form in which Jesus lives out His Priesthood is historical, the second and third are sacramental.  In the second and third, Jesus lives out His Priesthood through the lives of Christians:  through the members of His Mystical Body.  The second is the ordained priesthood, which Deacon Peter is preparing to enter into.  The third is called the baptismal priesthood, which every Christian enters into at the moment of baptism.

Today’s Second Reading points our attention towards the baptismal priesthood.  During the ritual of Baptism, the celebrant anoints the newly baptized person with Sacred Chrism.  At the same time, the celebrant says, “[Almighty God] now anoints you with the Chrism of salvation, so that you may remain as a member of Christ, priest, prophet and king, unto eternal life.”

It’s important to understand how much the baptismal priesthood and the ordained priesthood have in common.  However, it’s also important to understand how they’re different.

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There are two things that the baptismal priesthood and the ordained priesthood have in common.

The more important of these is that both are only possible because Jesus makes them so.  When an individual is baptized, Jesus by His grace makes it possible for that Christian to live her or his life through Jesus’ Priesthood.  When a man is ordained a priest, Jesus conforms that man to the life of Jesus Christ.  Once a man is ordained, when he carries out the sacraments, he acts in persona Christi:  “in the person of Christ”.

However, in the case of Baptism and in the case of the ordained priesthood, what happens is not a one-time occurrence.  It might be better to say that when these sacraments are received, Jesus establishes a link between Himself and the individual.  To use a modern metaphor:  you might say it’s like an internet connection between the Web and an individual computer.  The computer is always dependent upon the Web for internet access.  So when Jesus baptizes someone, or ordains a man, Jesus establishes a link, or a relationship, between Himself and the individual.

Through that on-going relationship, Jesus gives the power to make loving acts of sacrifice.  This power to make acts of loving sacrifice is the heart of both the baptismal priesthood and the ordained priesthood.  In fact, this is the second thing that the ordained priesthood and the baptismal priesthood have in common.  Both exist for the sake of making loving sacrifices.  Again:  both the ordained priesthood and the baptismal priesthood exist for the sake of making loving sacrifices.

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So given those similarities, what distinguishes these two forms of priesthood?  One important difference is the type of sacrifices that are made.

Those who are ordained priests offer their most important sacrifices within the walls of the church.  The ordained priest’s chief sacrifices are liturgical.  He offers sacrifice to God, and then he gives God’s grace—the fruit of the sacrifice—to God’s People.  The ordained priest offers the sacraments:  most importantly, the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass.  The ordained priest makes Christ present truly and substantially at the altar.

By contrast, the baptized person makes most of her or his sacrifices out in the world.  This begins in the home, and for those who live with family, these sacrifices are made for the sake of their families.  Of course, this also extends outside the home:  into the workplace, the marketplace, the community, and elsewhere.

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Consider all this from a practical perspective, with some statistics that are both sobering and hopeful.  Last year, in the entire country of Germany, there were 25 men ordained to the priesthood.[1]  Last year in the Diocese of Wichita, there were 51 seminarians, and six of them will be ordained to the priesthood this month. 

Many people ask why the Diocese of Wichita has so many ordinations year after year after year.  While there are many factors, the most often cited is the number of people in our diocese who pray in Eucharistic Adoration.  Both laypersons and priests sacrifice their time to pray in Eucharistic Adoration, before the Lord Jesus.  They pray to Him who, in the Eucharist, is our High Priest.  They pray to Him who, in the Eucharist, strengthens us to live lives of loving sacrifice.  They pray to Him for their families, and they pray for more vocations to the ordained priesthood.

In the Catechism, the Church teaches this:

“The Eucharist is ‘the source and summit of the Christian life’.  ‘The other sacraments, and indeed all [church] ministries and works of the apostolate, are bound up with the Eucharist and are oriented toward it.’”[2]

The Eucharist is “the source and summit of the Christian life”.  Therefore the Eucharist is the source and summit of Christ’s Priesthood within His Church.  For both the baptized faithful, and ordained priests, the closer they draw to the Eucharist—the closer they draw to the Sacrifice of the Mass, and the more they spend time in Eucharistic Adoration—the more they become like Christ, and so are able to allow Christ to love through their lives of sacrifice.

Jesus gave the Eucharist to His disciples at His Last Supper, on the night before He sacrificed Himself for sinful man.  Jesus gave the Eucharist to be an everlasting means of sharing in the power of His Self-Sacrifice on the Cross.  The Eucharist makes us present at Calvary on Good Friday.  Jesus through the Eucharist calls us to share in His sacrifice, so that we can share in His divine life.

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[1] https://www.pillarcatholic.com/p/how-priestly-formation-is-changing

[2] Catechism of the Catholic Church 1324, quoting Lumen Gentium 11 and Presbyterorum Ordinis 5.

The Fourth Sunday of Easter [A]
Acts 2:14,36-41  +  1 Peter 2:20-25  +  John 10:1-10
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 26, 2026

Throughout this past year, many people have turned their attention to the man elected Pope last May 8th.  What’s drawn the attention of many is the fact that he was born in the United States.  Less attention has been paid to the fact that he belongs to the religious order named after St. Augustine.  Saint Augustine was a bishop in northern Africa, then still part of the Roman Empire.  The members of the Order of St. Augustine follow what is called “the Rule of St. Augustine”, which he composed in the year A.D. 400.

Saint Augustine is regarded as the greatest theologian of the Church’s first thousand years (excepting, maybe, some of the apostles).  St. Augustine’s best-known work is called The Confessions.  This work is sometimes called the world’s first spiritual autobiography.

However, to call The Confessions just an autobiography would sell it short.  The Confessions does not focus only on Augustine.  It does not focus chiefly on Augustine.  The Confessions focuses chiefly upon the life of God.  The course of Augustine’s autobiography winds from his focus upon his own self, to his focus upon God.  That is to say, in the early part of his life, Augustine focused upon himself, his own interests, his own success, and his own satisfaction.  At the age of thirty-three, after many years of intense spiritual struggle and many mortal sins, Augustine was baptized.  He gave his life over to God, and he gave his life over to God’s interest in Augustine’s life.  In doing this, Augustine experienced the success, satisfaction, and peace that the world cannot give.

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In the iconography of the Church, every saint is portrayed with certain symbols that define his or her life of holiness.  Saint Peter, for example, is often portrayed in Christian art holding the Keys of the Kingdom.  Saint Boniface, the patron saint of Germany, is often portrayed bearing the axe he used to convert the pagans of that land.  Saint Augustine is often portrayed holding in his hand a burning heart:  a heart burning with the love of God.

That image of St. Augustine can help us appreciate the Scriptures on this Good Shepherd Sunday.  Every year on the Fourth Sunday of Easter, the Gospel Reading comes from John 10.  In this chapter of John, Jesus speaks of Himself as the Good Shepherd, and also as “the gate for the sheep”.  Because of his wayward youth, Augustine undoubtedly would have had a devotion to the image of Jesus as a Good Shepherd.  Augustine would have appreciated the words of today’s Second Reading:  “By his wounds you have been healed.  For you had gone astray like sheep, but you have now returned to the shepherd and guardian of your souls.”

In order to understand this Good Shepherd, each of us has to recognize ourselves as a wandering sheep, and ask why we wander.  Augustine spent many years of his life pondering this question, and his Confessions deal with this problem at length.  Let me share with you two short passages from St. Augustine’s Confessions.

The first passage is the very first paragraph of The Confessions.  In this passage, we hear the most famous sentence of the whole work (perhaps the most famous line written by St. Augustine):

“Great are You, O Lord, and greatly to be praised;
great is Your power, and of Your wisdom there is no end.
And man, being a part of Your creation, desires to praise You —
man, who bears about with him his mortality, the witness of his sin,
even the witness that You resist the proud,
— yet man, this part of Your creation, desires to praise You.
You move us to delight in praising You;
for You have made us for Yourself,
and our hearts are restless until they rest in You.”[1]

The second passage is from late in The Confessions, after the autobiographical section.  After reviewing his life, with all its sins, and all the lost opportunities to accept God’s grace, Augustine writes this:

“Too late have I loved you, O Beauty so ancient, O Beauty so new.
Too late have I loved you!
You were within me but I was outside myself, and there I sought you!
In my weakness, I ran after the beauty of the things you have made.
You were with me, and I was not with you.”[2]

Those passages reveal St. Augustine’s insights into the fallen human nature of us wandering sheep.  Our human hearts are restless because they’re torn between sin and grace.  They’re torn between living for our self and living for God.

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With that in mind, reflect upon today’s Responsorial Psalm:  the twenty-third Psalm.  More specifically, reflect upon the refrain of today’s Responsorial Psalm:  “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want.”  Even more specifically, reflect upon the refrain’s very last word:  “want”.  What does the Psalmist mean when he prays:  “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall want”?

For a long time, I misunderstood the meaning of this word “want”, and therefore, the meaning of this line of the 23rd Psalm.  For a long time, I thought that the word “want” meant “desire”.  I thought that this line meant that when I follow the Lord as my shepherd, there is nothing I shall desire.  But that’s not what the word means here.  In the 23rd Psalm, the word “want” means “lack”.  Now in modern English, we don’t use the word “want” to mean “lack” as often as we use the word “want” to mean “desire”.  But to give an example, the word “want” in the sense of “lack” figures in the old adage that goes like this:

“For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost; / for want of a horseshoe the horse was lost; / for want of a horse the rider was lost; / for want of a rider the battle was lost; / and for want of the battle the kingdom was lost. / The kingdom was lost for want of a nail.”

So in the sense of “want” that means “lack”, we pray in the 23rd Psalm:  “The Lord is my shepherd; there is nothing I shall lack.”

Why is this verse important for us wandering sheep to reflect upon?  One reason is that many of Jesus’ sheep are wandering because they think that “want” means “desire”.  That is to say, many of Jesus’ sheep think that the 23rd Psalm means that if the Lord is my shepherd, there is nothing I shall desire, because God will fulfill all of my desires.  You might say that he’s sort of like Santa Claus.  I tell God what I desire, and he fulfills my wish list.  But that’s not who God is, and that’s not what the 23rd Psalm prays.

The 23rd Psalm prays that because the Lord is my Shepherd, there is nothing I shall lack.  I shall not be lacking in life.  So the key distinction is between our desires and our needs.

Augustine struggled for more than thirty years because he didn’t understand that distinction.  Augustine’s heart was given over to his desires, instead of to his needs.  When a person gives his life over to his desires, instead of to his needs, his life is buffeted by desires, because in this world, there is no end to desires. 

What Augustine realized is that each of our desires need to be submitted to—subjected to—the Good Shepherd and His will.  He, rather than yourself, is the Shepherd of your life, leading you from earth to Heaven.  He, rather than yourself, is best able to distinguish your desires from your needs.

What’s more, the Good Shepherd, rather than yourself, is best able to order your needs, putting first what needs to go first.  The Good Shepherd is the One who shepherds us by reminding us of the lesson He first taught in the home of Martha and Mary:  that in the end, there is only one thing truly needed, and that only God can meet that need.

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[1] St. Augustine of Hippo, The Confessions, I,1,1.  < https://www.newadvent.org/fathers/1101.htm >

[2] The Confessions, X,27,38.  < https://melbournecatholic.org/news/late-have-i-loved-you-st-augustine >

The Third Sunday of Easter [A]
Acts 2:14,22-33  +  1 Peter 1:17-21  +  Luke 24:13-35
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 19, 2026

St. Luke the Evangelist explains at the start of today’s Gospel passage that it’s set on “[t]hat very day, the first day of the week”.  This is another way of saying that today’s Gospel passage is set on the day of Jesus’ Resurrection.

On that original Easter Sunday, “two of Jesus’ disciples were going to a village seven miles from Jerusalem called Emmaus”.  These two disciples symbolize you and me.  Like these two disciples, you and I at times wander away from God.  In the Gospel passage, the two disciples are walking away from Jerusalem.  They are walking away from the scene of Jesus’ Passion, Death, and Resurrection.  In other words, they’re moving on with their lives.  Though they’ve heard some rumor that Jesus was still alive, they have not put any faith in the story.  After all, they’re walking away from Jerusalem:  away from any chance of encountering this Jesus who supposedly had risen from the dead.

So we need to ask:  how often are we like these two disciples?  Rather than holding fast to our faith and making it the center of our lives, we walk away from opportunities to encounter Jesus.  In today’s Gospel passage, we hear that these two disciples were “conversing and debating… about all the things that had occurred” the past several days.  In other words, they’re talking about Jesus, but they’re also walking away from Jesus.

Yet while these two doubting disciples were walking away from Jerusalem, what happened?  “Jesus Himself drew near and walked with them”.  Here we see Jesus acting as the Good Shepherd.  Next Sunday we will hear Jesus describe Himself as the Good Shepherd who seeks out those who have wandered away from Him.  But today, we see Jesus living out this mission.  We see Jesus acting as the Good Shepherd.

Now, to put what Jesus is doing here into perspective, consider:  when the events of today’s Gospel Reading start, how many thousands of Jesus’ flock are dwelling within the gates of Jerusalem?  Yet here is Jesus, walking seven miles out of His way in order to bring these two wandering sheep back through the Sheepgate, and back into the fold.

Reflecting upon today’s Gospel passage, we ought to take comfort if we ourselves sometimes wander away from Him and His teachings.  We can take comfort in the fact that the patience, compassion, and love which Jesus shows to these two doubting disciples are the very same patience, compassion, and love that He has for each of us.  It does not matter where or how far we might wander away.  He seeks us out.

In today’s Gospel passage, the Good Shepherd asks these two straying sheep, “What are you discussing as you walk along?”  These disciples do not recognize their Good Shepherd, or know His voice.  So they recount to Him what their hope had been:  “that Jesus would be the one to redeem Israel.”  

Here’s a key point.  The doubting disciples believe that their hope has been shattered.  They believe this because Jesus had died.  The death of Jesus shattered their hope.  It seems obvious to these doubting disciples that someone who has died can do nothing for anyone. 

Against their false belief about their shattered hope, Jesus speaks harshly:  “Oh, how foolish you are!  How slow of heart to believe….  Was it not necessary that the Christ should suffer these things and enter into His glory?”  Jesus is directing His disciples’ attention to one of the most important truths of the Gospel.

The Cross—the death of Jesus—cannot destroy our hope.  Instead, the Cross of Jesus IS our hope.  That is why we put the crucifix on display in our homes, in our workplaces, and above the very center of our sanctuaries.  The crucifix is the visual expression of the truth that’s at the heart of our Catholic Faith:  that Christ’s death is our life.

So then Jesus goes through the entire body of Jewish Scripture with these doubting disciples.  He “interpreted to them what referred to Him” in the Old Testament.  He showed them that the Christ would have to suffer death in order to be “the one to redeem Israel”, and not only Israel, but—in time—the entire world.

The doubting disciples, now starting to believe, invite this man—still unknown to them—to stay with them once they reach their goal.  But this man, the Risen Lord, has another goal in mind.  He stays with them, but “while He was with them at table, he took bread, said the blessing, broke it, and gave it to them.” 

These four actions of Jesus—taking bread, saying the blessing over it, breaking it, and giving it to the disciples—might sound like ordinary actions.  However, when we compare this verse from today’s Gospel passage to St. Luke’s account of the Last Supper, we see that the language is the same.  St. Luke, in describing Jesus’ actions at the Last Supper, uses these same four phrases.

This connection between the Eucharist that Jesus instituted at the Last Supper and His actions at Emmaus in today’s Gospel passage is made even more clear by the last sentence of today’s Gospel passage:  “the two recounted what had taken place on the way and how he was made known to them in the breaking of the bread.”  This same phrase—“the breaking of the bread”—also occurs in the fifth book of the New Testament, Acts of the Apostles.  In Acts of the Apostles, the phrase “the breaking of the bread” describes the early Church’s celebration of the Eucharist.  St. Luke the Evangelist, the author of today’s Gospel passage, was also the author of Acts of the Apostles.

So when Jesus towards the end of today’s Gospel passage takes bread, says the blessing, breaks it, and gives it to the disciples, we reach the goal of today’s Gospel passage.

“With that their eyes were opened and they recognized Him”.  They recognized Jesus in the Eucharist.  Here is the sacrament that is the center of our Catholic Faith.  In the Holy Eucharist, God is with us in the Flesh.  In the Holy Eucharist, the Sacrifice of Jesus on the Cross is made present in our midst.

However, if you recognize Christ in the Eucharist, who is it exactly that you consider Him to be?  Is Christ only a good shepherd, drawing you closer to His side for comfort and protection?  He wants to be even more for you.  Is Christ only a teacher, interpreting the Scriptures for you?  He wants to be even more for you.  The Messiah who suffered and died for you on the Cross is also your Lord and your God.  He is the One who created you, and the One who wants to lead you along His Way.

How often do we wonder during the week if God is with us?  How often during the week do we feel like God has abandoned us?  In fact, He is always there for us:  we simply do not recognize His Presence in our midst.  How often do we feel weak and unable to live up to the demands of our Christian Faith?  Here in the Eucharist is the greatest source of all our spiritual strength.  Jesus wants us to worthily receive His Body and Blood, in order to receive the graces that we need to be loving during the week both to God and neighbor, loving with the same depth of love with which God loves each of us.

The Second Sunday of Easter — Divine Mercy Sunday [A]
Acts 2:42-47  +  1 Peter 1:3-9  +  John 20:19-31
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 12, 2026

Why is the Second Sunday of Easter celebrated as Divine Mercy Sunday?  Why not celebrate Divine Mercy Sunday on the fifth Sunday of Easter?  Or, for that matter, the second Sunday of Lent?  Or the twenty-fourth Sunday in Ordinary Time?  This Sunday’s Scriptures answer the question.  Consider first today’s Responsorial Psalm, and then today’s Gospel passage.

“Give thanks to the Lord for He is good, His love is everlasting.”  This is the refrain for today’s Psalm:  it is Psalm 118, verse 1.  This is one of the verses of Scripture that you can end up scratching your head over, if you consult different Catholic translations of this verse into English.  If you look up this verse in one Catholic translation, the last phrase of this verse is:  “His steadfast love endures for ever.”  But if you turn then to another Catholic translation of Psalm 118:1, in the last phrase you hear this:  “His mercy endures forever.”

These different translations reflect an important truth of our Catholic Faith.  God’s mercy is His love.  We might even go so far to say that that’s the message of Divine Mercy Sunday:  God’s mercy is His love.

Of course, we need to make a distinction.  God’s love does sometimes take other forms.  Mercy is only one of the forms that God’s love takes.

After all, “in the beginning”, before Adam and Eve and their Original Sin, there never had been any mercy because there never had been sin.  Mercy exists only in the face of sin.  From all eternity, before God created anything, there was not mercy, because there was only God Himself, and God is love.  But when sin entered the world, God responded by bestowing His love in the form of mercy.

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So with that in mind, consider today’s Gospel passage.  This beautiful passage from the 20th chapter of the Gospel according to St. John gives us the origin of the Sacrament of Confession.  One of the most important truths that this passage reveals is that it was on the very night following His Resurrection that Jesus gave the Sacrament of Confession to His Church.

This timing is definitely not a coincidence.  This is a providential part of God’s plan of salvation history.  The Sacrament of Confession is the Christian’s key to unlocking his or her potential for holiness, and so also his or her potential for sharing his faith in Jesus’ Divine Mercy.

To understand this better, keep in mind that Jesus gave His disciples a simple message about His Gospel.  He explained that what God wants from His followers can be summed up in two commands:  love God, and love your neighbor.

So, if God’s mercy is His love, what does that tell us about God’s two commands to us?  Today’s Scriptures reveal to us that to love God is to accept His divine mercy, and to love our neighbor is to bestow His divine mercy.  Think of an image from your student days in science class:  the simple electrical circuit.  No matter how much juice is in storage, ready and able to give power, if the circuit is open, you break the flow of electricity.  That open circuit reflects what happens when we’re willing to accept God’s divine mercy, but not to bestow it on others.

You can think of this in terms of the prayer that Jesus taught us:  the Our Father.  The Our Father ends with several petitions that we make to the Father.  Most of us don’t realize how dangerous one of these petitions is.  We beg God the Father in these words:  “forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us”.  That tiny word “as” is like the switch in the electrical circuit:  with it we either open or close the circuit of mercy.  If we do not forgive those who trespass against us—if we harbor grudges and are unwilling to reconcile with our sibling, spouse, parent, or any other neighbor—then every time we pray the Our Father, we are petitioning God not to forgive us.  Why would we ask God not to forgive us?  It does not make sense?  Neither does asking God to show mercy towards us, when we are unwilling to show mercy to others.

At the end of the Sacrament of Confession, in one of the optional conclusions the priest says, “Give thanks to the Lord, for He is good”:  those words are the start of today’s Psalm refrain.  It’s up to the person going to Confession to conclude that verse in both his words and actions:  “for His mercy endures forever.”

Easter Sunday of the Resurrection of the Lord
Acts 10:34,37-43  +  Colossians 3:1-4 [or 1 Corinthians 5:6-8]  +  John 20:1-9
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
April 5, 2026

Tomorrow if you go to Walmart, you’re likely to see the store decorated for the Fourth of July.  In most of the secular world, there is an attention deficit.

But God wants us to enjoy this celebration of Our Lord’s Resurrection.  God wants us to celebrate this Easter joy the way that we enjoy the best meal we’ve ever eaten; the way that we enjoy the best evening of conversation we’ve ever had.  God wants us to enjoy Easter by luxuriating in it.  God wants us not to turn the page tomorrow and forget about the mystery of Jesus rising from the dead.

God wants us to celebrate the Resurrection of Jesus for fifty days:  seven weeks plus one more day.  The last day of this season of celebrating the Resurrection will fall on Sunday, May 24 (the day before Memorial Day).  Between today and May 24, God wants us to “rest” in the joy of Jesus’ Resurrection.

Consider this word “rest”.  This word “rest” means a lot of different things to a lot of different persons.  To a three-year-old, the last thing he wants to do is take a nap, and he’ll let you know that.  To someone older, whose hair is a different color than when in school (or who doesn’t have as much hair as when in school), rest is something prized, sought after, and even snuck in wherever and whenever possible.  Then again, there’s the “rest” that we wish upon our dearly departed:  we pray that they will “rest in peace”.

In contrast to all of those kinds of “rest”, there is the rest that God is calling us to during these fifty days of Easter.  What is this kind of rest?

To see what this “Easter rest” is, we have to go back to “the beginning”:  not to the day of Jesus’ Resurrection, but many thousands of years before, “in the beginning”, when God created the heavens and the earth.

In six days God created the heavens and the earth.  Then, on the seventh day, God rested.  We might be tempted to think that God on that seventh day acted like we would if we were in His divine shoes.  But God does not rest as we rest.  When God “rests”, He delights, He rejoices, He exults.  On the seventh day, God rested in His creation, He was like a grandparent spending a day surrounded by children and grandchildren, delighting in the goodness of those lives:  that creation.  On the seventh day God rested in His creation, because He found it good, and very good.

Another way to consider this sense of “rest” is connected to the word “arrested”: not in the sense that a policeman arrests a criminal, but in a more personal sense. Imagine that you go on pilgrimage to Rome, and in visiting the Sistine Chapel, your attention is “arrested” by the fresco of the Last Judgment. It’s almost as if you are within the scene portrayed. The artistry transports you, and you “rest” within that sacred work.

This helps us understand the rest into which God is calling us.  He wants us to rest with Him, in His Presence, and in fact, within Him.  He wants us to enter into His rest [cf. Ps 95:11 and Heb 4:11].  We enter into His rest by placing faith in Christ and His power over sin and death:  by letting Him live His life within us, instead of us making our lives about ourselves and our own works.

During these fifty days of the Easter Season, we do not just celebrate over and over for fifty times Jesus rising from the dead.  We celebrate what Jesus chose to do after rising from the dead.  For forty days He appeared to His disciples to prepare them for what was coming next.  After forty days, the Risen Jesus ascended to Heaven, to sit at the Father’s Right Hand.  After ten more days, God the Father and God the Son sent down from Heaven their Holy Spirit.

This Holy Spirit, who is the Love of the Father and the Son, is what makes us sinners like Christ.  This Holy Spirit is the Gift whose Life destroys the power of sin and death.  This Holy Spirit is what allows Christ to live within us, and to live through us.  So ask God during these fifty days to open your heart further to the grace of the Holy Spirit, to make your life more like the life of Jesus Christ, who has risen from the dead so that you can rest in the beauty of God’s merciful Love.

Palm Sunday of the Passion of the Lord
Matthew 21:1-11  +  Isaiah 50:4-7  +  Philippians 2:6-11  +  Matthew 26:14—27:66
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
March 29, 2026

Jesus became a slave to sin for the sake of mankind.  Jesus, like His Mother, never committed sin, or inherited Original Sin.  Yet Saint Paul in his Second Letter to the Corinthians states something even more profound about Jesus.  St. Paul writes that God the Father “made [Jesus] to be sin who did not know sin” [2 Corinthians 5:21].  We heard that in the Second Reading on Ash Wednesday.  It’s in the light of this truth that today, on Palm Sunday, we need to look on Jesus as a slave to sin.

Here’s the difference between Jesus and us:  Jesus freely accepted the yoke of the Cross.  On the other hand, sinful human beings—stretching from Adam and Eve to us—always accept slavery freely.  In other words, by sinning we lose our freedom.  The devil whispered to Eve, “You shall be like gods!”  Had he spoken the truth he would have told them “You shall be slaves!”

Jesus, however, “though he was in the form of God, / did not regard equality with God / something to be grasped. / Rather, he emptied himself, / taking the form of a slave….”  Consider those words—from today’s Second Reading—in the light of today’s Gospel passages.

This is the only Sunday when there are two Gospel passages proclaimed at Sunday Mass.  The first we heard before the Entrance Procession.  It’s a very optimistic, hopeful passage, proclaiming the triumphal entrance of the Messiah into Jerusalem.  For century after century the Jews had longingly waited for the coming of the Messiah, and now Jesus seemed to make clear, by His entrance into the royal city, that He was the One.

But very soon after He arrived, things began to go downhill.  The second Gospel proclamation on Palm Sunday stands in contrast to the first:  not only in length, but also in tenor.  The optimistic triumph of Jesus’ procession into Jerusalem stands in contrast to the spite-filled mockery of Jesus’ recession out of Jerusalem to the top of Calvary.

Jesus’ descent into slavery is progressive.  We can hear this progress—or rather, regress—in our own words.  That is, when you see the Passion in the format shown in your hand missal or in the parish missalette—divided into spoken parts like the script of a play—the crowd’s words reveal Jesus’ descent.  These words reveal the fickleness of the heart held slave to sin.

Jesus, although He was and is God, did not save Himself from the Cross.  In this, He reveals to us what life is all about.  Life is about love.  Love is about an other, not about my self.

The Fifth Sunday of Lent [A]
Ezekiel 37:12-14  +  Romans 8:8-11  +  John 11:1-45
St. Anthony’s Catholic Church, Garden Plain, KS
March 22, 2026

There’s an interesting word in the last sentence of today’s Gospel passage.  Listen to this sentence again:  “Now many of the Jews who had come to Mary and seen what he had done began to believe in him.”  The word in this sentence that’s especially interesting is “began”:  they “began to believe in him.”

There are many different English translations of this verse.  The translation used at Holy Mass is the only translation I could find that uses the word “began” in this sentence.  Most of the other translations simply say that they “believed in him.”

You might not think that that’s a significant difference.  But in God’s Word, small things can point to large truths.  In this case, the translation we heard a few moments ago highlights the truth that believing in Jesus is a journey.

Having faith in Jesus is a journey with a beginning, middle, and end.  Along the way there are many potholes, speedbumps, detours, and forks in the road, with no Google Maps to guide you.  Faith grows and diminishes.  At times it’s weak and at others, it’s strong.  Some on the journey don’t make it to the end.

Consider some of the people Jesus interacts with in today’s Gospel passage.  In terms of faith, they range across a spectrum: each represents yourself at a different point in your spiritual life. In each case in this Gospel passage, there’s confusion in what people say about Jesus and Lazarus, even people who might be expected to have a lot of faith.  There’s even some confusion because of what Jesus does and says.  All of these show us that even people with faith who are following Jesus face challenges along the way, including both from their own lack of faith at times, as well as from the challenges that Jesus throws at them.

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Consider first some people at the short end of the spectrum.  These were people who did not know much about Jesus.  Towards the end of the passage, after Jesus weeps over the death of Lazarus, some of the Jews ask, “Could not the one who opened the eyes of the blind man have done something so that this man would not have died?”  They’re questioning what Jesus did; or to be more exact, what Jesus did not do.  Their question is reasonable, and reflects your own life as a disciple.  It’s important that you ask questions about your faith—about what God is or is not doing in your life—even if it seems like you’re challenging God and His ways (after all, God has big shoulders:  He can handle your questions and your doubts).

So now shift a bit down the spectrum of faith-bearing, and consider some people who certainly did know something about Jesus.  Toward the start of the Gospel passage, Jesus’ own disciples are confused.  Jesus speaks about Lazarus’ death, yet the disciples think that Jesus is speaking about ordinary sleep.

This sort of confusion is common in St. John’s account of the Gospel.  There’s often in John confusion—on the one hand—about the spiritual realities that Jesus speaks about, and—on the other hand—the earthly understanding that others ascribe to Jesus’ words.  The most famous example is likely the conversation that Jesus has with Nicodemus in John 3.  Jesus is wanting to teach Nicodemus about being “born again”, but Nicodemus understands Jesus in earthly terms.

The confusion that’s illustrated by Nicodemus and—in today’s Gospel passage—by Jesus’ own disciples, reflects something in your own life as a disciple.  At times you confuse the spiritual with the earthly.  At times you confuse the importance of the spiritual with the importance of what’s earthly.  Granted, if you have a family, there’s a true need to be concerned with earthly affairs:  if you didn’t, you would fail to honor the sacred vows you made at the altar when you were married.  Nonetheless, each of us, when we’re honest with ourselves, have to admit that sometimes we give earthly matters more attention than they’re due.  Sometimes this is because we confuse earthly “wants” with “needs”.  Sometimes this is because it’s easy to rest on our laurels, and enjoy the comforts of earthly life, setting aside the difficult work of following Jesus in faith.

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Then again, to be fair—both to yourself as a disciple, and to those in today’s Gospel passage—it is true that Jesus sometimes says and does things that don’t at first seem to make sense.  For example, in today’s Gospel passage, when Jesus hears that Lazarus is ill, instead of rushing to be with Mary, Martha, and Lazarus, Jesus remains for two days in the place where He was:  in other words, at a distance from the suffering of those He loved.  Later, Jesus declares to His disciples, “Lazarus has died.  And I am glad for you that I was not there.”  It would be hard to blame the disciples if they scratched their heads in confusion.  Sometimes we ourselves wonder why God does—or does not—act in our lives as we want, or as we think He ought.

Still, we might argue that these disciples were not among His closest friends, like Martha and Mary.  Here we shift further on the spectrum of those who bear faith.  In this passage, Jesus speaks at greater length with Martha and Mary, the sisters of Lazarus. The evangelist tells us that Jesus loved Mary, Martha, and Lazarus.  After the death of Lazarus, Martha and Mary were heartbroken.  However, they had faith in Jesus, just as they trusted in Jesus’ love for them and their brother.

Martha and Mary in their interactions with Jesus in this passage reveal something to us about our own spiritual lives at deeper levels of both greater closeness to Jesus, and greater suffering because of loving Him, and having greater expectations of Him.

It’s understandable that Martha and Mary, at separate points in today’s Gospel passage, say exactly the same words to Jesus:  “Lord, if you had been here, my brother would not have died.”  Still, their words express a lack of faith and understanding.  Of course it is in fact true that if the Lord Jesus had been there, their brother would not have died.  Yet Martha and Mary, like yourself at times in your own spiritual life, do not see the Lord’s larger purpose.  They do not understand what Jesus meant when He said:  Lazarus’ “illness is not to end in death, but is for the glory of God, that the Son of God may be glorified through it.”

We might wonder about Jesus saying that Lazarus’ illness was not to end in death, because Lazarus’ illness did result in death.  It just didn’t end there.  It ended with something more powerful than death.  Jesus brought Lazarus from death to life on earth again, not just for Lazarus’ sake, but also for the sake of those around Lazarus, so that they might grow in faith.  Jesus worked this miracle to help them, and yourself, to believe that the Lord’s power is more powerful than any suffering in your life.  If you remain steadfast to following the Lord in faith, He will lead you to an end that is eternal and without suffering of any kind.