Pastor Notes March 26, 2023
-
March 27, 2023Our Lenten Reconciliation Service & Confessions are this Sunday: 1:00pm at Sacred Heart Church, and 2:30pm at St. Malachy Church. Of course, the Sacrament is offered prior to Mass at St. Malachy, and before the 5:30pm Mass at Sacred Heart and after the 10:00am. You may call the parish office to set up a time if it is more convenient. For various reasons, we are hesitant to receive the healing grace of the Sacrament of Reconciliation. However, in these final days of Lent approaching Easter, this Sacrament is a profound step towards a personal renewal of faith, and receiving the joy promised with Christ’s resurrection. Pope Francis’ words provide the inspiration to receive the Sacrament of Reconciliation and the unburdening of our sins.
“The Sacrament of Reconciliation is a Sacrament of healing. When I [Pope Francis] go to confession, it is in order to be healed, to heal my soul, to heal my heart and to be healed of some wrongdoing. . . .The Sacrament of Penance and Reconciliation flows directly from the Paschal Mystery. . . .Like the merciful father in the parable of the prodigal son, God is eager to forgive. . . .Each time we go to confession, God embraces us. God rejoices! . . .Forgiveness is not the fruit of our own efforts but rather a gift, it is a gift of the Holy Spirit who fills us with the wellspring of mercy and of grace that flows unceasingly from the open heart of the Crucified and Risen Christ.” May you risk the opportunity to receive this gift of grace prior to Easter, regardless of how long ago you last received.
Our last three gospel passages this Lenten Season, are from the gospel of John. Longer passages, but profoundly human, filled with mercy, colorful and descriptive, and giving Jesus a ‘human face’ so to speak. In today’s passage with his friends Martha and Mary, the gospel describes a deeply human face of Jesus: When Mary came to where Jesus was and saw him, she fell at his feet and said to him, “Lord, if you had been here my brother would not have died.” When Jesus saw her weeping and the Jews who had come with her weeping, He became perturbed and deeply troubled, and said, “Where have you laid him?” They said to him, “Sir, come and see.” And Jesus wept. Though we depict him often with a halo, John’s passages of Jesus describes our Savior with all the human emotions we recognize within ourselves. Such is the distinctive description of Jesus’ humanity in the words of the late Christian writer Frederick Buechner.
“He had a face. . . .Whoever he was or was not, whoever he thought he was, whoever he had become in the memories of men since and will go on becoming for as long as men remember him—exalted, sentimentalized, debunked, made and remade to the measure of each generation's desire, dread, indifference—he was a man once, whatever else he may been. And he had a man’s face, a human face. . . .Like you and me he had a face his life gave shape to and that shaped his life and others’ lives, and with part of ourselves I think we might turn away from the mystery of that face, that life, as much of the time we turn away from the mystery of life itself. With part of ourselves I think we might avoid meeting his real eyes, if such a meeting were possible, the way that at certain moments we avoid meeting our own eyes in mirrors because for better or worse they threaten to tell us more than we want to know.
Nobody tells us what he looked like, yet of course the New Testament itself is what he looked like, and we read his face there in the faces of all the ones he touched or failed to: in Peter’s face as he sat at dawn by the high priest’s fire and hear the cock crow. . .or in the face of Judas leaning forward to plant his kiss in the moonlit garden; in the face of the leper, the wiseman, the centurion, Mary’s face. You glimpse the mark of his face in the faces of everyone who ever looked toward him or away from him, which means finally of course that you glimpse the mark of him also in your face too.
The face of Jesus is a face that belongs to us the way our past belongs to us. According to St. Paul, the face of Jesus is our own face finally, the face we will all come to look like a little when the kingdom comes and we are truly ourselves at last, truly the sisters and brothers of one another and the children of God. What words do we face him with? Maybe the best are the words the Bible ends with: Come Lord Jesus.” (The Faces of Jesus; 1974)
“And Jesus wept.”
(I apologize for the long excerpt from Frederick Buechner, but his spiritual writings have had a profound affect on me since I was introduced to his works by my seminary rector at St. John’s— many years ago.)
We are looking for someone to clean the parish office once a week, for a couple hours. I thank Cheryl Mordini for her years of service keeping our office clean and welcoming as she takes on another part time job at the new hardware store in Madrid. Please call the office if interested or have questions. Thank You