January 26, 2025

3^rd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Neh 8:2-4a, 5-6, 8-10

1Cor 12: 12-30

Lk 1:1-4

By Br. Michael Taffe, OSB

In Nehemiah, Ezra the priest reads the law to the people gathered in Jerusalem. This happens after the Babylonian exile so that the people can be brought back to the correct worship of God. The people listen ‘attentively’ from daybreak until midday to the instruction of the priests and Levites. They learn that they have not acted rightly, weeping as they listen. Then the wonderful ending: the people are told not to be saddened but to eat rich food and drink sweet drinks to enable them to rejoice in the word of the Lord that has been given to them!

Paul, in first Corinthians, continues this teaching of a community. God has created each of us uniquely and, thus, Christians (not even monks) are meant to be cookie-cutter images of each other. All have different gifts and abilities; we are asked to contribute to the community from the gifts and roles that Christ has given us (and not to worry so much about those that we do not have!). This way, we have greater impact on the world as a community than as a mere collection of individuals. In addition, we treat each other with dignity and respect that comes from our common baptism in Christ. 

In Luke today, Jesus reads from the scroll of the Prophet Isaiah in the synagogue in Nazareth. Prophecies in the Hebrew Scriptures promised a Messiah (Christ) God would send to the people to be their savior. After Jesus reads the prophecy, he announces that the prophecy has been fulfilled through him. Jesus is telling the people that they are to believe in him, the One promised by God as the Messiah, the Christ! 

In all these cases people are taught our task is to learn together in community. In our case that means bearing witness to Jesus the Christ our savior and to do so with joy and rejoicing.

January 19, 2025

2^nd Sunday in Ordinary Time

Is 62:1-5

1Cor 12:4-11

Jn 2:1-11

By Br. Bertrand Vogelweide, OSB

Zion, the dictionary tells us, is a synonym for the city of Jerusalem, or, by extension, the Land of Israel. The Scriptures often refer to Zion as the Temple in Jerusalem. In other places, Scriptural Zion implies not only the Land of Israel but the promised and awaited World to Come. 

Zion is mentioned 152 times in the Hebrew Bible, and one of the mentions is in Isaiah 62: 1-5, which today makes clear that Zion is a place loved by God. Is that loved place the Land of Israel? Such is hard to believe—that God loves the place at all—given the current strife in the Middle East, and the long history of wars in the Holy Land. Most would find it easier to think that Zion is godforsaken, certainly not God-loved. 

Let’s think about ourselves, too. Does God really love me when I experience so much trial and struggle? God doesn’t seem to answer my prayers. Should I turn to preachers such as Joel Osteen who focus on a God who gives to those he loves, a worldly prosperity, that the reward of obedient and pious Christians is material gain? 

A more mature theology we find throughout the Bible. “The Lord disciplines the one he loves,” we read in Hebrews 12: 6. “He chastens everyone he accepts as his own.” God does this, as he did with Job.

Religion is not supposed to be about us but about God. “If anyone supposes he knows something, he does not yet know as he ought to know,” Paul writes, 1 Cor. 8: 1. “But if one loves God, one is known by him.” Let us, then, love God.

January 12, 2025

Baptism of the Lord

Is 42:1-4, 6-7

Acts 10:34-38

Lk 3:15-16, 21-22

By Br. Symeon Rubbelke, OSB

Today, the crowd has very different expectations from what they are getting. The people come to see a great ascetic cleansing them from their sins and calling them to repentance. How disappointing to discover their hopes are not fulfilled. They were hoping this man to be their salvation, their messiah. 

John responds “A greater than I will come.” How strange to these who witnesses. What a let down. Now another man, one of the baptized, someone who seemed normal and unassuming enough, all of a sudden steals the show. A fantastic phenomenon: the Spirit in bodily form descends upon him, and a voice from heaven say, “You are my son, I have begotten you this day, with you I am well pleased.”

In a similar way for us, it may seem just as strange to be washed of original sin in the waters of Baptism and invited into the life of the Trinity. Also how strange that we speak to this God, laying out our whole self to him in honesty, when already he knows what we would say before speaking it. Yet this is the way Christ has laid out for us. How simple, how quaint, how easy. What excuse is there to not follow His footsteps? Maybe I wanted someone who would take away my afflictions? 

Yet, how much sweeter that we have someone who walks through them with us, not as spectator, but as companion, and what's more, makes us free of them.  Let’s remember the passage you have been faithful in small matters, I will give you greater responsibilities. Come, join in your master's joy. Let's trust in that with great confidence!

January 5, 2025

Epiphany Sunday

Is 60:1-6

Eph 3:2-3a, 5-6

Mt 2:1-12

By Br. Aaron Jensen, OSB          

Today, as at Christmas, what a powerful image: light shines out of darkness. The star leads seekers, even Gentile seekers—that includes us—to the one who at his presentation in the temple will be called by Simeon, “The light of revelation to the nations.” But this child is light for us from his first moments, in deepest night and the most abject conditions. 

Thus Isaiah encourages us to arise, shine out, for our light has come, despite the fact that night still covers the earth and darkness the people. Likewise, John the Evangelist, in the Prologue to his Gospel read on Christmas day, confesses that though the Word, the true light, is coming into the world, the world does not know or accept him. Nonetheless, this light shines in the dark and the darkness cannot overcome it.

The world in our time is full of unhappiness, violence and hatred just as the world in Jesus’ day was full of darkness. This is not difficult to discern on the grand scale, in the world around us. But we could spend time looking at the darkness inside us and the many ways in which we spread darkness and obscure the light of Christ. Let us instead fix our attention on this feast of great joy and brilliant light, and rejoice in that. Let us imitate Isaiah and St. John and the host of our holy ancestors in the faith and share Christ’s light in the firm hope engendered by his birth.