‘Faith and Recognition’: could these two words together encapsulate what the Easter season calls us to? From the second Sunday after Easter where we have the appearance before Thomas whose weak faith takes a huge leap when he recognizes Jesus in and through his wounds. We recognize through hearing and we recognize through seeing. Many of the resurrection gospels show us this: ‘They recognized him through the breaking of the bread’. When the risen One says ‘Mary’ at the tomb, Mary Magdalene, through the voice calling her name, suddenly recognizes the person standing before her as Jesus.
Sisters and brothers, we are being ‘summoned’; we are summoned to an ‘encounter’, to a living encounter with Jesus. This summoning, as Fr. Casey told us on Palm Sunday, asks that we come with our whole being: ‘our minds, our hearts and our feet’. The backdrop for our encounter with Jesus during these days of the Holy Triduumis God’s love. With Jesus love will always have the last word and will be his orientation towards us as we meet him in this present moment. The horizon of God’s love that Jesus embodies, which is brought to the encounter, meets the present horizon of our lives. We encounter the expansive horizon of Jesus’ life and consciousness: an horizon, which embodies the immensity of God’s love and truth and overshadows the very limited horizon of our lives where we strive to expand our minds and hearts to be more Christ like in our everyday living and in the choices we make.
The gospel for this Sunday is the woman caught in adultery (Jn 8:1-11). It is a gospel passage that moves me deeply for once again we find Jesus communicating an iconoclastic image of God. Jesus’ initial response to those who accuse the woman caught in adultery is ‘silence’: he bends down into the silence, pauses and waits. (Above Navajo Sand Painting)
The Sunday’s gospel of the ‘Prodigal Son’ is a very rich parable and only appears in the gospel of Luke. For a reflection on this gospel one has multiple points of entry or windows to apprehend all that Jesus is trying to communicate. Parenthetically this tells us the profoundness of the parable as a form of literary genre where multiple meanings are contained in one story and those meanings are ever new and fresh, like a poem is for the reader.
There are two pericopes in today’s gospel. The second is a parable and could be seen as a symbolic commentary on the first pericope. Jesus taught most often in parables. A parable contains metaphors, which communicate a deeper spiritual message. The metaphors Jesus often used to bring forth his teaching were images of farming and growth.
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