Continuing from this introductory material. John 7:37-39 and 20:19-23, RSV-CE On the last day of the feast,b the great day,a Jesus stood up and proclaimed, “If any one thirst, let him come to me and drink.c He who believes in me, as the scripture has said, ‘Out of his heartd shall flow rivers of living water.’”e Now this he said about the Spirit, which those who believed in him were to receivef; for as yet the Spirit had not been given,g because... Read more
Set Your Mind on Things Above Belarusian ikon of Pentecost, c. 1500. Photo by Wikimedia user Khomielka, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source). Two distinct Gospels are prescribed for this solemnity: one for the vigil (from John 7, set during the festival of Sukkot) and one for the day proper (from John 20, immediately following the Resurrection). Since both are quite short, only totaling eight verses together, I’m doing both. However, to introduce them, I want to talk... Read more
I decided to do something a little unusual for this post, picking up the epistle instead of the Gospel, and the alternate choice of epistle too. This is partly because I like doing this for solemnities, and partly because this passage has an interesting contribution to make to our understanding of the Old Testament. Ascension of Christ by Adriaen van Overbeke (c. 1510s), a painting which I cannot help but find very, very funny. Ephesians 4.1-13, RSV-CE I therefore, a... Read more
The Second Love This passage is kind of an odd one. As C. S. Lewis pointed out* in The Four Loves, friendship is not a metaphor Scripture uses all that much for God’s love of his people. It is certainly rarely used when compared to the parent-child relation (principally father-child: e.g. in Deuteronomy, Isaiah, Hosea, Romans, or Hebrews, but also mother-child: e.g. in Isaiah again, Luke, or Galatians) or the bridal analogy (e.g. in Psalms, Wisdom, Jeremiah, Ezekiel, Hosea again,... Read more
God the Vintner North American grapes (vitis labrusca) of the Concord variety. Vineyards and wine are common motifs in Scripture. This is natural; along with wheat and olives, grapes are one of the most important crops throughout the Mediterranean. Wine was extremely important in antiquity, and drunk from pretty young ages by our standards, because of something we virtually never reckon with: the difficulty of finding clean water and keeping it clean. Unless you lived by a mountain spring—which, no... Read more
The GOATS (Gospel Of this pAsT Sunday) Moving right along, here are the translation and notes for this past Sunday’s Gospel. The Fourth Sunday of Easter is informally named Good Shepherd Sunday in honor of this text. Crook of the eleventh-century Clonmacnoise Crozier, in the National Museum of Ireland in Dublin. Photo by Wikimedia user Sailko, used under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license (source). John 10.11-18, RSV-CE I am the gooda shepherd. The good shepherd lays down his lifeb for... Read more
No Rest for the Wicked I hope other people find the fact that I fell behind on posts again immediately after I caught up funny, because I do. (My official job hit me like a ton of bricks last week.) Sisyphus, Titian, 1549. Anyway, in hopes of catching up a second time, I’m going to do the Gospel passages from the last two weeks more minimally, without the long intros I’ve made a habit of for a while here. Hopefully... Read more
Of Whether the Body of Christ Hath a Butt As discussed before, during Year B, the Gospel of John is slightly more often selected for Sunday reading due to Mark’s brevity. Our topical character for the Easter II Gospel reading is St. Thomas—no, not the Cherubic Doctor1; I am sorry, Thomists, but he’s not in the Bible. I’m talking about the apostle, the one who later went to India, according to a persistent and by no means incredible legend.2 A... Read more
This Easter, I Gave You My Post This picks up from the post I published on and for the Easter Vigil; notes a-f can be found there. To keep anyone from having to tab back and forth, I’ve copied the Gospel passage (in both versions) into this post. (Verse 8, since it wasn’t in the actual reading for the Vigil, is in grey.) Mark 16.1-7 +8, RSV-CE And when the sabbath was past, Mary Magdalene,a and Mary the mother of... Read more
A Truncation Our Gospel for the Vigil tonight is to be Mark 16.1-7, which describes some of the women who followed Jesus coming to the tomb on the day after the sabbath, intending to finish embalming the body. However, when they arrived, the tomb was open and Jesus was not in it. What was there was an angel, who told them Jesus was alive, and to go and tell the other disciples to return to the Galilee and meet him... Read more
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