REFLECTIONS TODAY Today is Labor Day. The Church also honors St. Joseph the Worker. In the Gospel, Jesus is teaching the people in the synagogue of his own native place. The people who heard him are astonished but are unable to believe that the person they apparently knew to be the son of a...
REFLECTIONS TODAY As the passion of Jesus approaches, the disciples are distressed at the prospect of seeing him no more. Jesus assures them that his going away is necessary, because he is going to prepare a place for them in heaven, in God’s dwelling. Using a metaphor, Jesus likens this place of...
REFLECTIONS TODAY In the hierarchy of authority, all power begins with God. Jesus, on the other hand, is aware “that the Father has put everything into his power and that he had come from God” (Jn 13:3). In this sense, he can apply to himself the divine name “I AM.” And whoever receives him...
REFLECTIONS TODAY This section of the Gospel closes the Book of Signs, containing the seven “sign-miracles” that the evangelist focuses on so that people may believe in Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of God, and through this belief they may have life in his name (Jn 20:31). We have here the...
REFLECTIONS TODAY The Feast of Dedication (Hanukkah) celebrates the victory of the Maccabee brothers over the Greco-Syrian king, Antiochus IV Epiphanes, who forced the Jews to worship the Greek gods, to abandon the Law of Moses, and prohibited the reading of the Torah. Even the altar of the...
REFLECTIONS TODAY Jesus borrows the image from the early morning practice of the shepherd leading out the sheep to pasture. He presents himself as the Good Shepherd, calling his own sheep by name and leading them out. His concern for the flock is reciprocated; they recognize his “voice” and...
REFLECTIONS TODAY JOHN 10:11-18 Jesus said: “I am the good shepherd. A good shepherd lays down his life for the sheep. A hired man, who is not a shepherd and whose sheep are not his own, sees a wolf coming and leaves the sheep and runs away, and the wolf catches and scatters them. This is because...
REFLECTIONS TODAY The crowd and Jesus’ disciples have come to the point of decision: to accept or not that Jesus is the Bread of Life and that his words are “Spirit and life.” Jesus claims to be bread come down from heaven, and that his flesh is food and his blood is drink. This is too much...
REFLECTIONS TODAY “Eating flesh” and “drinking blood” have to be taken figuratively; otherwise, one could be charged of cannibalism. The term “flesh and blood” is a biblical figure of speech for human beings or human life. When Simon Peter confesses Jesus as the Messiah, the Son of the...
REFLECTIONS TODAY The Jewish crowd is so focused on Jesus as coming from Nazareth and as the son of Joseph that people refuse to believe in his true origin: from above and sent by the heavenly Father. To believe this, one must have confidence in Jesus as saying the truth; one must also allow...
REFLECTIONS TODAY The dialogue between the crowd and Jesus reaches a new turn. God gave manna to the Israelites in the desert to sustain them in the journey until they reached the land of Canaan. This is the prelude of the greater bread: the bread that has come down from heaven in the person of...
REFLECTIONS TODAY Bread is the stuff of life; it stands for something that sustains physical life. It is frequently used as a metaphor for food in general. Ancient peoples attributed bread to the divinities. They prayed to the gods for a rich harvest to avoid famine in the land. For Israel, the...
