Jeremiah, the prophet who claims that he was seduced by God and who gets in trouble for speaking the word of God, is at it again in our First Reading. He has been announcing ruin against various kings and leaders of Israel. Jeremiah denounces the leaders as shepherds who have scattered the flock, the people of Israel.

A true prophet does more than complain or denounce, so an important announcement issues from his spirit. God will send a new, faithful king. Jeremiah switches images to another agricultural one. The one to come will be a “shoot” off the stock of David. He will govern with justice, tenderness and wisdom. He will save Israel and have a wonderful new name which will indicate his personality and mission.

We humans reveal our truer selves in more ways than our words. God’s personality or interior is what we call “revelation.” We watch more than listen to the actions which reveal Jesus who is the fullness of revelation. Today’s Gospel reading is a study of the personality of God.

We, as readers and listeners of this story, have an opportunity to experience some revelation of ourselves. The apostles have told Jesus all they had done so he gathers them together and goes across the lake for a day of rest. Crowds of people find out where they are headed and so they get to the shore before the vacationers arrive. How would you feel? The apostles will reveal their spirit very quickly. Jesus reveals his inner self even more so. He is “open to” or welcoming to them.

Our text uses the word “pity” which has the usual meaning of feeling sorry for or condescending care. The Greek word here means that Jesus was moved deeply, literally to his guts. This is quite dramatic, but a beautiful revelation of his truer self.

The beach is no longer a deserted place, but now abounding with tender care. He will feed them in next Sunday’s Gospel, but first his words of tender instruction. They come as lost, but not dumb sheep who search for true nourishment. Food for the spirit first, then there will be food for the journey of life. It is a wonderful image of the Eucharistic liturgy.

There are many instruments and questionnaires arranged so that we might discover little fragments of what we call our personalities. We think we can understand more easily others when we learn their number, animal, letters, or anything else which can assist in solving their mysteries.

Does God have a personality? Does Jesus? Did he fill anything out which reveals to us a person to whom we can relate sincerely? We have his profile and that of the infinite God within scripture, especially our Gospels.

Through the words of Jeremiah, God reveals that God will lead the beloved people as a new kind of shepherd. That is a strong revelation of God’s personality. Jesus, who in John’s gospel says that to see him is to have a vivid picture of the God who sent him, displays his interior in every action and story he did and told.

Every story, miracle, gesture of Jesus reveals both his person and personality as well as the God whom he calls “Father.” He opens his heart and personality to the crowd and wants to give them what is good for them.

The apostles are always learning new facets of their friend and take it inside themselves very slowly, because getting closer to him invites them to become closer to themselves. As we know, this can be uncomfortable.

Most of the changes to our own personalities have been rearranged and strengthened by one or more significant relationships. We are ourselves of course, but influenced highly by the life patterns of these others.

As women and men of the liturgy, we put ourselves as close to Jesus as is possible and we hope that something rubs off. It starts in Baptism and becomes more and more a part of who we are. We live and how we live in Jesus is revealed in our smallest actions and most public gestures.

As each of us is known mainly by our actions, so Jesus is known through those same gestures. Each of us is ordained to reveal him according to our unique ways, our personality. No questionnaire, inventory, or test is necessary. What of God and Jesus does each of us reveal? What a great way to live!

“The Lord keeps in our minds the wonderful things he has done. He is compassion and love. He always provides for his faithful.”

Psalm 111:4-5

Larry Gillick, S. J., of Creighton University's Deglman Center for Ignatian Spirituality

On the evening of May 18th, five priests driving north from Guatemala City for a community meeting were stopped by masked gunmen. After robbing the priests of their belongings, they opened fire, killing Fr. Lawrence (Lorenzo) Rosebaugh, an American priest, and seriously wounding Fr. Jean Claude Nowama, a Congolese priest.

This item on the news hit close to home, not just because the victims were priests, but because they were all members of the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, the community to which I belong, and the man who was killed was someone whom I knew well and deeply admired.

Mircea Eliade warned communities to not botch its deaths. Our community does not want to botch this one. Lorenzo Rosebaugh was no ordinary man and no ordinary priest. He was a special gift to the world, to the church, to our community, and especially to the poor for whom he gave his life.

Fr. Lorenzo was born in Appleton, Wisconsin, in 1935, but grew up in St. Louis. He entered the Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate in 1955 and was ordained to the priesthood in 1963. Always in love with the poor and driven by a passion for justice, Lorenzo was strongly influenced by Dorothy Day and Daniel Berrigan. For this, he paid a price.

In 1968, in protest of the Vietnam war, he burned some draft files. This landed him in prison for two years. In 1975, he hitchhiked to Brazil and for the next several years lived on the streets of Recife, without a rectory or an address, celebrating the Eucharist with the street people and helping them find food each day. This aroused the suspicion of the authorities and he was arrested, imprisoned, and beaten. Given the political climate in Brazil at the time he would, no doubt, have disappeared had there not been international pressure for his release. Indeed it was only after Rosalyn Carter visited there that he was released. She met with him afterwards and he made the most of the opportunity, asking her to intervene on behalf of prison conditions in Brazil.

In the 1980s, a near-deadly bout of hepatitis forced him to return to the United States for treatment, but he was soon active again. In 1983 he was arrested for sabotaging a public address system at Fort Benning and playing Archbishop Romero's last homily through it. For this action, he spent another 18 months in prison.

From there, he moved to the Catholic Worker in New York, then on to El Salvador to live again with the poor, and, after a long retreat at our Oblate Motherhouse in France and some time in St. Louis to tend to his dying mother and write a memoir, he moved to Guatemala where he ministered to the poor until his death last month.

He authored a book about his experiences: "To Wisdom through Failure: A Journey of Compassion, Resistance and Hope". I had the privilege of writing the Foreword for this book, a disarmingly honest account of his inner journey through all of this. Among other things, I said this:

Daniel Berrigan once said: A prophet does not make a vow of alienation, but a vow of love. This is what Lorenzo did. He made a vow of love and it has taken him over some pretty rough roads, mostly alone, mostly on foot, landed him in prison, left his body beaten and showing the wear and tear of it, but it has left him in the end - happy, mellow, gentle, faithful, honest, and wonderfully grateful. Our religious community was founded to serve the poor and our founder challenged us to learn the language of the poor. We all try to do that, but only a few have the charism and heart to actually get down and dirty, right on the streets where the poorest of the poor look for food, for a bed, for consolation, for dignity, and for God. Lorenzo learned the language of the poor, became their friend, their advocate, and their priest and we are proud of him!

At his funeral, his provincial superior described him as "partly John the Baptist, partly Francis of Assisi". That's exactly how the poor saw him.

Lorenzo didn't like to talk about himself, but at our Motherhouse in France one night he shared this story: "Before I first went to prison for civil disobedience, I did a retreat with Daniel Berrigan. He told us: 'If you can't do this without growing angry and bitter - then don't do it!' I prayed the whole night before my first arrest, both because I was scared and because I knew I needed God's help not to grow angry and bitter!"

And he never did grow angry or bitter. Always gentle in spirit and baptized by the poor, I suspect that even in his final moments when an unthinking gunman was senselessly ending his life, he, like Jesus, had an empathic sense of why this was happening: "Forgive them; they know not what they do!"

Ron Rolheiser, OMI

This week we find Jesus powerless to work miracles.

He came to his home-town Nazareth, the Gospel says, and “he was not able to perform any mighty deed there, apart from curing a few sick people by laying his hands on them.”

Why not?

It is an intriguing question, because most of us think of miracles as based on power, as acts done by a mighty person. Jesus, God in human form, must have been all-powerful, just as God is. What was stopping him?

Let us take a different look at miracles. Instead Jesus being a solo act, an individual who does a whole lot of terrific things, try seeing him as the enfleshment of God. This will shift the question and make us look at what God is.

There are many answers, of course, but the one that is most agreed upon is very simple. God is love. God has loved human beings since he first created them.

Alright, you say, if he loves the blind and the lame and the homeless, why couldn’t he use that Godly love in Nazareth? What took away his powers?

Now we are getting to the heart of the question. Think of a love relation. Doesn’t love have to be two-way? I know that we must often go without the return of love from people we care for, but that is not the ideal. For a relationship to be real, I must be loved and I must love in return. Mutuality is love’s hallmark.

So we must say that God reality consists of mutual love. There will be time later to speak of the love dynamic that exists within the Trinity. Right now it is enough to see that all through the Old and New Testament God was thirsting for a shared union with human beings. “I will be your God, and you will be my people and love me in return.” Please!

Now we can see what took away Jesus’ miracles. The people in his home-town would not accept him. These people already had him in a category—carpenter. son of that working couple Joseph and Mary, the guy who used to live down the street. Who does he think he is preaching all this new stuff? So instead of listening to what he said, they made the noise with their tongues that we spell “tut,” which in the Midwest United States means, “look who is trying to put on airs. We know who he really is.”

They were pre-sealed against him.

But Jesus was not a circus performer or a magician. He did not work miracles in order to be noticed or to show off. In fact he took great pains to avoid being noticed.

This is why he said so often to the people he healed, “your faith has saved you.” Jesus’ miracles were an outcropping of the living, loving bonding we are invited to have with him. Faith is our acceptance of that bonding and without it God’s loving power cannot reach us.

Think it over. Do you and I ever listen to the offer of love from Christ and then harden our hearts to it? We can be quite crusty, you an I, and maybe we need to soften up a bit.

Fr. John Foley, S. J.

God did not make death, the book of Wisdom declares. Our God is a God of life, whose will for us is expressed in such words as being, wholesome, undying, imperishable. This God calls us to walk in the light of Christ, which is life, and not in the darkness of hatred and sin, which is death.

We must, therefore, be on the side of life, opposed to death. This should include opposition to all those things that diminish life.

The Gospel is about two healing incidents in the life of Jesus, healings which show that Jesus willed life, and willed full life. The Greek word for being healed also means being saved: to be brought to full life is the essence of salvation.

The second reading mentions another form of the diminution of life: poverty. No one should live on the survival level: there should be a certain equality.

We live in a society that pays lip-service to respect for life, and does not even do that much for quality of life. Jesus Christ challenges us to create a society that values life and rescues people from all forms of death and dying.

“Every man has the right to life, to bodily integrity, and to the means which are necessary and suitable for the proper development of life. These means are primarily food, clothing, shelter, rest, medical care, and finally the necessary social services. Therefore, a human being also has the right to security in cases of sickness, inability to work, widowhood, old age, unemployment, or in any other case in which he is deprived of the means of subsistence through no fault of his own.”

Pope John XXIII, Pacem in Terris (1963) 11

Gerald Darring

We humans are full of pride. We depend on our own resources and think we can solve any problem by applying our wit and energy.

Meanwhile, the problems pile up. Wars proliferate. Hunger abounds. The ecology deteriorates. There is poverty, homelessness, unemployment. Frustration drives some to crime. Others seek relief in drugs.

Perhaps one day we will realize that it will take more than our feeble efforts to rid the world of these problems. It will take the power of God, the one who shut within doors the sea and made the clouds its garment.

Humans alone against the great injustices of the world are like the disciples in the boat during the storm. They are helpless, unable to control these primal forces.

If only they would realize that they have with them the Lord of the universe, the one who can make the wind and the sea obey!

If only they would not be so lacking in faith, then maybe, by joining their efforts with the power of the almighty God, they could say to all the warmongers and haters and oppressors of the world: Quiet! Be still!

“Any interpretation that restricts the human predicament to a single, well-circumscribed problem, soluble through structural changes alone, is bound to be dangerously one-sided. Even to expect the solution of all human suffering or all social justice from revolution or social reform is to prepare oneself for bitter disillusionment.”

U.S. Bishops, Pastoral Letter on Marxist Communism (1980) 32

Gerald Darring

Indelicate Question

Why are you eating someone’s body and drinking his blood?

I know this is an indelicate question, and it makes a lot of presumptions. But still, why? Picture yourself walking up the aisle and receiving what appears to be bread and wine, but which is really Christ’s Body and Blood. The Roman historian Pliny the Elder (23-79 AD) seemed to have thought we were cannibals. And many of Jesus’ followers simply walked away when he told them “Whoever eats my flesh and drinks my blood remains in me and I in him.” (Jn 6:56ff)

Let's take a look. Today we use the word “sacrifice” to refer to something we give up for a good reason. “I sacrificed my own interests in order to raise you kids,” would be an example parents might use.

But there is a longer history of the word, and it involves body and blood. Once upon a time, the tribes of the world tried to please whatever gods their tradition believed in by offering sacrifices to them, in order to get a better harvest, to prevent the storm or the drought, to avoid starvation, get victory in battle, and so on.

They had to kill what was being offered. Why?

Slaughtering the best lamb from the herd made it a messenger to the gods because it was no longer part of this world, even though it came from here. It became part of heaven.

Send the best of earth to heaven in order that the best of heaven could come down to earth, they thought.

Often, people ate the flesh and drank the blood of the offering so that they too could be an integral part of this uniting of heaven and earth.

All along, of course, God knew about these sacrifices. He knew there was an intrinsic desire in all human beings to be at one with God (whom they were searching for with their "gods"). At root, sacrifices were an attempt to reach out to heaven and fulfill that desire. But their arms were too short. They could come to God only if God first came to them. God had to offer sacrifice on their behalf.

So in the fullness of time, the One God gave his people a real fulfillment of their urge to sanctify through sacrifice. He sent himself to them.

Send the best of heaven to earth in order that the best of earth can go up to heaven.

Jesus gave up his body and his blood, just as the ancient sacrifices had required, but now in a new way, to show the world that God acted first and all they needed to do was respond. Animals could not choose to be sacrificed, but Christ did freely so choose, out of love, on our behalf.

On the night before he suffered he gave them sacramental signs that would be fulfilled the next day. He gave them his body and blood under the appearance of bread and wine. He told them to consume it. These would become re-presentations for all time of the bloody sacrifice on the cross, but now in an unbloody form.

So the answer to the question with which we began is that you and I eat his body and drink his blood sacramentally—yes, in order to fulfill the idea behind the ancient sacrifices, but most of all in order to say yes to God’s never-ending love. We walk up the aisle to take our part in the new and eternal sacrifice of love.

Fr. John Foley, S. J.

Someone said once, "Anyone who talks of the Trinity, talks of the cross of Jesus and does not speculate about a heavenly riddle." (Sorry, I don't know the source for this quote.) Christians know about God through our experience and key to that experience is something we have in common -- suffering and the cross. I know a 56 year old woman who is a vibrant and fun-loving woman. She loves her family and they return that love. She has been described by her children as "the glue that holds the family together." She had severe back pain and an X-ray revealed a broken vertebrae.

But when she was in surgery they discovered cancer. Further tests showed the cancer had spread to her lungs. It had metastasised. Her daughter called a young woman friend and wept hysterically over the phone asking, "Why did God do this to her?" It is a question we have all heard during similar crises and maybe is a question we too have asked at similar times in our own lives. It is the question we ask out of pain and confusion, when life takes a harsh turn and threatens our faith.

It is really a Trinity question, isn't it? Who is our God? What is our God like? It isn't a question about church dogma or "heavenly riddles." When Jesus looked at what was coming at him in the Garden of Gethsemani he felt it was more than he could bear, so he asked God for it to be taken away. But God wanted to stick it out with us, not pull the emergency brake and get off. If Christ had been given a quick exit that night in the garden, then we would feel even lonelier in our struggles and pain. Instead God stayed with us; Christ showed us in his obedience that no matter how many physical or emotional stresses we have on us, God is not a stranger to our pain: no stranger to emotional pain -- Jesus wept; no stranger to physical pain -- Jesus was broken on the cross. That's in the scriptures.

What's not in the scriptures is that God sends us pain and suffering to test our faith. After all, what good parent would do a thing like that to a beloved child? And we do believe God loves us and that we are God's children, don't we? Paul reminds us in the letter to the Romans today, "The Spirit bears witness with our spirits that we are children of God,..."

What is also not in the scriptures is what some people say to others who are in pain to console them. "God never gives us more than we can bear." When people say things like that, I imagine God pressing down on someone to test their faith, but stopping just short of their breaking point. What a miserable and harsh God that would be! That's not the God we celebrate on this feast of the Trinity. Here's another one: "God helps those who help themselves." I can't tell you how many times I have heard that quote used to describe God. I have even heard people say that in scripture groups with open bibles on their laps and they quote it as if it were in the Bible they were holding. If we could help ourselves we wouldn't need God, would we? When we are struggling and feeling lonely in our pain, we don't need to hear about a God who will help us, but only if we can first help ourselves.

No -- life has its ways of testing us; sometimes giving us more than we can bear. God is the one who helps us carry what life piles on us. Not only so we can just bear up under our burdens, but that we can even grow and mature through them. God can get us through to the other side of suffering stronger than when we first entered in. Now that's the triune God Jesus sends his disciples into the world to proclaim.

When Jesus sends out his disciples to baptize, it is in the name of the God we have come to know through him: "Father, Son and Holy Spirit." God the Creator -- the source of life, the Creator who loves the works God had made. God the Christ -- God in our flesh, who walked our walk all the way through death to resurrection. God the Spirit -- the very life of God, in Jesus, offered us again here today as we celebrate and pray together.

How do we define the Trinity? Jesus tells us -- "I am with you all days, until the end of the age." Jesus has "defined" God for us -- revealed God already with us. So, when someone calls us on the phone or weeps on our shoulder, and asks, "Why did God do this to me? What have I done to deserve this?" We can respond, as the young woman I mentioned above did, "I don't understand all this. But I know God didn't put this suffering on your mother. God is with us in this and God is crying with us too." This young woman who said this to her friend is a high school graduate with three small children -- she was balancing the youngest on her hip as she gave this response to her friend. There she was, a theologian, explaining the Trinity in a way her grieving friend could understand and embrace!

Jude Siciliano, OP