Enjoy a cuppa after 9:00am Mass each Monday in the Parish Hall. All are welcome!

A huge THANK YOU to all our amazing volunteers who contribute so much to our Parish!  It was a great turnout at our volunteer's morning tea on Sunday 12th September in the Parish Hall. Thanks to everyone who contributed to the morning tea.

Dear Parishioner & friend,

At Easter we celebrate the Resurrection, not just the resurrection of Jesus but also our own resurrection, which is yet to come. But what does the Resurrection of Jesus actually mean, which in turn gives meaning to our own resurrection from the dead?

St Paul, the Apostle, understood exactly what the Resurrection of Jesus was all about. Paul writes:

One does not need to be a biblical scholar to understand that Paul is not here talking about the dead body of Jesus being brought back to life in order to depart the grave. And Paul, in all his writings, never refers to the Resurrection of Jesus as a divine-resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus in order to return to physical life. The mere mention of “you are still in your sins, if Christ has not been raised” tells us everything we need to know.

One of the difficulties the early Christians had was walking the difficult line of sticking to Paul’s meaning of the resurrection, and allowing the popular meaning of the resurrection, as the resuscitation of a dead body, to flourish at the same time, thus tolerating the popular use of the Resurrection of Jesus as part of Christian apologetics. Apologetics is an art of persuading non-believers in Christian God to adopt the Christian faith. The problem with apologetics, that is, this way of talking to people, however, is that faith is not something, which one can talk others into adopting. Faith is rather something, which a person can adopt only when they have thoroughly questioned and examined what is being presented to him/her. This also points to the shallow and premature way we refer to faith as something we all have, when in fact our faith has not been properly examined.

The Resurrection of Jesus, if it means the resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus, then that resuscitation was not witnessed by anyone other than by Jesus. To believe this way of understanding the resurrection simply because, we think that it is what Jesus means by “I am the Resurrection and the life” (11:25), is a poor argument. In circumstances where Jesus was the only witness, it becomes difficult to render as true, the event, which no one else witnessed, and to which Jesus himself did not testify to be the case.

On the other hand, the account of the appearances of Jesus in St John’s gospel, which many people take to refer to the Resurrection, not to the resuscitation of the dead body of Jesus from the tomb, do not, in any way, point to the fact that Jesus’ body may or may not have left the tomb, but can only point to something else, which John is trying to do. That is, John is using Jesus’ appearances to show that life is stronger than death, that Jesus was really alive to everything, which bespeaks of God’s perfection. It means that Jesus was dead to any sinfulness, any human weaknesses, any faults, or any misdemeanours. This is the sense in which St Paul speaks of the resurrection of Jesus from the dead. If Jesus had not achieved perfection or united wholly with his Father through his obedience to God’s moral principles, that is, through what he, Jesus, suffered, through his ethical and moral life, neither could we. The truth would be that we were in fact living unethically, completely diminished, in our frailty. And such existence is a hopeless existence.

We can say that when St Paul speaks about Jesus’ death, and about being raised, Paul is not thinking about simple physical death. Paul is thinking of the things, which diminish a man or a woman, morally and ethically, and thus reduce a man or a woman’s capacity in attaining the best of what he or she would, in their best moments, want to be. Paul is actually musing on the painfulness of having a full-grown man or woman being reduced to the poverty of an ethical life within which he or she is tethered permanently to diminishment. The bodily Resurrection of Jesus, which is often confused with the resuscitated dead body of Jesus, is only saying that the desires of that body, which could have led to the diminishment of virtues and authentic values, have been completely excised. In other words, all the moral limitations of that body are no more an obstacle to the growth in the virtues and the absolutely desirable values attaching to God.

It is in this respect that Paul’s meaning of the resurrection of Jesus has a deeper meaning than the popular understanding of the Resurrection, which is merely taken to mean that the dead body of Jesus was revived by God, following which the revived body left the grave. This is a seductive and a cheap meaning of the resurrection: it is seductive because this meaning of the resurrection is not achievable, in any case, in our time, by any human being; and insisting that Jesus is the Son of God, and therefore, should be able to do such things, as physically coming back to life from his physical death, loses sight of Jesus’ resistance to the temptation to flex his divine muscles to power everything into being. Even with God’s help, this notion of the resurrection is not achievable, because there are things, which God does not do, even if God would want to do them. True, nothing is impossible with God. But in our everyday experience, we know that everything is impossible with God if we left everything, or anything at all, to God to do. Besides, though we would want to believe that God can do everything, God, in fact, does not do everything, else we would become spoilt children of God. For example, we would want Jesus to play the prophet to satisfy the whims of his malefactors; but he does not do that. Or again, we would love to see God turn a square into a circle. Even though God can turn a square into a circle, however, in our lived experience, God does not actually do it. If God did it, God would be working against his own self. If God did it, it would be a cheap miracle, which defies what God is all about.

From everything we have come to know about our world, God is a being who works hard and wants his creatures to work hard. The picture of God that works miracles is a seductive picture of God, and it is dangerous.  For we are people of hard work; we are people who strive for every cent; and that is the law, which we, Christians, believe God has implanted in our hearts and minds. Anyone who lives differently is stealing from others. That is, anyone who gets what they want, without striving for it, is a thief, and such a person is more likely than not to end up morally spoilt and useless to themselves and to the world.

The truth is that Resurrection is hard work: hard work for us, grace from God.

Best Wishes,

Francis 

9:00AM Saturday Morning Masses will resume each and every saturday, beginning 6th February 2021

ALSO

Healing Masses will re-commence every "first Saturday" of the month.  
The first Healing Mass to take place this year will be on Saturday, 6th February 2021 at 9:00AM.

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