Monday, April 30, 2007

Monday word, 30 Apr 2007

4Easter Monday (29 Apr 2007) Ac 11. 1-18; Ps 42; Jn 10. 1-10
Homily of Fr. Paul Panaretos, S.J.
Passing Through

Our psalm, As the hind longs for the running waters...Athirst is my soul for God, the living God, reminds me to tell you about Easter in Milan when St. Ambrose was its bishop.

While those being baptized gathered where there was water, in the baptistry building nearby, the faithful prayed for them in the church. When the newly baptized processed into the church they sang today’s psalm, As the hind longs for the running waters...Athirst is my soul for God, the living God.

Not only did those in the church hear them coming, but when they entered the church they smelled them, too, because each was generously anointed with the aromatic oil, chrism, which is named for Holy Spirit. Risking sounding like an early-a.m. t.v. commercial: there’s more--more than hearing and more than smelling them coming. When the faithful saw the newly baptized they appeared lustrous in their white, lined garments over their anointed bodies.

They had passed through the gate of heaven, namely risen Jesus himself, when they died and rose with him in baptism.

Their hearts became an even larger territory of the divine love. The more they drank it in, the more they thirsted to be like their Messiah in their daily lives. Jesus desired to spread his love to every corner of each heart. More welcomed his life-giving love than rejected it, which is the pattern in the Acts of the Apostles we’re reading through the Easter season. More welcomed his life-giving love than rejected it, which is why we are here.

To thirst for God is a way of living. No one’s thirst for God can be completely satisfied this side of heaven. Yet its partial satisfaction is a gift because the Messiah’s way of living leads us and others to show more clearly that God has made clean, that is, made worthy to represent God’s desires in our world, no less than each one of us.


_______________________________________________________________
Wiki-image of Ravenna mosaic is in the public domain.

No comments: