More

Commentary on Jeremiah 23:5-8

Today’s reading comes from one of three prose sermons which seem to originate either from the period of exile in Babylon or soon after the return to Jerusalem. After scolding Judah’s rulers for scattering Judah, in today’s passage God promises to establish an upright member, a “Branch”, of David’s line over a restored Israel.

‘Branch’ is used elsewhere as a messianic title. Zerubbabel, whose name means ‘branch/shoot of Babylon’, was one of the leaders in the return of the Jews from exile. And he was a descendant of David.

The Messiah, unlike any previous descendant of David, will be the ideal King. He will sum up in himself all the finest qualities of the best rulers, and infinitely more. He will rule responsibly before God as a real king and not as a puppet like King Zedekiah. He will be a true shepherd for his people, free of the corruption found in so many of Judah’s rulers. He will:

…deal wisely and shall execute justice and righteousness in the land.

He will be called “The Lord is our righteousness”. This is in contrast with the present ruler, Zedekiah, whose name in Hebrew meant ‘the Lord [Yahweh] is my justice’. King Nebuchadnezzar of Babylon originally gave this name to Mattaniah when he was appointed king.

Zedekiah was the last king of Judah (597-587 BC). He was a tragic figure. He tried to enter into an alliance with surrounding peoples, including Egypt, to rebel against Babylon. But he suffered defeat and was led off to Babylon. Here his two sons were executed in his presence and then his own two eyes were gouged out. Although Zedekiah did not in any way live up to his name ‘the Lord is our righteousness’, the new Lord of Righteousness will bring many blessings to his people and give them all that they need to be truly God’s people.

A new era is on the way. People will no longer be thinking of God as the one who brought his people out of Egypt. Rather, they will think of him as the one who brought his people from their place of exile to live once more on their own soil. This will be the ‘New Exodus’, one of even greater significance than the earlier one. And it will not be complete until the Messiah comes and establishes the Kingdom of God, not only in Israel, but throughout the world—bringing true justice and peace to all.

More

Commentary on Matthew 1:1-17

Perhaps this passage is regarded as one of the dullest Gospel readings of the year! It consists of a long list of names, many of which mean very little to most Christians. But it has one resounding message: Jesus fully entered our human condition, with all its virtues and vices.

One of the main purposes of Matthew’s Gospel, which was written for Jewish Christians by Jewish Christians, is to show the continuity of Jesus in the history and tradition of Israel. Jesus was no upstart; still less was he a rebel or a traitor. On the contrary, he was the natural development of the long process of God’s relationship with his people. Not only was he the natural development, he was the long-awaited climax. He was no less than the Messiah, the Christ, the Anointed King of Israel.

Today’s passage from Matthew is the opening of his Gospel. It is introduced with the words:

An account of the genealogy of Jesus the Messiah, the son of David, the son of Abraham.

These two names are the most significant in the family line. Jesus, as the Messiah—the Christ—will be a King in the line of David. And he is descended from Abraham to whom God had said:

…and by your offspring shall all the nations of the earth gain blessing for themselves… (Gen 22:18)

The genealogy is divided into three significant parts, each with fourteen generations. This is probably because the numerical value of the Hebrew letters in David’s name amounts to 14. The third and last list actually only contains 13 names. Perhaps Matthew meant Jesus’ name to be part of the list. After all, the genealogy of Jesus continues beyond him to his followers. Or perhaps a scribe somewhere along the line got his numbers mixed up; there is no way to know.

The first part is from Abraham down to David; the second, from David to the deportation to Babylon; and the third, from the deportation to Joseph and Mary. Of course, it is not a complete genealogy. The names mentioned all appear one way or another in the Hebrew Testament. There are four women mentioned—Tamar, Rahab, Ruth and Mary—each one of them an interesting character in her own right. There are also a number of scoundrels in the list. Even David, one of the most outstanding servants of God, was an adulterer and a murderer (apart from those he killed in war).

When the Son of God became a human being, he really did become one of us. The Gospel makes no effort to ‘sanitise’ his origins, or the members of his immediate family. There is no shortage of skeletons in Jesus’ cupboard. John said no less than the truth when he wrote:

…the Word became flesh and lived among us… (John 1:14)

As well, if Jesus was totally incarnated in the world so that he could communicate the message of God’s love to the world and for the world, then we too, must be totally incarnated. We are not true to our calling if we think that, in order to be true to Jesus, we have to separate ourselves from a material and sinful world. We cannot be the “salt of the earth” unless we are fully inserted into it. But this happens only when we also fully identify with the values and concerns of the Kingdom. Otherwise we are salt without taste.

More

Commentary on Genesis 49:2,8-10

In today’s First Reading, Jacob is on his death bed and making his last statement to his family. It is the longest poem in Genesis. The reading is part of what is known as the ‘Blessings of Jacob’, although they are more like prophecies than blessings. This is especially true of the passages in today’s reading. And it is directed, not so much to the sons of Jacob, but more to the tribes who bore their name.

Although this passage ostensibly refers to Jacob’s immediate descendants, in fact, the final writing dates from the time of David (much later), with possibly some earlier elements contained in it. Its contents really concern the time of the Judges and the Kings. It was at this later time that it would have been inserted into the Genesis narrative. Put together from preexisting songs and sayings, it looks at the tribes of Israel in their early days in Canaan. It is put here to signify the closing of a historical period—that covered by the Book of Genesis.

Two of the tribes stand out—those of Judah and Joseph. Judah is seen as coming to dominate all the others, but not permanently:

The scepter shall not depart from Judah,
nor the ruler’s staff from between his feet,
until tribute comes to him,
and the obedience of the peoples is his.

Another reading of “until tribute comes to him” in the original Hebrew text translates as “until he comes to whom it belongs”. This is a reference to the Messiah. Judah will be the one through whom the promises made to Abraham and Jacob will be fulfilled. Judah was the fourth born to Jacob’s wife Leah, and also the fourth son born to Jacob, but his three older brothers, for various reasons, lost their right to family leadership.

Judah is shown as preeminent over his brothers:

…your brothers shall praise you…your father’s sons [i.e. his brothers] shall bow down before you.

From the time of the second journey of Jacob’s sons to Joseph in Egypt, Judah acted as their spokesman. Judah, under the name of Ephraim, did in fact become the most influential of the northern tribes and would form the nucleus of the future kingdom of Israel. And through his descendant David, he would be an ancestor of Jesus—hence the purpose of today’s reading.

Judah is called a “lion’s whelp” (or “lion’s cub”) as a symbol of power, strength and courage. In later times, he is often pictured as a lion and, in Revelation (5:5), Jesus himself is called the “the Lion of the tribe of Judah”.

The meaning of the closing prophecy is obscure, but it is often read in a Messianic sense—fulfilled first of all in David, and ultimately in Christ, the Messiah. It is to Jesus Christ that the “sceptre”, the ruling power, ultimately belongs.

Both the First Reading and today’s Gospel, which contains Matthew’s genealogy of Jesus, emphasise Jesus’ roots going back to the very beginnings of Israel. Jesus was a Jew through and through, and linked with many of the most significant characters in Israel’s turbulent history.

As we prepare to celebrate the birth of the Child Jesus in Bethlehem, we need to remember that the content of today’s readings is an important aspect of the Incarnation. Jesus did not just appear as an isolated human being. He came from God, but he is also intimately and crucially linked with the history of his own people. And because of that, so are we.

More

Commentary on Matthew 9:35—10:1,5,6-8

The promises of today’s First Reading are shown being fulfilled in the person of Jesus in the Gospel, and they are arranged in two sections.

First, Jesus is shown constantly on the move, teaching in synagogues all over the region, proclaiming the Good News of God’s reign coming among them and bringing healing to all who are sick and diseased. Matthew does not use the title of Good Shepherd for Jesus, but he does indicate the deep compassion of Jesus for all those who are harassed and depressed, people with no direction in their lives, who are like sheep without a shepherd. Jesus is clearly the Shepherd who can lead them back to where they belong.

Second, Jesus then says to his disciples that there is a huge harvest waiting to be reaped. Up to this he has been working alone, but he needs help, especially after he is gone. There are very few people available to work in the harvest field. He then calls the Twelve and hands on to them his own powers to liberate people from evil powers and to heal all kinds of sickness.

The harvest is still great and the need for labourers is as great as ever. In asking the Lord to send labourers into the harvest, we have to ask ourselves what the role is for each one of us. It is not just a question of priests and religious. Jesus was not talking to priests and religious (there was no such thing as ‘religious’ at the time the Gospels were written), but to every one of his followers—to every one of us who has been baptised. Every one of us is being called to be a harvester. Each one of us can reach a corner of the harvest field that is accessible to no one else.

These include our family, neighbours, our work colleagues and others who come into our lives. I may be the only person who brings Jesus with his healing and compassion into someone’s life.

And what are we to do? We are to let people know that the Reign of God is very close, because God himself and Jesus are so close. Once we say yes to God and his Son, they become part of our lives. And we are to do the same work Jesus told his disciples to do:

• Cure the sick: by our sympathy and support, which can often add tremendously to the effects of any medical treatment.
• Raise the dead: clearly not literally. But there are many who are intellectually, emotionally or socially dead. They are physically alive, but they have stopped living meaningful lives. We can help them to find life again.
• Cleanse the lepers: all those people who are on the fringes of society, whom we neglect, ignore, despise, reject or avoid. There are the dropouts, those suffering from addictions (e.g. drugs, alcohol or pornography), the homeless, single mothers, ‘sex workers’, and others—we can let them know they are accepted and loved by God.
• Cast out demons: help people liberate themselves from the demons of fear, anger, hatred and violence; from drugs, alcohol, nicotine or sexual abuse (themselves and others); from greed for money, attention, status or the adulation of others.

There are so many people who need to hear and to experience the message of Christmas. And there are many, alas, for whom Christmas is bad news, a time of misery, depression and loneliness. Let’s work to change that.

More

Frank Doyle SJ 1931 – 2011

Living Space is the area of the Sacred Space website where you will find commentaries on the daily scripture readings. These are written by the late Frank Doyle SJ unless other contributors are credited. (About Frank Doyle)

Using Living Space

You can access the current commentaries by using the Living Space calendar in the right column. This sidebar allows you to select readings from the coming days – with a few days in the past allowed for too. You will see this calendar on the right sidebar of all Living Space pages.

Please note that the calendar may differ from region to region and cannot take account of all the regional variations.

In general, the following commentaries are provided:

• Sundays: one commentary on all readings.
• Weekdays: separate commentaries on the first readings and gospel texts.
• Saints: separate commentaries on the saint and on the assigned readings.

Archives

The following lists can be found on the Living Space Archive page.

Index of commentaries on Gospel texts from the Gospels:

• Matthew
• Mark
• Luke
• John

Index of scripture texts for which commentaries are available:

• List of books of the bible in canonical order

Index of commentaries on texts according to the liturgical cycle:

• Year A – Matthew
• Year B – Mark
• Year C – Luke
• Feasts and Saints

More

Commentary on 2 Corinthians 4:7-15; John 17:11-19

The Gospel reading comes from Jesus’ long discourse at the Last Supper as found in John’s Gospel. It is part of the prayer that Jesus makes at the end of the discourse and is the part where he prays for his own disciples. He prays that they may be one as Jesus and his Father are one.

While he was still with them, he protected them, but now that Jesus is preparing to return to his Father, he prays that they, too, may share the joy that Jesus is going to experience. Jesus gave them the ‘word’ of the Father, the message of where true life was to be found and paradoxically, because of this, the world is full of hatred for them. It is because they do not identify with the spirit of the world any more than Jesus himself does.

At the same time, Jesus does not pray that they may be removed from the world, which needs so much to hear their message of life, but only that they be protected from the evil forces which pervade the world. And so Jesus prays that they may be consecrated in truth, the truth that comes from the Father and which has been mediated by Jesus.

And, with this protection, Jesus sends them out into the world in the same way that Jesus himself was sent into the world by the Father:

And the Word became flesh and lived among us… (John 1:14)

Cornelius and Cyprian lived in a world of division and hatred, both in the secular world and within the Church itself. They spent their lives bringing the truth of Christ to their world. They were attacked by members of their own Church and eventually fell victims of persecution by the forces of the emperors.

Our Church today still is the object of hatred and derision by anti-religious and secular forces and that is something we should be ready to expect. And it is not a sign that we should escape from that world, but rather stay within it and persevere both in word and action in communicating our message to create a world of love, service and sharing to replace one of hatred, domination and self-seeking.

In the First Reading from the Second Letter of Paul to the Christians at Corinth, he speaks of the paradox of being a Christian missionary:

We have this treasure in clay jars…

The message of the Gospel and the vision of life that it communicates is a treasure, but it is brought to the world in very fragile vessels, our weak humanity.

We are afflicted in every way but not crushed, perplexed but not driven to despair, persecuted but not forsaken, struck down but not destroyed…

And, Paul says:

…always carrying around in the body the death of Jesus, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our bodies..

Paul elaborates on this:

For we who are living are always being handed over to death for Jesus’s sake, so that the life of Jesus may also be made visible in our mortal flesh.

This indeed is the paradox of the Christian witness. The Church finds life and gives life most effectively through those who sacrifice their lives for the Message of the Gospel. We see this happening even in our own time.

It is, of course, the reason we celebrate the memory of such people as we do today in the persons of Cornelius and Cyprian. But we just do not remember and admire. We are also to be inspired and emboldened to follow in their footsteps. It is those who are ready to let go of their human life who will find true life and pass it on to others.

More

Apart from her being martyred at Syracuse in 304 AD during the persecution of Diocletian, there is very little certain known about Lucy. However, her cult began quite soon after her death and spread widely. An inscription dating from about the year 400 is to be found in Syracuse. Her name appears in the First Eucharistic Prayer of the Roman Rite, also in the Ambrosian rites, as well as in the oldest Roman liturgical texts, in Greek liturgical books and in the marble calendar of Naples. Churches dedicated to her can be found in Rome, Naples and in Venice. A church near the railway station in Venice claims to have a partially incorrupt relic of her body.

According to her Acts (which have little historical value) Lucy, a Christian, was a wealthy Sicilian during the persecution of the Emperor Diocletian. She consecrated her virginity to God, turned down proposals of marriage to a pagan, and gave away her dowry to the poor. She was betrayed as a Christian by the man who wanted to marry her to the governor of Syracuse. A judge ordered that she should be sexually violated in a brothel, but miraculously she could not be moved from where she was. He then tried—unsuccessfully—to have her burnt, and she was finally executed by the sword. In medieval accounts, her eyes were gouged out prior to her execution.

Artistic representations reflect the stories in these Acts. Her eyes sometimes appear on a plate that she is holding. The earliest known image of her (showing no symbols) is in a frieze of virgins in the 6th century mosaics in the church of St Apollinare Nuovo in Ravenna.

Until 1861, Lucy’s remains were housed in a church named after her in Venice. When this church was demolished, they were moved to the church of San Geremia, where they can still be seen.

In Scandinavia her feast, held on what was the shortest day of the year in the old calendar, has become a festival of light. The youngest daughter in the family, dressed in white, wakes the rest of the family with coffee, rolls and a special song.

In Sicily, and in many other places, the song ‘Santa Lucia’ remains enduringly popular. Lucy’s name (from the Latin word lux, meaning ‘light’) also played a large part in her being named as a patron saint of the blind and those with eye trouble.

More

Thanks to the work of Slovenian Matej Nastran, scripture text can easily be consulted wherever there is a reference. Just point at the reference with your mouse and you will see the text. Point again or click on the text to hide it. (See it on this text: John 3:16) Note that this does not apply to scripture references that are themselves hyperlinks, such as the navigation in the right sidebar. When you have clicked on the links to the right any further scripture reference in the body of the texts appear when you point to them.

Use of this plugin was discontinued in November 2008 after several failures to connect with its database. This failure generated errors that made aspects of Living Space unavailable.

More

Commentary on Luke 9:46-50

Following on Jesus once again telling his disciples that he was going to be “handed over” to suffering and death, we were told in our previous reading that they did not understand what he meant. It did not make sense to them.

Now, almost as an indication of how far they were from Jesus’ thinking, they began arguing among themselves which one among them should be seen as the greatest. Why should they be arguing about this? Was it because, whatever difficulties they had in accepting what Jesus had said about his future, they were wondering what was going to happen after Jesus had been taken away from them? If they were to remain together as a group, which of them would be in charge?

Perhaps Peter was already beginning to think that he should be the one. Perhaps some of the others felt it should be one of them. But Jesus, who, of course, was not present during these sensitive discussions, was well aware of what was going on. He took a child and put it in their midst, saying:

Whoever welcomes this child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me, for the least among all of you is the greatest.

It is interesting that the greatness is to be seen in the child rather than in the one who ‘welcomes’ the child. The child represents all who are vulnerable and weak and powerless. To ‘welcome’ such persons is to treat them with the utmost dignity and respect and to accept them and lift them up.

In Jesus’ eyes, such little people are truly great because, to those who have eyes to see, they are the ones in whom we can especially meet Jesus and love and serve him. St Francis of Assisi, who kissed the leper (a particularly daring thing to do in his time), or St Teresa of Calcutta, tenderly picking up a decaying, barely living body off the street, knew this well. To find Jesus in such a person is to make direct contact with God himself.

Jesus himself will reach the peak of his own greatness when he hangs dying and helpless on the cross. This is the lesson the disciples will learn to see and accept in time. We have to keep working on it too, because it does not come easily to any of us.

The second part of today’s Gospel points to another area where the disciples have to change their outlook. John, the brother of James, who both come across in the Synoptics as somewhat hotheaded (they had the nickname “sons of thunder”), tells Jesus they saw someone driving out devils in Jesus’ name. They had told the man to stop because he “does not follow with us”. Perhaps there was also an element of jealousy, because in Mark’s Gospel (9:14-29) we are told that the disciples were unable to drive out an evil spirit from a boy.

Here we have something of the arrogance of the insider, of the elitist. John and his companions felt that the exorcism of evil spirits in the name of Jesus was something only they were allowed to do. Jesus did not agree. Jesus tells them:

Do not stop him, for whoever is not against you is for you.

In doing so, he enunciated this principle for them to follow.

It is a constant temptation among more devout religious people to set themselves apart from ‘others’. It can happen to bishops or priests or religious. It can happen in a parish to members of the parish council or some parish group—a prayer group, charismatics, the liturgy committee or whatever.

We can find ourselves developing a two-tier community of ‘us’ and ‘them’. We can find ourselves looking down on those who come in late for Mass and hang around the back door, or who only come occasionally, or maybe even only turn up at Christmas.

Even more, we can be tempted to set ourselves apart from non-Catholic and non-Christian groups. We can fail to see God working in all kinds of people, religious and non-religious, atheists, agnostics and people who apparently do not believe in anything.

Of course, as Christians, we do have a distinctive understanding of life and its meaning coming from the teaching and life of Jesus and it should not be compromised. But at the same time, we do not have a monopoly on the truth—no one has. The full Truth is beyond all of us. We are all searching.

Still less do we have a monopoly on good works. God can and does use any person to build the Kingdom. And it is our responsibility to work hand in hand with such people. Ultimately, our aim is not to promote our Church, but God’s work and God’s plan for the whole world.

More

Living Space is an established part of Sacred Space. The daily commentary on the readings have become an important part of the day for for some seven thousand people every month. The texts are written by Frank Doyle, and Irish Jesuit priest, and regularly updated and revised.

The new format makes for easier management of Living Space and allows many possibilities of enhancing the presentation of the daily reflections. The user of the site will find a dynamic calendar to allow quick access to the readings. The resource can be shared readily with others through the facilities for printing and emailing that are on each page.

In time, we hope to be able to add a calendar to make days easier to find. It helps too that, as days are added into the new system, they are available to the search facility.