5th Sunday of Eastertide, Year A

On April 20, 2008, the Fifth Sunday of Easter, Pope Benedict XVI celebrated Mass at Yankee Stadium while visiting the United States. He commented on the Mass readings, drawing a parallel between the increase in numbers of the early Church recorded in the Acts of the Apostles (Acts 6:1-7) to the growth of the Catholic Church in the United States. The full text is given on the Vatican website; here's a small selection of his words:

Christ Pantokrator (St. Catherine's, 6th c.)

Authority” … “obedience.” To be frank, these are not easy words to speak nowadays. Words like these represent a “stumbling stone” for many of our contemporaries, especially in a society which rightly places a high value on personal freedom. Yet, in the light of our faith in Jesus Christ – “the way and the truth and the life” – we come to see the fullest meaning, value, and indeed beauty, of those words.

The Gospel teaches us that true freedom, the freedom of the children of God, is found only in the self-surrender which is part of the mystery of love. Only by losing ourselves, the Lord tells us, do we truly find ourselves (cf. Lk 17:33). True freedom blossoms when we turn away from the burden of sin, which clouds our perceptions and weakens our resolve, and find the source of our ultimate happiness in him who is infinite love, infinite freedom, infinite life. “In his will is our peace.”

Real freedom, then, is God’s gracious gift, the fruit of conversion to his truth, the truth which makes us free (cf. Jn 8:32). And this freedom in truth brings in its wake a new and liberating way of seeing reality. When we put on “the mind of Christ” (cf. Phil 2:5), new horizons open before us! In the light of faith, within the communion of the Church, we also find the inspiration and strength to become a leaven of the Gospel in the world. We become the light of the world, the salt of the earth (cf. Mt 5:13-14), entrusted with the “apostolate” of making our own lives, and the world in which we live, conform ever more fully to God’s saving plan.

10th Sunday of Ordinary Time, Year C

Today's Gospel account is of the resurrection of the widow of Nain's only son. Luke tells us that Jesus had compassion for her and said to her, “Do not weep.” Then he came forward and touched the bier, and the bearers stood still. And he said, “Young man, I say to you, rise!” The dead man sat up and began to speak, and Jesus gave him to his mother. The crowd is seized by fear and they glorify God.

In a sermon on this gospel, St. Augustine told his congregation:

All believers are moved when they hear the accounts of the miracles wrought by Jesus, our Lord and Savior, though they are affected by them in different ways. Some are astounded by his wonderful physical cures, but have not yet learnt to discern the greater miracles that lie beyond the world of sense. Others marvel that the miracles that they hear of our Lord working on people’s bodies are now being accomplished more wonderfully in their souls.

No Christian should doubt that even today the dead are being raised to life. Yet, while everyone has eyes capable of seeing the dead rise in the way the widow’s son rose, as we have just heard in the gospel, the ability to see the spiritually dead arise is possessed only by those who have themselves experienced a spiritual resurrection.

It is a greater thing to raise what will live for ever than to raise what must die again. When the young man in the gospel was raised, his widowed mother rejoiced; when souls are daily raised from spiritual death, mother Church rejoices. The young man was dead in body, these latter are dead in spirit. Those who witnessed the lad’s visible death mourned openly and visibly, but the invisible death of the dead in spirit was neither seen nor thought about.

Jesus raises the widow of Nain's son, Codex Aureus of Echternach, ca 1030-1050