MASS READINGS
March 14, 2024 (Readings on USCCB website)
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COLLECT PRAYER
Thursday of the Fourth Week of Lent: We invoke your mercy in humble prayer, O Lord, that you may cause us, your servants, corrected by penance and schooled by good works, to persevere sincerely in your commands and come safely to the paschal festivities. Through our Lord Jesus Christ, your Son, who lives and reigns with you in the unity of the Holy Spirit, God, for ever and ever.
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More than any other Gospel, John gives us an insight into the suffering soul of Jesus. Today we have the “Moses Mass.” In it both readings speak of that great Prophet and Deliverer of the people. And we note how the plot against the Lord’s life is thickening. Moses is a type of Christ—the interceding suffering Mediator for God’s people. —The Vatican II Weekday Missal
St. Matilda (895-968) (also known as "Maud" or "Maude"), Queen of Germany and wife of King Henry I is commemorated today in the Roman Martyrology. She was well known throughout the realm for her generosity, she taught the ignorant, comforted the sick, and visited prisoners. She was betrayed by Otto after Henry’s death when he falsely accused her of financial mismanagement.
Meditation—Christ’s Sacrifice on Calvary
The first reading of to-day’s Mass relates the intercession of Moses before Yahweh so that He should not punish his People’s infidelity. He invokes moving reasons: the good name of the Lord among the Gentiles, the faithfulness of his People to the Covenant made to Abraham and his descendants… And, in spite of their infidelities and the inconstancy of the chosen People, God forgives once more. Moreover, God’s love for his People, and through his People for the whole human race, will yet reach its supreme manifestation: For God so loved the world that he gave his only Son, that whosoever believes in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
Christ’s total self-surrender on our behalf, which reaches its culmination on Calvary, is an urgent call to us to correspond to his great love for each one of us. On the Cross, Jesus consummated his total self-surrender to his Father’s will, and showed his love for all men, for each and every person. He…loved me and gave himself for me. Faced with this unfathomable mystery of Love, I should ask myself, what do I do for him? How do I correspond to his love?
On Calvary, Our Lord, Priest and Victim, offered himself to his heavenly Father, shedding his blood, which became separated from his Body. This is how he carried out his Father’s will to the very end.
It was the Father’s will that the Redemption should be carried out in this way. Jesus accepts it lovingly and with perfect submission. This internal offering of himself is the essence of his Sacrifice. It is his loving submission, without limits, to his Father’s will.
In every true sacrifice there are four essential elements: and all of them are present in the sacrifice of the Cross: priest, victim, internal offering and external manifestation of the sacrifice. The external manifestation must be an expression of one’s interior attitude. Jesus dies on the Cross, externally manifesting (through his words and his deeds) his loving internal surrender. Father, into thy hands I comment my spirit! I have finished the task you committed to me, I have fulfilled your Will. He is, both then and now, at once Priest and Victim. Since, then, we have a great high priest who has passed through the heavens, Jesus, the Son of God, let us hold fast our confession. For we have not a high priest who is unable to sympathise with our weaknesses, but one who in every respect has been tempted as we are, yet without sinning.
The internal offering of Jesus gives full meaning to all the external elements of his voluntary sacrifice—the insults, the stripping of his garments, the crucifixion.
The Sacrifice of the Cross is a single sacrifice. Priest and Victim are one and the same divine person: the Son of God made man. Jesus was not offered up to the Father by Pilate or by Caiphas, or by the crowds surging at his feet. It was He who surrendered himself. At every moment of his life on earth Jesus lived a perfect identification with his Father’s will, but it is on Calvary that the Son’s self-surrender reaches its supreme expression.
We, who want to imitate Jesus, who want only that our life should be a reflection of his, must ask ourselves to-day in our prayer: do we know how to unite ourselves to Jesus’ offering to the Father and accept God’s will at every moment? Do we unite ourselves to him in our joys and our sorrows and in all the activities that make up each one of our days? Do we unite ourselves to him at the more difficult times, such as moments of failure, pain or illness, and at the easy times, when we feel our souls filled with joy?
My Mother and Lady, teach me how to pronounce a ‘yes,” which, like yours, will identify with the cry Jesus made before his Father: non mea voluntas…. (Luke 22:42)…not my will but God’s be done.
—Francis Fernandez, In Conversation with God
Meditation for the Thursday within the Octave of Easter: Grasping What the Resurrection Means
Keeping in mind the magnitude of the change wrought by the Resurrection—a divine action in history and nature that changed history and nature in a radical way, opening new possibilities of life beyond the reach of death—we can perhaps ponder with a bit more patience yet another gospel reading in which the disciples don’t at first, get it. Today’s Gospel account, read, appropriately enough, at the station of the Twelve Holy Apostles, picks up where yesterday’s gospel reading ended. The two disciples who recognized the Risen One in the breaking of bread (and, retrospectively, in his breaking open the Scripture for them in a new way) have returned to Jerusalem, where they have shared their experience with other friends of Jesus. Both the Emmaus disciples and the disciples in Jerusalem believe that Jesus has been raised; they accept the testimony of their own eyes and of other witnesses. But they still cannot grasp what this “being raised” means. So when the Risen One appears among them, their first reaction is to think that this is a “spirit,” a ghost.
The Lord chastises them mildly, pointing out that he has “flesh and bones” that a Spirit” would not have—and still they do not get it, although St. Luke tells us that they “disbelieved for joy”: that is, this is too good to be true. So the Lord asks for something to eat; they give him broiled fish, which he eats before them. Then, as he had done on the Emmaus road, he shows them from Scripture that the Anointed One of God had to suffer; that he then had to rise from the dead to a new form of life; and that repentance should be preached in his name “to all nations, beginning from Jerusalem.” They are, he concludes, “witnesses to these things” —which is to say, they have a mission, for which they will be equipped in due course by “power from on high,” in the gift of the Holy Spirit.
This pattern—incomprehension followed by divine instruction and example, and then by a gradual emerging of Easter faith in its fullness—has now occupied the first four days of the Easter Octave. It is striking that the Church made its own dullness and initial lack of understanding a central part of its preaching of the Resurrection—which is not precisely what modern marketers would recommend. Why? Why was this slowness to grasp the meaning of the New Life remembered? Why was it enshrined in the holy books of the New Covenant?
Benedict XVI, once again, suggested an answer. This was done, he wrote, because it accurately reflected the ways of God with humanity. Why didn’t God do things the way we would have done them—smiting the enemies of God with power, coming down from the Cross, revealing the Truth of the World and of history to the powerful and influential, rather than to a small band of illiterates, peasants, and pious women? Because, Pope Benedict reflected, God’s ways are not our ways:
It is part of the mystery of God that he acts so gently, that he acts so gently , that he gradually builds up his history within the great history of mankind; that he becomes man and so can be overlooked by his contemporaries and by the powers that shape history; that he suffers and dies and that, having risen again, he chooses to come to mankind only through the faith of the disciples to whom he reveals himself; that he continues to knock gently on the doors of our hearts and slowly opens our eyes if we open our doors to him.And yet—is this not the truly divine way? Not to overwhelm with external power, but to give freedom, to offer and elicit love. And if we really think about it, is it not what seems so small that is truly great? Does not a ray of light issue from Jesus, growing brighter across the centuries, that could not come from any mere man and through which the light of God truly shines into the world? Could the apostolic preaching have found faith and built up a worldwide community unless the power of truth had been at work within it?
And because of that, nature and history, the material self and the soul, the world and the cosmos have been transformed: they have been brought into communion with God, who is both Creator and Redeemer. Because of that, we can see, with St. John (if more dimly than he saw), where all of this is heading:
Then I saw a new heaven and a new earth; for the first heaven and the first earth had passed away, and the sea was no more. And I saw the holy city, new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband; and I hear a great voice from the throne saying, “Behold, the dwelling of God is with men. He will dwell with them, and they shall be his people, and God himself will be with them; he will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning nor crying nor pain any more, for the former things have passed away.”—George Weigel, Roman Pilgrimage: The Station ChurchesAnd he who sat upon the throne said, “Behold, I make all things new…” [Revelation 21:1-5a].
Thursday in the Octave of Easter
Station with Santi Dodici Apostoli (Church of the Twelve Holy Apostles):
At Rome, the Station is in the Basilica of the Twelve Apostles, better known in Rome as better known as Santi Apostoli. The newly baptized were brought, today, into the church dedicated to the witnesses of the Resurrection, where repose the bodies of two out of the twelve: St. Philip and St. James the Less. An ancient inscription shows that this church was formerly dedicated to Philip and James.
For more on Santi Dodici Apostoli, see:
- The Station Churches of Rome
- Churches of Rome
- Rome Art Lover
- Walks in Rome page
- Roman Churches
- Aleteia
- Station Church
- The Catholic Traveler
For further information on the Station Churches, see The Stational Church.
