​READ

46  And they came to Jericho; and as he was leaving •Jericho with •his disciples and a great multitude, Bartimaeus, a blind beggar, the son of Timaeus, was sitting by the roadside. 47  And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out and say, “Jesus, Son of David, have mercy on me!” 48 And many rebuked him, telling him to be silent; but he cried out all the more, “Son of David, have mercy on me!” 49 And Jesus stopped and said, “Call him.” And they called the blind man, saying to him, “Take heart; rise, he is calling you.” 50 And throwing off his cloak he sprang up and came to Jesus. 51 And Jesus said to him, “What do you want me to do for you?” And the blind man said to him, “Master•, let me receive my sight.” 52  And Jesus said to him, “Go your way; your faith has made you well.” And immediately he received his sight and followed him on the way.  (Mark 10:46–52, RSV2CE)

REFLECTION

Jesus is always passing by. He is always available. But so is the crowd. I must focus and choose who to cry out for mercy too. 

I am a blind beggar. All I have is gift (breath, body, skills, provisions, church, family, etc-given by God) if I earned it, it was by God’s grace empowering me-all is gift). 

I am blinded in my pride thinking I got what I have instead of realizing all is gift - my very existence, whole and entire. 

I call out for mercy to God. People may rebuke me. I call out even more for mercy. Don’t listen to the crowd! Focus on God!

Jesus calls me to him. I am to take heart! Jesus calls me! Get up from my sin and pain. Throw off all that I have and go to him! Make him my only hope! Go to Jesus. 

Jesus asks me what I want. 

I want to be made well. I want to see you. I want to see reality through your eyes not my sin and the world. Jesus can heal my sin and I do not have to live in it anymore. I can see and believe he loves me and will empower me to fight sin with grace. 

Jesus says to go and live in the healing he gives since I believed and trusted in Him (faith). 

I choose to keep following and being healed as I walk home with him. 

RESOLUTION

I have been born again. I am now His child. I have the Holy Spirit to guide me. I must keep asking and listening to Jesus to walk in this healing. I must keep my eyes on Him not the crowd. I must keep all my hope in Him leaving the old ways behind. 

REST

Thank you Jesus for loving me and calling me to you. Thank you for hearing my cry for mercy. Thank you for your healing. Help me Holy Spirit listen and empower me to obey. Only You have eternal life and healing from sin. I Trust In You!  Amen. 

​Not every one who says to me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, 

but only he who DOES THE WILL of my FATHER who is in heaven. 

On that day many will say to me, ‘Lord, Lord, did we not prophesy in your name, and cast out demons in your name, and do many mighty works in your name?’ 

And then will I declare to them, ‘I NEVER KNEW you; DEPART from me, you EVILDOERS.’ 

​The Mass in Close-Up

Father Antony Jones

The Memorial

Jesus said: do this in memory of me/as a memorial of me.

The Jews had a very different understanding of memorial from ourselves. For us, it is a stone monument or a brass plaque; for the Jews, it was something living, something still very much alive – a feast.

Moses had ordered that the Exodus from Egypt (God’s central act of salvation in the Old Testament) be commemorated annually and at the same time of year as it actually occurred. Moses prescribed that this commemoration, this Memorial, should take the form of a celebratory feast (cf.Leviticus 23:5-8).

When the Jews thereafter celebrated this Pascal Meal, the Passover Meal, they celebrated not only the fact of the historic Exodus but also its lasting effects. They celebrated their continuing freedom from Egyptian slavery; they celebrated that they had become and still were God’s covenanted People.

The Christian Memorial

It is highly significant, therefore, that Jesus established the Eucharist while He was actually celebrating the Passover Meal. He was bringing this biblical celebration of the Passover to its total fulfilment, just as He brings to completion everything else in the Old Testament, as he promised He would in the Sermon on the Mount (Matthew 5:17).

So, in his bringing the Passover Meal to its fulfilment, He keeps the meal, but he raises everything to a higher plain. From now on, his disciples would continue to thank God for all that He did for the Jewish People at the Passover and throughput their history: but now there is an altogether new dimension.

As well as remembering and thanking God for the historic liberation of their Jewish spiritual forebears from Pharaoh’s tyranny, Christians would henceforth give thanks for the wondrous liberation and salvation won for them by the victorious death and resurrection of God’s Son.

And this is where Jesus raises the Passover Meal onto an entirely new plane. Formerly, the saving acts of God had become present only to the minds of the Jews by the simple fact of their remembering them. Now Christ, by his own and the Holy Spirit’s power, would make really present in Sacrament, in Bread and Wine, the very events being remembered.And these events were his Last Supper, his Death, and his Resurrection – the pivotal happenings in the history of the Universe.

From now on, the Lord’s Death and Resurrection would not be just in the memory, but also in outward reality, in present and living fact, in the consecrated elements of the Sacrament of the Eucharist.

Let’s put it all together

The Last Supper. The celebration of the Holy Mass, the Memorial of the Lord, makes Christ present in the actual event of his Last Supper – not a repetition for the millionth time, but a re-presentation of the actual once and for all, real-time event.

The word represent has an almost totally different meaning in this theological context from the multiple meanings it has in everyday speech. And the difference is important to notice. Theologically speaking it means to make present: to re-present. It does not mean “to repeat” or “to stand for”. In the context of the Mass, “represent” indicates the divine activity which makes Our Lord’s Supper, Crucifixion and Resurrection actually present to us. You may find it easier to understand this if you think of it in reverse – the Sacrament enabling you to be really present at these sacred events and to share in their action. Either way, the Eucharist is a Time Warp of divine devising.

Not in in an imaginative or fanciful way, as with cinema and theatre, are we present to the action. At holy Mass, we enter the Upper Room and share the Meal in actual fact. Sacramentally we are there, it is as simple as that and as real as that. We approach the table, as it were, and ask Peter and John to make room for us. From Christ’s own lips we hear the sacred words of consecration; from Christ’s own hands we receive the Bread of Life and the Cup of eternal Salvation.

The Crucifixion. That crucial and utterly sacred moment, when Christ died for the salvation of the world, is also simultaneously made present in the Mass. That saving event which happened in Jerusalem two thousand years ago is now re-presented in the New Jerusalem of today, the Church.

This is why we can talk about the Sacrifice of the Mass. The Mass is a sacrifice simply because it is the very Sacrifice of Christ re-presented. It means that at its celebration we stand beneath the Cross of Christ as really as Our Lady did, or St John. In our next chapter we shall consider what we are really doing as we stand in this awesome presence of the Crucified Christ.

The Resurrection. The moment of resurrection was hidden from the eyes of the Apostles, even from the eyes of his Mother. She and the Apostles witnessed the empty tomb and the Risen Christ Himself; but neither they nor we were permitted to witness that sublime moment when Christ rose from the dead. That moment is made present in the Eucharist, but because the Sacrament hides it under the forms of bread and wine, we do not see it either. But it is there, the glorious rising of Christ from the tomb, and we are present to it. The Risen Christ is here among his people, as present to us as He was to Mary Magdalene in the garden or the disciples in the Upper Room. He is so really present in the mystery of his rising from the dead that we, by attending Mass, become ourselves witnesses to his Resurrection, not in the same way as the eye-witness Apostles were, but just as really.

This understanding of what we mean by the word Memorial and what Our Lord meant when He used it at the Last Supper tells us exactly what the Mass is, as far as our minds are able to pierce the Sacred Mystery: it is the celebration of the Death and Resurrection of the Lord through the re-enactment, re-presentation, of the Last Supper. 

We can say, therefore, that there is only one Priest and only one Holy Mass – Christ and the actual Events as they played out two thousand years ago in Jerusalem. Our priests are sharers in Christ’s Priesthood who, at his command and in the power of the Holy Spirit, effect the greatest time-warp ever, by bringing into the here and now those once and for all pivotal Events of history. And that Time-Warp is the Holy Mass.

The Eucharist is the great Mystery of Faith, which stands at the heart of the living Church of Christ. The Second Vatican Council decreed that the Liturgy (the Mass) is the summit toward which the activity of the Church is directed; at the same time it is the fountain from which all her powers flow. (Vat II. Dogmatic Constitution on the Church. 10).

The Error of Total Depravity

One of the great errors the Church has had to fight throughout her history, but especially during the Protestant Reformation, is the doctrine of “Total Depravity”. This is the idea that human beings are pure evil, that there’s nothing good about us at all. And because there’s nothing good about us at all, there’s nothing we can contribute to our own salvation. There’s nothing to work with, nothing on which to build. For Luther, our only hope was that God would forgive us by declaring us to be acceptable to Himself. But He wouldn’t actually clean us or heal us from our sin. He wouldn’t really make us holy. 

If we accept salvation by faith in Jesus Christ, Luther said, that’s all there is to it. We don’t have to get over our sins, grow in the love of God, or come to a deeper understanding of God’s ways. We can just be saved, then and there, because even though God leaves us as the same wretched sinners He found us, he won’t hold it against us. Because we’re totally depraved, and God knows that’s all we’ll ever be. But actually, that’s not how salvation works. Not at all.

Salvation as Healing

Whenever Jesus passes someone sick, or blind, or lame in the Gospels, what does that person want? Does that person just want Jesus to overlook their problems? Of course not! That person wants to be healed. No blind man cries out to Jesus, “Son of David, have pity on me! Accept me as I am!” No lame man says, “Please, Lord, I want you to ignore my disability.” They say, “I want to be healed.” “I want to see.” They say, “If you will, you can make me clean.”

Jesus doesn’t ignore our problems. Jesus doesn’t just decide not to hold our problems against us. Jesus offers healing from our problems; that’s the promise of salvation. Because God made us good. And we are still good. And God wants to heal us to make us as good as we can be, so that we will be fit company for Him for all eternity.

The Three Solas of the Protestant World

Martin Luther, because he believed humans were all hopelessly corrupt, didn’t think God could use or perfect any aspect of our nature. This is how he came up with his three great “solas”, the three great “only”s of the early protestant system. He said we were saved by “Grace Alone” (sola gratia). In other words, God just decided to be merciful to certain sinners. That mercy was a grace, but it didn’t change our character. Our characters remained as awful as ever. So we’re saved “by grace,” but not by our characters becoming virtuous.

Luther also said we were saved by “Faith Alone” (sola fide). Faith was an acceptance of God’s mercy and forgiveness, and that was all that mattered. Works didn’t matter; it didn’t matter what you did, that could never contribute to your salvation, because a rotten sinner like you could never do anything good anyway.

And Luther said we could only know anything about God or salvation through “Scripture Alone” (sola scriptura). Reason is a human faculty, and if all our human faculties are depraved and worthless, then reason can’t ever help us understand anything about God or His will for us. So forget philosophy. Forget theology. Forget the Church’s careful reflections and teachings on our faith over the centuries. For Luther, those were all “vain reasonings,” human things that have nothing to do with God. The Bible alone. That’s the only place for any truth.

Again, this is all based on the view that human nature is so totally broken that it can’t be fixed, even by God. But if it turns out that we are still basically good and that with God’s help, what is broken in us can be healed and sanctified, then salvation is going to look a lot different.

The Goodness of Human Nature

The Catholic Response to the Protestant Reformation was to reject the doctrine of total depravity. God made us good, and we are good. God loves that goodness in us. He respects that goodness, and He wants to enhance and employ that goodness in all His saving work. GRACE. That’s why He took on our human nature in the first place, because He loves our human nature, and He wants to show us how good it can be and how much good it can do.

So it’s not just grace alone. It’s grace working with human nature. Taking what’s good in human nature, raising it, purifying it, empowering it. Grace doesn’t ignore or replace nature. Grace builds on nature and perfects nature. And it’s not just faith alone. We have to believe, yes, but then we have to live according to our beliefs. We have to work, we have to be God’s coworkers in the vineyard, as St. Paul says. Paul also tells us to “work out our salvation,” for “God will repay everyone according to their works.”

God wills that we cooperate with Him in our salvation by Grace. He forgives us our sin, but He also wants to be perfect as He is perfect, which takes a lot of prayer, love, sacrifice, and growth in virtue. And it’s not just Scripture alone. Yes, Scripture is a source of divine truth, but Scripture came to us through the human hands of the Apostles and those they authorized, and through their successors. And the Church’s reasoning reflection on Scriptural truth, preserved from error by the Holy Spirit, is what makes it possible to understand Scripture, and apply it, in our own time and in our own day.

The point is that the Christian life, the moral life, the process of Justification, it’s not just letting God do things to you. It’s not God ignoring your nature or overriding your nature. It’s God using your nature, celebrating your nature, enlisting the cooperation of you and everything there is about you. The Christian life isn’t just passive acceptance on the part of a totally inert and worthless person. God thinks you’re better than that.

The Christian life is a dynamic, active, constructive participation in the work of God. It’s working with Christ as we strive to become more and more like Christ. That’s what salvation means. That’s what justification is.

The Work of Justification

Of course, in a sense, Luther’s vision of salvation is a lot easier. You just get to do your own thing, and as long as you admit you’re a sinner and have faith in Jesus, you’re set. You don’t have to do anything else, because there’s really nothing else a miserable worm like you could even do. Whereas if God wants to be a protagonist in your own healing, your own sanctification, if you have to constantly work by grace to get over vice and grow in the rectitude of divine love, that’s a lot more work.

But the work is worth it. Because it’s a great joy to know you’re loved by God, not just because He’s good, but because you are good too, even if you have a long way to go. And it’s a great joy to be able to give back to the Lord from your own efforts, no matter how small, in the confidence that He appreciates those efforts and will use them for the salvation of yourself and of others. 

​READ

17  And as he was setting out on his journey, a man ran up and knelt before him, and asked him, “Good Teacher, what must I do to inherit eternal life?” 18 And Jesus said to him, “Why do you call me good? No one is good but God alone. 19  You know the commandments: ‘Do not kill, Do not commit adultery, Do not steal, Do not bear false witness, Do not defraud, Honor your father and mother.’ ” 20 And he said to him, “Teacher, all these I have observed from my youth.” 21  And Jesus looking upon him loved him, and said to him, “You lack one thing; go, sell what you have, and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven; and come, follow me.” 22 At that saying his countenance fell, and he went away sorrowful; for he had great possessions.

23 And Jesus looked around and said to his disciples, “How hard it will be for those who have riches to enter the kingdom of God!” 24 And the disciples were amazed at his words. But Jesus said to them again, “Children, how hard it is for those who trust in riches to enter the kingdom of God! 25 It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” 26 And they were exceedingly astonished, and said to him, “Then who can be saved?” 27 Jesus looked at them and said, “With men it is impossible, but not with God; for all things are possible with God.”  (Mark 10:17–27, RSV2CE)

REFLECTION 

The question to Jesus is how do I inherit eternal life?

Jesus says to inherit eternal life you need to keep the 10 commandments. 

But not just the commandments. You also have to make heaven your treasure and follow Jesus. 

The kingdom of God is, heaven and eternal life on earth, all the way through death since it has been defeated. 

Jesus calls me his child and says Trust is the key. You cannot trust in anything but God. 

With men it is impossible to be saved, but with God all things are possible and we can gain the kingdom. 

Trusting God to give me what He wants and knowing it is enough to be with Him. To let God give me the kingdom by grace is eternal life. Grace to live the commandments. Grace to make Heaven my treasure. Grace to follow Christ. This comes by a deliberate choice to surrender my life over to God trusting Him for all things. This is salvation. Only God can do it, it is not in man. My life must be surrendered to Grace. 

RESOLUTION

I choose to let go of my earthly life and embrace the kingdom you offer. I choose to trust you my God. I ask for the Grace filled life to obey your commandments, pursue Heaven as my treasure, and to follow you. Help me surrender to you since I cannot do that without grace either. I am your child and all things are possible with you. 

REST

Thank you Jesus for telling me what I need to inherit eternal life. Trust, Surrender, and follow! Thank you for defeating death and being willing to bring the kingdom to the here and now. Thank you for wanting to walk me home. Thank you for making me your child.  Thank you for your Grace! I love you. Amen. 

​Receive the Holy Spirit 

Not by obedience to law (cannot earn) under a curse because it cannot be perfectly executed. Jesus fulfilled. 

But by hearing with faith (believe and trust) justified through Faith, Christ redeemed from law (he took the punishment of disobedience) in Christ Jesus we receive the promise of the Holy Spirit through Faith. (I must be in Christ)

The law is fulfilled in Jesus. I get power to live by the Holy Spirit. I do not worry about laws, I listen to Spirit to guide me as I stay in Christ by Faith (believe and trust)

2 Let me ask you only this: Did you receive the Spirit by works of the law, or by hearing with faith? 3 Are you so foolish? Having begun with the Spirit, are you now ending with the flesh? (Galatians 3:2–3, RSV2CE)

10  For all who rely on works of the law are under a curse; for it is written•, “Cursed be every one who does not abide by all things written in the book of the law, and do them.” 11  Now it is evident that no man is justified before God by the law; for “He who through faith is righteous shall live”; 12  but the law does not rest on faith•, for “He who does them shall live by them.” 13  Christ redeemed us from the curse of the law, having become a curse for us—for it is written, “Cursed be every one who hangs on a tree”—14 that in Christ Jesus the blessing of Abraham might come upon the Gentiles, that we might receive the promise of the Spirit through faith.  (Galatians 3:10–14, RSV2CE)

​God Offers A Covenant

Exchange of persons: 

1. Father/Child [Perfect Fathers know best for their kids, he leads, protects, loves, and provides. I must Trust Absolutely]
2. Friend [shares life, love, intimate thoughts, struggles, and secrets]
3. Lover [spousal love that is knit together, lifelong commitment, and intimacy beyond explanation]
4. King/Citizen [God determines Kingdom regulations, we follow as citizens so we have abundant life and flourishing]

Duties and responsibilities: 

1. God has law of Love [Love Him with everything you are and Neighbor for love of Him]
2. He will providently take care of you, watch over you, never leave you, and walk with you to heaven if you keep following 

Renewal:

1. Eucharist [Body & Blood of Christ that Changes Me] 
2. Repentance & Confession [apologize and turn back for hurting God’s heart by not living up to covenant duties and responsibilities, Trusting Him Completely] (we sin when we don’t trust Him that he knows best, will provide for our needs, and let our broken desires override our love for Him.)