Fifth of Easter
April 2010
If anyone has ever recommend a book to you then you will have experienced the disappointment of reading it and wondering what they were so enthusiastic about.
It is the same with films, programmes, holidays etc which come highly recommended. Most of the time our expectation is not fulfilled. Appreciation is often highly subjective. Time, place, personal disposition and moods can affect my appreciation of even the most beautiful things.
During my life here on earth there is always a fly in the ointment.
In today’s first reading Paul is retracing his steps through all the places where he had preached the Good News. He encounters a great welcome and much adulation. But being wise and much experienced he reminds them that “it is necessary for us to undergo many hardships to enter the kingdom of God.”
In the second reading we are told that this world cannot be definitively fixed. Redemption or salvation involve the passing away of the world as we know it. True redemption or salvation, we are told, will involve ‘a new heaven and a new earth. The former heaven and the former earth had passed away. I saw the holy city, a new Jerusalem, coming down out of heaven from God, prepared as a bride adorned for her husband.’
In today’s Gospel Jesus tells us ‘Now is the Son of Man glorified, and God is glorified in him,’ but!! Judas has just left on his way to betray him.
I feel a bit sorry for people who are full of religious enthusiasm and fervour. I view such enthusiasm with a slightly jaundiced eye because I know it is not, and cannot be, a permanent condition.
My relationship with my God will not differ greatly from my relationship with my marriage partner. There are the good days and the bad days. The times of closeness and joy and the times distance, of anger of thick headedness.
Religion, like marriage, is appreciating the good times and in the bad times ‘hanging in there.’